Archive for the 'Competitive Strategy' Category
Coca-Cola needs a bubbly domestic market
Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) really needs to get things going in the North American territory. whether you take a look at Coke’s latest earnings report, you’ll see that unit case volume moved up 1% for the fourth quarter, and down 1% for the entire fiscal year. That’s well below the 6% growth in vol…
Ambac deal rumor bails out Dow
Bloomberg News reports that a bailout of Ambac Financial Group (NYSE: ABK) is going to be announced next week. Ambac rallied on speculation a recapitalization would salvage the second-largest bond guarantor’s AAA credit rating. The Dow is rising — going from being down 120 points earlier in the…
Teva sees strong generic growth
At their investor day, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (ADR) (NASDAQ: TEVA), the world’s largest generic drug maker, said that they expect to double revenues by the next 4 years. Teva predicts that they will grow faster than the generic market. While that is interesting in its own right, their v…
As drug patents come to an end, Big Pharma raises prices
For big pharmaceutical companies, the largest commerce challenge is that patents are expiring on some of their most popular drugs. whether they do not have new “blockbusters” to replace those, revenue is convinced to fall. The solution is to raise prices on the best selling drugs and milk them b…
Peter Lynch looking for a dot-com ‘ten-bagger’
One of history’s greatest investors is Peter Lynch, who managed Fidelity’s Magellan mutual fund from 1977 to 1990. For the most part, he focused on investments that he understood well, such as GE (NYSE: GE), Kemper, Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) and so on.
So, what is he doing now?
Interestingl…
Airline pilots could kill Delta (DAL) merger with Northwest (NWA)
The conventional wisdom is that labor unions in the US are shut to dead and no longer have much influence on the managements of big companies. Tell that story to the boards at Northwest (NYSE: NWA) and Delta (NYSE: DAL). Disagreement at the pilot’s union may undermine a merger amoung the two air…
Oprah Effect works for trade books too — particularly when they’re free
Since the announcement on Oprah’s television program that Suze Orman’s financial advice book Money & Women would be available for free as an e-book from Oprah.com, more than a million copies in English have been downloaded, as well as an additional 19,000 in Spanish, according to a statement rel…
NASCAR: Car advertisers dream
NASCAR may be a good place to experiment engines, but the three U.S. car-makers all preserve budgets for the wild races which top $100 million each. A Chrysler executive quoted by Reuters explained the love affair by saying that “there are still 75 (million) to 80 million NASCAR fans out there ….
Newspapers try to strike back online
Several large publishers will set up a joint ad sales operation in the hopes of getting more revenue for their online businesses. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Gannett (NYSE: GCI)., Hearst Corp., the New York Times NYSE: NYT). and Tribune Co. are setting up the network as a stand-alone …
General Motors may find its buyout offer is too popular
General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), which nowadays reported an auto industry record loss of $38.7 billion in 2007, is offering its unionized workforce of 74,000 a buyout package. The automaker, along with rivals Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) and Chrysler LLC which have offered similar deals, better hope tha…
RIM Blackberry outage points to firm’s Achilles’ Heel
Research-In-Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) sells one of the most popular smartphones in the world. The Blackberry does well considering it allows commerce folks to have an easy system that makes their e-mail portable. The software and hardware invent the product an absolute necessity for many professional…
eBay to list GM preowned inventory
eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) stock is falling that AM after the company announced on Friday that it will list the entire inventory of General Motors (NYSE: GM) used-car segment. In addition, both GM and EBAY will develop marketing and other offerings designed to drive leads and sales to GM dealers. …
Yahoo! set to approach AOL
There are only four big web portals. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has tender for one of them, Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). whether that deal came through, soon after the total would drop to three. Yahoo! does not much like the tender Microsoft has made and says it is worth by $40 a share, not the $31 that Mic…
EarthLink puts its wi-fi division on the block
This week, EarthLink Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK) announced its Q4 results. There was a loss of $9.5 million, or $0.08 per share, which included a $31.1 million write-off from its wi-fi assets.
And, yes, now the company wants to offload the segment. So what does that mean for EarthLink, as well as the…
