Apple - Once you have one, you wanna have more of it!

Well Apple recently announced their mind-boggling results. Even without an iPhone 5 they were able to shake the markets and tremble competitors. At one point of time, Steve Jobs said that he wanted to emulate Sony’s model of product development and marketing. And it is 2012, when Sony posted a net loss of a $1 billion and announced that they would like to emulate Apple’s product development & marketing model. What an irony!

 

 

Anyhow, Apple announced a result which would put any global giant into envy. They went on to become the largest corporation in the world based on market capital outstripping Exxon and if I remember correctly, it was a whopping $450 billion. Apple posted revenues of $46.3 billion for the last quarter of 2011 and an astonishing $13 billion profit. Amazingly, Apple’s profit alone was more than Google’s Q4 revenues which was at $10 billion and was more than double the annual revenue of Facebook. Microsoft has done very well too but clocked $17 billion in revenues. Keep in mind that these are all giants and not to be undermined just because they were overshadowed by Apple on earnings. These are all huge corporations with great talent and ideas. They are in the same league. However, we can say that Apple is in a league of its own!

 

 

This gargantuan result could be easily attributed to the 37 million units of iPhones sold by Apple. With rumors around the Apple TV doing the rounds, who knows where Apple would land.

 

 

Perhaps, I should blog next on the success factors of Apple…

 

Facebook IPO - The Holy Grail of all IPOs !

Facebook has always been in the news but its decision to go public has made recent waves. Well, the obvious question is – why does a company like Facebook need to go public?

 

As a matter of fact, Facebook is not going totally public. An estimated 5% of the company is up for sale and it’s almost like it’s being forced to. How? Well, Facebook is unofficially worth close to a whopping $100 billion and all this money came from private stakeholders. And by worth, I mean market value – the potential of the company as considered by investors. Currently, Facebook has 500 such private shareholders and by law if the figure crosses 500, then you need to make financial disclosures. As a result, Facebook was pedantically instructed to disclose financial statements every quarter as is the case with all public companies. However, Facebook decided to go partially public and raise some funds via an Initial Public Offering(IPO) and this partial stake of the company is worth $5 billion. This is by far the biggest IPO for any technology company !

 

So what does Facebook plan to do with this big pile of cash? Facebook is already rich and popular. It has loads of money available for its expansion plans and is growing at a rapid rate. It already has 800 million users and through user focused advertisements, it is generating its revenue. Today, they reported a billion dollar worth of profit against a $3.7 billion revenue which is a remarkable figure for any company. Anyways, this huge pile of cash from the IPO will present Facebook with additional opportunities in terms of buying hot startups and generating new ideas and products. It will aid compete with rivals by quickly adopting new technologies and innovating marketing tactics.

 

 

The IPO was supposed to be announced this week, but no news yet – potential investors are keeping fingers crossed and waiting to plunge. Is it worth plunging? Not sure, since Facebook has already grown drastically. Under-writers are going to evaluate the stock and then come up with a value figure. Analysts, however, feel that Facebook has to grow at an amazing rate of 30% year on year to make this investment really worth. Is it possible? It surely is tough, but not impossible. Tough because when the company is so large, 30% growth on revenue is a mountainous task. Regardless of that, sentiments & speculations mean a lot in the stock market arena and Facebook is definitely the hottest, the fastest, the coolest company on the block. Well only time will tell if the investors get lucky!

SOPA and PIPA – What are they?

SOPA and PIPA – What are they?

 

Recently, you must have heard a lot of the buzzwords – SOPA and PIPA. But, what are they? They made a lot of headlines recently and have subsided as quickly as they gained attention. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA is the acronym for protect IP Act. Both the bills aim at foreign websites that encroach on copyrighted materials and deliver those freely to common public. There is no law today which would stop this infringement against foreign websites like 'The Pirate Bay' or 'Mega Upload'. These are bills which the congress has been trying to pass and once approved will allow the government to take strict actions against websites which infringed copyrighted material. However, these are not something new and have been around doing the rounds for quite some time. SOPA attempts to bring to court such websites, while PIPA aims to block such sites from the internet service provider layer and even filter out such websites on search engine results. Recently, with the stimulation from music and movie industries, these bills gained attention and were to be presented to Congress for an approval. While most of the media companies are for it, all the major technology companies are in fact against the bill.

 

 

You must have heard about most websites which had de-labeled their logos on a January day to denote their non-support towards the bills. These were major companies including Google, Craigslist, Mozilla and Wikipedia, which also included on their site an explanation as to why they are not supportive. The same day, more than 10000 websites went black and more than 7 million people signed petitions on Google.com opposing the bills. Anyways, the current state of things is that decision on both the bills has been deferred until March of 2012 citing the chaos caused due to them. While the Anti-SOPA groups and campaigners celebrate for a short while, Hollywood is disappointed. We'll see what happens next when once again these bills rise from their graves!