At least one company, salesforce has looked into the possible acquisition of Zendesk per today’s Wall street Journal (WSJ). Zendesk is a leader in customer service ticket automation, and services over 40,000 customers. For product details you can go to their website https://www.zendesk.com/product/tour/ Zendesk is a natural fit for companies already supplying software such as Salesforce as it could be another product that salesforce reps could sell to their existing clients. In 2014 75% of salesforce customers had revenue in the 1-150 million range and in the 2015 annual report they mention a client base of 150,000 companies. Combining Salesforce with Zendesk could yield synergies suchRead More →

Netflix is up 20% in after-hours trading mainly due to beating earnings expectations. For the 3rd quarter, revenue grew 36%, surpassing $2 billion. Whist Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $0.12, significantly ahead of expectations for $0.05. Shares had previously been lower by 11% for the year with concerns about growth, costs and competition. This is now superseded by optimism about international growth, increased revenue from the higher rates paid by new subscriber, coupled with the gradual unravelling of grandfathered lower cost older subscribers and finally optimism about new programming estimated to be 1000 hours in 2016/2017 v 600 hours one year ago. TheRead More →

AMD is up today after a favorable Credit Susse report with a price target of $7.50 (Current price $6.63). With a strong 2017 roadmap, new $1 Billion refinancing will reduce interest expenses by over $40 Million annually. The new Polaris technology graphix cards finally give AMD the opportunity to by pass Nvidia as the tech reviews below suggest. (To be continued…) The Radeon RX 480 is the “new king of budget video cards” according to Engadget, which was impressed by its solid VR performance. “AMD has successfully delivered on its promise of making a VR-ready card that everyone can afford. And what’s most intriguing isRead More →

Due to news reports of Google dropping out of the Twitter bidding, twitter shares took a huge decline of 18-20%. At $20 they represent a potential opportunity as the normal market 30% premium on takeovers would be pricing in the $23 range. Whether it’s worth the risk to enter at $20 for a 15% gain v a possible 15% fall is debatable. However there have been no indications of Facebook or potential European or even Chinese internet companies such as Alibaba not being interested. At this stage the possible volatility upwards due to good news is probably greater than further bad news.Currently we are longRead More →

Twitter is recently up based on rumors of a sale to one of the tech giants, Salesforce or Google perhaps. At current pricing of $23.52 the share is already up $5.37 from $18.15 or 29%. Typically we have seen average premiums of 30% paid for new acquisitions. However Twitter has a few things going for it, The Linkedin purchase was at a 50% premium Twitter is one of the last top tier social media companies available for sale. At current pricing the cost would be $16.5 Billion, v Linkedin $26.2 Billion, an amount many companies might find palatable So what’s the ceiling? A 50% premiumRead More →