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A rapid expansion of Coach Factory outlets has overtaken Coach’s more expensive goods, as well as its image as a luxury brand.
Navigating the balance between luxury and affordable is a rare feat in retail, as Coach is finding out. The brand's aggressive expansion into outlets in the past decade has not only hit its higher-end luxury products, but it's making it harder for Coach to transform into a cool, aspirational lifestyle brand in the U.S. The retailer reported Tuesday an 18% plunge in North American sales for the year's first three months, continuing a dismal trend it expects to persist, and sending shares to the biggest loss in the S&P 500.
Victor Luis, who became Coach's new chief executive officer in January, has a lot on his plate: Coach is now selling a much broader array of merchandise than it has in the past, including coats, sandals, and even $400 leather baseball gloves. Newer rivals like Michael Kors, Tory Burch, and Kate Spade are on fire, especially with young women, eating into Coach's high-margin U.S. handbag business, which still dominates sales. And while Coach is putting a lot of faith in new executive creative director Stuart Vevers to infuse freshness into the brand, his designs won't hit full-line stores until Sept. 15.
But a large part of Coach's woes are self-inflicted — the company has aggressively expanded its outlet business, cannibalizing sales of its upscale and fashionable full-price brand. It's even pushed outlet goods online in the past few years, where the distinction between full price and factory is especially blurry, particularly for a luxury brand.
There are now 205 Coach outlet stores in North America versus 338 full-price locations, a gap that's poised to shrink even further this year, following the trend of other retailers whose sales at off-price locations have been booming. (The pricier brand is also sold at department stores.) Geographically, the two have been placed closer and closer to each other over the past decade. In 2005, Coach said in its annual report that most of its factory stores were located 50 to 100 miles from major markets. By 2008, that language had been tightened to "generally more than 50 miles" away. Now factory stores tend to be more than 30 miles from major markets, as per its latest report.
"Continued planned North America outlet expansion makes no sense to us in terms of restoring the luster of a luxury brand or creating a lifestyle in which the company's core full-price customer will want to partake," Eric Beder, an analyst at Brean Capital, wrote in a note yesterday.
What's key is that the vast majority of Coach's outlet goods are made for outlets — a practice that most retailers engage in now — resulting in a proliferation of branded items you'd never find a full-line store. Back when outlet stores first started, they were a place for excess or slightly damaged inventory, but that's no longer the case.
Coach doesn't hide that. The company says in its annual report that factory stores, which are highly profitable, are "an efficient means to sell manufactured-for-factory-store product, including factory exclusives, as well as discontinued and irregular inventory outside the retail channel." Coach's head of investor relations, Andrea Shaw Resnick, told BuzzFeed that around 85% of outlet merchandise is made-for-factory. Much of it is unique to the stores, though Resnick noted it also includes "archived designs and customer favorites from our full-priced assortment from previous seasons and years."
The reason it works is that Coach believes its average outlet customer is totally different from its average full-price shopper. In the 2008 report, Coach said factory stores were meant to target "value-oriented customers who would not otherwise buy the Coach brand," at prices knocked down 10% to 50% from regular stores. Resnick said in May 2011 that there's only a 20% overlap between the two groups: The outlet buyer tends to want the brand for the sake of the name at a discount, while the full-line retail customer cares more about what's in fashion, she said.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now preaching stability for Facebook’s platform, as the massive land grab for developers accelerates.
BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley
In its earliest days, Facebook was able to outmaneuver larger companies like MySpace or Google by pushing updates quickly and tolerating a few bugs along the way.
Now Facebook is a large, publicly-traded company worth more than $100 billion and that isn't going to work any more — and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows it. So, at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, he's preaching stability in an effort to attract developers that will build applications using Facebook.
"Move fast with stable infra might not have the same ring to it, it might not be as catchy," Zuckerberg said. "But it helps us build better experiences."
In terms of the nitty-gritty details, Facebook said it's going to ensure that the functions developers use, like logging in with Facebook, will be stable for at least two years. In industry parlance, this is called "API versioning," and it's a big change from the company's traditional strategy which often saw developers complain that Facebook would "break" their apps when they update their APIs.
Facebook also said it would fix any bugs within 48 hours of new code being released to developers. In essence, Facebook's "move fast, break things" era seems to be over — for good reason, as the company now not only has to make its case to its billion-plus users, but also investors.
In the past, Facebook's case to developers has been that its user base is large enough for them to be tolerant of its rapid updates. But now Zuckerberg seems to be making the case that Facebook will be a "stable mobile bridge" across platforms like the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and the Web.
One way it will do that is through Parse, a developer toolkit that Facebook acquired last year — beating out a number of other large tech companies in the process — that powers many of the behind-the-scenes functions of more than 260,000 apps.
The strategy shift makes sense for Facebook given that both Apple and Google have sought to attract as many developers to their platforms as possible — including even offering preferential placement for exclusive apps. Facebook's case seems to be that it transcends and links those platforms, a separate kind of value proposition to individual platforms.
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The aggressive Manhattan U.S. Attorney is close to pursuing guilty pleas from two banks. His trick: an unusual two-step with regulators.
Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Preet Bharara, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, appears to have found a way around one of the major obstacles to indicting big banks, sharpening a new prosecutorial tool and offering satisfaction critics who say the Justice Department has been soft on major financial institutions since the 2008 financial crisis.
The basic obstacle to charging a bank with a crime is this: It's hard to indict a bank without killing it. In particular, a criminal indictment could easily persuade the bank's regulators, at the state or national level, to pull its banking charter, effectively shutting the institution down and turning a guilty plea to specific criminal counts into a death penalty.
And the Justice Department has, since it indicted and destroyed the accounting firm Arthur Andersen in the 2002 Enron case, had a policy of considering the collateral consequences — lost jobs in innocent business units, economic ripples — of indicting a corporation. That policy has allowed bank lawyers to stare down prosecutors, and produced criticism of the Justice Department that they've effectively allowed banks to become "too big to jail."
But Bharara, who has led has become the face of a widespread crackdown on insider trading, appears to have solved that prosecutorial dilemma. The New York Times reported Tuesday that his Southern District is nearing bringing criminal charges against two banks that "could produce the first guilty plea from a major bank in more than two decades."
The Times report suggests that Bharara's strategy has been to negotiate in advance with regulators, and to take the risk — and threat — of a pulled charter off the table.
It's a strategy he's attempted in the past: Bharara reportedly met with Thomas Curry, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and JPMorgan's national bank regulator, "to discuss the potential fallout from criminal charges" but was unable to win assurances that the OCC wouldn't pull JPMorgan's charter following a guilty plea. (It's widely thought that banks will plead guilty to criminal charges if they're bought because of the fear that lenders and depositors will abandon a bank that's been indicted, driving the firm into failure. )
But Bharara's new targets are reportedly foreign banks operating in the United States, Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, and BNP Paribas, a French bank, which have different regulators than U.S.-based banks, giving Bharara the chance to make his case anew for cooperation. (Neither bank has been formally accused of or charged with a crime.)
Prosecutors are investigating BNP Paribas for processing money transfers to countries under U.S. sanctions, like Sudan and Iran, while Credit Suisse is being investigated for aiding Americans in setting up tax shelters that may have run afoul of tax evasion laws.
The Times reported that the Southern District prosecutors and their counterparts in Washington have held similar meetings with regulators that could determine the fate of BNP Paribas following a guilty plea. Bharara, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division David O'Neil, and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, met with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Ben Lawsky, New York's financial and insurance regulator. The law enforcement officials left the meeting "largely reassured," the Times said.
The cooperation of Lawsky, who served as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan attorney prosecuting organizing crime cases alongside Bharara earlier in both men's career, is key.
The New York official has been aggressive in pursuing banks for violating sanctions laws and has recently emphasized the need for going after individuals as opposed to corporations.
Early in his tenure at the head of New York's Department of Financial Services, Lawsky threatened to pull the charter of another foreign bank — Standard Chartered — for violating sanctions rules and eventually settled for a $340 million fine. The Times said that Lawsky "planned to impose steep penalties against BNP and its employees but would not revoke the bank's license" and that the New York Fed made "similar assurances."
All the while, regulators do not appear to have been completely defanged. Lawsky will reportedly consider "temporarily suspending the bank's ability to transfer money through New York branches on behalf of foreign clients."
The criminal division of the Justice Department "has held discussions with the New York Fed about securing a guilty plea" from Credit Suisse for helping American citizens evade taxes.
In a speech earlier this year at a financial industry trade conference, Bharara said "After Arthur Andersen, the pendulum has swung too far and needs to swing back a bit. And so you can expect that before too long a significant financial institution will be charged with a felony or be made to plead guilty to a felony, where the conduct warrants it."
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The company added 14 million monthly active users in the first quarter this year, up 6% from the last quarter. The company reported its first-quarter earnings today.
Eric Gaillard / Reuters
Twitter picked up 14 million users in the first quarter this year — but it still seems that is not enough for Wall Street.
The company reported its first-quarter earnings today, which included beating analyst estimates on both revenue and earnings. But investors still sent the stock tumbling more than 8% in extended trading after the release came out. That drop alone sent the company's market cap down by about $2 billion.
At the end of the first quarter, Twitter had 255 million monthly active users, up from 241 million at the end of 2013 and up 25% from the same quarter last year and up 6% from the last quarter. Of those, 198 million were checking the service from their mobile devices, also up 31% in from the same quarter a year ago.
In addition, the company's "Timeline Views" — which can be used as a proxy for engagement — were up about 15% from the same quarter a year ago to 157 billion in the first quarter this year.
At the company's last call, Twitter's core business (much the same this quarter) seemed to be performing fine — but it became clear it was having trouble attracting new users. That's important for Twitter's business, because in order to grow it needs to both attract new users and find better ways to target advertisements. Twitter's shares as of this morning were down more than 35% on the year, most of that decline coming after the company's first earnings report.
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K12 Inc. is facing a litany of regulatory problems and a new shareholder lawsuit, but as long as new students are signing up, none of that matters to investors.
A K12 student does coursework in of the company's virtual charter schools.
K12 / Via k12.com
The problems plaguing K12 Inc., the country's only publicly-traded virtual charter group, are no secret. They've been hit with two shareholder lawsuits, subjected to state investigations, and weathered exposes in the New York Times and the Associated Press.
But in their quarterly earnings call today, K12 reported that enrollment has grown yet again, swelling to 125,000 students — an increase of more than 5% since March of last year. Their revenue, which topped $235 million, actually exceeded analysts' estimates, as did their operating margins. Net income was $15.9 million.
Enrollment is what matters to the company and its shareholders: each student that signs up for K12's online schools comes with public funding attached, and as long as enrollment grows, revenue likely will, too.
Though enrollment is growing, as many as 50% of K12's students drop out within a year, according to Gary Miron, a researcher with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. Because funding is allocated on a yearly basis in most states, however, Miron says that doesn't matter much to K12's bottom line.
"It doesn't really hurt them because if the student leaves, the money stays," Miron said. "They can just enroll another student the next year."
In addition to high dropout rates, K12's student outcomes are notoriously poor, with students performing worse than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar schools. As a result, just a quarter of their schools meet adequate yearly progress metrics. Just like for-profit giants University of Phoenix and Everest College, K12 attributes these outcomes to the higher numbers of poor and academically challenged students it enrolls, and the high turnover among its students.
A representative for the company did not respond to a request for comment.
After a 2011 article in the New York Times highlighted the company's many problems with student performance, shareholders filed suit against K12, alleging that they had been misled about student outcomes and had boosted its enrollment and revenue by using "deceptive recruitment" practices. That lawsuit was eventually settled last year, but a second one is in the works, according to an announcement by law firm Levi & Korsinsky.
Prominent hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, of Kase Capital, has been one of K12's biggest critics, announcing last year that the company was his biggest short position.
Though legislators and state education departments have started to go after K12 and its smaller counterparts, Miron said most attempts to close down or limit funding to underperforming virtual charter schools have been settled or dropped altogether.
On the company's earnings call, executives assured investors that the latest attempt to scale back virtual schools, a Pennsylvania bill that targets online charter funding, would have minimal impact.
ExxonMobil and Morgan Stanley decline to comment on the future of their dealings with the head of the Russian oil giant.
Rosneft Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin.
Toru Hanai / Reuters
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration's decision to slap sanctions on Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft, complicates things for two major U.S. companies that have become entwined with the Russian state-run oil company: ExxonMobil and Morgan Stanley.
Both companies declined to engage on the specifics of their future plans with the company, though both have shown signs that they'll continue with their respective relationships with Rosneft.
Exxon signed a deal with Rosneft in 2011 with potential investments in the range of tens of billions of dollars, and the Russian company made it clear on Monday they would move ahead with plans to explore two Arctic oil fields together.
Sanctions rules forbid U.S. businesses or persons from doing business with people or businesses on the sanctions list. Asked how Exxon would handle that, Jeffers said: "We will comply with all sanctions. I don't have anything beyond that at this time."
"We don't have any comment at this time," Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said, when asked whether the addition of Rosneft's CEO to the sanctions list would have any effect on Exxon's partnership with the company.
Meanwhile, financial services firm Morgan Stanley said it plans to continue with the sale of its oil trading unit to Rosneft, a deal announced in December.
"Our view is that we are very much on track to close [the deal] in the second half of this year," Morgan Stanley CFO Ruth Porat told Bloomberg television on Monday. The deal is subject to regulatory approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee that reviews business deals for potential national security issues.
"Obviously it is subject to regulatory approval," Porat said, adding that she "can't comment on the regulatory environment."
"Our view is we are continuing to focus on closing the second half of this year," she said.
A spokeswoman for CFIUS declined to comment on the Morgan Stanley–Rosneft deal, which Bloomberg has reported has not yet been submitted for review and which may have to wait until tensions with Russia cool down.
"By law, information filed with CFIUS may not be disclosed by CFIUS to the public," the spokeswoman, Holly Schulman, said. "Accordingly, the department does not comment on information relating to specific CFIUS cases, including whether or not certain parties have filed notices for review."
A spokesman for Morgan Stanley didn't respond to a query about how the company plans to handle the new restrictions.
The deal would see Morgan Stanley, one of the first investment banks, to invest heavily in the physical commodities business, like shipping oil or gas, sell Rosneft its physical oil trading unit, which includes about 100 employees who work as traders and shippers in the U.S., U.K., and Singapore. Morgan Stanley also agreed to sell its 49% stake in the tanker company Heidmar to Rosneft.
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on Russian businesses, oligarchs, and government officials in response to Russian aggression against Ukraine. The latest round was announced after the U.S. judged that Russia had failed to live up to a de-escalation agreement reached in Geneva two weeks ago.
The Kremlin owns more than 70% of Rosneft. Sechin, its CEO, is a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sechin had no experience in the energy business before joining Rosneft as chairman in 2004; he took over as president of the company in 2012.
Rosneft is one of the world's largest energy companies, with more oil and gas sales and reserves than Exxon (although it is is considerably less profitable), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. John Mack, Morgan Stanley's former chairman and chief executive officer, sits on the board of the company. Rosneft was a middling oil company until it bought up the assets of Yukos after the company was forced into bankruptcy following a Kremlin campaign. Yukos' former CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, accused Sechin of organizing the campaign against him and his company. Sechin also oversaw Rosneft's $55 billion acquisition of TNK-BP, which was completed last year.
Insiders say the U.S. business community is nervous about the sanctions.
"They wish it weren't happening and wish that their business interests weren't being affected," said Ed Chow, a senior fellow in the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He warned that the sanctions could have more of an impact on the companies than they realize. "There's a lot of wishful thinking on their part right now given how fast the Ukraine crisis has moved and given how things have increasingly gotten worse."
American companies' business relationship with Russia is small compared to Europe's; oil giant BP has a 20% stake in Rosneft and its chief executive sits on the Rosneft board. A spokesman for BP told the Wall Street Journal that it was "considering today's announcement to see specifically what this may mean for BP" but did not plan to stop investing in Russia.
Speaking about Exxon, one energy industry source said: "For a company of that size they [Exxon] have limited exposure, but obviously were planning for this to grow significantly. In terms of exposure it's not like BP which has major investments and not like Shell."
In Europe, companies with massive energy interests in Russia have succeeded in slowing down the European Union's efforts to levy sanctions against Russia. German and Italian energy companies as well as BP have reportedly been lobbying behind closed doors against increasing economic sanctions, convincing European officials that a cautious approach is best. The U.S., with its shale gas reserves, does not share Europe's dependence on Russian energy.
The risk to the companies is "a reputational risk," said Alexander Kliment, director of Russia research for the Eurasia Group. "No one wants to extend a loan to companies that, if things escalate, could be on a sanctions list."
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Skip McGee, a former Lehman Brothers investment banking executive, received the bank’s largest bonus for 2013.
Barclays Americas Chief Hugh McGee.
Michael Fiala / Reuters
Hugh "Skip" McGee, who headed the investment bank at Lehman Brothers and ascended to chief of Barclays' Americas business, will leave the bank, the company said today. He will be replaced by Joe Gold, who now runs client capital management.
McGee was one of the most senior executives at Lehman Brothers to join Barclays after the British bank bought Lehman's investment banking division following its 2008 bankruptcy that touched off the financial crisis. The Texas native McGee joined Lehman in 1993 and was an energy and natural resources banker who helped lead efforts to save the bank before it careened into bankruptcy. He came over to Barclays as head of its investment banking division and became head of its U.S. business in May of last year.
McGee will leave at the end of April and Gold will take over May 1, when he will he report to Tom King and Eric Bommensath, the co-heads of corporate and investment banking.
Barclays, which paid one of the earliest and largest fines in the interest rate manipulation scandal that claimed the career of its then-CEO Bob Diamond in 2012, has come under pressure for its business practices and especially how it pays its senior executives amid meager profits.
At its annual meeting in London last week, shareholders harangued its senior management, including its Chief Executive Officer Anthony Jenkins and Chairman David Walker, over what they saw as excessive pay, especially at the investment bank. About a third of shareholders voted against the bank's compensation plan.
Barclays reported a quarterly loss in February of £514 million, about $865 million, while its pool for bonuses had grown to £2.4 billion or about $4 billion.
The senior executive with the biggest bonus for 2013 was Skip McGee, who got shares worth some £8.9 million, about $15 million. Jenkins, on the other hand, turned down a bonus for 2013 and 2012 but still received base pay of £1.1 million and £3.81 in long-term pay for past years' performances. All told it was about $8.25 million.
The bank has also said that it intends to focus on less-risky businesses, which would likely entail a relatively smaller role for its investment bank. Barclays said earlier this year that it would cut 12,000 jobs across the bank.
The change in focus can be seen in the transition between McGee and Gold. In a statement, Jenkins described McGee as "our most senior client-facing executive, responsible for driving some of the industry's highest profile transactions." McGee's role at both Lehman and Barclays was winning big business from the bank's clients. The bank described Gold's previous role as managing credit risk and the collateral for the bank's loan and derivatives portfolios.
Barclays said that McGee was stepping down "given the focus" on the bank having to switch to a new corporate structure in the U.S. by July 2016 as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act, which substantially overhauled financial regulation. Barclays said the leadership changes were to "prepare for this significant transition, one which will require a great deal of management focus over the next two years on regulatory relations, compliance, and the very significant legal and operational ramifications associated with the creation of the new entity."
"Skip McGee has delivered outstanding service over the last 21 years, both at Barclays and previously at Lehman Brothers," Jenkins said in a statement. "Skip has made a significant contribution over the last year as CEO of the Americas, and he has been a valued member of my Group Executive Committee. He will leave us with the good wishes of colleagues here."
McGee said in the same release: "After 21 years with Lehman Brothers and Barclays, I have made the difficult decision to leave. Banking is a 'team sport', and I am incredibly proud of the team we assembled here. It has been a true honor and privilege to work with so many talented people over the last two decades. We have accomplished a great deal since the combination of Barclays and Lehman in 2008. As for me, I am looking forward to my next challenge." McGee did not say where he would be going next.
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On Tuesday, shareholders of Domino’s Pizza will decide whether to oust the chairman of its compensation committee, who granted a $43 million three-year payout to the company’s CEO under terms that industry observers say are unprecedented.
Luke Macgregor / Reuters / Reuters
Domino's Pizza's stock has been on a tear in the last year, but that hasn't stopped a group of large shareholders from questioning the way CEO J. Patrick Doyle is getting paid — $43 million over three years — and who is pulling the compensation strings at the pizza giant.
Domino's annual shareholder meeting will take place Tuesday, and with it will likely come a contentious battle over the reelection of board member Andrew Balson, a former Bain Capital executive, who is the lead decision-maker when it comes to compensation matters on the board.
Pension plan advisory firm CTW Investment Group, which sent a letter to the largest Domino's shareholders, argues that Doyle's compensation package puts shareholders at risk of losing a lot of money, despite the gains its stock has made in recent years. The California State Teachers' Retirement System, one of the largest pension funds in the country, has also taken issue, having publicly disclosed its intention to withhold support for Balson's reelection to the board at Tuesday's meeting.
"As our shareholder meeting and final tabulation of the votes on our proxy will not be complete until Tuesday, we believe it's inappropriate to comment before our shareholders have their say," a Domino's spokesperson said.
Making things even worse for the chair of Domino's compensation committee, both proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services have sided with CtW's campaign, which senior governance policy analyst Michael Pryce-Jones will reiterate at the shareholder meeting in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"Shareholder returns can really hide all sorts of bad pay practices that can blow up in shareholders' faces down the line," Pryce-Jones said. "What is unique in Domino's is that investors are looking through the performance, and how short-term the pay practices actually are."
The problem is, that plan has a six-month component, where half of Doyle's compensation can be paid out in the first six months, despite the threat of the company not meeting annual performance goals, Pryce-Jones said, adding that Doyle's pay package is two to three-times the average pay in similar industry sectors, and Balson has granted him and the board discretionary equity options in the last year.
"They could lose money by the end of the year," Pryce-Jones said. "Most people would be very concerned about any plan that causes management to miss yearly objectives."
Randy Falco, who previously served as one of the highest-ranking executives at NBC, said on Univision’s first-quarter earnings call Monday that the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is bad for competition, particularly for Hispanic consumers. NBC owns Univision’s top competitor, Telemundo.
Univision CEO Randy Falco.
Al Diaz/Miami Herald / MCT
Well, the CEO of a big media company finally spoke out against the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. But it wasn't Disney, News Corp, or any of the usual suspects. Instead, it was Randy Falco, the chief executive officer of Spanish-language broadcast company Univision.
On Univision's first-quarter earnings call Monday, Falco called the impending $45 billion merger "truly a cause for concern," saying it was "bad for competition" and that a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would have "staggering influence over Hispanic consumers."
"When you have the number one and number two cable providers come together, it's truly a cause for concern, requires greater scrutiny by the government for approval, obviously, and you're hoping at the very least that there is that scrutiny and potentially much tougher restrictions added to the existing consent decree that will protect Comcast competitors such as Univision who are serving minority communities," Falco said. "You know, the fact is that there is not one other media or telecommunications company that has the level of vertical integration of Comcast, and I'm talking about video and broadband and content. Not Google, not AT&T, not Facebook, not the satellite providers."
Falco went on to say he was concerned that, if approved, Comcast would serve markets representing 91% of all Hispanic households and be the top TV distributor in 19 of the top 20 Hispanic markets. This is a particularly important concern for Univision since Comcast, through NBC, owns its Spanish-language broadcasting rival, Telemundo.
"This new company will have staggering influence over Hispanic consumers and the risk of this merger is really not a hypothetical, especially for providers like us who offer networks and services that compete with NBC and Telemundo and even NBC Sports," Falco said.
As an example, Falco cited the success on the company's sports-focused UniMas network, which doesn't receive distribution on Comcast systems.
Pointing to UniMas' strong ratings and right to World Cup soccer, Falco said, "All of the top distributors have embraced this network and are distributing it, all except Comcast. Either Comcast doesn't understand that soccer is a passion point for Hispanics or they don't support competitors. My fear is the latter is the case and this type of anti-competitive conduct would continue."
Falco conveniently forgot to mention that another of Univision's networks, El Rey, a partnership with film producer Robert Rodriquez, came to life as a condition of Comcast's merger with NBC requiring it to carry more minority-focused networks.
Falco did pretty much everything except come right out and say he opposed the merger, as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did on his company's first-quarter earnings call last week.
Falco's comments are interesting not only because they look at the merger through the prism of the Hispanic audience, but also because he spent more than three decades in various executive positions at NBC, including as president and chief operating officer. He left NBC in 2006 for an ill-fated tenure atop AOL after it became clear that he lost the competition to succeed Bob Wright as CEO of NBC to Jeff Zucker. Before joining Univision in 2011, Falco served as a consultant on Comcast's takeover of NBC.
Univision is perhaps the most-watched television network that no one talks about, sometimes beating its larger English-language broadcast counterparts in certain ratings demographics, including the advertiser-coveted 18-49 year-olds, in prime time. But the share of advertising and carriage fees it attracts has not yet caught up to its ratings, something executives have sought to rectify by talking up the size and buying power of the Hispanic market.
"Not reaching out to the Hispanic audience through Univision, the gateway to that audience, is a flawed business strategy," Falco said on the call.
On the numbers, Univision grew revenue 10.5% in the first quarter to $621 million, but earned just $6.2 million, a drop from the $9 million it posted in the year-ago quarter, owed to higher expenses and a tax-related charge. For comparison, NBC's broadcast network alone recorded revenue of $2.6 billion in the first quarter (Comcast does not separately break out net income for NBC's broadcast network.)
Univision is owned by a group of private equity firms — among them Thomas H. Lee Partners, Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners, and TPG Capital — that bought the company for just over $12 billion in 2007. Though the company is private, its debt is held publicly, which requires it to disclose earnings. Reports have periodically surfaced over the last two years saying Univision's owners were exploring a sale or IPO of the company. That is definitely a possibility given the five- to seven-year time horizon that private equity firms typically hold onto investments before seeking an exit.
Last week, Citigroup analysts reiterated that view in a report, saying they believe 2014 "could be the year when Univision decides to IPO or put itself up for sale."
In addition to its main network and the sports-focused UniMas, Univision also owns several other cable networks and radio stations serving the Hispanic population.
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Promos for rides that are almost free and even a guarantee for personal replies from Hailo’s New York general manager.
Rachel Sanders/BuzzFeed
Yellow cab-hailing app Hailo has been emailing lots of promos to New Yorkers lately — to the point that they're practically giving away free rides.
Over the weekend, Hailo offered $15 off fares to their users, outlining the situations in which that might come in handy: "Your chill weekend...your productive weekend...your family weekend." ("Arm flailing is sooo 2012.") It's giving away a $15 discount on 70 rides every time the temperature hits 70 degrees this month in New York, Boston, Washington D.C. and Chicago. And just in case the emails from "HAILO NYC" weren't getting through spam filters, there was one from Hailo's New York general manager Adam Gerson last week, outlining some new features on the app and promising a personal reply to anyone who sends questions or feedback to his email address.
While Hailo has been a hit in its founding city of London, as well as other European cities, it's clearly working hard to get New Yorkers on board. Uber, which costs more than Hailo and doesn't use yellow cabs, appears to reign king among e-hailing apps in the city, despite complaints over its surge-pricing during busy periods. The New York Times pointed out in January that Uber fares might soar to 8.25 times their standard price during snowstorms or other inclement weather, an example of price-gouging that's frustrated many New Yorkers, but hasn't really driven them to delete the app en masse.
Hailo's Facebook page is replete with complaints over its software. Ironically, many of the complaints are about these frequently-distributed promo codes failing to work, resulting in riders getting stuck with large bills. The year started with $5 off offers, then escalated to $10, and are now at $15. An email to Gerson and a request through Hailo's contact page weren't immediately returned.
Below, the progression.
The bank had won a long-sought increase from its meager capital return to shareholders. It will now have to be resubmitted to the Federal Reserve.
Mike Blake / Reuters / Reuters
The Federal Reserve announced this morning that Bank of America would have to suspend its plans to increase its dividend and buyback this year. This is a reversal of the approval Bank of America won in the Federal Reserve's review process for the largest banks to pay out dividends and buyback stock. Bank of America had announced last month that it would buy back $4 billion worth of stock and increase its quarterly divided from a penny a share to 5 cents.
The company's stock is down more than 5% in early trading to $15.10. The Fed's suspension of the buyback is a blow for the bank's shareholders which had been counting on receiving much more in buybacks and dividends this year.
Bank of America said this morning that it had incorrectly calculated its regulatory capital ratios. The bank said that it had recorded an "incorrect adjustment related to the treatment of certain structured notes in the Merrill Lynch."
"Bank of America must address the quantitative errors in its regulatory capital calculations as part of the resubmission and must undertake a review of its regulatory capital reporting to help ensure there are no further errors," the Federal Reserve said in a statement. Bank of America will have 30 days to resubmit its capital plan according to the Fed's statement this morning.
Bank of America said that it expects its revised buyback and dividend request to be smaller than what the Fed approved last month.
Bank of America disclosed that the bank's capital ratios — a measure of how much of the bank's total assets are funded by retained earnings and sale of stock instead of debt — were incorrect when it submitted them to the Fed for its evaluations. This is crucial because a major component of the Fed's approval process for he 30 largest banks to pay dividend or buyback stock is measuring how a bank's capital ratios will be affected by an economic downturn.
Bank of America is now the second megabank not able to increase its dividend and stock buyback — Citigroup was rejected by the Fed for what the Fed said were qualitative gaps in how the bank projected its revenue in a large economic downturn.
Bank of America bought the investment bank Merrill Lynch in the midst of the financial crisis and the massive losses it had to assume brought along years of legal trouble and lawsuits that eventually claimed the job of then-CEO Ken Lewis, who resigned from the bank in 2009. Bank of America settled a suit with investors for $2.43 billion in 2012 over allegedly hiding the true condition of Merrill Lynch's finances when trying to win shareholder approval for the merger. Lewis and the bank's then chief financial officer Joe Price recently settled civil suits by the New York state Attorney General over the Merrill merger.
The rejection from the Federal Reserve comes at a trying time for the company, which has still not gotten its pre-crisis legal troubles behind it. The bank is reportedly in negotiations with the Justice Department over Bank of America and Countrywide's — the mortgage broker it acquired 2007 — sale of shoddy mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis. Just last month, Bank of America reached a $6.3 billion settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage companies, over mortgage securities it sold to them.
Thanks to its massive expected legal costs, the bank reported a loss of $276 million in the first quarter of this year. The bank reported a $6 billion pre-tax legal expense.
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Remember phone-hacking?
Lucas Jackson / Reuters / Reuters
Rupert Murdoch, the most outspoken of media moguls, is not one to couch words or shy away from expressing an unpopular opinion. The Chairman of both News Corp. and 21st Century Fox is sort of a natural at Twitter, using its 140 character limit as digital media Op-Eds that almost always go viral.
Like his latest tweet, posted Saturday night, in which he questioned whether or not Google was an ethical company in light of recent reports that it knew about but failed to alert the government to the so-called "Heartbleed" security bug.
Only problem is, while Rupert may have put behind him the phone-hacking scandal that nearly brought down News Corp in 2011/2012, most everyone else hasn't. Back then, to refresh your memory, journalists at News Corp's News of the World tabloid in London were found to have hacked into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and even a missing 13-year-old girl. The scandal forced Murdoch to close the paper, abandon a bid to acquire full control of BSkyB, pay tens of millions of dollars in fines, and make an embarrassing appearance before Parliament.
On Saturday night, Twitter was more than happy to remind Murdoch that his questioning another company's ethics was rich with irony.
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The company revealed a new type of search engine for its app called “Guided Search.” It was revealed at an event at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters this evening.
BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley
SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest now has its own take on how people should be searching for things on their phones.
The company rolled out a new search engine at an event at its San Francisco office Thursday evening called "Guided Search."
The initial experience, which is geared toward smartphones, is not unlike a normal search engine — a Pinterest user will search for something like "chairs." However, the user is then requested to get a little more specific based on its initial search, by swiping across a rail on the top that has related content. For the sake of the example at the event, additional related topics to chairs were along the lines of "wood finish."
Each related tap further refines the search and brings up new, more closely suggested pins. It's a bit like a flow chart optimized for a smartphone, further and further refining a search without having to type additional keywords and using Pinterest's visual-oriented search results.
Earlier this year, Pinterest bought a small startup that specializes in visual search called VisualGraph, another step in its obvious trajectory to building a search engine built around visual and logical cues rather than keywords.
BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley
"Guided Search is an approach to search that focuses on exploration, not information retrieval," Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at the event. "We think search in the future can be a discovery tool, and guided search can make it easy to do with what's most important to you. it should be a lot less typing like this, and a lot more browsing like this. It should be fun, visual, fast."
Pinterest has "trillions" of data sets, according to the company — it said it had more than 30 billion total pins, which was up 50% in the past six months. But the advantage of Pinterest is that its classified visually and not by a set of metadata or keywords. For example, a "chair" in a traditional search engine might not include things like couches or stools, though there's a sort of visual and logical association there.
It can be summed up in the words from one of the lead engineers on the project, Naveen Gavini: "We fundamentally needed to change search."
One of Pinterest's highly valuable propositions is being a a mechanism for discovering new content on the Internet, whether it is photos, videos or anything else — as the company has continued to roll out new kinds of "pins," most recently pins that let its users share their location. It's highly differentiated from Google, which has traditionally relied on keywords.
The implications of such a refined search engine, which could help users discover relevant content in a way Google or even Facebook can't provide, has investors salivating over the company and has helped propel the startup to being worth billions of dollars. The new search engine is rolling out for iPhone and Android Pinterest users Thursday evening.
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s latest move has some praising him as a deal genius and others saying it is an example of everything wrong with corporate America, activist investing, and regulatory law.
Eduardo Munoz / Reuters / Reuters
Bill Ackman, billionaire founder of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, is rewriting the rules of the corporate raider game. And while some are in awe of his bold, barely legal move to team up with the Canadian pharmaceutical conglomerate Valeant Pharmaceuticals to acquire Botox-maker Allergan, others are holding out the deal as an example of everything wrong with corporate America, activist investing, and regulatory law.
The proposed $45 billion deal is unusual because Ackman is basically serving as the shadow buyer of Allergan through Valeant. Put more simply, before Valeant launched its takeover bid for Allergan, the company and Ackman formed a special purpose vehicle, dubbed PS 1, to acquire a stake in Allergan by buying up shares on the open market. Nearly all of the money used to fund the Allergan share purchases came from Ackman, who through PS 1 accumulated a 9.7% stake in the company, effectively giving him a major say in approving or rejecting the deal. And he is obviously in favor of the deal — though Allergan's board thus far has been resistant — since he is in cahoots with Valeant.
The move raises questions about decorum and ethics in activist investing since, though technically legal, it has been widely viewed as extremely aggressive.
"With regard to ethics, what ethics are there?" hedge fund attorney Ron Geffner of Sadis & Goldberg, Geffner asked rhetorically. "Trading is fungible, it's similar to going to war, you either survive or you don't." Geffner added that Ackman's job is to make money for investors and as long as he complied with all laws, which it seems he has, than shareholders should welcome the move.
The fact that the regulations as currently written allow for this kind of shadow maneuvering goes to the very heart of the problem some have with the deal. At issue is the fact that after Pershing built up a 5% stake in Allergan, the threshold for which the law states its position has to be disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was able to acquire an additional 4.7% of the company's shares before its position became public. That's because the reporting timeframe for disclosure spans 10 days, thus allowing Ackman to effectively double his stake in Allergan under what he called in a presentation a "rapid accumulation program."
While this is a totally standard part of the activist investor toolkit, no less than Marty Lipton, a partner of the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and one of the most prominent corporate deal lawyers in the world (he invented the 'poison pill' takeover defense), is one of the rule's more vocal critics. Lipton has called the 10-day reporting time an eternity and said the delay in reporting when an investor has crossed the 5% threshold can give activist hedge funds "a springboard to attack the company with a proxy fight or a hostile takeover bid."
At a recent conference, Lipton also expressed his disdain for several activist investors, including Ackman specifically.
"I don't like Bill Ackman," he said.
Another Wachtell Lipton partner, Theodore Mirvis, said the rule "simply makes no sense" and the firm has gone so far as to petition the SEC to shorten it to one day. Such a rule change would make activism much harder because investors would have less time to accumulate the stock that gives them more weight in public debate and in electing new directors.
"The real question is whether the window should be 10 days or if it should be shorter to try to prevent those accumulations," Steven Davidoff, a law professor at Ohio State told BuzzFeed in an interview. "If you make the window tighter, you will discourage activism."
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters / Reuters
Lipton's feelings about Ackman underscore his polarizing personality within the investing community writ large. Famed for his lengthy presentations and poison pen letters to the chief executives and board of companies he is agitating against, Ackman's confidence, good looks, and track record of success are admired by some and envied by others. The latter group seems to delight in his failure, like when he lost some $700 million on an ill-fated overhaul of J.C. Penney. His very public Herbalife short bet managed to entice a litany of rival hedge fund heavies, among them Carl Icahn, Dan Loeb, and George Soros, to line up on the opposite side and take a long position, resulting in massive losses for him. One of the most-watched moments in televised business news history came when Ackman and Icahn got into a verbal brawl on CNBC, with Icahn saying that Ackman was like a "little Jewish boy crying that the world was taking advantage of him."
Yet Ackman has just as many, if not more, successes under his belt, including some big recent wins. His investment in railroad company Canadian Pacific has more than tripled in value after the company brought in a new CEO and board members. (During that activist brawl, to illustrate Ackman's poison pen prowess, he ended a letter to Canadian Pacific's then-chairman with this nugget: "Let's avoid having a border skirmish turn into a nuclear winter. Life is too short.")
More recently, he scored big when bourbon maker Beam was purchased by the Japanese company Suntory for $13.6 billion, likely netting Ackman around $370 million when the deal closes.
And Ackman is nothing if not a persistent investor. Despite the accumulated losses, for instance, he has promised to pursue his Herbalife short "to the end of the earth" and he maintained his short bet on the bond insurer MBIA for seven years. Generally, Pershing tends to hold onto investments for four to six years.
That trait should serve Ackman well since the Allergan deal is expected to be a long, drawn-out battle given its complexity. For starters, the company hasn't accepted the offer. To be sure, it seems downright resistant to it, initiating a shareholder rights plan, or poison pill, that effectively prevents Pershing from accumulating a greater share of the company. When Valeant CEO Michael Pearson was asked during a presentation to discuss the merits of the deal and why he decided to partner with Ackman, he joked, "He's charming."
"Bill is very persistent, we need someone who is going to be persistent, he's going to go the full distance, he's not going to drop out in a month or two," Pearson said, adding that Ackman also brought $4 billion to the table.
Indeed, if the Allergan deal proves anything, it is that Ackman really doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. He only cares, it seems, about making money and the thrill of the deal.
"The Pershing Square–Allergan deal is an innovative development in investor activism and will likely prove as a model for other activists in the future," said Sahm Adrangi, founder of Kerrisdale Capital, a $300 million hedge fund currently embroiled in its own activist fight with Morgans Hotel Group. "Pershing Square has a track record of innovative activism, such as organizing a charity event to present on one of their shorts and now the Allergan deal."
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The company reported its first-quarter earnings today.
Gus Ruelas / Reuters / Reuters
Before even getting to how the rest of its core business is growing, Amazon would like to take a second to talk about how much it is investing in its media empire.
In its earnings announcement today, Amazon (without any kind of specific statistics, naturally) spelled out how much work it has put into its media empire before getting to talking about its core business of selling and delivering goods — the business that actually brought in the majority of the $19.74 billion it made this quarter.
"We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start," CEO Jeff Bezos said as part of the announcement. "Our device team launched Fire TV, offering great content, including our recently announced exclusive deal with HBO, and innovative features like unified voice search, which we're delighted is being adopted by so many new partners, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, Crackle, and Showtime Anytime. The team is working hard to keep Fire TV in stock."
He then proceeded to meander a bit about the company's release of its grocery delivery service Prime Pantry, which is part of its Amazon Prime delivery service. Then spoke briefly about its cloud services, before cutting straight back into the growth of its media business.
As is customary with Amazon's quarterly earnings, the company beat expectations on revenue, brought in a ridiculously tiny portion of that as a profit (its margins were 0.7% — compared that to a business like Facebook which has margins upwards of 50%). Amazon is expecting to lose money in the second quarter — and, as usual, the stock is up a hair after the earnings report. It also released a few vanity stats about its media business ("video streams on Prime Instant Video nearly tripled year over year") that don't have any real context.
Granted, Amazon had a lot to reveal when it came to its growing media business this quarter — but it also rolled out a lot of other new services that more neatly align with its online retailing business that consistently generates billions.
Alongside its retail business, Amazon has also been aggressively building out a media business. Amazon launched a set-top box, the Fire TV, and has its own giant game studio producing first-party titles for the Fire TV — including many high profile game designers. The company has a suite of original shows for its Amazon Prime Instant Video service as well, which comes with an Amazon Prime subscription (a service that allows two-day deliveries for free).
In addition to launching a set-top box, Amazon was able to get another jump on streaming rival Netflix by signing deal earlier this week that would allow the online retail giant to stream select HBO shows through its Amazon Prime Instant Video service. The deal, which will run over the course of three years, is estimated to be worth around $300 million, according to an estimate by BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield.
"HBO fears Netflix's growing industry power," Greenfield wrote. "We suspect HBO wanted to balance Netflix's growing media industry hegemony by helping to bolster their largest direct-to-consumer, SVOD competitor – Amazon."
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