Friday Jun.11, 2021

🛍 "Buy now, pay later" billions

_The holo colleagues are coming [Paper Boat Creative/Stone via GettyImages]_

Hey Snackers,

A 16-year-old made $1.7M by reselling gaming consoles, patio heaters, dumbbells, and other scarce pandemic items. Unique bullet for the college app.

Stocks closed at a record yesterday, but investors still have inflation on the brain. Consumer prices spiked 5% in May from a year earlier, the highest annual inflation rate since 2008.

ASAP

"Buy now, pay later" is booming: Europe's biggest fintech Klarna hits a $46B valuation

Love the AllSaints biker jacket... don't love the $500 price tag. Klarna helps you sport that leather now, and pay for it later by spreading out payments as interest-free monthly installments. The Swedish company just raised $640M at a huge $46B valuation, becoming Earth's second most valuable private fintech after Stripe. Quick Klarna stats:

Numbers: 90M+ global active users, with 2M transactions per day.
$$$: Klarna posted record annual revenue of $1.2B last year on fees from merchants, but its loss grew.
Investors: Backers include Softbank, Snoop Dogg, and A$AP Rocky.

Speaking of ASAP... People want retail therapy immediately, but want to pay for it ASLP (as late as possible). Klarna is one of the buy-now-pay-later firms — like Affirm and Afterpay — that have been thriving since the pandemic began. PayPal also intro'd a BNPL checkout option last year. Money was tight, and spending moved online. It took Klarna eight years to hit a $1B valuation, but less than 12 months to go from $5.5B to $46B. It could go public this year.

BNPL eases the "mental accounting" burden... It can help rationalize large purchases by breaking them into smaller chunks in our minds. With a credit card, you have to fully pay off purchases at the end of the month to avoid interest. With BNPL, that $3K Peloton suddenly seems "affordable" at $50/month. Hence: merchants often see a boost in sales after offering Klarna's service. But that easy accounting could also come with financial consequences for some.

Holo

The holograms are coming: tech companies' big bet on the future of remote work

Can't skip the pants on this one... Holograms are getting closer to becoming a workday reality. Think: hologram colleagues giving speeches at all-hands (already happened), and team meetings where you can see everyone's shoes.

Do it for the gram... Holo style. As tech companies move to hybrid WFH models, they're investing in holo-tech to fight Zoom fatigue blues. But holograms aren't just for employees — they're a bet on the future of remote communications. In the last few months:

Google unveiled Project Starline, an effort to create a video-chat system that gives participants 3D depth (it looks like a trippy mirror... straight out of Black Mirror).
WeWork is partnering with a holo tech company to bring holograms to 100 WeWorks around the globe. The program kicks off this month.
Microsoft intro'd Microsoft Mesh, a "mixed-reality" service that displays life-size 3D avatars and content through smart glasses.

Holograms could be the second coming of Zoom... and companies could pay big bucks for them. WeWork is already charging $2.5K for holograms to be displayed on one standard HoloPod. Holograms could offer the best of both worlds in a hybrid future: the flexibility to WFH, paired with the bonding benefits of an in-office experience. But holo tech is also complex, expensive, and likely years away from being adopted. And pants are definitely required.

What else we’re Snackin’

Pandemic: Covid deaths this year have already exceeded 2020’s toll, as cases surge in poor and developing countries.
Drop: GameStop shares plunged 27% yesterday after it declined to provide an earnings outlook and said it may sell 5M shares.
Vax: The US halted new shipments of J&J's Covid vaccine, as states deal with a surplus of expiring doses.
StarFi: SpaceX's satellite internet network Starlink is in talks with airlines to offer in-flight Wi-Fi.
Check: As much as half of US unemployment money doled out over the past year may have been stolen, according to some experts.

Friday

Consumer sentiment index. Earnings expected from Nathan's Famous

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Google and Microsoft

ID: 1682476

Latest Stories

Quitting time

Huge week in tech has market bouncing back

Yikes

Feds launch new probe of Tesla recall

Alphabet’s record Q1

Search and Cloud continue to deliver, as Alphabet announces its first-ever dividend

William Coulman, David Crowther6h

America’s birth rate keeps dropping

Births in the US, like almost everywhere else, are on the decline

Millie Giles, David Crowther6h

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, is struggling

William Coulman, David Crowther6h

Tangential remarks

Nicolai Tangen, the CEO who holds the purse strings of Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, thinks that his fellow Europeans don’t quite stack up to US employees when it comes to pure hustle, telling the Financial Times in a recent interview that there is a difference in “the general level of ambition” and that “the Americans just work harder”.

Tangen has clearly been putting his money — or more specifically Norway’s — where his mouth is: the sprawling Norwegian oil fund, now one of the largest investors on the planet, has been pumping more capital into its US holdings in the past decade, while decreasing its investment into European entities.

The troublesome news for our European readers? Tangen might be onto something. According to data from the OECD, American workers are putting in almost 60 hours a year more than the weighted average for OECD nations… a benchmark that workers from countries in the European Union are already ~180 hours shy of.

Europeans ‘less hard-working’ than Americans | FT

Rani Molla

$2T is the new $1T

Alphabet’s phenomenal earnings yesterday was enough to push the search giant’s market cap beyond $2 trillion, joining the likes of NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft.

Air taxi Blade is actually an organ transport business in disguise

How the helicopter fleet quietly became America's biggest airborne ambulance.

Jack Raines8h

13h

NBA TV rights are finally up for grabs — with cable and streaming giants battling for the top spot

Nia Warfield

Read

13h

Southwest nurses its wounds as airlines continue to feel the Boeing sting

Max Knoblauch

Read

Friday, Apr 26th

13h

What’s happening

Pop Quiz!

Sales of what are up 136% since 2019?

Don't be a sucka

$70B

Alphabet shares are soaring in the after-market session, with a initial jump of more than 10% implying a gain of upwards of about $200B in market value when the stock opens tomorrow morning.

Google’s parent company crushed earnings expectations, initiated a cash dividend for the first time, and authorized a fresh $70B in share repurchases for good measure. The market likes it very much.

What’s up doc?

4/25/24

HOP TO IT

Joshua Topolsky

We get results!

4/25/24

This earnings season is fully operational

Balancing Act

4/25/24

Acrobatic Accounting

So, you want to join the circus?

Megan DeMatteo

Rani Molla

4/25/24

No, Apple hasn’t cut its Vision Pro production estimates in half

Quite a few news outlets are reporting that Apple thinks it’s only going to sell 400,000 to 450,000 Vision Pros in 2024, compared a “market consensus” of 700,000 to 800,000. They’re all citing a note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Obviously there’s no question that Apple’s $3,500 face computer will have a limited audience and could be a huge flop, but this also doesn’t seem like accurate news.

The issue is that 1) this 400,000 number isn’t new. Back in July of 2023, the Financial Times reported that Apple planned to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024, reducing its initial projections of 1M units, citing two people close to Apple and, the Chinese contract manufacturer assembling the device. 2) It's unclear who was estimating 700,000-800,000 Vision Pros in the first place, but it appears that it was Ming-Chi Kuo himself?