Do tough times draw TV-viewers to Web?
— Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
In the first global recession of the Internet Age, budget-conscious consumers are showing they no longer have an endless appetite for every new gadget or media service.
Many users are looking to eliminate overlapping services that offer more of the same old formula entertainment in a different package or on another device.
With iPods, digital TVs, video recorders, multimedia PCs and broadband connections in many households, consumers considering their options now find a range of cost-effective online substitutes for broadcast, cable or satellite TV.
TV programming, not just short-form entertainment, is served up on video sites in markets around the globe at Google Inc’s YouTube, Daily Motion, Joost or at Hulu in the United States.
Could 2009 then be the year we seriously ask “What’s on the internet?” rather than “What’s on television?”
A study released last week by the consulting group Deloitte on media consumption habits suggests that this digital switchover may be occurring before our eyes.
Cleantech stock implosion yields gems
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Cleantech, with its intoxicating mix of high-tech promise and save-the-world bloody-mindedness, has fallen harder and faster in the destruction that has visited growth stocks in 2008.
Underscoring the sector’s risks, German solar cell maker Q-Cells cut its 2009 outlook on Tuesday, saying slack demand could linger until the middle of next year amid a growing industry price war. The stock lost nearly a fifth of its value in trading and the news sent down shares of rival companies.
But while it’s too early to say when the selling might be over for solar and wind stocks, gems lie in the rubble of collapsed valuations, ready for investors to snap them up when markets recover their appetite for growth and its attendant volatility.
To understand what is possible, take measure of the decline: The WilderHill Clean Energy Index, composed of around 50 renewable energy and conservation stocks, has lost three quarters of its value year-to-date, twice the loss of the S&P 500.
The mea culpas are flowing. “Every stock we cover has performed worse than the S&P 500 year-to-date,” Raymond James analyst Pavel Molchanov confessed recently in a note to clients.
In recent weeks, solar stocks, the global sector’s biggest segment by far in terms of market capitalization, have cracked up — laid low by the sharp fall in the price of oil, the plunge in the euro, the credit crunch and a move to safer havens.
Timing matters. I don’t generally want a hot shower at noon, especially when it’s 90 degrees and sunny. (If it’s a weekday, I’m likely not even home.) My elderly neighbors, in contrast, may want to run their air conditioning at a low level just about then. By having my small solar array attached to the grid, my power can offset the spike in their demand at the right time. Now, multiply by a few thousand. Sure, inverters and cells require energy to build and transport, and they don’t last forever, but…20 years or more? Not too shabby. (Not knocking batch solar water heaters, mind you.)
Ecommerce loses immunity to economy woes
— Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
For years, Web retailers have touted their convenience and efficiency over conventional retailers, and enjoyed surging double-digit sales growth, especially in the crucial year-end holiday shopping season.
But the steady draining of consumer confidence reflected in recent government data and the latest market research reports suggest the online retail industry is bracing for a humbling first-ever year of flat or even contracting holiday sales. Ecommerce, for reasons tied to both the global economic crash and Web-specific factors, is poised to fall harder than the much maligned retail store industry, itself struggling with recent high-profile bankruptcies and widespread signs that consumers are looking to sharply curtail their spending.
“Retail spending has not really dropped,” says Gian Fulgoni, chairman of consumer audience measurement firm comScore Inc. “It’s ecommerce growth rates that have fallen off a cliff.”
This week, comScore once again cut its forecast for U.S. holiday shopping, reporting that sales in the first 23 days of November had fallen to $8.2 billion, down 4 percent from a year earlier.
Forecasts for online holiday shopping issued in October or early November took the “glass half full” view of the coming shopping season — predicting low double-digit growth. That would be below prior years, but healthy versus overall retail.
The declining outlook comes after third-quarter U.S. Department of Commerce data showed dismal October growth online. Forecasters who had clung to the notion that online retailers would prove an exception, have changed their tune recently.
“Pure market forces” give us depressions, slavery, predatory management, monopolies, and anarchy. Not really something I like to wake up to in the morning. The local shopkeeper pays the same bills you do, has his son in the same football league, goes to the same local grocers, and supports the same local charities. He actually contributes to your quality of life and pays some of the costs you would be paying (taxes etc) without him.
I’ll buy online if I can’t find it locally, but that’s not very often.
Silence is no defense for Euro tech executives
— Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
When on trial, any attorney will tell you, the best defense is to stick with what you know and speculate about nothing.
That’s the situation virtually all of Europe’s biggest technology, media and telecoms executives found themselves in when making presentations at Morgan Stanley’s annual technology, media and telecoms conference, the season’s biggest industry gathering, with 75 speakers over three days ended Friday.
Investors generally consider company executives and the stocks they represent to be guilty until proven innocent. But even those that cry out and say they did nothing wrong, and that business looks good, sell off.
The right to silence has drastic consequences. This historic protection of the accused carries the consequence for executives of listed companies of seeing their stocks dumped by shareholders at the slightest hint of uncertainty or vagueness.
“Lack of visibility” or “uncharted waters” — two favorite CEO excuses — are not defenses, just reasons to exit the stock.
“It is very difficult to give clear guidance for fiscal year (2009),” said Wincor Nixdorf Chief Financial Officer Jurgen Wunram. “We are not too pessimistic but, of course, we are not too optimistic.”
I actually think that “I don’t know” is a fair sort of statement for an executive to make. I am more troubled by flase statements. But I feel that portfolio managers want concrete values to plug into their investment models. Investors love nice-looking financial reports. If you take any intermediate level of accounting, it should become evident that financial statements can be engineered to say almost anything. I actually think that we need some major rethinking in the area of equity valuations. I also believe that company executives should be doing everything possible to support the company’s interest – short of giving false information. Investors have to take some responsibility. In many cases unfortunately we should let them lose their savings for bad decisions. Alternatively we can regulate companies out of existence.
For Yahoo’s Yang, news keeps getting worse
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Jerry Yang’s elevation to chief executive at Yahoo Inc after a long period of decline at the Web pioneer had the air of a fairy tale where the noble prince grows up and restores his kingdom’s faded glory.
But Yang has worn his leadership like an ill-fitting coat since coming to power last year, appearing reluctant to make the dramatic restructuring moves analysts and investors have long considered vital to get Yahoo to reaccelerate its growth.
Yang made no concessions to the growing chorus of angry investors and media pundits calling for his ouster at a Web industry conference in London this week.
Avoiding questions about Microsoft’s recent rebuff to renewed merger talks between the two, Yang posed for photos in front of dancing singers in oddly chosen surgical costumes singing “Staying Alive,” the never-surrender disco anthem.
It was the kind of goofy humor cultivated by a company that turned a yodel into one of the biggest brands in Internet media but lately has seen little go its way as it attempts a turnaround in the midst of a 15-month-long downturn in online advertising.
In his speech to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Yang reiterated plans to boost Yahoo’s audience and drive more advertising sales. But his underlying message was of deeper and deeper gloom for his company and the Web industry.
This makes perfect sense. I just graduated from college recently, and spent three of my four years there without a TV, only my wireless connection to the school network. Nowadays, it makes less sense than ever before to even own a TV. All of my favorite news sources are online, and movies and TV shows can be rented and watched online (I’m in the habit of renting movies on iTunes and then watching them in my living room on a 21″ flat screen monitor that I can connect to my laptop).
Frankly, it’s becoming difficult for me to imagine that television as a medium won’t become obsolete and abandoned in my lifetime.