Category: Stocks

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Stocks

Peloton reports wider-than-expected loss

Peloton shares tumbled more than 25% on Thursday, after the company reported weakening sales growth and a wider-than-expected loss in its fiscal first quarter.

The company slashed its outlook for the full fiscal year amid softened demand for its exercise equipment and ongoing supply chain challenges. More consumers are opting to return to gyms such as Planet Fitness and Equinox, or fitness junkies are purchasing another at-home option from the flurry of companies that sell everything from rowing machines to connected mirrors.

In August, Peloton slashed the price of its original Bike by 20% to $1,495. On Thursday, Chief Financial Officer Jill Woodworth said that while Bike sales accelerated after the change, the results haven’t entirely met Peloton’s expectations.

CNBC

Loss per share: $1.25 vs. $1.07 expected

Revenue: $805.2 million vs. $810.7 million expected

With gyms reopening, I think Peloton’s gonna be a bear case.

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Stocks Technology

Lime raises $500M and public plans

Lime raises over $500 million, confirms plans to take its electric scooter company public.

Now, Lime says that its most recent funding round was oversubscribed, with $418 million in debt financing led by Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Fidelity Management & Research, Uber, and certain funds managed by Highbridge Capital Management. The company also received a $105 million senior secured term loan facility from a private equity group at UBS O’Connor. (These bank loans are typically made to companies that have below investment-grade credit ratings.)

Going public would certainly help raise cash in the near term, but it also carries big risks. Lime’s main rival, Bird, recently went public via a SPAC merger that valued the Santa Monica-based company at $2.3 billion. That deal just closed, and as soon as they were publicly listed, shares in the newly merged company fell sharply.

But while Bird relies on its business model of sending fleets of scooters to small operators to handle deployment and charging, Lime will likely rely on its scale and global status to attract investor interest. The company claims to be the top scooter operator in the US and Europe. It hit 250 million rides over the summer (recall it was at 200 million a year ago) and recently rolled out the fourth-generation version of its electric scooter.

The Verge

I am a Lime user and I can’t wait to see them go public. We are still not seeing financial filings to judge whether they have a sound business model.

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Stocks

AMD beats revenue estimates with $4.31B

Advanced Micro Devices reported its revenues and earnings for the third quarter ended September 30 exceeded expectations, with revenue growing 54% to a record $4.3 billion.

Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $893 million, or 73 cents a share, beating expectations of 67 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis. AMD said it was increasing its annual earnings forecast and its shares are up slightly to $123.15 a share in after-hours trading.

The Santa Clara, California-based company has had a good run on momentum behind its Zen and Zen 2 architectures for processors, which can generate 50% or more better performance per clock cycle than the previous generation. This architecture put AMD ahead of Intel in performance for the first time in a decade, and it has helped the perennial No. 2 PC chip maker into a fast-growing contender against Intel.

VentureBeat

AMD is doing so well. They were $14 like 5 years ago and they are rocking at $120. They’ve done so many things right and they profited on Intel’s missteps.

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Stocks Technology

Facebook Q3 earnings: profit beats estimates

Surprise surprise, Facebook beats profit estimates. I was skeptical in this round considering Apple’s effort on privacy and I was wrong Looks like ads are still doing pretty well.

Facebook reported mixed third quarter earnings on Monday, slightly missing revenue estimates but continuing to grow its user base in the face of multiple controversies that have sparked widespread criticism and calls for tighter regulation.

Here are the most important numbers from the report compared to analysts’ expectations, as compiled by Bloomberg:

Revenue: $29.01 billion versus $29.45 billion expected

Earnings per share: $3.22 versus $3.17 expected

Family daily active users: 2.81 billion versus 2.76 billion expected

Family monthly active users: 3.58 billion versus 3.51 billion expected

Yahoo Finance

And Mark Zuckerberg had to mention the metaverse again.

“We made good progress this quarter and our community continues to grow. I’m excited about our roadmap, especially around creators, commerce, and helping to build the metaverse.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO

Apple is announcing Q4 2021 earnings release on October 28.

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Stocks Technology

PayPal is exploring Pinterest acquisition

San Jose, California-based PayPal has recently approached Pinterest about a potential deal, the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private. The companies have discussed a potential price of around $70 a share, the people said.

Bloomberg

Pinterest suffered user decline in the last year and I don’t think their management knows how to fix the problem. I highly doubt PayPal would much to help on Pinterest user decline. To me, Pinterest users are a niche market of designers and collectors. I thought it would be easy for Pinterest to create a vibrant marketplace with the user personas they have. I guess it’s just too niched.

Pinterest stocks jumped about 14% today.

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Stocks

Facebook fined $69.6 million in the UK for Giphy takeover

After Facebook acquired the popular GIF repository Giphy (reportedly for $400 million), the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation to determine if the merger would lessen competition. As part of that probe, it said Facebook couldn’t continue with activities related to the merger (integrating products, merging teams and so on) without prior approval from the CMA. 

Now, the CMA has announced that it has fined Facebook £50.5 million ($70 million) for breaching those enforcement orders. “This is the first time a company has been found by the CMA to have breached an [order] by consciously refusing to report all the required information,” the CMA said in a press release. 

Engadget

The troubles with Facebook just never ends although $70m is probably not significant to Facebook.

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Stocks Technology

WHO hired company to copy Moderna

The World Health Organization has hired the company, called Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, as part of a $100 million plan to figure out how to make an mRNA vaccine against COVID that is as close as possible to the version produced by Moderna.

As to why WHO has chosen to try to copy Moderna rather than the other mRNA COVID vaccine, which is made by Pfizer BioNTech, Friede says the choice was practical.

“Moderna has reiterated on several occasions that they will not enforce their intellectual property during the pandemic,” says Friede. In other words, a manufacturer probably won’t face a lawsuit for producing a vaccine that’s virtually identical to Moderna’s.

But Afrigen’s Petro Treblanche says there are still a lot of unknowns. Take Moderna’s patent.

“It’s written very carefully and cleverly to not disclose absolutely everything,” says Treblanche.

So while Afrigen has been able to determine most of the equipment and specialized ingredients that are needed, “what we don’t know is the exact concentrations,” says Treblanche. “And we don’t know some of the mixing times — some of the conditions of mixing and formulating.”

NPR

The fact that we are in a pandemic situation and we have Moderna not sharing the COVID-19 vaccine recipe makes me uncomfortable. On one hand, I think innovation should be protected and rewarded. In this case, trade is protected for 20 years for the technology that Moderna invented. The question is whether this is ethical to have a company guard their profits at the cost of potential human live losses. Moderna also promises not to enforce their intellectual property during a pandemic which seems kinda reasonable. Moderna also released the genetic sequence but not give the exact procedure to manufacture it.

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Stocks

Netflix adds 4.4 million membership

Netflix Inc. added 4.4 million memberships in the third quarter and beats earning estimates.

Netflix Inc. said it added more subscribers than it predicted in the latest quarter as profit and revenue rose thanks to the return of popular series and new hits.

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based streaming company said third-quarter profit increased to $1.45 billion from $790 million a year earlier. Per-share earnings were $3.19 a share, compared with $1.74 a share last year, topping GAAP earnings estimates of $2.56 a share, according to FactSet.

Revenue rose to $7.48 billion from $6.44 billion a year earlier and was in line with analysts’ expectations.

The streaming service said it added roughly 4.4 million memberships in the third quarter. It had previously forecast it would add 3.5 million memberships.

Wall Street Journal

Looks like Squid Game helped.

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Stocks Technology

DoorDash and Uber Eats is gaining on Grubhub

Note that this is a share-price chart and not representing the sales of the various companies.

On Wednesday, the new parent company of Grubhub, Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway.com, TKWY 0.33% also known as Jet, provided a third-quarter trading update. While several countries showed stellar growth, Grubhub’s business looked disappointing, setting a negative tone ahead of third-quarter earnings for DoorDash DASH 0.61% and the Uber Eats unit of Uber Technologies. UBER -2.67% One conclusion is that Grubhub’s trends signal an industrywide slowdown for food delivery in the U.S. More likely, Grubhub’s pain is its competitors’ gain.

Competition looks like a key factor, though. YipitData shows that Uber Eats gained market share in the third quarter at the expense of Grubhub, overtaking the incumbent to become the market leader in New York City. Meanwhile, data from M Science shows that the U.S. market leader, DoorDash, expanded its national share over 6 percentage points year over year in the third quarter, at least in part at the expense of Grubhub.

Wall Street Journal

Both DoorDash and Uber Eats appears to be doing pretty well in the delivery business in USA.

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Stocks Technology

Uber completes Drizly acquisition

Uber Technologies, Inc. today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Drizly and that the two companies will begin integrating their complementary delivery apps and services. The purchase consideration was approximately $1.1 billion, consisting of approximately 18.7 million newly issued shares of Uber common stock plus cash.

Uber

On other new, cannabis marketplace Lantern is spun out of Drizly.

I think the Drizly-Uber combintion will be something to watch out for. It’s good to see Uber doubling down on delivery. There’s so much opportunities there for both companies.