Category Archives: Publishing

is News Corp a buy?

July 14, 2011 By in Industry Analysis, Publishing, Stock ideas, Trading Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Is News Corp a buy?

The short answer is that I don’t know. But I do think that analysts recommending the stock on t idea that it’s unduly depressed by the current scandal in the UK are premature. I have two observations:

By far the most valuable asset in the News Corp empire is Fox media in the US. Your first question should be whether you really want to own it, even at today’s lower price

I also think that Americans will tend to underestimate how serious the political situation for News Corp in the UK might be.

I think Americans are most influenced by the letter of the law. We have a quiet admiration for a scoundrel who can wriggle out of the onerous terms of a business deal by finding an obscure loophole in the legal documents that govern it. And we approve of an astute lawyer who can win his case on a technicality.

In my experience, the UK is different. There, the spirit of the law is more important than the letter. The intentions of the lawmaker—which it is assumed everyone understands—are sacrosanct. In the cellphone and email hacking case, it seems to me the accepted response is not a sharp legal defense, but rather admission of guilt on all charges, immediate corrective action, and an apology and plea for clemency. Anything short of that—and I don’t perceive this as being News Corp’s response to date—will likely result in severe legal penalties of a type that Americans would never expect.

One must also ask whether what happens in the UK with News Corp will have negative fallout in the US. I don’t expect it, but I don’t see there’s any rush to buy News Corp stock, either.

I’m suddenly a tablet advocate: here’s why

June 15, 2011 By in e-readers, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

my take on tablets

I like gadgets.

I’ve had my eye on a tablet since I first saw one in a university bookstore (a MSFT product) almost a decade ago.  But that one was very clunky and didn’t let you do much more than highlight Word documents.  I looked at a Lenovo combination laptop/tablet a few years later, but it was very underpowered.  And there was still no infrastructure of applications to justify the tablet part.

Now there’s the iPad.  It’s the usual well-designed AAPL consumer device.  But to me it has seemed little more than another device to lug around that’s not much more than an expensive e-reader and an extremely costly way to play Angry Birds.

my newspaper problems

Then the Financial Times newspaper stopped coming to the house.

Yes, I still read the physical newspaper.

I read:

–the FT (comprehensive global business news; a UK perspective on US/world economic and political developments),

–the NY Times (reasonable, US-oriented business news, good–though weakening–sports coverage) and

–the Wall Street Journal (good sports, lots of gossip in the NY section, almost no useful business coverage–meaning I won’t renew).

why the physical paper

I’m not a fan of wood products per se.  But I’ve thought the physical paper has several advantages over the web version:

–the amount of news in the physical paper is greater than on the front page of the newspaper website.  So the editors’ selection of what’s most important is a greater influence on what you see online than in the physical paper.  As a result, the chances of finding information whose significance is not adequately understood is greater in the physical paper.

–I think the web presentation is organized to highlight stories that will maximize visits.  In contrast, the physical paper is organized to deliver information.

–I thought (not any longer) that it’s easier to reconstruct with the physical paper a timeline of information flow by reading back editions you might not have gotten on the day of publication than it is to go back a day or two in time on the website.

my call to the FT

When I called the FT last Saturday to get replacement copies of the papers that didn’t come, the representative I talked to mentioned the e-paper that’s available through ftnewspaper.com.

The site is run with software from Olive Software, a private company in Aurora, Colorado.  ftnewspaper.com has daily back editions.  You can turn the pages of each edition, just like an online catalog.  You can pop out to larger size and different formats the articles you want to read in depth.  I also discovered that, through FT email alerts, I had already read most of “today’s” paper online yesterday!

ftnewspaper.com has been around for a couple of years.  I just didn’t know about it.

my calculation

Anyway, I can cancel my physical paper subscription and save a couple of hundred dollars a year.  No more worries about cancelling delivery when we may be travelling.  No more toting around piles of unread orange newsprint.  Less recycling to do.

All of that just means that I can rationalize paying for a tablet with the money I’ll save by stopping a newsprint subscription.  But I’ve also found a sophisticated and valuable application, other than email, that’s completely suited to what a tablet can do and that I use every day.  This means that I have a positive reason to buy one.

I’d like to see the new Google tablets, as well as iPad 3, before I take the plunge.  I have only one concern.

one concern

In my career on Wall Street, I’ve observed the long struggle for control of brokerage houses between researchers and traders that has been decisively won by the latter.  I’ve thought of this as somewhat like the age-old high school contest between jocks/cool people and the nerds.

It seems to me that the same battle is going on in newspaper firms between traditional reporters and online search engine optimizers–the latter being more interested in eyeballs than in information.  As I study successful financial websites with an eye to improving this blog, I can see the same dynamic in play in this arena–well-crafted and very popular websites with lots of advertising, but almost no useful investment information.

By shifting my financial support from the reportorial nerds to the online jocks, I’m most likely speeding the day when even the FT will suffer from a content deficiency.    But that’s a problem for another day.

 

AAPL’s 2Q11: more records, another big positive earnings surprise

April 22, 2011 By in Current Market Thoughts, e-readers, earnings conference calls, emerging markets, Industry Analysis, Stock ideas, Technology, Wireless Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

the results

After the market close on April 19th, AAPL announced earnings results for its 2Q11 (AAPL’s fiscal year ends in September).  The company made $5.99 billion, or $6.40 per share, over the three months, on revenue of $24.7 billion.  These figures were up 95% and 83% year on year, respectively.   Wall Street analysts had expected eps of $5.37.

the details

AAPL sold an eye-popping 18.6 million iPhones, 113% more than in the comparable period of 2010.

It sold 3.76 million Macs during the quarter, up 28% year on year.

In a transition quarter, the company sold 4.7 million iPads. There’s no year-ago comparison, but sales were down by about a third from the December period’s 7.3 million.

The iPod, which in its heyday was around half the company, sold 9.0 million units, down 17% year on year.  iPod now represents only 6.5% of APPL’s revenue.  I see this as less a comment about MP3 players than one about how incredibly the rest of APPL has been growing.

Geographically, Asia-Pacific, up 151% year on year, was the star; Europe, “only” up 49%, was the caboose on the AAPL train.

items to note

Greater China (the mainland + Hong Kong and Taiwan) are now accounting for 10% of AAPL’s sales, up from less than 2% a few years ago.

AAPL is now guiding to a lower full-year tax rate, meaning it’s expectations for the share of revenues coming from lower-tax foreign areas have risen.

Of the 18.6 million iPhones sold, 1.7 million went to build telecom carriers’ inventories rather than into the hands of consumers.  Part of this probably represents the rollout of the iPhone to VZ in the US.  But I think it also likely indicates that carriers sense strong demand for AAPL phones and want extra insurance they won’t be out of stock.  …more problems for Nokia?

Although AAPL made around 7 million iPad1s in 1Q11, it produced only two-thirds of that number of iPad1s + iPad2s during 2Q11.  This comes despite AAPL’s assertions that it has had no supply problems from the earthquake/tsunamis in Japan, and its comments about “staggering” demand for iPad2 and the “mother of all” backlogs for the device.  This may simply be the way that the inventory rundown of the older model and the rampup of the new are playing out.  It may also be that AAPL isn’t able to get all the resins or components or other raw materials it needs company-wide and is allocating them to higher-margin smartphones.  Or it may be that AAPL wants to cultivate an it’s-hard-to-get mentality to heighten interest in the device, since consumers have as yet no effective alternative.  This isn’t a bad thing, just something to note–and watch.

the stock

Investors bid the stock up–but not by a lot–in trading on Wednesday and Thursday.

There may be a technical reason for the tepid response.  Early this month, NASDAQ announced that it is rebalancing its NASDAQ 100 index.  The weighting of AAPL, the largest index constituent, is being reduced from about 20% of the index to around 12%.  This has generated short-term selling pressure from index-tracking investment pools.

Why do this?  When NASDAQ 100 ETFs were launched a decade or so ago, these vehicles had difficulty meeting SEC-mandated rules on maintaining a diversified portfolio, since then-giants like MSFT or CSCO were so large a part of the index.   In order to be sure of adhering to SEC guidelines, NASDAQ slashed the relative weights of MSFT et al  and beefed up those of then-minnows like AAPL.  Now it has the same problem again, only with different names.  So it’s applying the same process to today’s titans.

Yes, AAPL is scarcely an undiscovered gem.  And, yes, reversion to the mean does happen.  But at 14x fiscal 2011 earnings, AAPL’s stock is trading at right around the market multiple.  That looks way too low to me.

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No one wants to buy Barnes and Noble?

March 25, 2011 By in Books, e-readers, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Retail Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

That’s what the Bloomberg news service said the other day, citing interviews with five (count ’em, five) unnamed sources knowledgeable about the auction of the company that’s now underway.  It appears potential buyers–at least seven, according to Bloomberg–have all lost interest as they have had an opportunity to study the company and its financials more deeply.

What could be their concerns?

Well, for one thing, BKS is a big-box retailer with a lot of real estate under lease that it has to pay for.  And big-box retailers are all trying to shed floor space as fast as they can.   They are suddenly realizing that this floor space has been rendered much less valuable by the rapid growth of online sales.

For another, BKS sells books, a merchandise category that is showing little, if any, growth.  In fact, the company most similar to BKS, Borders, has just gone into bankruptcy, illustrating the parlous state of the industry.  Potentially more relevant, Chapter 11 will likely allow Borders to free itself of many financial burdens and to streamline operations very quickly, presumably turning it into a much more formidable competitor as it reemerges from bankruptcy.

Finally, BKS is a force in internet sales, both of physical books and of e-volumes readable on the firm’s proprietary e-reader, the Nook.  While this puts BKS in a strong competitive position vs. Borders (which has neither kind of online presence), it also puts the company directly into the sights of two larger, much better capitalized, aggressive digital competitors in AMZN and AAPL.

That’s not good.

For one thing, a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group suggests that, although digital is the future of publishing, most people want to buy tablets, not e-readers.  Score one for AAPL.  For another, the accord that the publishing industry forced on AMZN about a year ago compelled the e-tailing giant to stop competing on price in the digital book industry.  That didn’t mean competition in digital books ceased, as I think the publishers thought.  It just meant AMZN had to shift the focue of competition to another arena, namely, the price/performance of the e-reader.  At the moment, BKS’ color Nook may be in the lead.  But AMZN has much more R&D money to toss around than BKS.  Score one for AMZN.

Given my description, why would anyone even consider bidding for BKS?  A growth investor like me wouldn’t, even though I was a very big holder of BKS fifteen years or so ago.  But deep value investors are another breed entirely, with a very different–and somewhat counterintuitive–investment philosophy.

I look for healthy companies where I think the consensus has seriously underestimated their growth rate.  Deep value investors, on the other hand, look for mediocre companies, or worse, where they think the consensus has seriously overreacted to the bad news that’s in plain sight.  They hope to find assets worth 100 that they can buy for 30 and sell for, say, 60.  This is a tough business, where you’ve got to be very sharp to survive.  But it’s also one where the chance to acquire a company fitting my description above would have such investors rubbing their hands in anticipation.

To my mind, the surprise isn’t that value investors have started to investigate.  It’s that they’ve apparently all lost interest.  This implies they’ve found something in doing their due diligence that wouldn’t be obvious from the SEC filings and that makes them think the situation is riskier than they had imagined it would be.

What would such a risk be?  In my experience, deep value investors are most comfortable with mature businesses.  They tend to like basic industries (like cement or pulp and paper) and simple manufacturing, where the world changes slowly.  They also tend not to like, or to do well with, technology.

So I think their new-found worries come in the digital side of BKS …that once they peeked under the hood they concluded that BKS is in a more fragile condition there than they had estimated.  My guess is that the bone of contention is the cost/market position of the Nook, not the state of actual e-book sales.  The auction is supposed to be over in a couple of weeks.  We may learn more then.

iPad 2 is likely to be a big success: Boston Consulting Group survey

March 9, 2011 By in Current Market Thoughts, e-readers, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Recent Market Action, Surveying, Technology Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

the Boston Consulting Group survey

The iPad 2 goes on sale this Friday.  It’s faster than the original iPad–as well as sleeker and lighter.  It comes equipped cameras and is available in two colors.  A recently-released internet survey of over 14,000 respondents done by the Boston Consulting Group last December suggests that iPad 2 will be a much bigger success than its predecessor.  This survey follows up on a previous one done in March 2010, just before the launch of the first iPad.

its conclusions

The main conclusions of the December 2010 survey, with is actually about both tablets and e-readers, are:

1.  Awareness of this category of devices is growing.  In the US, for example, 67% of respondents to the survey knew about tablets and e-readers.  That’s up from 54% in the December poll (I wonder where the other 33% live).

2.  Lots more people intend to buy one. Globally, 69% of respondents who are familiar with tablets and e-readers intend to buy one in the next three years.  That’s slightly smaller percentage than the 73% of people from the March survey.  Given that awareness has increased so much, though, the pool of potential buyers is still much deeper than it was a year ago.  Applying the figures to the US, for example, suggests that 17% more Americans want to buy a device now than a year ago.  Half plan to pull the trigger in the next 12 months.

3.  Consumers want tablets, not e-readers.  The margin is 3.5/1 in favor of tablets.

4.  The market understands what these devices do. Respondents said they wanted to use the devices to browse online (85%), read email (84%) and view videos (69%).

5.  People are willing to pay for content…

(Note:  my experience is that people aren’t crazy.  They flat-out lie to surveyors about the prices they’d be willing to pay for stuff.  They regard money questions as part of a price negotiation and give low-ball numbers.  Wouldn’t you?  So I regard the content responses as very encouraging.)

US respondents said they’d pay $5-$10 for a digital book, $3-$6 per month for a digital magazine subscription and $5-$10 a month for a daily newspaper.  These are roughly the same numbers people gave last March.  The figure that jumps out to me as especially high is the magazine one.

6. …but not for the device itself. Respondents from the US say they’d pay $130 for an e-reader (which they don’t particularly want), but  only about $200 for a tablet (which they do).  See my note to point 5.

All in all, the picture looks very good for AAPL.

methodology

BCG had 14,314 respondents from 16 countries:  Australia, Austria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US.  Each provided at least 700 respondents, split equally between male and female.  All were internet users (duh!), and read print books or periodicals.  In Australia, South Korea and China, respondents tended to be clustered around cities; elsewhere they were distributed proportionally in urban and rural areas.

The big advantages of internet surveys is that they’re fast, cheap and can reach lots of people.  The main worry is that the techniques used in traditional surveying to figure out whether respondents really mirror the population you want to find out about don’t work.  See my post on internet surveying for more details.