Amazon's Announcement
Here's my discussion with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg's Money Moves earlier today about what to expect out of today's Amazon announcement:
Eric Jackson's Blog About Longs, Shorts, Hedge Funds, Corporate Governance, and China
Here's my discussion with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg's Money Moves earlier today about what to expect out of today's Amazon announcement:
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Labels: AAPL, Amazon, AMZN, Apple, Bloomberg, Deirdre Bolton, Money Moves
My appearance on CNBC today discussing $AMZN $NFLX $CSTR $VZ
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Labels: Amazon, AMZN, CNBC, Kindle Fire, Netflix, NFLX, Prime, VOD
Unlike the experts who believe Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon should have waited to IPO, I think the companies' rocky results as a public company show they should have gone public much sooner than they did.
Read the full Forbes post
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Labels: Amazon, AMZN, Andrew Mason, Eric Lefkofsky, Facebook, FB, GOOG, Google, Groupon, GRPN, Mark Pincus, Mark Zuckerberg, ZNGA
Eric Jackson, president and founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, talks about the outlook for Research In Motion Ltd. and the company's stock. Jackson speaks with Betty Liu and Sheila Dharmarajan on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)
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Labels: Amazon, AMZN, Betty Liu, Bloomberg, Eric Jackson, RIM, RIMM
Facebook needs to bulk up to kill Google. Once they go public, watch for them to seriously consider buying Nokia or Yahoo! -- with a little help from their big brother Microsoft.
Read the full post on Forbes.
Is Your Tech Company a Greenfield Gorilla or a Nichey Nancy?
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If you're building a company today, here are 6 things Jeff Bezos knew back in 1997 that made Amazon (and will make you) so successful.
Read the full post in Forbes
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Labels: AAPL, Amazon, AMZN, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs
Apple has to decide whether it wants to play in the ad world or not. Eddy Cue will now make that decision.
Read the full Forbes post.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Contributor Eric Jackson details his findings regarding Chinese e-commerce and what companies need to do to fix problems they currently face.Fri 07/08/11 05:15 AM EST -- Brittany Umar & Eric JacksonStocks in this video: FDX SINA AMZN NTES SOHU YOKU UPS
Another Internet Bubble is not about to collapse. We have a few more years still. So party like it's 1996.
Read my full post at Forbes here.
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Labels: AAPL, Amazon, AMZN, Apple, BIDU, Cisco, CSCO, Fred Wilson, Groupon, Henry Blodget, TheGlobe.com
They have no accountability, skewed compensation, and are inherently conservative. Why do we continue to pay attention to them?
Read my full post at Forbes.
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Labels: AAPL, AMZN, AOL, GOOG, Morgan Keegan, Research in Motion, RIMM, Sina, stock analysts, Tavis McCourt
By Eric Jackson It debuted with great fanfare in an initial public offering last December. The stock priced at $16 a share, which was considered high, opened at $24 and quickly went to the $30 range, closing at a high above $34 in mid-January. Since then, the stock has steadily been returning to its initial trading levels. Yesterday, it released its first earnings report since going public. As usual with these Chinese stocks, it takes time for the market to digest the news contained in the results. The initial reaction was positive. The stock traded up in the premarket to almost $27 after closing the prior day under $26. But it immediately started selling off yesterday and hasn't stopped yet. Today, the stock is currently trading under $23, down nearly 7%. So what happened in the earnings report? The e-commerce site, which still makes the majority of its money selling books, revealed that its net revenue for the fourth quarter was up 58% year-over-year to $108 million and its full-year revenue also grew 57% to $346 million. They also boasted in their earnings call that non-book revenue grew 150%. They aim to reposition themselves -- much like Amazon (AMZN - commentary - Trade Now) did 10 years ago -- by selling a variety of goods via e-commerce rather than just books, which tend to be lower-margin sales. General merchandise revenues in 2010 were up 156% to $59.4 million from the previous year. Yet, the scale of those general merchandise sales -- only 17% of overall sales -- shows that Dangdang still has a way to go to credibly saying it's no longer just a bookseller. Its first-quarter guidance indicated that net revenue would be between $102.4 million and $103.6 million, representing a 50% increase year over year. That was in line with estimates. [*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]
RealMoney Contributor
3/10/2011 1:45 PM EST
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What happened to E-Commerce China Dangdang (DANG - commentary - Trade Now)?
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Labels: AliPay, AMZN, DANG, eBay, MSFT, Taobao.com, YHOO, YOKU
By Eric Jackson For example, over the last week, Dangdang has been attacked by two companies that want to enter into a price war with it. It's not surprising. After all, Dangdang is in the middle of its first quarter as a public company. All newly public companies like to come out of the gate strong during their first earnings call. Their competitors know that this success can start to feed on itself with investors and consumers alike. Therefore, why not try to short-circuit that positive feedback loop with a negative one? In other words, by entering in to a price war, competitors can make it appear that the new IPO is stumbling in its first earnings call, which can seed fear and doubt among investors and consumers. This, in turn, might position the competitors as "more successful." At the moment, Dangdang is being attacked by private Chinese company 360buy and American juggernaut Amazon (AMZN - commentary - Trade Now). 360buy (also known as Jingdong Mall) recently announced that it would spend RMB 80 million (approximately $12 million) on discounting prices prior to the peak holiday shopping season. This came after 360buy said a week ago that it would drop prices on its books by 20% in order to win business.
RealMoney Contributor
12/20/2010 5:00 PM EST
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China-based bookseller Dangdang (DANG - commentary - Trade Now) will go down in history as having one of the most successful IPOs of 2010. The company raised just under $300 million, was priced at $16 per share, opened at $24 per share and hasn't looked back. The stock topped out as high as $34 per share a couple of days after the Dec. 7 IPO, but it has since fallen significantly from that level. Still, shares of Dangdang are trading above their initial post-IPO level, giving investors who partook in the IPO a nice return.
Although TD Ameritrade recently said that Dangdang is one of the three most traded stocks at the moment (the others are Youku (YOKY - commentary - Trade Now) and Baidu (BIDU - commentary - Trade Now)), it's amazing to me that there is not more information about the company readily available in the U.S.
Mon, 20 Dec 2010 - Eric Jackson
Contributor Eric Jackson says recent Chinese IPO Dangdang has been attacked by 2 competitors within the last week on pricing into the holiday season. But why hasn't any of the American business media covered it?
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By Eric Jackson Dangdang ended its first day of trading up 87%. Youku ended up 161% for the day. It feels like 1999 all over again. However, any time you see moves like that, you will get the chorus of worriers. "These price-to-sales ratios are crazy!" is one comment I heard during yesterday's market action. "This is going to end in tears!" One more: "I'm going to short the hell out of these two stocks." I wrote about Youku being the monster China IPO two weeks ago, though I'm not some Pollyanna cheerleader. Still, even I was surprised by the giant move the stock made yesterday. The critics of Youku point out that the company has raised more than $100 million from venture capitalists to date, and that it has yet to turn a profit. In fact, Youku's losses have only grown along with the company itself. It has faced increasing costs of acquiring proprietary content (think Hulu), keeping up with intense competition, paying for more servers to stream video and large pirating risks. Even if the company can supplement its advertising-based revenue with subscription revenue, critics wonder how will it will convince the Chinese to pay for content when bootleg DVDs can be bought for pennies on the street. Yet, what Youku has going for it -- as I've said before -- is that it's the leader in the online video space at the moment. China's No. 2 online-video company, Tudou, filed to go public first, but Youku is actually the first one out. If it didn't have name recognition in the U.S. before yesterday, it does now. That will be important for Youku's continued access to the capital markets in order to fund its growth -- assuming its price holds up.
RealMoney Contributor
12/9/2010 11:30 AM EST
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Wednesday's price action in the new Chinese initial public offerings in Youku (YOKU -commentary - Trade Now) and Dangdang (DANG- commentary - Trade Now) was eye-popping. Americans love easy comparisons to for understanding foreign businesses, so we've heard endlessly heard that Youku and Dangdang are China's YouTube and Amazon (AMZN -commentary - Trade Now), respectively.
By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor
03/10/10 - 06:00 AM EST
Stock quotes in this article: AMZN , BKS , BGP , BAM
Last week, Amazon.com(AMZN) announced that it would try to enhance its service in Canada through Amazon.ca by expanding its distribution centers within the country.
Chapters Indigo, the No. 1 bricks-and-mortar bookseller chain in Canada, has cried foul to the Canadian government, appealing to an obscure law that any distribution center in Canada needs to owned by a majority of Canadians.
Chapters Indigo is the top online competitor against Amazon in Canada. The same products sold on Amazon.ca are up to 40% more than the ones sold on Amazon.com. An increased cost of doing business in Canada for Amazon from a less efficient distribution means that Chapters Indigo can keep its margins up at the expense of consumers.
But there is a much longer back story to this relationship than just this latest scuffle about distribution centers. It goes to the heart of how governmental regulation -- whether in Canada or elsewhere -- can be capricious and work against the interest of consumers and in favor of those with the money and access to power to shape it for its own ends.
Chapters Indigo, a national bookseller chain, is no different from Barnes & Noble(BKS), Borders(BGP), or Books-A-Million(BAM). It's the result of a merger of two old chains -- Chapters and Indigo -- that struggled with profitability. The old head of Indigo, Heather Reisman, became the new head of Chapters Indigo.
Why aren't any of the big American booksellers in Canada? They have never been allowed to enter the market. Back in the late 1990s, when the super-store bookseller chain idea emerged and Chapters and Indigo both were founded, the two Canadian chains appealed to the Liberal federal government to block American companies like Barnes & Noble and Borders from entering the market.
Their argument went that Canadian literature, opinion, and news coverage was culturally unique and deserved to be protected by the Canadian government. The large American chains had much more capital. In a true free market system, they would have been allowed to enter the market and sell their wares. With more capital, presumably they would have undercut the Canadian booksellers until the big ones had suffered enormous losses and been forced to withdraw from the market, leaving the American firms with a stranglehold on the Canadian bookselling market.
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Labels: Amazon, AMZN, BAMM, Barnes Noble, BGP, BKS, Books-a-Million, Borders, Chapters Indigo
By Eric Jackson We've known for a long time that Apple is not a valued on the basis of fundamentals alone. It has undergone a rapid expansion of revenue and operating profit in the last five years. In the 2004 holiday quarter, Apple reported top-line revenue of $3.5 billion with a net profit of 70 cents per diluted share. The consensus for Monday's earnings announcement is that the company will have a $12 billion quarter with net earnings of $2.05 per diluted share. That's progress. Since Apple trades at a trailing P/E ratio of 34 (although this will drop later this year because of an accounting rule change in how iPhone revenue is recognized) and at $215 per share, which is beyond the $200 it reached in late 2007, some observers believe this stock is living beyond its means. They're wrong.
RealMoney Contributor
1/20/2010 4:01 PM EST
After a conversation with Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, Henry Blodget has come out with a $1,000 price target on Apple (AAPL - commentary - Trade Now). Call it a current-day version of his $400-a-share Amazon (AMZN - commentary - Trade Now) call back in 1998.
The market liked the call on Tuesday, along with several analyst upgrades, good feelings about next week's Tablet announcement and the prospects of a solid earnings report on Monday. The stock was up 4% on Tuesday, to $215, and it closed Wednesday at $210.81.
[This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com.] Note: subscription required.]
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Labels: AAPL, Amazon, AMZN, Apple, Gene Munster, Henry Blodget, iSlate, Piper Jaffray, Tablet, upside, valuation