Hey Snackers,
Birthday coming up? Your best bet might be Quarantine Cakes: frosted layers of deliciousness with a healthy dollop of CDC messaging — eating an entire cake alone never felt so right.
The Dow inched up 190 points, rebounding from its 3-year low the day before. Meanwhile, oil surged 23% for its best day ever.
$10B in cash, lots of food, and some side-hustlin'... Sounds like a good recipe for weathering a pandemic — and Uber just flaunted it to the world, fresh out the oven. Its stock popped 38% after CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said his company has plenty of cushion to weather the crisis. First, the burnt cake:
But Uber is primarily a tech company... While some investors equate ride-hailing with travel, and travel with a current mega-struggle bus, Uber wants the world to remember that its business is tech. It flexed its crisis-confidence by throwing out some #fancy terms:
Flexible costs could be Uber's lifeline... Another fancy term Uber dropped: "highly variable cost structure." Uber's expenses are flexible — costs can scale when business winds down/up. Uber doesn't have many fixed costs (think: rent). That's an advantage over business like airlines and car-makers, which have massive factories and expensive machinery. Uber's "storefront" is an app — not a rent-heavy retail spot.
Netflixing while stretching and video-conferencing... That Love is Blind episode might be coming in a little fuzzier than usual. Netflix is a leader of the "stay-at-home" stock pack, and we've been doing a preternatural amount of staying-at-home lately. So the EU asked it to stop streaming HD video to "secure internet access for all" — aka, not break the internet:
Netflix isn't the only one pushing the web's limits... Facebook also had a massive viral-surge in usage for its "family of apps" (Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger) — and it admitted it's being stretched to the limits of its tech infrastructure. Google, which is now offering its enterprise WFH software for free, has been working on increasing its capacity, too.
While media usage is surging, media is not equal... The key difference is in the business model: Google/Facebook/Snapchat rely on ad sales, while Netflix has a subscription-based model (starting at $8.99/month). If the economy hits recession, advertisers are expected to cut back on their ad budgets. That's a threat to ad-based biz models — Netflix's subscription-focus might be more reliable in the long-term.
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Uber and Alphabet
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