The international business continues to be very flat. Amazon is investing in international operations including India and China but is faced with high competition with local companies like Flipkart and Alibaba respectively
Google throws money into fantasy projects.. but not many see the roll outs - much for the investors disappointment. Google glass, hotair balloon wi-fi, self driving cars etc are still to see the light of the day. Google still relies on Search for most of its revenue. All its other products are low margin products.
The results are good, but the concerns are in few pockets. Revenues from America/Canada still account for a larger share while ROW has not picked up. The company is very aggressive on R&D spending while expenses are 87% more compared to last year. The operating margin was currently at 29% for 4th quarter compared to 44% for the same quarter last year
Since taking the helm of Yahoo in 2012, Marissa has nothing great to report except for the stability that she has brought in the business. Now with Alibaba stake to move out of Yahoo, she will have to invest in extra-ordinary products to kick start the internet giants growth engine.
International sales, especially in China might have rebounded after the company lost some market share earlier. Some time back Apple was No.6 smart phone maker in China, but Canalys, a research firm reports that Apple is the No. 1 smart phone maker in China currently.
The growth in Lumia smartphones sales will help Microsoft get addition revenues in terms of services and cloud apart from bringing in the revenue from phones. The phone segment grew 28% compared to last year.
The cloud is the future and both Microsoft and Amazon (Annotated earlier) are growing in this area. Microsoft has doubled its revenue in cloud computing and also reporting strong X-box sales after the company reduced the prices last quarter.
Yes. Not only it lost money on its major segments, It also reported declines in all geographic segments (decline of 9% in Americas, 13% in Europe/ME/Africa, 17% in Asia)
For smaller shareholders this means a waiting period of few years before company can emerge stronger. The shareholders have already seen over 10 quarters of revenue declines and the stock is trading at lower end of 52 week range
At a time when IBM is restructuring its business by selling hardware businesses and focusing on cloud computing, the revenue growth of 60% means the company is moving in right direction..
The competition for content will be a space to watch for. Amazon is also too keen on acquiring top content (and also ready to bleed to gain market share) and such strategies would cause the companies as well as the industry to be flagged negative.
The streaming of "The Interview" would be a big positive for the company on back of all the publicity that the film has already gained in US and rest of the world
International expansion strategy will come at a price of lower margins initially. The company is expecting material global profits only by 2017.
The results were particularly strong ifinvestor views legal expenses as a one time expense. Without the $990 million after-tax legal expense, core earnings were a solid $1.45 and Q4 net income would've reached nearly $5.9 billion.