Before exploring the competitive concerns that have sent shares cratering nearly 60%, it’s worth reflecting on what it is that got people excited about Adyen in the first place. In a typical online transaction, a shopper’s credit card details are picked up and encrypted by a gateway before being routed to the appropriate merchant acquirer. […]
No analysis of the North American railroad industry would be complete without a discussion of Hunter Harrison as no single person has had a bigger impact on the operating performance of Class 1 railroads over the last 25 years. A lifelong railroader who began his career oiling railcars in the early ‘60s when he was […]
Part 1 of this series offers a historical survey of how today’s Class 1 rails came to be. Parts 2 and 3 start at the ground level with the very basics of freight carriage, build up to an understanding of how an industry that had destroyed over most of its 200-year history managed to turn […]
In the gaseous hot ball of 19th century US rail activity roils the primordial elements of American industry: a technology startling in its potential yet exaggerated in its promise by visionaries and hucksters, transformed into shape by private enterprise with government aid and later controlled and extended by the ambitious and vicious. The atrophying influence […]
If all you knew about Dun & Bradstreet was that it sold mission critical data on more than 520mn companies, that all this data was linked to its widely referenced proprietary identifier, that 96% of its customers retained every year and were mostly monetized through high margin subscriptions, you might be tempted to comp to […]
related post: [APO] Apollo Charles Schwab is broker that monetizes like a bank. They invest excess cash from brokerage accounts into government securities and keep the difference between what they earn on those securities and what they pay to clients. This worked out all right for a while: clients could earn a bit more by […]
In previous posts, I emphasized the part of bioproduction where cell populations are grown in bioreactors and proteins extracted from those cells are purified. This is where Lonza, WuXi, and Samsung mostly play. Catalent does some of that too but their exposure to biologics is heavily tilted toward “drug product”, where the active substance is […]
Related posts [TMO] Thermo Fisher [DHR] Danaher Over the last 4 decades, a growing share of the pharmaceutical market has shifted from small molecules derived through chemical reactions to large molecules extracted from living cells. The latter process is far more difficult. Cell populations are temperamental. They need to be fed with just the right […]
