This Is China! Weblog

This Is China! Weblog
Business, IT outsourcing, culture... lot's of interesting and personal episodes from a foreigner doing consulting work in China.

Apple's Music Business

Apple makes 42% of its revenue in the music business.

Revenue source                      4th Quarter 2006
Macs                                $ 2'213 million 
Peripherals and Other Hardware      $   297 million 
Software, Service and Other Sales   $   316 million 
Computers total                     $ 2'826 million    58%
iPods                               $ 1'559 million 
iTunes                              $   452 million
Music total                         $ 2'011 million    42%
Total                               $ 4'837 million   100%

Google's Shopping Tour

From Wikipedia: List of acquisitions by Google (here is the same list for Microsoft)

For reference, here is a list with a description for all Google Acquisitions.

The following list is copied from Google Blogoscoped: The Acquisition Price Guide

Company	Acquired by	Price
Skype	Ebay	$2.6 billion
YouTube	Google	$1.65 billion
5% investment in AOL	Google	$1 billion
MySpace	News Corp	$580 million
dMarc Broadcasting	Google	$102 million
Grouper	Sony	$65 million
Flickr	Yahoo	$30-35 million (rumored)
del.icio.us	Yahoo	$30-35 million (rumored)
Bloglines	IAC (Ask)	$25 million (rumored)
Weblogs Inc.	AOL	$25 million (rumored)
Blogger	Google	$20 million (rumored)
Oddpost	Yahoo	$20 million (rumored)
Jumpcut	Yahoo	$15 million (rumored)
LiveJournal	SixApart	$20 million (rumored)
Rojo	SixApart	$10 million (rumored)
Picasa	Google	Under $5 million (rumored)
MeasureMap	Google	Under $5 million (rumored)
2.6% ownership of Baidu	Google	$5 million
weblogs.com	Verisign	$2 million
Writely	Google	Around $2 million (rumored)
Dodgeball	Google	Around $1 million (rumored)
Upcoming.org	Yahoo	Around $1 million (rumored)
WebJay	Yahoo	Around $1 million (rumored)
Urchin	Google	$???
Keyhole	Google	$???
Deja News	Google	$???

BTW, Google sold their 2.6 % share in Chinese search engine Baidu for USD 60 million (source).

Chinese Banks

Source: Bloomberg Markets, 2006 September p. 11.

Total assets and foreign investors:

• Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, USD 814 billion, Goldman Sachs, Allianz, American Express: 10%


• Agricultural Bank of China, USD 611 billion


• Bank of China, USD 593 billion, Royal Bank of Schottland Group consortium: 8.5%


• China Construction Bank, USD 574 billion, Bank of America: 8.5%

Compare to other banks world wide: Bank Market Caps

Millionaires 2004

in USD, source Bloomberg Markets, July 2006 p. 44:

Country   Millionaires   % of      Population
USA          2,498,000   0.85     293 million
Japan        1,334,300   1.06     127 million
China          300,000   0.02   1,300 million

Bank Market Caps

Source, Stocks Magazine, 2006 No 18, in billion USD:

01. Citigroup                 USA      240.8
02. Bank of America           USA      237.6
03. HSBC                      GB       206.8
04. JP Morgan Chase           USA      158.8
05. MUFG                      Japan    153.5
06. UBS                       CH       120.7
07. Wells Fargo               USA      118.3
08. Bank of China             China    106.3
09. Royal Bank of Scottland   GB       106.1
10. Mizuho Financial          Japan    100.2
11. Santander                 Spain     97.3
12. Wachovia                  USA       88.5
13. Unicredit                 Italy     84.7
14. Sumitomo Mitsui           Japan     83.5
15. Barclays                  GB        79.8
--------------------------------------------
??. ING                       NL        97.5
??. Credit Suisse             CH        65.6
??. Deutsche Bank             Germany   60.7
??. ABN AMRO                  NL        54.9

Getting soon into that list:
- a new merged mega bank in Italy bigger than Unicredit and
- the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, supposedly bigger than the Bank of China.

Here is a list of uptodate market cap rankings of US listed banks at Google Finance: Money Center Banks

Here is a German article comparing the market cap development of Credit Suisse with UBS over the last couple of years.

Tages-Anzeiger: Credit Suisse im Schatten der UBS

It says that on 2000-03-22 both banks had roughly the same market cap of CHF 90 billion. Actually I can remember the time when CS was actually higher valued than UBS at the height of the dot com bubble. More than six years later, Credit Suisse is again valued at CHF 90 billion. But most funny, in the interim it was down to CHF 24.5 billion. So you can also make (or loose) a lot of money with a blue chip company.

Another funny comment (but unrelated to mc) from that article about the CS boss:

Zunächst hat Kielholz in den letzten drei Jahren all das umgesetzt, was er erklärtermassen nicht zu tun beabsichtigte, wie in verschiedensten Interviews nach dem Rücktritt Mühlemanns nachzulesen ist. Vom Versicherungsgeschäft wolle man sich nicht trennen - die Winterthur wurde an die französische Axa verkauft. An der Konzernstruktur werde man festhalten - man hat sie durch die One-Bank-Strategie ersetzt. Die zunächst gewählte Doppelführung an der Konzernspitze mit Oswald Grübel und John Mack sei keine Übergangslösung - sie überdauerte gerade anderthalb Jahre.

Yahoo! Doom

Two blog entries from InsideGoogle about recent Yahoo results and employees leaving yahoo finance, which is actually their cash cow.

Here an interesting side by side comparison of Google and Yahoo quarterly results:

Google’s earnings, in millions, for every single quarter since the third quarter of 2003:

2003: $394 | $512

2004: $652 | $700 | $806 | $1,032

2005: $1,257 | $1,384 | $1,578 | $1,919

2006: $2,253 | $2,456

Yahoo, in those same quarters:

2003: $356 | $663

2004: $758 | $832 | $906 | $1,077

2005: $1,173 | $1,253 | $1,330 | $1,501

2006: $1,567 | $1,575

See the rest in: Yahoo Warns Of A Bad Quarter

And, very insteresting read: Yahoo Finance Employee Exodus?

While people say they are not impressed with Google's offering yet, it doesn't look like Yahoo! Finance does have a lot of (positive) traction right now.