LinkedIn Corp

Professional network service LinkedIn is pulling its business out of China. How much business does it have in China?

LinkedIn’s stock, which traded at $269 in February 2015, fell to one of its lows of $101.11 in February 2016.

Salesforce continued its spree in December 2016 with its acquisition of Twin Prime, a startup focused on machine learning.

Oracle’s Marketing Cloud allows customers to run marketing campaigns and manage data related to those campaigns on web, social, mobile, and email.

Cisco is expected to announce its fiscal 3Q15 earnings on May 13. Cisco expects its year-over-year revenue growth to be 3%–5% in the quarter.

The third quarter of 2014 was by far the best for SiriusXM in terms of market penetration as well as increasing revenues.

The technology sector in general is facing headwinds because the U.S. dollar is strengthening. Facebook earned about 54% of its revenues from international markets in the last quarter. As a result, a strengthening U.S. dollar impacts its revenues and margins.

Twitter’s Project Lightning will let users view a collection of tweets with images and videos of a specific event without following individual accounts that have tweeted on the event.

Facebook (FB) is expected to announce its Q4 2014 earnings on January 28, 2015. In this series, we’ll analyze how the last quarter of 2014 could turn out.

Facebook has proven to be a game-changer by introducing the world to the concept of social networking, something quite unheard of in the Y2K era.

IBM’s acquisitions to boost Watson Since its inception, IBM (IBM) has been betting heavily on Watson, its cognitive computing platform, to steer the company toward much-needed growth. As expected, Watson was IBM’s highlight in 2016 and is expected to be in 2017 as well. Considering IBM’s acquisitions to equip Watson in the healthcare space, namely […]

In fiscal 1Q17, Microsoft’s gross margin stood at ~61.7%, as compared to ~64.7% in fiscal 1Q16. Intelligent Cloud contributed ~34% to total revenues.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is often questioned about Facebook’s high-priced acquisition of WhatsApp, which generated revenue of only $20 million in 2013.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google and Amazon (AMZN) are going for each other’s jugular in the home automation systems market.

In addition to its partnership with Paperless Post, Yahoo (YHOO) also launched contact cards in Yahoo Mail to increase user engagement.

Social media stocks performed well last year, with the Global X Social Media Index ETF (SOCL) up 65% from January 2013.

Facebook (FB) recently announced that it’s acquiring Oculus VR, the maker of a virtual reality headset, for a valuation of $2 billion.

LinkedIn expects its Talent Solutions segment to grow by 25%–26% YoY (year-over-year) in 2016 compared to growth of 30% YoY in 2015.

As of March 21, 2016, Twitter (TWTR) has generated returns of -67.1% for the trailing 12 months and -7.8% in the trailing-one-month period.

Although the Dow Jones Index fell 0.7%, the tech-heavy NASDAQ (IXIC) index fell 1.4%. This was the second big tech stock sell-off in 2014.

With cloud computing, instead of keeping an organization’s data on its own server or updating applications, you use a service over the Internet from a remote location to store your information and use applications.

People have been asking me over the past few weeks what my views are on the Twitter IPO (TWTR) as well as my view on Twitter as a general business.

After Microsoft’s announcement, LinkedIn’s stock rose 47% to $192.21 while Microsoft’s stock fell 2.6% to $50.14 on June 13, 2016.

Salesforce.com is a leader in the customer relationship management industry. The company has built its moat on the back of its network effect and strong brand.

Salesforce’s acquisition spree Earlier in this series, we discussed Salesforce’s (CRM) recent acquisition of Sequence. We also looked at why companies such as Salesforce and IBM (IBM) are increasingly drawn towards the digital agency space. Of late, Salesforce has been on an acquisition spree. Since 2006, Salesforce has made 44 acquisitions, according to Crunchbase. In the past […]

AppDynamics has managed to grow 50% on an annual basis. Moreover, 75% of AppDynamics customers make purchases based on a subscription-based model.

Salesforce pioneered SaaS, and since its launch, Salesforce has developed an impressive mix of cloud-based offerings.

Calendar 2016 marks the second year on record in which tech deals accounted for the majority of M&As. Prior to 2016, 2000 saw the highest number of deals.

Twitter trades at lower multiples than its peers Earlier in this series, we discussed rumors of Twitter’s (TWTR) possible acquisition and how Salesforce (CRM), Google (GOOG), and The Walt Disney Company (DIS) could be contenders. In this part, we’ll compare Twitter’s value proposition with that of other companies in the social media space. As of […]

Much like Google (GOOG), Facebook has remained successful in capitalizing on the user shift to mobile.

Microsoft (MSFT) issued Aaa/AAA rated high-grade bonds worth $19.8 billion through seven parts on August 1, 2016.

The Harbor Capital Appreciation Fund Investor Class has tanked by 3.5% YTD in 2016, making it the second-worst performer YTD among our 12 funds.

Facebook’s (FB) mobile monthly active users (or MAUs) constitute about 91.5% of its total MAUs, which stood at 1.65 billion in 1Q16.

LinkedIn’s major business division, Talent Solutions, faces macro headwinds in the EMEA and APAC regions.

Earlier in 2016, Cisco completed the acquisition of European video conferencing startup Acano for $700 million in cash.

Social media platform Twitter (TWTR) is going through its toughest phase since its launch in July 2006. Twitter’s issues include a volatile stock price, stagnating user growth, the departure of key executives, and core product issues.

Microsoft paid a 50% premium to LinkedIn’s June 10 closing price. At 7.5x revenues and 75x EBITDA, Microsoft is paying a lot. LinkedIn is a unique property.

LinkedIn will be a standalone entity within Microsoft. This transaction is part of Microsoft’s plan to focus on cloud-based offerings. It wants to rely less on PCs.

With more than 400 million monthly active users (or MAU), Instagram now has 200,000 advertisers.

The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund (FBGRX) fell 4.6% in 1Q16. Its one-year returns were -3.9%, placing it among the bottom three funds under review.

LinkedIn (LNKD) invests aggressively in Sponsored Updates, with the aim of incorporating additional functionalities and streamlining the process of targeting ads for the marketers.

The leading professional networking site, LinkedIn (LNKD) is finding it difficult to keep its stock price up since it announced its 4Q15 earnings. The company’s shares have seen a significant fall of 43% to a three-year-plus low of $102.90.

Facebook (FB) is engaging more and more users with its set of features such as groups, events, and pages.

Tableau Software’s (DATA) and LinkedIn’s (LNKD) issuance of weaker-than-expected guidance for 2016 caused technology stocks to fall like a ton of bricks in February 2016.

In early January 2016, Oracle (ORCL) announced the acquisition of AddThis.

Facebook (FB) has done well in growing its user base. Facebook’s worldwide monthly active users (or MAU) have grown from 1.35 billion in 3Q14 to 1.55 billion in 3Q15.

LinkedIn’s (LNKD) gross margin has been more or less flat year-over-year from 86.4% in 3Q13 to 86.8% in 3Q14 and 85.71% in 3Q15.

Twitter’s (TWTR) revenues rose 199% from $106 million in fiscal 2011 to $317 million in fiscal 2012. Revenues then rose 109.78% year-over-year in fiscal 2013…

Twitter’s new Moments feature could help to boost user growth for the company, which has been struggling to win new users and retain existing users.

Investors were clearly unhappy with the weak outlook that LinkedIn provided, as the company’s stock plunged by 20% after the earnings were announced.

On March 13, 2015, Oracle (ORCL) announced that it updated its Social Cloud SRM (Social Relationship Management) platform to add support for Facebook’s Instagram.

Point72 started a new position in LinkedIn during 4Q14. The fund held 612,600 LinkedIn shares. It accounts for 0.99% of the fund’s total 4Q14 portfolio.

Creative Talent Search is a search tool that enables recruiters to find the talent they need. The tool also provides creative people with a platform for showcasing their portfolios.

Currently, one of the most popular forms of advertising is social media advertising, which uses social media websites or networks to gain website traffic.

Display advertising is a type of online advertising that appears next to content on websites, instant messaging (or IM) applications, and email.

The company’s annualized subscription billings growth of 12% has been declining consistently. Salesforce.com saw 68% subscription growth four years ago.

In 3Q14, Coatue Management added to its position in Baidu Inc. (BIDU). The stock accounted for 8.19% of the fund’s portfolio for the quarter.

In 3Q14, Coatue Management added to its position in LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD). The stock accounts for 7.36% of the fund’s portfolio for the quarter.

The main reason why Facebook has been able to grow its market share is the strong advertising revenue growth that it has experienced in the last few years.

Salesforce1 Community Cloud enables customers to build and operate public websites and applications that are supported by its servers and bear resemblance to online communities. According to Salesforce.com (CRM), the community cloud is a $3.5 billion market.

Salesforce.com (CRM) got ~94% of its fiscal 2014 and six months ending FY15 revenue from subscription and support fees. The fees are associated with cloud services. This implies that it has a huge investment in cloud-based application services. Salesforce.com offered solutions as a system for customer relationship management (or CRM) through cloud.

News Feed ads have significantly higher engagement, click-through rates, and price per ad compared to right-hand column ads. So a higher proportion of ads appearing in News Feed drives up the overall average price per ad.

Owing to the enormous digital data flow, there’s hardly any field that isn’t likely to be benefited by huge investments in “big data.”

According to a report from eMarketer and as the previous chart shows, Yahoo’s U.S. digital display ad market revenue growth is only expected to be 2% this year.

The point you need to note here is that LinkedIn expects its sales to range between $2.06 billion and $2.08 billion for full-year 2014.

We didn’t expect a 4% fall in Facebook’s stock—especially since the company has been doing well in the online advertising market.

Facebook is well ahead of its direct competitors Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG), and LinkedIn (LNKD) in terms of advertising growth rates, and the company only lags behind Twitter (TWTR).

The expiration of Twitter’s lockup period caused shares to drop sharply on the day.

Despite posting earnings above guidance and Wall Street consensus, the stock dropped sharply lower, at $37.66 per share compared to the prior day’s close of $42.62 per share.

According to a press release from Facebook, the company plans to expand the Oculus Rift headset’s applications beyond gaming to broader fields.

There were a few points that may have struck investors as disappointing about Twitter’s 4Q13 earnings report. Firstly, Twitter reported average monthly active users of 241 million as of year end 2013.

Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO) on May 18, 2012. This was seen as one of the biggest IPOs in technology and Internet history.

Twitter stock as appreciated rapidly since its recent IPO, but is it worth the price? Find out why we think Twitter is a bad deal.