Category Archives: internet

rent vs. buy: why rent a product instead of selling it?

April 2, 2014 By in cloud services, Industry Analysis, internet, inventory days, leases, software, Technology Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Adobe (ADBE) used to sell physical copies of a given edition of its Creative Suite of products to individuals or small businesses for $2600 apiece.  Now it rents the same thing as Creative Cloud for $50 a month.  In 2012, selling physical copies (let’s ignore the other cloud-based tools ADBE sells–the big change is in its media tools), ADBE made $1.66 a share in profit and had $2.24 in cash flow.  This year, having gone totally digital the company says it will have earnings of around $.30 a share and will generate, I think, $1 or so in cash flow.

How can this be a good deal?  It takes over four years of rental income to generate the same revenue that a sale would do all at once.  In addition, in a world where interest rates were back to normal, present value considerations make the rental stream worth less than cash in hand today.

So why switch?

I can think of four reasons:

—pricing umbrella   $2600 for Creative Suite, or $700 for Photoshop alone, leaves the door wide open for a competitor to enter the market with a lower-priced product–even a shareware entry–that does more or less the same thing as an ADBE product.

—piracy  I’ve seen bootleg copies of Creative Suite on Craigslist for $100.  Yes, they’re illegal and, yes, maybe they won’t all work forever, but still the price difference is enormous!  Back when I was following Microsoft carefully–which is over a decade ago–that company thought that almost half of the copies of its Office suite being used by small- or mid-sized companies were stolen.  Because the rental model matches the cost of the software more closely with the potential buyer’s cash flow, stealing the software becomes much harder to justify.  If it’s all on the cloud, it’s impossible for most people to do.

—upgrades (or lack thereof)  Before I signed up for the cloud version of Photoshop, I was using a version (CS5) that was several years old.  I’m sure there are individuals and businesses using much older versions.  Same general argument as for piracy–using outdated tools become much less worthwhile.

—selling direct  Delivering Creative Cloud products through downloads eliminates the commissions paid to distributors of physical copies.  It also eliminates the expense of making the physical copies, but I think that’s a minor expense (the box and shrink-wrap are probably the largest cost elements).

 

ADBE thinks it will make $2 a share in 2015 and $3 a share in 2016 because of switching to the cloud for its media tools.  I’m not sure these number make the stock cheap at today’s price (I have a small position and would be a buyer at lower levels), assuming they come in as ADBE anticipates.  But I’m convinced that the piracy thing is real and that the incremental cost of selling an extra copy is as close to zero as you can get.  Also, once you start using the better tools it’s highly unlikely you’re going to go back.  You’ve probably thrown out the disks anyway.

Therefore, there’s at least a shot that number s are better than that.

But in this post, my main point is that the rental model is an extremely powerful one.

Examples tomorrow–Anixter, Olympus and EA.

Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC)

March 21, 2014 By in Cable, Entertainment, Industry Analysis, internet, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

I laughed out loud when I heard the press report that the Roberts family, which controls Comcast, is concerned that customers are not giving them credit for their attempts to improve service.  On virtually any metric you’d care to choose, and for as long as I’ve been watching the company–both as an investor and as a customer–CMCSA has consistently ranked at or very near the worst in customer satisfaction.  It’s the only reason TWC isn’t in last place.

Hence the legislative and regulatory concern about consolidating the bottom of the pile into one low-service mega-company.   …and, I presume, the claim that customer service is now a priority for CMCSA.

I have only limited experience with TWC.  My impression is that no one is in charge.  This contrasts with CMCSA, where I don’t think incompetence is the issue.  Instead, I believe the profit-maximizing strategy of the firm is to:

–find the line where customer dissatisfaction turns into revolt and make the minimum investment necessary to stay just above it.  I’ve never discussed this with CMCSA management–in fact, I can’t recall ever having spoken with them.  But companies all have personalities.  And that’s the way CMCSA acts.

CMCSA wouldn’t be the first to do this.  Marriott (MAR) had  similar thinking at one time.  It built its hotel rooms with the ceilings an inch or two lower than other companies and the rooms, say, 10% smaller in total area.  The hot water was never really hot.  MAR managment argued to that these deviations from the norm all saved money and were too small for anyone to notice.  People would, at worst, only be vaguely uncomfortable.  And then they wondered why they were never able to attract (lucrative) business customers.

Eventually, the lightbulb came on for the Marriotts. The family ousted the management that thought up this approach.  (Those guys decamped to Disney, where then created the Eurodisney fiasco, and, after being pushed out the door again, went on to severely clip the wings of Northwest Air.)  MAR began to build more comfortable hotels and built a thriving corporate business (by the way, I own MAR shares).

The difference between MAR and CMCSA is that the latter is a semi-monopoly.  Customers have very few other choices.  That’s why a customer-unfriendly strategy continues to work.  It’s also why the question of whether regulators should encourage this behavior is coming up.

I’m not a CMCSA customer any more.  I use FIOS now.  Superstorm Sandy did me in.

The week after the storm, Verizon (VZ, another stock I own) trucks were all over our neighborhood, repairing their mobile and wired internet infrastructure.  CMCSA trucks didn’t arrive for a month!!  Nevertheless, CMCSA continued to charge for the service it was not delivering.  The customer service representatives I spoke with on more than one occasion explained that I could get a refund for the time the service was unavailable.  To do so, however, I would have to submit proof that my electric power had been restored.  And I would not get a refund for any time (a week, in my case) that the electric power was out.  Yes, CMCSA cable and internet weren’t available for a month after the storm.  But for CMCSA that was irrelevant.  Their argument was that without electricity I couldn’t receive the service CMCSA couldn’t provide.  So I had to pay for the non-service anyway.   Talk about through the looking glass.

Anyway, like most everyone else on our street, we switched to FIOS.

It will be interesting to see how the regulators treat the possible merger of CMCSA and TWC.

Netflix and Comcast

February 26, 2014 By in Cable, Entertainment, Industry Analysis, internet, Technology Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Netflix just agreed to pay Comcast an undisclosed amount to ensure that the video rental company’s customers can access subscription content rapidly through the Comcast network.  In doing so, Netflix belatedly joins high internet traffic-generating firms like Google, Yahoo and Amazon in paying ISPs to get enough bandwidth that their offerings function correctly on subscribers’ computers or tablets.

Terms have not been disclosed.

why now?

Three factors are likely at work:

–a Federal appeals court recently ruled that the rules for net neutrality laid down by the FCC in 2010 exceed that agency’s authority, meaning it’s not clear what obligation, if any, Comcast has to make sure Netflix works right.

–inability of Netflix subscribers (like me) to access “House of Cards” when it first came out led to numerous customer complaints.

–Comcast has bid for Time Warner Cable.  If the deal survives Federal anti-trust scrutiny, Comcast will have considerably more market clout than it has today.  If so, terms would probably be better today than after the merger closes.  Also, in the meantime, Comcast presumably doesn’t want Netflix arguing against the combination.

what changes?

My guess is that in terms of profits the deal makes little difference to either Netflix or Comcast.  Before, Netflix didn’t pay Comcast and Comcast didn’t allocate capital to improving its ability to transmit Netflix.  Now, Comcast gets money, but will have to spend on equipment to support Netflix.  Presumably some people who had avoided Netflix previously will become customers.

I’m not sure whether I’d bet the farm that this is so, but given that as outsiders we have very little information, I think the safest assumption is that the deal doesn’t move the profit needle much for either party.

What I find interesting, though, is the way that Comcast wants its relationship with Netflix to evolve.  Until now, Netflix has been using third parties to route traffic.  They also attempt to smooth traffic’s flow as they connect Netflix to “last mile” ISPs like Comcast.  According to press reports, both Netflix and Comcast want to stop using such intermediaries.   Although the precise form of, and rationale for, the new working arrangement isn’t clear (to me, at least), the gist is that money formerly paid to middlemen will now go into Comcast’s pockets.

Maybe the structure of the new deal will unfuzzy itself after the government rules on the proposed Time Warner Cable merger.  Maybe not.  But the main investment conclusion I see is that Comcast is true “owner” of its internet customers and will continue to use that power to shift money away from middlemen and toward itself.

a short reprise of the Zynga (ZNGA) IPO

February 24, 2014 By in Current Market Thoughts, Entertainment, Industry Analysis, internet, Technology, Video games, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

King Digital Entertainment, PLC  is the maker of the fabulously successful mobile-centered game Candy Crush Saga.  The firm has filed a form F-1 in preparation for an IPO.  King (proposed ticker: KING) intends to raise around $500 million.

Not surprisingly, the KING offering has reawakened bad memories of the 2011 IPO of ZNGA, which was led by Morgan Stanley and Goldman (no shock, either, that neither of those firms has a role in the KING IPO).

I haven’t yet read the KING offering document.  It’s possible that I won’t.  But I still thought it might be useful to look back at the characteristics of ZNGA that, in my view, made that stock an unattractive investment from the start.

1.  Virtually all the traffic coming to ZGA’s games was generated by Facebook.  This made it difficult to tell whether ZNGA’s games were successful because they were great games, or because they were being featured on FB.  If the latter–which subsequently proved to be the case–FB held the economic power in their partnership.  Any lessening of FB’s marketing efforts would quickly translate into a reduction in ZNGA’s profits.  A big weakness of ZNGA, not a plus.

2.  A reasonable way of assessing social games is to measure:

–the time needed to reach the peak number of players,

–the number of peak users, and

–the rate at which the number of users fades from the peak.

Even prior to the IPO, ZNGA offerings launched after its signature game, Farmville, were peaking faster than Farmville, and at lower numbers of users than Farmville.  In addition, they were as fading from the peak more quickly.  In other words, none of them had anything near the oomph of Farmville. This was all bad news.

3.  The actions of  the lead underwriters, both before and after the ZNGA IPO were quite odd, in my view.

For one thing, according to the New York Times, Morgan Stanley mutual funds bought  $75 million worth of pre-IPO shares of ZNGA in February 2011 at $14 a share.  Some have suggested that this was done to help persuade ZNGA to choose Morgan Stanley as a lead underwriter.

For another, the underwriters released the top management of ZNGA, as well as some venture capital investors, from IPO share “lockup” agreements that prevented their sale of stock prior to May 29, 2012.   Instead, a sale of 49,4 million shares at $12 each raised close to $600 million in early April for these high-profile holders.  By the original lockup expiration, the stock was trading at little more than half that level.

My overall impression is that the underwriters (incorrectly) thought that the heyday of tech investing was over.  This would imply that they and the companies they were moving to initial public offerings had only a short time to cash in before the rest of the world figured this out.  As a corollary, the traditional rules of trust and fair play between underwriter and professional portfolio manager/wealth management client no longer held–because there would be no follow-on business that once-burned clients would shy away from.

relevance for KING?

Again, I should mention that I haven’t yet analyzed KING.  Candy Crush Saga may well prove a fleeting fad and KING a one-trick pony.  On the other hand, the underwriters are different this time.   And I don’t sense the same IPO-before-it’s-too-late urgency that was in the air in 2011.

a US holiday shopping post-mortem

January 17, 2014 By in Industry Analysis, internet, Portfolio management, Recent Market Action, Retail, Stock ideas Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Information is trickling in about how the holiday shopping season in the US went.  What jumps out at me (not necessarily exactly what was said) so far is:

–overall retail sales were up by 3.8% year-on-year.  To my mind that’s great, not the disappointment (vs. expectations of +3.9%) it’s being pitched as.  The reason:  the comparison is between the shortest possible holiday season, in 2013, and the longest possible in 2012.

–extended store hours didn’t appear to do much for sales.  It increased costs, though.

–the weak got weaker (think:  Best Buy, Sears, JC Penney).  Sears and Penney are both closing stores.

–Macy’s is laying off 2,500 in-store workers and hiring an equal number to work on its on-line offering

–mall traffic (not sales necessarily, but the number of visits by potential customers) is down by 50% from three years ago

–on-line sales were up by 9.3% yoy

my take

I’ve begun to believe that generational change–a passing of the baton from the Baby Boom to Millennials–will be an important stock market theme in the US for years to come.  I think the just-passed holiday season is evidence in favor of this idea.  (By the way, I heard the other day–but haven’t checked the source–that the single most important attribute to current car buyers is the technology in the car, not styling or engine power.  If I heard correctly, another piece of evidence.)

I’ve always thought that the greatest risk to equity portfolio managers performance  is that as they become more successful and wealthier, they gradually lose touch with the way normal people live their lives.  As that happens, they become less able to see the economic currents that ultimately influence stock prices.  Celebrity hedge fund managers are particularly vulnerable, in my view–but that may just be my prejudice.

Why is this important?    …because you and I will see this change going on long before the professionals do.  So we’ll be able to find the names and position our portfolios to benefit in advance of the wave of buying that will come as the light bulb comes on for gated-community pros.