Amazon

In the past seven years, including its fiscal 4Q17 results, Salesforce (CRM) has met or exceeded analysts’ expectations with each passing quarter.

The fourth quarter of 2016 marked the third straight quarter in which Microsoft emerged as the leader in the overall enterprise SaaS market.

Salesforce’s deferred revenue So far in this series, we’ve discussed Salesforce’s (CRM) position in the cloud space and the threat posed by its peers. In fiscal 4Q17, Salesforce reported deferred revenue of $5.5 billion. Its unbilled deferred revenue stood at $9 billion. Its revenue grew 29% and 27%, respectively, in constant currency terms, indicating improvement […]

Collaboration is the largest segment in the SaaS space and, after enterprise resource planning (or ERP), it grew the most in the SaaS space.

In fiscal 2Q17, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure revenues rose 93%, and its computing usage more than doubled on a year-over-year basis. In constant currency terms, MSFT’s growth reached 95%.

Netflix stated that it would spend $6 billion to produce original films in 2017, suggesting a $1 billion increase to a similar 2016 budget.

Nvidia (NVDA) is looking at new revenue streams within the gaming space after dominating the high-end PC gaming market.

To gain a strong foothold in the public cloud space, VMware has pursued a hyper-converged infrastructure (or HCI).

Oracle was trading at a forward EV-to-EBITDA multiple of ~8.3x on December 8, 2016. This metric was lower than Microsoft’s multiple of ~10.3x.

Morningstar first began rating companies in 2002 according to the strength and longevity of their competitive advantages.

Along with Microsoft (MSFT), VMware was named a leader in the x86 server virtualization infrastructure space in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

while Netflix enjoyed a popularity of 37% among teens who streamed videos from the service every day, Alphabet’s (GOOG) YouTube came a close second.

Emerson Electric’s (EMR) omnichannel sales strategy is a multichannel approach that provides an integrated shopping experience.

Rackspace and other smaller players are losing market share to large players in the cloud space.

Azure retained its position as a top performer in Microsoft’s cloud offerings with triple-digit growth in fiscal 4Q16.

In this part of the series, we’ll discuss why investors shouldn’t worry about Amazon’s (AMZN) lofty valuations compared to those of its peers.

The growing number of third-party sellers on Amazon Marketplace is one of the key factors driving the company’s expansion in its gross margin.

The Channel 5 acquisition has led to Viacom (VIAB) gaining access to nearly 100% of the United Kingdom’s television audience, particularly for the Nickelodeon brand.

Amazon (AMZN) currently dominates the cloud infrastructure space. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is used by more than 1 million customers.

In the last five years, Amazon’s revenue has risen at a compound annual growth rate of 22% thanks to its flourishing e-commerce sales.

Amazon’s other services, which were developed to support its core retail business, have now become its revenue and profitability drivers.

Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service could be forced to ensure that 20% of their content catalogs consist of European content.

Earlier in the series, we discussed Salesforce’s (CRM) fiscal 1Q17 results and the company’s growing relationship with Amazon (AMZN).

Comcast is increasingly focusing on its Business Services segment, which has three growth engines: small business, mid-sized business, and enterprise.

Previously, Facebook (FB) accounted for less bandwidth usage than it does now. This has changed with the rising use of rich media content.

As of March 4, 2016, Alibaba (BABA) has generated returns of -16.1% for the trailing 12 months and -15.3% in the trailing-one-month period.

Facebook (FB) is highly monetizing its growing user base of 1.6 billion as of 4Q15. It’s doing this by liberalizing its policies for publishing Instant Articles.

At -$276 million, Netflix had negative free cash flow for the fourth straight quarter in 2015 as the company continued investing in original programming.

Netflix’s competition in the video streaming market is increasing. Amazon has taken several initiatives in the last year to expand its Prime Instant Video service to counter Netflix.

Amazon is the largest e-commerce player in the world. It could beat its own guidance for the December quarter. It will announce its earnings next month.

The advertising revenues for Comcast’s (CMCSA) NBCUniversal Cable Networks and Broadcasting Television business are susceptible to advertising cyclicality and program ratings.

The advertising revenues for Comcast’s NBCUniversal Cable Networks and Broadcasting Television segment are susceptible to advertising cyclicality and program ratings.

The smartphone growth cycle will reach its maturity stage at the end of this year. For the first time, it’s showing single-digit worldwide growth, according to IDC.

In fiscal 4Q15, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) revenue fell 4% YoY to $14.1 billion, above analysts’ expectation of $13.5 billion.

The global e-commerce market is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17 from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $2.5 trillion by the end of 2018.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, a three-year-old game, witnessed engagement growth on a quarter-over-quarter basis to nearly 12 million monthly active users in 3Q15.

Time Warner announced its 3Q15 results on November 4, 2015. Warner Bros. was a major contributor to the revenue of Time Warner in 3Q15, accounting for 47%.

Competition in the technology sector Microsoft (MSFT) faces competition from a number of companies in the tech (technology) sector due to low barriers of entry and continuous evolution of the tech space. As seen in the above chart, Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), and Google (GOOG) are Microsoft’s major competitors in the cloud business segment. Microsoft focuses on […]

Walmart’s (WMT) e-commerce business is slated to grow the fastest of all its channels, at 20%–30% per annum from fiscal 2016 to fiscal 2019. E-commerce sales were $12.2 billion in fiscal 2015, a growth rate of 22%.

In 3Q15, Netflix reported consolidated revenues of $1.7 billion compared to 1.4 billion in the same period the previous year—an increase of 23.3%.

Netflix holds the content licensing rights to its original content, but this original content is currently produced by outside studios like Disney’s ABC Studios.

Currently, Amazon’s Prime Video service is not a major player in the video streaming market, but it continues to grow at a rapid pace thanks to Amazon’s continued investment.

We live in the “Information Age,” where a huge amount of data is generated every second and storage systems are needed to store this data.

The Alliance for Open Media aims to develop video formats that have no royalty costs. The nature of the business makes royalty payments significant for companies like Apple and Google.

Over the last five years, Family Dollar was able to generate a five-year CAGR revenue of 7.2%. That looks decent when you look at it alone. But let’s compare it to its peers.

Project Lightning is a new feature. It’s a button that’s available on Twitter’s social media mobile app. Users can view pictures and videos of live events.

When we compare the S&P 500 (SPX) with the SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT), the retail ETF has beaten the broad market index on a trailing one-year basis.

Web sales for The Home Depot (HD) rose 25% year-over-year in 2Q16. E-commerce sales made up 5% of total sales, or $1.2 billion.

Disney uses a franchise-focused growth strategy that enables it to monetize its intellectual properties across its segments for a long time.

Disney’s Studio Entertainment segment had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2Q15, down 6% from 2Q14. The segment had operating income of $0.4 billion, a 10% fall from 2Q14.