Archive for January 21st, 2008
Filed under: International markets, Earnings reports, Forecasts, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, eBay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), Marketing and advertising
 E-commerce giant eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) will be reporting its fourth-quarter numbers this Wednesday, and analysts are looking for a strong quarter from the company, but then again, the fourth quarter has typically always been strong for the company. What analysts will most likely be more interested in, even more so than fourth-quarter numbers, will be the company’s 2008 outlook.
For the fourth quarter, the company is expected to show earnings of 41 cents per share. For its fourth quarter 2006, the company only showed 31 cents per share, so if it were to report 41 cents for its most current fourth quarter, we will be seeing earnings growth of slightly over 32 percent year over year, but will that be enough to bring buyers into EBAY shares?
2008 should prove to be a very pivotal year from eBay, which is struggling to get its auction business back on the right track. One thing that we could see this week is eBay announcing that it will be lowering its “insertion” fees. These are fees that the company charges its users to list items, and would lift the commission that users receive for selling their goods.
eBay users have been calling for the company to lower its fees, and maybe the company is starting to listen. Higher fees are blamed as part of the reason why the company has been in such a tight battle with its main e-commerce competitor, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), lately.
A spokesman for eBay said that the company will continue to experiment with its fee structure in order to find the sweet spot that both company and users can be content with. The company realizes that there is a point of “friction” for its big user base and the company is working to find this point, and work within those boundaries.
While its auction business has been faltering, other components of the company have been growing nicely, including PayPal and Skype. Unfortunately, these aspects of its business offer lower profit margins, so the company has to figure out a way to get its auction business back on the right track.
So basically, when the company reports this Wednesday following the market close, earnings will probably not be the main thing that Wall Street is listening for. Of course, earnings are important, but for this precise moment in time, they’ll take a back seat to the company’s 2008 forecasts and the company’s plans to regain some lost ground in its auction business.
After the official numbers come in, BloggingStocks will be sure to update you with the figures as well as the market reaction to the quarterly numbers.
Here is a 12-month chart for the struggling EBAY stock to give you a superior idea of just how badly the stock could use some good news:
What are your thoughts? Should we expect to see the company show strong numbers for its most current quarter? What about 2008… will we hear positive guidance, or hear news of a tough year to come? What announcements would you most like to hear from the company this week? Let us hear your thoughts!
Enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer
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Filed under: International markets, Earnings reports, Forecasts, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, eBay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), Marketing and advertising
E-commerce giant eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) will be reporting its fourth-quarter numbers this Wednesday, and analysts are looking for a strong quarter from the company, but then again, the fourth quarter has typically always been strong for the company. What analysts will most likely be more interested in, even more so than fourth-quarter numbers, will be the company’s 2008 outlook.
For the fourth quarter, the company is expected to show earnings of 41 cents per share. For its fourth quarter 2006, the company only showed 31 cents per share, so if it were to report 41 cents for its most recent fourth quarter, we’ll be seeing earnings growth of slightly over 32 percent year over year, but will that be enough to bring buyers into EBAY shares?
2008 should prove to be a very pivotal year from eBay, which is struggling to get its auction business back on the right track. One thing that we could see this week is eBay announcing that it will be lowering its “insertion” fees. These are fees that the company charges its users to list items, and would lift the commission that users receive for selling their goods.
eBay users have been calling for the company to lower its fees, and maybe the company is starting to listen. Higher fees are blamed as part of the reason why the company has been in such a tight battle with its main e-commerce competitor, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), lately.
A spokesman for eBay stated that the company will continue to experiment with its fee structure in order to find the sweet spot that both company and users can be content with. The company realizes that there’s a point of “friction” for its big user base and the company is working to find this point, and work within those boundaries.
While its auction business has been faltering, other components of the company have been growing nicely, including PayPal and Skype. Unfortunately, these aspects of its business offer lower profit margins, so the company has to figure out a way to get its auction business back on the right track.
So basically, when the company reports this Wednesday following the market close, earnings will probably not be the main thing that Wall Street is listening for. Of course, earnings are important, but for this precise moment in time, they’ll take a back seat to the company’s 2008 forecasts and the company’s plans to regain some lost ground in its auction business.
After the official numbers come in, BloggingStocks will be sure to update you with the figures as well as the market reaction to the quarterly numbers.
Here’s a 12-month chart for the struggling EBAY stock to give you a better idea of just how badly the stock could use some good news:
What are your thoughts? Should we expect to see the company show strong numbers for its most recent quarter? What about 2008… will we hear positive guidance, or hear news of a tough year to come? What announcements would you most like to hear from the company this week? Let us hear your thoughts!
Enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the web investment advisory service Investor’s Observer
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Filed under: International markets, Good news, Products and services, Consumer experience, Market matters, Mexico, Economic data, Housing
 “It’s a time of hope,” claims Ana Laura Pulido, a real estate broker in Mexico. While its northern neighbor remains in the depths of a housing meltdown, the Mexican real estate market has been booming.
Mexico has long found its economy overly sensitive to the happenings in the United States, so to see the country’s real estate market thriving despite the turmoil in America is a very encouraging sign for our southern neighbor.
And don’t think that American investors haven’t started to notice this new trend.
According to Clark McKinley, the spokesman for the nation’s largest pension fund, the California Public Employees Retirement System, his fund sees greater returns for its money in Mexico and has already decided to pump over $300 million into Mexican real estate funds.
The main difference between the Mexican and American homeowner is the chances that his or her home is mortgaged. At this point in Mexico, only slightly over 25 percent of all homes are financed with mortgages. That’s wildly different from the situation in America, where 67 percent of all homes are mortgaged.
The mortgage gap between the countries should begin to slow however, as the nation’s leader, President Felipe Calderon, has established a national goal of 1 million new mortgages a year by 2010.
Another factor that has helped insulate the nation from the mortgage crisis that is tearing through the American landscape is that lenders there have had the advantage of being more selective with who they give their loans to so far. Looking over the country as a whole, we see a shortage of about 6 million homes. Considering that we’re talking about a country with a total population of 108 million, that is a pretty sizable shortage.
What the shortage has done is create serious pent-up demand and therefore allowed lenders a greater advantage in hand-picking the most trustworthy borrowers to give loans. As a result, in the third quarter 2007, mortgage delinquency in Mexico was under 4 percent, compared with 5.7 percent in America.
Calderon is expected to announce a new set of measures and goals today that will be aimed at continuing growth and combating urban sprawl.
Will the Mexican real estate market continue to show immunity to the problems facing America? That remains to be seen, but so far it looks like the country’s growth is going smoothly, and with so much room to grow it seems unlikely that things will turn around any time soon.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer
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SK writes “The University of Tokyo and the Japan folded paper (origami) plane society hopes to fly a paper airplane from the International Space Station to Earth. The plane will be 30-40cm long and weigh about 30 grams. A University of Tokyo research group has successfully designed a special paper plane model that was able to withstand a Mach 7 high velocity stream for 10 seconds. The experimental plane was about one-fifth the size and withstood temperatures as high as 300C without burning up.” Unfortunately for most of us reading this, the original source is all in japanese.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Posted by: in Housing
Filed under: International markets, Good news, Products and services, Consumer experience, Market matters, Mexico, Economic data, Housing
“It’s a time of hope,” claims Ana Laura Pulido, a real estate broker in Mexico. While its northern neighbor remains in the depths of a housing meltdown, the Mexican real estate market has been booming.
Mexico has long found its economy overly sensitive to the happenings in the United States, so to see the country’s real estate market thriving despite the turmoil in America is a very encouraging sign for our southern neighbor.
And don’t think that American investors haven’t started to notice this new trend.
According to Clark McKinley, the spokesman for the nation’s largest pension fund, the California Public Employees Retirement System, his fund sees greater returns for its money in Mexico and has already decided to pump over $300 million into Mexican real estate funds.
The main difference between the Mexican and American homeowner is the chances that his or her home is mortgaged. At this point in Mexico, only slightly over 25 percent of all homes are financed with mortgages. That is wildly different from the situation in America, where 67 percent of all homes are mortgaged.
The mortgage gap between the countries should begin to slow however, as the nation’s leader, President Felipe Calderon, has established a national goal of 1 million new mortgages a year by 2010.
Another factor that has helped insulate the nation from the mortgage crisis that is tearing through the American landscape is that lenders there have had the advantage of being more selective with who they give their loans to so far. Looking over the country as a whole, we see a shortage of about 6 million homes. Considering that we are speaking about a country with a total population of 108 million, that is a pretty sizable shortage.
What the shortage has done is create serious pent-up demand and therefore allowed lenders a greater advantage in hand-picking the most trustworthy borrowers to give loans. As a result, in the third quarter 2007, mortgage delinquency in Mexico was under 4 percent, compared with 5.7 percent in America.
Calderon is expected to announce a new set of measures and goals this day that will be aimed at continuing growth and combating urban sprawl.
Will the Mexican real estate market continue to show immunity to the problems facing America? That remains to be seen, but so far it looks like the country’s growth is going smoothly, and with so much room to grow it seems unlikely that things will turn around any time soon.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor’s Observer
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Posted by: in Housing
Filed under: From the boards, Management, Citigroup Inc. (C), Housing
 Former Citigroup (NYSE: C) Chief Executive Chuck Prince isn’t going to feel the pinch of the worst real estate market in a generation that he helped create.
Prince has put his place in Greenwich, Connecticut — a tony New York City suburb that is home to countless hedge funds and celebrities such as Tommy Hilfinger and Regis Philbin — up for sale at the asking price of $6.15 million, according to Bloomberg News. The Tudor-style manor home was sold in 1996 for $2.27 million, according to ZIllow.com. By my calculations, that would be a profit of 170%.
Too bad that most homeowners aren’t as fortunate as Mr. Prince. The National Association of Realtors is due to release its figures for December home sales later this week, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News anticipate sales to have fallen 1% to 4.95 million, the fewest since records began in 1999.
The former Wall Street hot-shot, though, doesn’t need to concern himself with the needs of ordinary folks anymore. He was pushed out the door at Citigroup with a retirement package worth about $60 million. “By retiring rather than being fired, he preserved the right to keep about 743,640 Citigroup shares with a market value of about $26.7 million, compensation consultant Brian Foley based in White Plains, New York, said at the time,” Bloomberg notes.
Prince’s realtor told Bloomberg that the Greenwich house, which includes an entrance hall with barrel-vaulted ceilings, an exercise room with a sauna and shower and a dining room that sits 12, “no longer meets his needs.” Prince also has a place on New York’s Park Avenue.
It must be nice to be able to live your life not having to face the consequences of your actions.
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Posted by: in Housing
Filed under: International markets, Industry, Consumer experience, China, Economic data, Politics, Housing
 We have heard and read a lot over the past year regarding the weakening U.S. real estate market, but what about the red hot Chinese market? Some evidence is starting to show that the Chinese real estate market is also starting to soften a bit.
For the past several years, the Chinese government has started to try to curb the rapidly surging housing market, which kick-started around the start of 2001. Now the first signs of a housing slowdown are starting to show themselves, as property brokers are scaling back their operations, or in some cases closing their doors altogether.
Just how much of a slowdown are we looking at? Consider this… in the first week of 2008, home sales in Beijing fell 20 percent compared to the week before. OK, I know what you’re thinking… that’s just one week, we shouldn’t take too much from just one week’s data. Well, that would be correct, so we can’t just immediately assume the worst, but the writing is definitely starting to appear on the wall.
One good sign for China is that the experts are predicting that even in the event of a housing slowdown, conditions are very unlikely to get to the point where they’re in the U.S. No one thinks that prices are going to plummet the way they did across America in 2007, as the country’s strong economic growth should continue to support demand for the time being.
You can be sure of one thing: the Chinese government has definitely been watching the situation in the U.S. and trying its best to prevent a mortgage meltdown from occurring in its country. Raising rates and imposing property transaction limitations are just a couple of ways that the government is trying to prevent a housing bubble.
One of the things that really got America into trouble was consumers’ growing desire to “flip” properties over short period of times. Basically people were buying property that was probably out of their price range, just planning to keep it for a year or two and then dump it in order to keep the profits. That works as long as two factors exist in the market. One is rising prices, and the other is strong demand. Unfortunately for America, both of those factors dried up in 2007 and created the situation that we now find ourselves in.
China is working hard to dissuade consumers from trying to flip properties, and this alone could be enough to keep the country out of trouble.
Just how hard the housing market will get hit in China remains to be seen. 2008 should definitely see things slow down a bit, but then again maybe that is the best thing for the country considering just how fast real estate growth has been over the past 6 or 7 years. I definitely wish someone would have put the brakes on the American housing market a few years back to help prevent the situation the country is now facing.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the on the internet investment advisory service Investor’s Observer
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Posted by: in Housing
Filed under: Forecasts, Economic data, Housing, Federal Reserve
An economic stimulus package would have been great … if it had come in December. But the slow shuffle of shoes can be heard around Congress as it gets ready for a debate that’ll come too late.
Speaking of a program to help the economy, “Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said he expects Democrats and Republicans to find common ground and there was already agreement that the plan should include tax cuts,” according to Reuters. That means that the first quarter will pass without any effort from the government, save rate cuts by the Fed.
Most plans being considered right now would deliver $150 million in stimulants to the economy, many in the form of tax cuts. The programs would raise the Federal deficit, but that can be someone else’s problem a few years from now. There’s also speak of creating 500,000 new jobs by offering incentives to businesses to create new jobs.
Because of the glacier-like pace of the government’s activity, nothing is apt to be in place before the second quarter. At that point, the economy could already be in a deep recession. It would take another two or three quarters for any set of incentives to take hold.
That is a long time for all of the people who could lose homes and jobs this year.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Posted by: admin in Today News
GE Money Reports 650000 Customers’ Data Lost - eFluxMedia
Scientific American |
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Filed under: Products and services, Wal-Mart (WMT)
 The newspaper industry in the U.S. continues to lose ground to the instant satisfaction offered by internet news, but magazines and books are still a decent business for many publishers. When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) announces that it will stop carrying about 1,000 magazine titles on its store shelves, though, one has to wonder about the future of the publishing industry.
The world’s largest retailer has announced the discontinuation of mostly smaller magazine titles; the real question is what took it so long. Shelf space at Wal-Mart is totally critical, and dedicating a 20-foot section of the store to quite a few slow-moving titles is probably no longer a sound business decision. Small titles like Celebrity Living, Elle Girl, Teen People, Suede and others have been given the boot, and nearly every major magazine publisher was hit when Wal-Mart announced the change.
It’s believed that Wal-Mart generates about 20% of all retail magazine sales in the U.S. — so dropping a thousand titles is a major problem for the publishing industry. The huge question is this: will Wal-Mart dedicate more display space for fast-moving magazines in an effort to turn more inventory, or will magazine sections in Wal-Mart stores be downsized to make room for more lucrative, higher-margin products? The answer will be coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you.
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