Hey Snackers,
Mid-summer move: Rent the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile on Airbnb. Now a thing.
Stocks barely budged up Thursday as investors digested the final big bank earnings report from Morgan Stanley.
Amazon <> Microsoft... They're cross-lake tech rivals in Seattle. Amazon set sales records earlier with Prime Day — Now it's Bill Gates' baby's turn: Microsoft profits spiked 49% to a record high last quarter. And it remains the world's only $1T (trillion with a "T") publicly-traded company as the stock rose 3% after the report.
It's thanks to the "profit triangle"... You probably notice Microsoft products at work. But it's so much more than that. Here's how its $33.7B of revenue last quarter was almost perfectly divided 33/33/33:
Microsoft owned chapter 1 and chapter 3 of computers... but completely missed chapter 2.
It's the comeback tour... For nearly a decade, America's biggest radio broadcaster was drowning in corporate debt. Then bankruptcy. Now iHeartMedia re-debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange yesterday (the stock slipped 3.5% on day 1). The return was kindly made possible by a bankruptcy judge who expunged (great word) $10B of those debts. Prior to that, it was paying almost $2B per year (1/3 of revenue) in interest payments alone.
iHeartMedia is Jackson Maine (from A Star Is Born) — and podcasts are Ally... iHeart's radio reaches 275M users monthly in the US — that's almost all Americans over the age of 6, which iHeart boldly claims is a vaster reach than Google. But a driver of its comeback is podcasts:
"Companionship" is now the real star... Talk radio shows and podcasts (which the CEO calls "radio on demand") foster relationships with listeners. IHeartMedia even dropped the term "companionship" 21 times in its S-1, the critical filing document for companies that want to trade on stock exchanges like Nasdaq or the NYSE. Engaged listeners are more valuable for the company that's already reaching nearly the entire country.
Dress for the earnings report you want... not the one you have. Skechers is channeling it. Your go-to middle school shoe option's overall sales jumped 11% last quarter. But it's basically become a foreign company — nearly 60% of those sales were overseas, where sales surged about 20%.
Influencers not wanted... Skechers' US growth strategy may be less extensive as it expands abroad, but it's got one theme: C-list celebs who can side hustle as shoe ambassadors.
Avoiding trends is Skechers' trend... With more than 3,000 style options, the company is focused on giving a little something to everyone — not the next "it" thing that one friend of yours always has first. That mass-market strategy is captured by this single quote from the CFO: “Our core demographic isn’t the teenage fashionista.” You do you.
Disclosure: An author of this Snacks owns shares of Amazon.
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