Hey Snackers,
"Life should be lived"... Elon Musk's metaphysical message, tweeted alongside a photo of a massive ice cream sundae in a martini glass. Some assumed Elon musk have been out celebrating the reopening of Tesla's Bay Area factory. Turns out the photo was taken by a food blogger... in 2017... at Buca di Beppo. Happy Monday.
Markets ended the week down on a record drop in retail sales, rising trade tensions with China, and over 36M unemployed Americans in two months. On Friday, the House narrowly passed another $3T coronavirus relief bill, which includes a 2nd round of checks for Americans — but the bill is expected to be blocked by the Senate.
On the pod: McDonald's 59-page guide to reopening — we jumped into it on our 15-minute Snacks Daily podcast (everyone deserves a happy meal right now).
The "G" is hard... Mark Zuckerberg must have been blasting Will Smith's 1997 banger as he signed the papers to acquire GIPHY for $400M. The GIF-sharing platform will join Facebook as part of Instagram — its library of LOL-inducing moving images will be more deeply integrated into Insta as well as FB's other apps. FYI - GIPHY won't get banned from non-FB apps, like Twitter and Slack.
What's in a GIF?... While FB says it acquired GIPHY to help people better "express themselves," 50% of GIPHY’s traffic already comes from Facebook's "family of apps" (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger) – 25% of that traffic comes from Insta alone. So it's gotta be something else...
GIPHY is the secret sauce to Facebook's ad-reliant burger... Facebook and GIPHY are free, but make money by promoting sponsored content — Facebook does ad sales on a ginormous scale. By making GIFs a more prominent part of its apps, Facebook can make more $$$ from GIPHY's brand partners by exposing them to its 2.5B+ users.
Hit me with the "high" puns... Aurora Cannabis stock soared 70% after the Canadian pot producer reported higher-than-expected quarterly sales — it was Aurora's biggest daily gain (ever). Aurora really needed a good hit, especially after its stock nearly crashed over '18 and '19. After losing almost $1B in the previous quarter, Aurora cut costs and was able to beat its comedown — sales jumped 18% compared to last quarter.
Make Lululemonade... Despite its 400+ closed stores, Lululemon found zen in the corona-conomy — 33% of its sales were happening online before lockdowns, so going 100% ecommerce didn't make it break a sweat: online sales tripled compared to April 2019. Lulu's products happen to be season-less and stay-at-home versatile (we call it Work-leasure). Under Armour and Nike stocks are both deeply down this year — Lulu is up almost 6%.
Don't push your luck(in)... Luckin Coffee faked its 2019 sales numbers by $310M (#FakeBrews) — so shares have been halted from trading since April when it plunged 80% on the fraud. Yet it still opened 10 stores every day last quarter. And it's pivoting: The techie coffee chain is becoming a digital convenience store, now selling lifestyle products from sanitizing wipes to beauty masks in the app — seems random, but random add-ons to apps are more common in Chinese tech.
Cult classic movie Office Space... may become a historical fiction. Last week, Twitter announced it's giving employees the option to WFH forever. But companies that rely on you coming to the office — aka the "Work from Work" — could lose big if permanent WFH becomes a trend. JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley both said it's highly unlikely that all employees will return to offices post-corona. Commercial real estate giant CBRE's stock fell nearly 13% for the week, while Office Depot is planning store closures and 13K job cuts by 2023.
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Slack, Twitter, and Luckin Coffee (😢)
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