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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Markets took a little time to appreciate the current cyclical and structural squeeze on profitability, but eventually got the message. So far, that message is pain today as the group invests to extend is leadership in digital learning through a protracted cyclical downswing in its main markets followed by jam tomorrow as these measures yield […]
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So you’ve seen the headlines. First Fox’s proposals to consolidate its interests in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland into BSkyB, described by many as a “tidying up” exercise. Now we are treated to something more substantial to explain the earlier moves; an $80bn (c.$86 ps) plus offer for Time Warner. The newswires are of course […]
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He “made money so plentiful, that interest fell and the price of land rose considerably, And afterwards, as often as large sums of money came into his possession by means of confiscations, he would lend it free of interest, for a fixed term, to such as could give security for the double of what was […]
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Shock, horror. “Publicis and Omnicom agree to terminate proposed merger of equals” 10 months ago when Publicis and Omnicom announced their intention to merge I wrote two articles on this blog. The first was titled ‘Omnicom & Publicis – a marriage not made in heaven’ and was an initial response to the press leaks […]
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Pearson:  Another update (Jan trading statement) and another slippage in underlying expectations as US educational markets continue to decline and with even the 70p per share FY13 guidance relying on some exceptional massaging of the ‘adjusted’ tax rate. Without an early turn in this market cycle and Pearson’s own internal investment programme unlikely to deliver […]
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