Saturday, October 28, 2006

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.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

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%

Saturday, October 14, 2006

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

CompanyAcquired byPrice
SkypeEbay$2.6 billion
YouTubeGoogle$1.65 billion
5% investment in AOLGoogle$1 billion
MySpaceNews Corp$580 million
dMarc BroadcastingGoogle$102 million
GrouperSony$65 million
FlickrYahoo$30-35 million (rumored)
del.icio.usYahoo$30-35 million (rumored)
BloglinesIAC (Ask)$25 million (rumored)
Weblogs Inc.AOL$25 million (rumored)
BloggerGoogle$20 million (rumored)
OddpostYahoo$20 million (rumored)
JumpcutYahoo$15 million (rumored)
LiveJournalSixApart$20 million (rumored)
RojoSixApart$10 million (rumored)
PicasaGoogleUnder $5 million (rumored)
MeasureMapGoogleUnder $5 million (rumored)
2.6% ownership of BaiduGoogle$5 million
weblogs.comVerisign$2 million
WritelyGoogleAround $2 million (rumored)
DodgeballGoogleAround $1 million (rumored)
Upcoming.orgYahooAround $1 million (rumored)
WebJayYahooAround $1 million (rumored)
UrchinGoogle$???
KeyholeGoogle$???
Deja NewsGoogle$???

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

Saturday, October 07, 2006

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

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

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.

Monday, October 02, 2006

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.