Tech Review | Why The Tech Giants Have Many CEOs Running Scared

Tech Review (TR 2019-04-13)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech investing news: Features • 1) Why The Tech Giants Have Many CEOs Running Scared, 2)  SpaceX ARABSAT-6A Falcon Heavy Launch and Triple Landing Highlights, 3) Investing: The Week & Investor Notes, 4) ICYMI Tech News: Amazon, Huawei, Qualcomm, SAP, Grab, Lyft & Uber IPOs, Boeing, Disney.

1) Why The Tech Giants Have Many CEOs Running Scared

Why are chief executive officers so worried about tech giants investing in their sectors? James Fontanella-Khan, the FT’s US corporate finance and deals expert, explains how legacy companies are trying to fight the disruptors and stay relevant by making risky acquisitions. Financial Times (ft.com) video above published Apr 5, 2019. Learn more at https://bigdeal.ft.com/.

2) SpaceX ARABSAT-6A Falcon Heavy Launch and Triple Landing Highlights

Highlights from the 11 April 2019 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA.

3) Investing

The Week: NASDAQ Composite +0.6% | S&P 500 Index +0.5% | DJIA -0.1%

US stocks close higher Friday on robust bank earnings, Disney helps propel Dow up triple digits

Investor Notes: 
• Survey: which US sector will outperform for the remainder of the year? "Tech" #1

We have the results of last week's DataTrek Market Outlook Survey! Tech was the #1 choice among respondents when asked "which US sector will outperform the most over the remainder of the year?" Read the rest of the results & our analysis here: https://t.co/CjRYMvEmuE $SPY $XLK pic.twitter.com/YD0VgaaamU

— DataTrek Research (@DataTrekMB) April 8, 2019

•  US: Initial Jobless Claims Plunge To Lowest In 50 Years--zerohedge.com. Inflation? Less than 2%. Fed Funds Rate? Less than 3%.  Hedge funds have 'once again missed much of the recent move in stocks'--zerohedge.com.

•  EU:  IMF sharply downgrades its outlook for euro-area economies--bloomberg.com. SocGen Slashing 1,600 Trading Jobs After 19% Loss--750 jobs in France will go as part of cuts--bloomberg.com. The French bank's share price has declined 40 percent in the last 12 months, compared with a 17 percent drop in the Euro STOXX Banks Index. Europe, The Big Short--seekingalpha.com.

• Brexit: the UK economy has been drifting away from Europe for years: one of five reasons why--"... the EU is stagnating ..."--telegraph.co.uk. Nonetheless, UK's political class apparently can't let go.

• China:

• China's Debt Bomb Is Back: Beijing Injects Most Ever Credit For Month Of March.

• ‘Belt and Road--A Chinese World Order’ review: Beijing’s map of the world | thehindu.com.

• Buying Baidu Ahead Of The Science and Technology Board Launch?

• Real Estate? A Simon Property Group Mall Generates Largest Loss Ever for Retail CMBS  How the Brick & Mortar Meltdown works for Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities after America’s largest mall landlord defaults on a mortgage and walks away from the mall--wolfstreet.com. See also US housing market deteriorates, shift to a buyer's market accelerates, U.S. markets will have the highest percentage of homes that sell at discount versus the list price in many years----2Q19 National Knock Deals Report.

• Asset prices in the modern era: In Barron’s this past weekend, J.P Morgan chief U.S. equity strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas:  

 We are all used to using the word “cycle”; we’re all used to looking at historical charts and graphs and equations and relationships. The reality is that maybe the word “cycle” is no longer even relevant, given that we have so much unconventional central-bank involvement.

4) ICYMI Tech News:

Amazon Day Two: 1) Amazon Shares Are Headed Higher From Here; 2) “Project Kuiper” plans to launch over 3,000 satellites offering broadband internet. See also Inside Eero's $97 million fire sale to Amazon--mashable.com, and Amazon buys warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology.

Huawei: "How did a private Chinese firm come to dominate the world’s most important emerging technology?--One theme is clear: Throughout its history, Huawei appears to have benefited from state support not available to the company’s Western rivals ... European investigators have found evidence that Huawei may have received a massive $30 billion line of credit from the China Development Bank, among other well-timed financing ..."--foreignpolicy.com. [Editor's note: all Chinese companies are SOEs to one degree or another.]

Qualcomm aims to take on Nvidia, Intel with new AI chips.

SAP cloud business head quits after 27 years in latest top departures--under a restructuring announced in January about 4400 positions will be eliminated. SAP rival Oracle has also announced some layoffs with some of its top talent going to Google.

Grab (domain: grab.com) seeks another $2 billion funding. The Southeast Asian startup, based in Singapore, is backed by Japan's SoftBank.

Lyft's stock slide casts long shadow on Uber's IPO:

$LYFT

Boeing 737Max: another chapter in the book titled Normalization of Deviance?

Disney announced Thursday its new family-friendly streaming service will cost $7 monthly or $70 annually.

Personal Tech: 

• Investigation shows how easy and affordable obtaining cellphone customers' real-time location data can be, as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T peddle it to middlemen.

• The Robocall Crisis Will Never Be Totally Fixed--"Always hang up immediately if you answer a call that you don't recognize"--wired.com.

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Technology in the World: End of the Beginning, What's Next? (video)

The End of the Beginning

a16z.com video above published Nov 16, 2018: In his now annual state-of-innovation talk at the a16z Summit in November 2018, Andreessen Horowitz’ Benedict Evans walks through where we are now in software eating the world... and how things may continue to change over the next 10 years.

What's the state of not just "the world of tech", but tech in the world? The access story is now coming to an end, observes Evans, but the use story is just beginning: Most of the people are now online, but most of the money is still not. If we think we're in a period of disruption right now, how will the next big platform shifts -- like machine learning -- impact huge swathes of retail, manufacturing, marketing, fintech, healthcare, entertainment, and more? Especially as technology begins to tackle bigger problems, in harder markets, at deeper (and more structural) levels?

Transcript:

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Interview with Fintech Startup WiseAlpha CEO Rezaah Ahmad (video)

Tech Talk: interview with Rezaah Ahmad, WiseAlpha

Rezaah Ahmad, CEO, WiseAlpha, a fixed income platform giving everyday investors and savers access to corporate bonds, talks about disrupting the lending market and why the corporate debt market is ripe for digital innovation. TheBanker.com video above published Oct 8, 2018.

Domain: WiseAlpha.com

Categories: Credit, Financial Services, FinTech
Headquarters: London, England, UK
Founded: Mar 1, 2014
Founder: Rezaah Ahmad
Last Funding Type: Equity Crowdfunding

WiseAlpha is an online investment platform offering its members access via Notes to senior secured loan investments. replacing the substantial costs and complexity of investing in specialist credit funds with a simpler and more cost effective way to invest. Until now, the corporate loan market has remained largely untransformed by technological innovation but WiseAlpha is now making this asset class accessible to a wider investment audience. In order to gain access to this asset class, individual investors usually had to use brokers and/or invest in specialist debt funds which often charged substantial upfront fees and ongoing management and performance fees.

Tweets by WiseAlphaTeam

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Tech at the Heart of Startup ThirdLove's Intimate Apparel Success (video)

Tech Is at the Heart of ThirdLove's Success, Co-CEO Heidi Zak:

Third Love, Tech, & Retail Disruption: co-founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer Heidi Zak speaking at the 2018 WWD (Women's Wear Daily) Digital Forum NYC, Sep 13, 2018, says technology is at the heart of ThirdLove's success. (Heidi was voted "Top 3" speaker of the day by the audience--more on WWD Digital Forum here).

Struggles of the owner of Victoria's Secret (victoriassecret.com), L Brands (lb.com), has allowed a number of startups to grab market share in the intimate apparel space and one of the most successful is ThirdLove, one of the fastest growing consumer companies in the U.S.

ThirdLove, Inc.
Domain: ThirdLove.com
Business founded: 2013
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Number of employees: 260
Founders: Heidi Zak, Dave Spector

Tweets by ThirdLove

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Tech Review | Digital Advertising's Disruption and Data Addiction (video)

Tech Review (TR 2018-06-30)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Digital Advertising's Disruption and Data Addiction, 2) Four-way competition among China's smartphone giants, 3)Investing: The Week, Investing Notes: It's Summertime & Playing the "Trump",  Crypto, Gold, 4) ICYMI Tech News.

1) Digital Advertising's Disruption and Data Addiction - The advertising industry is in flux and no one can keep up:

CNBC International video above published Jun 26, 2018: advertising executives are facing a lot of questions about the future of their business - and not a lot of answers. CNBC’s Elizabeth Schulze reports from the Cannes Lions festival on disruption in the advertising industry, data monetization and privacy rules such as Europe's GDPR on data protection.

See also:

• The ad-based Internet is dead, but not because of privacy regulations--thehill.com.
• Google rebrands AdWords as Google Ads, consolidates enterprise tools as Google Marketing Platform, and unifies publisher monetization tools as Google Ad Manager--blog.google. 
• Google retires DoubleClick, AdWords brand names--Reuters.com.

2) Four-way competition among China's smartphone giants

source Statista.com (June 26, 2018)

Goodbye Samsung and Apple? Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi (mi) increasingly dominate the smartphone market in China. Also note that Xiaomi's IPO in Hong Kong valued the company at about $54 billion, roughly half the company’s initial goal--Bloomberg.com.

3) Investing

The Week: NASDAQ Composite -2.4% | S&P 500 Index -1.3% | DJIA -1.2%  | U.S. stocks end Friday broadly higher, major indexes post negative week but positive quarter. For the second quarter of 2018, all three indices ended up: DJIA +0.7%, S&P500 +2.9%, and the NASDAQ +6.3%. For the first half of 2018, the DJIA is -1.8%, the S&P500 +1.7%, and the NASDAQ +8.8%:

NASDAQ Composite

Investing Notes: It's Summertime & Playing the "Trump"

"... summer liquidity is so thin its’ difficult to see where the pressure to really spike a crash would come from. On my PA account – I’m waiting for the moment to pile in if it looks cheap – but not convinced that summer is necessarily a good time to be convinced of anything ... Playing the “Trump” is very much a matter of stripping out the negative bias news flow, working out what is real in negotiations, and assessing the real games being played in Geopolitics. Nothing is quite what it seems ..."--Bill Blain June 27, 2018.

 “The U.S. continues to be the most resilient economy and the source of many upward earnings revisions”--Marketwatch.com June 29, 2018.

Forget the tariff tantrum—S&P 500 is headed 10% higher in 2018, says Blackstone’s Wien--Marketwatch.com June 27, 2018.

Crypto:

Despite being in a mansion-sized doghouse, #bitcoin is still in our thoughts. We recently updated our correlation work on $BTC vs the S&P 500 for our DataTrek Morning Briefing. Does bitcoin’s decline tell us anything about the direction of US #stocks? The math is clear: NO.

— DataTrek Research (@DataTrekMB) June 26, 2018

• Bitcoin drops to $5,860, lowest since October 2017. True Believers with Fake Hopes Got Cleaned Out by Early Movers--WolfStreet.com Jun 24, 2018 "Down 70% from the peak. This is just not fun anymore ... at the moment, bitcoin is even worse – incredibly – than one of the worst fiat currencies in the world, the Argentine peso, which has plunged “only” 35% over the period during which bitcoin plunged 70%. That takes some doing!"
• Inside the Crypto World's Biggest Scandal--wired.com.
• Bitcoin: Mt. Gox bankruptcy in Japan changed to civil rehabilitation, allowing compensation to customers in bitcoin, which will reportedly 'more than cover cash losses'--Fortune.com.
• Blockchain will become 'obsolete' says Geopolitical Futures founder George Friedman--"I've never known any encryption technology not to be broken," Friedman told CNBC at the UBS CIO Global Forum in New York. CNBC also reported some analysts have noted that if and when an emerging technology called quantum computing matures, it could easily decrypt blockchain.

Gold:

• Gold prices mark another 2018 low even as surging dollar pauses--Marketwatch.com June 25, 2018.
• Safe Haven? A bearish ‘death cross’ formed in gold even as trade turmoil rattles stock market--Marketwatch.com June 21, 2018--“Gold is getting bogged down from a stronger U.S. dollar.”

4) ICYMI Tech News:

• Amazon buys online pharmacy PillPack--thehill.com.
• Alibaba v. Tencent: The Battle for Supremacy in China - Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent have built tech titans that dominate China's digital economy--Fortune.com.
• Google v. Apple: There Is A Clear Winner--SeekingAlpha.com. See also 4 Myths about Alphabet (Google)--SeekingAlpha.com.
• Google: Interview of Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land, who is now Google's “search liaison” giving explanations for the Google search engine's 'errors'--CNBC.com
• The Walt Disney Company ($DIS) can buy Twenty-First Century Fox ($FOXA) provided it sells 22 regional sports networks says US Department of Justice--justice.gov.
• Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN) (redfin.com): The 'Everything' Of Real Estate--SeekingAlpha.com.
• Sprint and T-Mobile Merger: The 12 Points From The FCC Filing That Signal Merger Approval And Potential Appreciation--SeekingAlpha.com. See also "Examining the Competitive Impact of the T-Mobile – Sprint Transaction"--Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights (US Senate video), June 27, 2018.

• WaPo Unions vs Jeff Bezos: “When Your Owner Is Richer Than God, It’s Easier To Get Uppity”: Discontent At The Washington Post As The Union Targets Jeff Bezos | VanityFair.com. [Editor's note: Bezos still thinking about building Amazon's HQ2 in a suburb of Washington, DC?]

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Tech Review | Media Disruption, Mergers & Fear of the Future (video)

Tech Review (TR 2018-06-23)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Media Disruption & Fear of the Future, 2) Time Warner - What AT&T Got For $81B, 3) Investing: The Week, Investing Notes: Short Tesla $TSLA?, 4) ICYMI Tech News.

1) Media Disruption, Mergers & Fear of the Future
AT&T, Time Warner and the Entire Media Merger Frenzy Explained

Wall Street Journal (wsj.com) video above published Jun 14, 2018: From AT&T and Time Warner to the hot pursuit of 21st Century Fox and Sky, media mergers are in full swing. Why now? WSJ's Amol Sharma answers all your questions about the forces driving media deals.

Is the Media Sector Evolving or Devolving?" | inflectioncapital.co: "The media sector is at an existential crossroads. Its content is going direct to the consumer and traditional distributors like cable and satellite will be bypassed. Savings from cutting out distributors will be passed on to the consumer and video content choice should rise, allowing consumers to watch more TV shows and films. Consequently, audiences will continue to splinter and it will become more costly to attract an audience; industry revenue growth and margins will both deteriorate. 21st Century Fox and Disney have taken steps to produce more value for shareholders. However, that value will likely accumulate only at a low-double-digit annual rate. For the remainder of media, value is likely to fall as the companies don’t have a strategy to resolve their legacy dependencies. The tech and telecom titans (AT&T, Apple, Amazon, etc.) that already have adjacent media business will likely only accumulate value from their core businesses, not from their media assets. This is because video packaging and distribution is becoming a profitless business—unless one has massive global scale. Additionally, there is little way for the other tech and telecom titans to buy Discovery, Viacom, AMC Networks, etc. and create meaningful shareholder value. All the needle-moving assets are now taken. In contrast, Netflix has reached such a large scale in subscribers and content-acquisition capability that its market value is likely to accumulate at a rate faster than low double digits." (emphasis added) [Editor's note: for more, read the White Paper (pdf).]

2) Time Warner - What AT&T Got For $81 Billion (closing price per the 8K filing) - AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner closed on Thursday, June 14, 2018. Since then AT&T (NYSE:T):

The chart below shows the revenue of AT&T and Time Warner in 2017 by business segment

Source: Statista.com

See also:

• Revisiting AT&T's Rationale for Buying Time Warner | fool.com

• Why I Am Acquiring More AT&T | SeekingAlpha.com 

• AT&T (NYSE:T) Best Dividend Stock Of All Time Now Trades Cheap--SeekingAlpha.com 

3) Investing

The Week: NASDAQ Composite -0.7% | S&P 500 Index -0.9% | DJIA -2%.
But on Friday (June 22), both the S&P 500 and the Dow ended trading up--S&P +0.2%, Dow (DJIA) +0.5%.

“Underlying breadth points to an eventual new high in price for the S&P 500,” wrote Bespoke Investment Group, in a report cited by Raymond James. The “long-term uptrend channels are still in place.”--Improving market breadth could indicate stock strength ahead | MarketWatch.com 18 June 2018.

"... the stock market - particularly big-tech ... Every dip is met by a wall of buying, ramping the market ever higher ..."--This Is The Greatest Short-Squeeze In History | ZeroHedge.com 20 June 2018. 

Wall Street's Charging Bull

Investing Notes: Short Tesla $TSLA?
Black Swan author Nassim Taleb defended Tesla after an actress posted a video of a Tesla on fire:

There are 150K-200K car fires per annum. You take one event & an emotional statement of an actress & turn it into a statement about the safety of @Tesla. And this is 2018.

I am blocking any commentator who doesn't get it. In this and other similar situations. Finito.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 17, 2018

On Monday Elon Musk showed off Tesla's newest production line and predicted that those who have shorted $TSLA “have about three weeks before their short position explodes.” But note the report out Friday, June 22, 2018: Exclusive: Tesla to close a dozen solar facilities in nine states--Reuters.com.

Other notes:

• The Cass Freight Index: A Measure of North American Freight Activity | cassinfo.com: shipments and expenditures up significantly. "The US is pretty much the only normalised economy on the planet"--Bill Blain. See also The Huge Ships for the Booming LNG Trade | WolfStreet.com.

• Why heads are exploding at the Fed | MarketWatch.com: at 3.8% unemployment, all of the econometric models indicate we should be seeing a lot more wage and price inflation than we are experiencing, but those econometric models are based upon historical statistics which don't factor in the consequences of the technological and institutional changes that are redefining U.S. labor, commodity and product markets, including the disappearance of the Phillips curve—the hypothesized inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment.

• Euro Risk: "The reasons the European economy remains so anemic are more to do with the Euro – the need to restructure economies at a time of enforced austerity to make the common currency work."--Bill Blain. See also Italy never should have joined the euro, and the ECB can’t rescue it from its next crisis: "Italy could plunge the eurozone into an unmanageable crisis"--MarketWatch.com.

• What about China? Read this week's expose at Axios.com, including intellectual property theft, the link between China's anti-monopoly policies and its industrial goals, etc.

• Global Debt: Are debt crises in Argentina and Turkey a global warning sign? | TheGuardian.com by Kenneth Rogoff. 
• If it’s already carrying significant debt, it’s “really handcuffed”--The Toys “R” Us Bankruptcy and Private Equity | TheAtlantic.com--“Had these companies remained publicly owned, they would have had a much higher probability of being able to adapt, to invest, and to withstand the ups and downs of the economy."--Thomas Paulson, founder of Inflection Capital Management (inflectioncapital.co).

• How U.S. tax reform rewards companies that shift profit to tax havens | Reuters.com.

• Investing Without People (pdf) by Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital (oaktreecapital.com), and Revamping Or Starting A Portfolio Now--SeekingAlpha.com. 

4) ICYMI Tech News:

• Internet Tax: US Supreme Court allows states collect sales tax from online retailers--Reuters.com.
• Regulation: FTC plans to reexamine how it polices tech companies | TheHill.com.
• Yahoo Mail aims at emerging markets and casual users, launches versions for mobile web and Android Go--TechCrunch.com.
• 5G: Ericsson needs industries to embrace 5G to underpin its recovery--Reuters.com.
• Data: The consumer data collection industry is about to explode (opinion June 19, 2018)--TheHill.com.
• Google to invest $550 million in JD.com, China's 2nd largest e-commerce site--cnbc.com.
• Google: More transparency and control in your Google Account--blog.google. 
• Google rolls out web interface for Android Messages enabling texting from desktop and says GIF search, Smart Reply, and more features coming--blog.google.
• Personal tech--pocket-lint.com re: bbc.co.uk/iplayer--How to watch BBC iPlayer in the US and elsewhere. 
• Work: Companies need older workers and here is why--Reuters.com.
• Environment: By 2030, an estimated 111 million metric tons of used plastic will need to be buried or recycled somewhere else—or not manufactured at all according to a new analysis of UN global trade data by University of Georgia researchers--Bloomberg.com.

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

How Uber Disrupted the New York City Taxi Medallion Market (video)

How Uber disrupted the New York City taxi medallion market

CNNMoney video above published Jun 5, 2018: CNN.com's Jon Sarlin explains how Uber (domain: uber.com) moved into the biggest market in the country and defeated the formidable yellow cab industry.

Tweets by Uber

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

CES 2018 Livestream Tuesday: FTC, White House Deputy CTO, FCC

CES 2018 Livestream Schedule | CES 2018 Jan 9-12 (all times PST)

Date and time Las Vegas, NV (PST): 

Tuesday, Jan 9th, at CES | Livestream highlighted sessions:

• SuperSession: Insights from the FTC | CES 2018 11:30 AM-12:30 PM:

FTC Acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen sits down with CTA President and CEO Gary Shapiro for a candid conversation about the challenges facing the agency and navigating the constantly evolving technological landscape. Background:

• Statement of FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen on Net Neutrality and the Role of Antitrust | Federal Trade Commission (pdf)

• Statement of Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen on Returning FTC Competition and Consumer Protections to Broadband Subscribers | Federal Trade Commission.

Great blog from FTC’s acting chief technologist Neil Chilson https://t.co/2eKCJ84H6p

— Maureen Ohlhausen (@MOhlhausenFTC) January 4, 2018

•  Innovation Policy | CES 2018 2:15-2:30 PM:  Q&A with White House Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios on the Trump Administration’s approach on innovation and technology policy.

• 2018 Preview: FCC Commissioner Roundtable | CES 2018 3:30-4:30 PM: FCC Commissioners will discuss critical regulatory and policy issues, including: infrastructure, spectrum allocation, 5G, privacy, accessibility, the Internet of Things, regulatory reform, disruptive innovation, and technological convergence, among other hot topics.

source: CES

Tweets by CES

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Tech Review | Tencent Reaches $500 Billion Market Capitalization (video)

Tech Review (TR 2017-11-25)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Tencent Reaches $500 Billion Market Capitalization, 2) Media & Advertising Disrupted, 3) Investing: Stock Indexes at Record Highs, Trump's First Year & Legacy, 4) ICYMI Tech News.

1) Tencent Reaches $500 Billion Market Capitalization

Tencent on Monday punched through a stock market capitalization of $500 billion, becoming the first Chinese technology company to join an elite group dominated by US corporations. Financial Times (ft.com) video above published Nov 20, 2017.

Tencent Holdings Limited (domain: tencent.com) is a Chinese investment holding conglomerate whose subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, social network, payment systems, smartphones, internet-related services, value-added services, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, property services, and online advertising services, principally in China. Global ambitions: will Tencent be as successful competing in the global marketplace as it is on China's state-controlled internet?

• Tencent Holdings Ltd shares HKG: 0700 (pricing in HKD) Disclaimer
• Headquarters: Shenzhen, China
• Revenue: 151.9 billion CNY (2016)
• Subsidiaries: Supercell, China Literature, WeBank, MORE
• Founders: Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong, Chen Yidan, Xu Chenye, Zeng Liqing
• Tencent is the world's fifth-largest internet company by revenue according to wikipedia.org.

Tencent's killer app is WeChat (domain: wechat.com), a social mobile application with voice and text messaging service. It is the most popular social mobile application in China and some overseas Chinese communities, such as Malaysia. See: Tencent turns to WeChat, games and deals for global strategy: "Malaysia the first foreign country to roll out its WeChat ecosystem," an executive told Reuters.com.

2)  Media & Advertising Disrupted: Why there's so much anxiety in the media business right now | CNN.com: "The digital advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook -- in which they take in 2017 about 90% of all the digital ad dollar growth -- drives everyone else in media to run tighter ships," said analyst Ken Doctor. 

See also:

• Angst Among Digital Media CEOs as Ads Fall: Is It Time to Sell? | Bloomberg.com: "With ads tough to sell and new capital hard to raise, dreams of creating new digital behemoths have given way to a more realistic view that survival may hinge on being part of a larger company."
• Mainstream Media Turns On Social Media--"Mark Zuckerberg's Long Litany Of Failings."--ZeroHedge.com.
• New model? Move Over WaPo & NYTimes: Axios.com Raises $20 Million to Fund Newsroom Expansion | WSJ.com: "The 10-month-old media startup plans to increase staffing to 150 by the end of 2018, develop new coverage areas, and expand its data analysis and product offerings." 

3) Investing

The Week: Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. made this a short week for investors, but a time to reflect on the year and give thanks:

"... Donald Trump is a lucky guy, and the economy during his first year in office has been a dream cocktail of favorable results. Real growth has increased from 2% over the past few years to 3% in the second and third quarters. (The third quarter was a real surprise. Everyone expected growth at 2% or below because of hurricanes Irma and Harvey.) Inflation is tame at 2%, very low for the late stage of an expansion (unless this isn’t a late stage). The 10-year U.S. Treasury is yielding a very unthreatening 2.4%, the unemployment rate is just over 4% and looks like it is headed into the 3% range, household net worth is at an all-time high, consumer confidence is at a 15-year high and the Standard & Poor’s 500 is at an all-time high. That’s a pretty good set of statistics for less than a year in office. Perhaps giving President Trump credit for all of it isn’t right, but it did occur on his watch ..."--Byron Wien Commentary | blackstone.com (excerpt)(emphasis added)

For the week ending Friday Nov 24, 2017, U.S. stocks: the S&P 500, NASDAQ, and Russell 2000, all end the week at all-time record highs--MarketWatch.com and S&P 500 closes above 2,600 for first time | CNBC.com.

Investing Notes:

• Tax Bill: "After I saw that tax bill, I lost hope with the drain the swamp concept, the swamp keeps getting bigger."--DoubleLine's Jeffrey Gundlach. See also: The Republican Tax Plan Is Very Swampy | ZeroHedge.com.
• Wall Street Betting on Tax Reform Passing? "Key point about the Shiller PE is therefore NOT that stocks are expensive. Rather, it is that markets expect inflation/interest rates to remain low and corporate earnings to stay elevated."--datatrekresearch.com 
• Trump's Legacy: "Tax reform and the end of year spending deal will consume all of Washington's oxygen until the end of the year" but next week the Senate is scheduled to confirm President Trump's ninth judicial appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals this year, which beats President Reagan's eight  in his first year, and President Obama's three in his first year in office. "This [judicial appointments] will be the single most important legacy of the Trump administration"--Sen. Chris Coons, Delaware Democrat and Senate Judiciary Committee member.--BusinessInsider.com
• Goldman Sachs says 2017 was surprisingly good, 2018 will be more of the same: "2017 is shaping up to be the first year of the expansion in which growth surprises to the upside ... We expect 2018 to deliver more of the same"--Goldman analyst Charles Himmelberg--cnbc.com.
• Trump & China: Don't "be lulled by Trump's public praise of President Xi. Behind the scenes, [Trade Rep] Lighthizer's arguments are winning the day"--Axios.com.
• Bitcoin: “Can you live without bitcoins? Yes. Could you live without tulips in the Netherlands? Yes,” said Sankaran Naren, CIO of ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, at the Reuters Summit in Mumbai--Bubbly bitcoin not worth the wager: investors | Reuters.com.
• Short $TSLA? "Put it this way," short seller Jim Chanos said, "if you wouldn't be short a multi-billion-dollar loss-making enterprise in a cyclical business, with a leveraged balance sheet, questionable accounting, every executive leaving, run by a CEO with a questionable relationship with the truth, what would you be short? It sort of ticks all the boxes" --cnbc.com. See also: Bloomberg.com--Tesla’s Burning Through Nearly Half a Million Dollars Every Hour--"By this calculation, Tesla would exhaust cash on Aug. 6, [2018]."
• $INTC--SeekingAlpha.com: Chromebooks--One Good Reason To Like Intel. 
• 'The fear is gone,' boom-time complacency tops investors' worry list--Reuters.com.

4) ICYMI Tech News:

• Amazon's Last Mile | gizmodo.com: "... plainclothes contractors with few labor protections, driving their own cars, competing for shifts on the company’s own Uber-like platform ... In terms of size, efficiency, and ruthlessness, Amazon has few equals ... "

• Is Google's AI almost as stupid as Siri? Google Has Picked an Answer for You—Too Bad It’s Often Wrong | WSJ.com: "Going beyond search, the internet giant is promoting a single result over all others, and many are contentious, improbable or laughably incorrect."

• Apple offices raided ahead of launch of iPhone X in South Korea | metro.co.uk: "Apple products are wildly popular in South Korea, which is home to several giant tech firms including Samsung and LG."

• Qualcomm to Win EU Approval for NXP Deal by End of Year--Bloomberg.com.

• A Windows 10 alternative: Microsoft should embrace, extend Linux on the desktop | ZDNet.com: "I get it ... you don't want Windows 10. Let me suggest another solution." See also: "​Linux totally dominates supercomputers"--ZDNet.com.

• Another Cryptocurrency Gets Hacked, Money Disappears. Here are the 30 Biggest Crypto Hacks | WolfStreet.com: "Bitfinex, which doesn’t even disclose where it is located (it’s incorporated in the British Virgin Islands at a mailbox address and files some paperwork in Hong Kong), was hacked again, after its May 2015 hack."

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER

Automotive Disruption: Electric Car Dreams Come At A Cost (video)

Electric car dream comes at a cost

Video above published by FT.com Sep 15, 2017: Bosses warn of challenges in turning technology into profits. As carmakers race to replace diesel with electric, concerns are mounting that they may have to sacrifice margins to succeed in selling battery vehicles to the public.

AlixPartners' Wakefield Sees China Leading the EV Market

Video above published Sep 15, 2017: Mark Wakefield, AlixPartners.com managing director, discusses the global electric-car race with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson on "Bloomberg Technology."

What Electrification Means for the Margins on Cars

Video above published Sep 14, 2017: Scott Corwin, Deloitte.com managing director, discusses the electric-car industry with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg Technology."

feedback & comments via twitter @DomainMondo
Follow @DomainMondo

DISCLAIMER