I am surprised! Having cleaned up the reported numbers a little (eg including stock comp and intangible amortisation – excl goodwill), and applied a broadly average growth discount trend, the Alibaba NPV on the WYT growth discount model comes within 5% of the post IPO price – nb this already adjusts for forward valuation horizon […]
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With marketing infatuated with big data, social media, mobile and any other nerdy technology where they can bamboozle the client with techno-babble, it is a pleasure to see a good creative advert. I may have been ‘exposed’ to a thousand marketing messages from the financial services industry, and for which someone has paid good money, […]
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When I was but a nipper, a wise old Chairman of a large and successful financial information business gave me a valuable piece of advice:Â That mediators extract better margins in poor information environments and when price discovery is obscured. As his business, amongst others, picked off and commoditised market after market with real-time pricing, […]
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WPP :Â Â The group is tightening the screw on hiring and staff costs to absorb slowing net sales growth while maintaining the public forecasts of rising GDP and advertising expenditure into 2015. The hitherto growth engine markets of BRIC however, are looking increasingly wobbly, while the contraction in margins at the digitally heavy specialist communications […]
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Having seen the outrageous premium Murdoch paid for the WSJ, markets must have been salivating over how much he might now stump up for Time Warner. Surely, the $86ps ($80bn) offer was a mere opening shot and that the old boy could be bounced into perhaps three figures, or so the narrative went. Not to […]
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What was that supposed Chinese curse – “May your wishes come true”? Well for foreign auto manufacturers dreaming of rising Chinese sales to offset withering Latin American demand and possible interest rate rises this may not have seemed much like a curse. Without China, BMW’s Q2 unit deliveries would have been up by a meagre […]
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Facebook: Unparalleled qualitative information on consumers and unmatched reach makes Facebook a must have for both advertisers and NSA alike. For the moment, the group is managing the migration to lower yield mobile and overseas users while sustaining overall yield growth of +41% YoY and +14% QoQ and somewhat surprisingly, an average yield increase on […]
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BSkyB: OK, so what’s the narrative to be? 21st Century Fox (Murdoch) parks some low yielding European payTV assets into a 39% owned subsidiary to raise at least £4.6bn of cash to help fund its (Murdoch’s) $80m Time Warner bid? As long as the market thinks that he will be back for the lot at […]
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