Category: Stocks

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Stocks Technology

Elon Musk agrees to buy Twitter

Major day for Twitter shareholders, Elon Musk agrees to purchase Twitter at the premium price of $54.20.

Twitter shares surge 22% after Elon Musk revives deal to buy company at original price

Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed course and agreed to buy Twitter for the agreed upon price, according to a filing on Tuesday.

The social media company issued a statement saying it had received the letter and said, “The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”

Source: CNBC

I wonder what changed his mind.

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Stocks Travel

Grab aims to break even by H2 2024

It will be interesting to see how Grab make the economics work for Grab rides and food, considering South East Asia is a highly competitive market.

Grab Sees Slowing Growth As It Aims To Break Even By Second Half 2024

Grab Holdings said it’s aiming to breakeven by the second half of 2024 on an adjusted earnings basis before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, although the growth of its business is slowing.

Grab was established 10 years ago, but it’s never managed to turn a profit. Grab’s shares have lost more than 70% of their value since going public on Nasdaq through a merger with Altimeter Capital Management’s SPAC (special purpose acquisition company).

The Singapore-based company said its revenue would grow 45-55% in 2023 on a constant currency basis, which is slower than its forecast for the current year.

Grab has also recently launched a digital bank—called GSX Bank—in Singapore in partnership with Singtel, and has plans to launch two more banks in Indonesia and Malaysia next year. Grab said on Tuesday that it expects the bank to break even by 2026.

Source: Forbes
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Stocks Technology

Stadia is shutting down

Wow. I expected this but not so fast. Just a month ago, Google was denying Stadia is going to shut down. I guess economics kept up with them.

Google is shutting down Stadia

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January.

Last year, rumors abounded it would shut down after the number of games released to the platform slowed and the company shuttered its in-house game development studios. When those rumors popped up again this year, Google insisted that Stadia was not shutting down. “Rest assured we’re always working bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro,” the company said in a tweet. Which was true… until today.

Source: The Verge
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Stocks Technology

Twilio and anti-racist layoffs

Wait what does that even mean? Layoffs being anti-racist. Does that mean you layoff people of majority races in the company?

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson announced in a message to all employees that 11% of its workforce would be laid off, stating that they made the layoffs through an “Anti-Racist” and “Anti-Oppression” lens.

“As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company,” Lawson wrote. “Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

The company had 7,867 employees as of Dec. 31, 2021, according to its December annual report.

In the past year, Twilio shares have declined in value by over 78%.

Source: Fox Business

Maybe they are laying off by the same proportion of people based in California or USA. I haven’t got a clue but love to hear an explanation.

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Stocks Technology

Tesla Texas produced 10,000th Model Y

Looks like Tesla’s managed to, gradually, catch up with production in Texas which is great news.

Tesla Gigafactory Texas has produced 10,000th Model Y electric SUV

One of the biggest stories at Tesla right now as the production ramps up is that the automaker is trying to simultaneously achieve Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas. Those two factories are expected to roughly double Tesla’s production capacity within the next year.

However, those production ramps are hard to predict, and Tesla is not exactly forthcoming with the production numbers. But it does share milestones – today, the automaker announced that Gigafactory Texas produced its 10,000th Model Y vehicle:

Source: Electrek
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Stocks Technology

Adobe acquires Figma

I see this as Adobe is fading into irrelevance with product engineers. Today hardly almost all designers I know of are using Figma.

Smart defensive play there Adobe.

Adobe makes $20B bet on a collaborative future with Figma acquisition

Prior to announcing its intent to buy Figma for $20 billion on Thursday, Adobe’s largest deal was its $4.75 billion Marketo acquisition in 2018.

Perhaps Adobe saw the Figma deal as its organization-altering moment as it watched the creative market making a key change from one centered on creating assets with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to one firmly focused on the creators themselves and the collaborative nature of the design process.

The former is where Adobe has built the bulk of its business. The latter is represented by Figma, a startup with visionary founders who wanted to change the way people thought about design in a digital context, a change so important that the old-guard company was willing to overspend to grab the young upstart and bring the two ways of thinking together.

Source: Techcrunch

Well, good luck. $20B is way higher than I imagine.

Figma is used by Airbnb, Uber and Zoom.

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Stocks Technology Travel

Lyft shuts down in-house rentals

I didn’t see this coming. Lyft Rentals is shutting down less than three years after it opens.

Lyft is shutting down its in-house car rental program

Lyft will stop renting out cars from its own fleet and has laid off around 60 employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. As TechCrunch notes, the layoffs have also been confirmed by the LinkedIn posts of affected workers. The people who lost their jobs, The Journal said, worked in operations and covered 2 percent of the company’s workforce. Back in May, the company reportedly wrote in a staff memo that it’s slowing down hiring due to the economic downturn, but that it didn’t have any layoffs planned. Things have clearly changed since then.

Source: Engadget

Lyft Rentals is one of the more affordable options that I see. I thought they were able to make the unit economics work out.

RIP. They will be missed.

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Stocks

Amazon takes stake in Grubhub

Amazon on Wednesday agreed to take a stake in Grubhub as part of a deal that will also give members of its Prime subscription program a one-year membership to the food delivery service.

The partnership gives Amazon the option to take a 2% stake in Grubhub, the U.S. subsidiary of Just Eat Takeaway.com, the European food giant said. Amazon will be able to increase its total stake to 15% of Grubhub depending on certain performance factors, such as the number of new customers added.

News of the deal sent shares of delivery platforms lower. Uber’s stock fell more than 3%, and shares of DoorDash plunged as much as 9%.

The agreement comes as Netherlands-based Just Eat is exploring a sale of Grubhub amid pressure from investors to improve its business. Just Eat’s stock is down more than 60% this year.

Amazon had previously experimented with adding food delivery perks to Prime. In September, it announced a tie-up with European delivery company Deliveroo that gave Prime members in the U.K. and Ireland access to Deliveroo Plus for one year. Amazon took a stake in Deliveroo in 2019.

Source: CNBC

This is a powerful collaboration. DoorDash is probably watching this closely.

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Stocks

SEC to require climate-change risk disclosures

I’m still a little confused how this would manifest but I’m glad SEC is mandating companies think about climate change as a risk to their businesses.

SEC to Require Climate-Change Risk Disclosures Under New Plan

Companies will need to reveal detailed information about their greenhouse gas pollution under a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plan, portending a major shift in how corporations must show they are dealing with climate change. 

For the first time ever, the agency plans to require businesses to outline the risks a warming planet poses to their operations when they file registration statements, annual reports or other documents. Some large companies will have to provide information on emissions they don’t make themselves, but come from other firms in their supply chain. 

Bloomberg

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Stocks

Bird continues to face challenges

Bird sold a vision of micro-mobility and got me excited. I thought it would really worked out initially. In the next year I saw their vehicles trashed into lakes, vandalized and I encountered one that isn’t functional. I realized this wasn’t going to work out. Not in Oakland and San Francisco at least.

Bird Stock Plummets After Electric Scooter Firm Gives Weak Guidance

Bird rents electric scooters and bikes in over 400 cities in more than 30 countries. It also sells its micro-electric vehicles to consumers. Last year, those hardware sales made up 9% of total revenue.

In the December quarter, Bird lost an adjusted $21.5 million on sales of $54 million. Wall Street was modeling a loss of $31 million on sales of $50.8 million.

For the full-year, Bird lost an adjusted $66.9 million on sales of $205 million. Analysts were projecting Bird to lose an adjusted $77 million on sales of $201.9 million in 2021, according to FactSet.

In 2021, Bird’s sales rose 117% year over year due to easy comparisons to the Covid-hampered 2020. Compared with 2019, sales were up 60%.

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