Category Archives: internet

earnings calls: Apple (AAPL) vs. Microsoft (MSFT)

July 23, 2014 By in cloud services, earnings conference calls, internet, software, Stock ideas, Technology, Video games, Wireless Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Last night after the market close, AAPL reported earnings per share that beat the consensus of Wall Street analysts–and the stock went down in the after-market.  MSFT, in contrast, reported results that fell short of analysts’ estimates–and the stock went up!

What’s going on?

AAPL gave next-quarter guidance that fell below Wall Street’s projection–but it always does this, so that’s not the reason.  MSFT’s income statement looks better after factoring out the large operating loss generated by Nokia, but I don’t think that’s the reason for the market’s positive response, either.  After all, if you wanted to (I didn’t), you could have gotten a reasonable guess at how much Nokia would subtract from the MSFT total from Nokia’s recent results as a stand-alone company.

I think the market’s response is much more a a conceptual response.

Tim Cook has made it clear that AAPL is a manufacturer of high-end mobile consumer technology.  There’s no “next big thing” on the horizon, however, with only a periodic refresh of the company’s smartphone line due any time soon.  If reports from suppliers are accurate, new offerings will include a phone with a large, Samsung Galaxy-matching screen size, and a(n even larger) tablet/phone.  For Jobs-ites, this departure from Steve’s view that phones should be small enough to operate with one hand may be earth-shaking.  But for the rest of the world, this is only catching up to what Samsung already has on the market.  So a ho-hum Wall Street response is appropriate.

For MSFT, on the other hand, the news is relatively better.  The company seems to have a focus for the first time in a long while.  The fact that Nokia is putting up operating losses at a near-$3 billion annual rate seems to me to justify the downsizing MSFT has recently announced.  The only surprise is that this wasn’t started sooner.

Leaving the X-Box content creation business is probably more symbolic than anything else, but it removes a potential distraction–especially given the continual mess the company has typically made of its game software development efforts.

One, admittedly small, figure what caught my eye was that MSFT has added another 1,000,000 individual/small business users to its Office 365 rolls during the June quarter.  I think this just shows the power of the cloud–easier administration, much lower cost-of-goods expense, and hugely better protection against counterfeiting.

For MSFT, then, the earnings were nice, but the fact that the company’s board is allowing significant changes is nicer.  True, the message may turn out only to be that the company will try harder not to shoot itself in the foot again, but even that’s an uptick.  Hence the positive market response.  Absence of missteps won’t be good enough for long, but it’s ok for now.

a closer look at Intel’s 2Q14

July 18, 2014 By in cloud services, earnings conference calls, internet, semiconductor manufacturing, software, Stock ideas, Technology Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

2Q14 results

After the close of Tuesday, Intel (INTC) reported a strong 2Q14.   Revenue came in slightly higher than the company’s upwardly revised guidance from last month.  Earnings per share were $.55 vs. Wall Street analysts’ expectations of $.52 (expectations which were revised upward when INTC announced in mid-June that business was looking up).

INTC also revised up its full-year revenue guidance from basically flat year-on-year to +5% growth.  It said that its server business ($3.5 billion of the company’s $13.8 billion total during the quarter) continues to boom, with both unit volumes and unit prices rising.  That’s no surprise.  In addition, however, the PC business ($8.7 billion in 2Q14 sales) appears to have bottomed and to be bouncing back a bit.

The PC development has two aspects.  Corporate customers, who make up about 40% of the PC total, are buying again.  The simplest explanation for this is that their existing laptops and desktops have just gotten too old.  Buying may also be spurred by the fact the Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP, that corporations don’t regard tablets as a viable substitute for laptops, or simply that firms are flush with cash.  In any event, corporates are buying, and will easily continue to do so in increasing amounts into next year.

Consumers, 60% of the total PC market, may also be showing signs of life–although this is more OEM and distributor body language than actual orders.

Remember, too, that INTC’s sales are not to end users.  So it stands to benefit not only from increased final sales but also by manufacturer and distributors purchases to built up bare-bones inventories.

operating leverage

INTC has substantial operating leverage, both from the capital-intensive nature of its manufacturing and its very large R&D and SG&A budgets.  As a result, small changes in revenue can make a disproportionately large impact on the bottom line (in fact, they’re almost pure profit).  At the moment, the revenue changes in INTC’s two main businesses, PCs and servers, are both positive.

tax rate

INTC is saying it  expects its tax rate to remain at 28% for the rest of the year, implying that the growth it is seeing is mostly coming from the developed world, where tax levies are relatively high.

lines of business

As is always the case in securities analysis, the line of business table is where the real work is done.  For INTC, I’ve duplicated the relevant 2Q14 lines below:

PC Client Group :    revs = $8.667 billion, op income = $3.734 billion

Data Center Group :   revenues = $3.709 billion, op income = $1.807 billion

Mobile and Communications Group : revenues = $51 million, op income = ($1.154 billion).

No, that’s not a mistake.  INTC’s tablet and smartphone chip business had revenues of $51 million for the quarter …and an operating loss of $1.2 billion.

INTC is earning operating income of $22 billion – $25 billion a year from its traditional businesses and using a chunk of that to fund the massive losses it is incurring in trying to break into the mobile computing business.

The M&C Group figures need some interpretation.  The revenue figures are net of marketing or other incentives INTC gives to buyers of its mobile chips; the operating loss includes R&D and other expenditures that arguably have an enduring value.

Nevertheless, the line of business table does convey the essence of the INTC story for shareholders wiling to pay $30+ for a share of stock.  INTC is, in effect, two companies:

–one is a mature microprocessor maker earning $2.50 or so a share and growing at maybe +10% a year

–the other is a startup currently bleeding red ink at a $4 billion annual rate.

my take

The fact that INTC is incurring large near-term losses on its M&C Group says two things to me:

–it doesn’t yet have a set of products customers are willing to actually pay for, and

–INTC believes M&C is crucial to its long-term success.

I might be persuaded to pay 15x earnings for the traditional business, if I thought it would have stable-to-rising earnings.  That would mean a target price in the high $30 range.  However, INTC’s actions imply that top management doesn’t believe the business is viable without M&C.  So maybe the right price for the traditional business would be $30.

That leaves the question of the status of M&C still up in the air, though.

On the other hand, if INTC can create a profitable mobile business, that would mean–to pluck numbers out of the air–total INTC near-term earnings could be $3 a share, with a higher growth rate.  Worth $45 a share?  …probably so.

My bottom line:  news of a cyclical upturn in the PC and server businesses probably supports INTC shares for the time being.  Eventual downside to the high $20s (?) if/as it becomes clear the mobile chip business has no hope.  Upside to $40+ on signs that INTC is narrowing its M&C operating losses.

I find it hard to assign probabilities to either outcome.  For the time being I’m content to remain a holder of the stock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo yesterday

June 26, 2014 By in Aereo, Cable, Entertainment, internet Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Aereo, the antenna company

As Aereo would describe itself, it’s kind of like a company that rents storage lockers to individuals–only it rents TV antennas.  Each customer has his own individual micro-antenna, located in a central antenna farm.  These micro-antennas receive the free over-the-air broadcasts from the major TV networks and retransmit them over the internet to a customer device, where TV programs can be viewed in real time.

If Aereo had started up ten years ago, this might not have been a big deal.  But in today’s world the TV networks collect hundreds of millions of dollars in annual retransmission fees from cable networks in return for allowing them to stream network content in real time to cable customers.  In the current cord-cutting environment, Aereo offers/ed an easy and cheap way for getting TV content (sports programming is the key) without having a cable subscription.

Aereo had two claims:

–it was acting just as if it were putting a rental antenna on each customer’s roof, only the antenna is located in a warehouse somewhere with good reception, and

–because each customer was choosing what to have streamed to him, even if there were copyright issues, the networks’ beef is with the individual customer, not Aereo.

prior lawsuits

The networks sued Aereo in Federal court in New York   …and lost.  They sued an Aereo knockoff  in Utah   …and won.

Both Aereo and the networks urged the Supreme Court to take the case and decide.

the ruling

The decision, 6 – 3 against Aereo, with the most conservative justices dissenting, came yesterday.

If I understand the ruling (don’t bet the farm that I do), the decision came in a way that Aereo hadn’t expected.

The majority said that back in the day, cable companies set up their own antennas to capture over-the-air network content and deliver it to cable customers without paying the networks for doing so.  Congress expressly made this illegal in 1976, through a revision to the Copyright Act .  So it didn’t matter if Aereo owned one humongous antenna or a gazillion teeny-tiny ones.  It also didn’t matter that the customer ordered his personal antenna to send the content or not.  All that mattered was that Congress outlawed delivering real-time network content without paying retransmission fees.

The majority also made a point of distinguishing real time delivery from time-shifting, where a customer records content for later viewing.

stock market implications

Take the Aereo IPO off your calendar for now.

It’s a big win for the broadcasters, protecting their cable retransmission fees for at least several years.

Unfortunately for them, it also leaves a lot up in the air.  We now know what Aereo can’t do, which is stream network content in real time, or with a brief delay.  But could it stream content with an hour lag?   …or the next day?  What about someone who records copyrighted content and shares it through Dropbox?  Is Dropbox responsible, or is it only the user who’s in trouble?

This case seems to show that operating through a big bunch of teeny antennas is colorful, but provided no legal protection.

My guess is that someone, maybe not Aereo, but someone, will try to revive the service, building in a time delay.  I’m not sure how much people would be willing to pay for time-shifted content, but my hunch is the audience would be surprisingly large.

Anyway, I think this possibility will prevent the content companies from running away to the upside.

 

 

 

once more on Amazon (AMZN)

May 6, 2014 By in Amazon, Current Market Thoughts, Industry Analysis, internet, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking/daydreaming/musing about AMZN lately.  I don’t know quite why, since I’m probably not going to buy the stock.  But my mind apparently doesn’t want to let go.

The latest thing to pop into my head is something I’d seen on the Value Line page for the stock but hadn’t paid much attention to.  It’s that:

–during the bounceback from the 2000 collapse of the Internet Bubble, AMZN shares tended to trade at about 30x cash flow.  In the recovery from the Great Recession, its cash flow multiple expanded to 50x.  Both are mind-boggling figures, to be sure-the second more so.

What could cause this gigantic multiple expansion, particularly during a period when investors were scared out of their wits and therefore more cautious than usual?

…possibly a better appreciation of the transformative nature of the internet and AMZN’s premier position as online merchant.  Cash generation from operations continues to grow at about 25% a year, virtually the same as before the GR, despite the company’s larger size.  That’s both a plus and a minus.  It’s an heroic achievement to maintain growth in the face of ballooning size.  But that’s usually something that keeps the multiple from contracting, not that causes it to expand by 60%.

…so I can’t help thinking that a lot of the favorable move is due to the Fed’s super-accommodative money policy.

Which gets me to my point.

Let’s assume that the economy’s release from intensive care and a return to normal money policy cause AMZN’s cash flow multiple to shrink to a “mere” 30x.  In simple terms, this means the stock should lose 40% of its value–maybe not all at once, but ultimately.  Continuing relentless growth in cash flow could cushion the fall somewhat.

Since the end of January, when the Fed made it clear it would continue baby steps toward normal despite weakening economic indicators, AMZN shares have pretty much made the entire reverse movement already–they’ve lost 25% of their value in a flat market.  They haven’t been alone, either.  Every other story stock has fallen this much–or more.

This thought makes me want to speed up my efforts to dig through the rubble.

 

rent vs. buy: digital goods

April 8, 2014 By in Amazon, Current Market Thoughts, e-readers, Entertainment, Facebook, internet, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

My daughter, who’s very interested in digital goods, suggested that I write about them.

Why?

They’re new, and they’re different.  Also, Laura supplied a lot of the information in this post.

Part of the difference between the digital goods we have now and their physical counterparts is in the nature of the beast(s).  Part, however, comes the desire of sellers–particularly Apple–to recreate the AOL-style “walled garden” that tethers the buyer to a given seller’s product line and secures fat profits for the retailer.

Some examples:

Generally speaking, for digital goods like e-books, or songs or movies, you don’t really own the digital copy you download.  You only have a license to use it.  Kindle owners found this out early on.  Amazon was inadvertently distributing 1984 without having bought the digital rights.  When the company found out–presumably when the rights holder called asking for money–Amazon simply went “Poof!” and made the book disappear from all the Kindles it had appeared on.  Apparently very few of the shocked Orwell fans had read the fine print in the Kindle service agreement.  It is kind of funny, though.

Usually, you can’t give your download to someone else.  You may be able to lend it for a short period of time, but maybe not.

The digital good may appear on all of your devices.   …or it may appear just on all your Android devices but not Apple, or vice versa.

 

The most peculiar aspect of digital goods, to my mind, is what happens with e-books in (if that’s the right word) libraries.  Many authors or imprints won’t sell e-books to libraries, so the selection is limited.  At least some sellers place counters in the downloads, so that the copy disappears after a certain number of borrowings.  It isn’t a quality control issue–a worry that the digital copy has somehow degraded;  it’s to mimic what happens to physical books, which eventually fall apart after repeated use.   In other words, it’s to force the library to pay again after a certain number of uses.

 

investment significance?

Maybe there’s none.

On the other hand, I think we’ve got to distinguish carefully between essential characteristics of digital goods and those that are a function of sellers’ desire to create closed “ecosystems.”  After all, the AOL walled garden lost any allure it had (I never got it) when people discovered there was a big wide world outside the AOL server farms that AOL got in the way of people experiencing.

I suspect the same will eventually happen with Apple–personally, I think this might be happening already.  As/when this occurs, I’d expect the price of digital goods in general to fall (maybe a lot).  A sharp separation will probably also emerge between high-quality content, whose unit sales will increase (again, maybe by a lot), and me-too content, which will disappear.