“The upcoming arrival of services like Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and Peacock is increased competition, but they are still small compared to linear TV … In our view, the likely outcome from the launch of these new services will be to accelerate the shift from linear TV to on demand consumption of entertainment. Just like the evolution from broadcast TV to cable, these once-in-a-generation changes are very large and open up big, new opportunities for many players.”
Seriously interesting article on Calouste Gulbenkian and negotiating.
If you haven’t heard of him he was the richest man in the world in the 1950s by virtue of negotiating “5%” royalties on Middle Eastern (especially Iraqi) oil developed by western companies.
Lessons include never put all demands upfront but make demands step by step, often right at the last moment.
Make agreements so complex that non one will dispute them later.
“An S-1 is meant to be a bland financial document, but WeWork’s took a different direction. With Adam’s encouragement, Rebekah became unusually involved in the artistic presentation of the document. “The traditional approach to producing an S-1 is bankers and lawyers hashing this out, but the process was continually usurped by Rebekah’s involvement,” one executive said, echoing a sentiment expressed by multiple people who worked on the project. “She treated it like it was the September issue of Vogue.” “
A fascinating piece on how the nutrition of the world’s plants is changing because of climate change.
“Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.“
We previously pointed out that it was looking bad for these products.
Now work at New York University has established the first link between cancer and vaping nicotine in mice.
The usual provisos hold – results in humans might be different – but …
“Out of 40 mice exposed to e-cigarette vapor with nicotine over 54 weeks, 22.5% developed lung cancer and 57.5% developed precancerous lesions on the bladder. …
… None of the 20 mice exposed to e-cigarette smoke without nicotine developed cancer over the four years they studied the mice, researchers said.“
Fedex is an early cyclical while TPG have their fingers in a lot of pies.
“The industrial sector remains sluggish due to an inventory build-up and increased geopolitical trade tensions…US manufacturing PMI has been very weak this year. Given that our industrial production outlook is down 70 basis points from June currently at 0.9%.” Fedex CEO.
“Certainly growth has slowed globally not going negative in terms of recessionary worries but we’re not seeing the sort of optimism and forward leaning behavior that we saw in our CEOs just a few years ago” – TPG Capital Co-CEO James Coulter, 23rd Sep, CNBC
“Looking ahead, the deterioration in trading conditions seen during Q3 across the majority of our regions is anticipated to continue. In the UK, heightened Brexit related uncertainty is expected to remain as we approach and go beyond 31 October. With worsening macro-economic indicators in Continental Europe, particularly in Germany, and in the US, there are signs that growth in these markets may slow. In Greater China, confidence in Mainland China continues to be affected by trade tariff uncertainty and the social unrest in Hong Kong is increasing.” Q3 Trading Update.
There was a slowdown across the board. Group slowed from +2.1% growth from +7.4% last quarter with UK and Asia negative.
Uber is “turning [into] an operations company — not a product/tech company” said one former senior employee.
All of the perks seem to be disappearing.
But morale suffered as the company seemed to crack down. It stopped letting people anonymously ask questions at all-hands meetings. Starbucks showed up in coffee dispensers, and craft coffee from Stumptown, a roaster based in Portland, Ore., went away. Office supplies like giant sticky notes dried up, and the company no longer hands out “Uberversary” balloons. (from WP article).
The FCA is out with their report on insurance pricing in the UK.
Key chart – the blue line is customer margin against length a policy is held (tenure). The bars show dispersion of margin at each tenure.
What this tells you is that customer margin is correlated with tenure (but that there is dispersion so it is not the only variable).
In other words – the longer you are a customer the more margin you pay …
“The difference in average customer margin between a front book customer (tenure 0) and a longstanding customer (tenure >10) is 31 percentage points for buildings-only policies, 39 percentage points for combined building and contents policies, 33 percentage points for contents-only policies and 21 percentage points for motor policies“
This is something the FCA is taking action on – calculating £1.2bn could be saved (in a total market of £18bn).
