When someone says they own shares of X, what they typically mean is that a broker owns shares of X on their behalf in “street name”[1]. But wait, no, the broker doesn’t really own the shares either. Shares are held and legally owned by Cede & Co., the nominee of the Depository Trust Company (DTC)[2], […]
Most auto lenders won’t finance cash strapped buyers with deeply tainted or limited credit histories. Credit Acceptance Corp, founded in 1972 by Chairman and 11% owner Donald Foss[1] to collect loans originated by his own dealerships, steps into the breach with an unorthodox lending scheme that goes like this: the used car dealer originates a […]
It used to be that a chip engineer would design an integrated circuit by hand drawing a few dozen pages of schematics using standard templates, the resulting patterns X-ACTO knifed out of plastic film. But with transistor density doubling every 18 months, this manual process couldn’t scale and was eventually replaced with a technology called […]
In the US, tower companies have enjoyed a 20-year growth tailwind that shows no signs of fatigue. The population of wireless subscribers has grown at a high single digit rate, from fewer than 130mn in 2001 to 440mn in 2018. In turn, network standards have evolved – from 2G (voice, SMS; 2000-2006) to 3G (mobile […]
Related posts [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 1 [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 2 In 2016, six years and several pro-competition pieces of regulation after the Central Bank of Brazil and antitrust authorities first pried the merchant acquiring market open to […]
Related posts: [Wix – Wix.com] Scaling profitably (November 2017) [GDDY – GoDaddy; VRSN – Verisign; EIGI – Endurance International] Value Migration in Web Services (May 2018) When I started looking into Wix more than two years ago, its capabilities seemed far beyond those of Weebly, Square Space, and several other competing site builders I was […]
Like Tom Hanks sustaining dialog with a Wilson volleyball, I sometimes let myself believe that my words mean more to my readers than is certainly the case. For most of you, scuttleblurb is just one of many resources you consume to get smarter about companies. But for me, a guy who reads and writes most […]
If you follow the payments space even casually, you are no doubt aware of the sequence of the mega mergers that have taken place between merchant acquirers and core processors this past year. Source: scuttleblurb and public filings The bolded companies in the table above are the surviving merged entities, their market caps and enterprise […]