In July, the chairman of the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust called Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple “emperors of the online economy” that “enjoy the power to pick winners and losers, shake down small businesses and enrich themselves while choking off competitors”. It laid the foundation for what would come next: on October 20th, the U.S. Department of …
View PostMicrosoft released Q1 earnings this week. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Whilst the current earnings season is called the “Q3 season” by most people to align with the calendar year (i.e. covers the period July – September), companies with year-ends other than December won’t be calling this Q3. Microsoft’s year-end is July, so this is a Q1 result …
View PostMicrosoft released Q1 earnings this week. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Whilst the current earnings season is called the “Q3 season” by most people to align with the calendar year (i.e. covers the period July – September), companies with year-ends other than December won’t be calling this Q3. Microsoft’s year-end is July, so this is a Q1 result …
View PostMedium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) – just reading it out loud is more of a mouthful than Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s finest roast chickens on Twitter. This is different to the annual budget speech which presents the country’s finances for the next financial year. The MTBPS gives context to the budget speech for the forthcoming year, giving the market details …
View PostHave you ever read a results announcement and wondered how revenue can grow by perhaps 7%, yet profit before tax somehow grows by 20%? It seems like an innocuous question, yet the answer holds the key to why many companies are successful and others fail. Top-line growth (i.e. revenue growth) is obviously important, but as revenue growth starts to reach …
View PostHave you ever read a results announcement and wondered how revenue can grow by perhaps 7%, yet profit before tax somehow grows by 20%? It seems like an innocuous question, yet the answer holds the key to why many companies are successful and others fail. Top-line growth (i.e. revenue growth) is obviously important, but as revenue growth starts to reach …
View PostAdapt IT is a JSE small cap operating in the IT industry. The company is worth around R390m which is unremarkable. The remarkable news is that it was worth only R160m at the end of September. This is the thing with smaller companies on the JSE: they trade sideways for extended periods and experience significant jumps or drops based on …
View PostAdapt IT is a JSE small cap operating in the IT industry. The company is worth around R390m which is unremarkable. The remarkable news is that it was worth only R160m at the end of September. This is the thing with smaller companies on the JSE: they trade sideways for extended periods and experience significant jumps or drops based on …
View PostTesla has released its much-anticipated Q3 results. “Alright, so Q3 was our best quarter in history.” Those were the opening words of Elon Musk on the Tesla Q3 earnings call. A sales record combined with free cash flow of $1.4bn is certainly impressive, but as ever I remain concerned about the hype around this company which does not operate in …
View PostDividends have been thin on the ground this year. Remember, a dividend is a cash distribution of profits to shareholders. Dividends are typically declared twice a year, coinciding with the release of interim and final results. In an average year on the JSE, the average company might return say 12% in share price growth and 3% in dividends. It’s therefore …
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