Prior to their July 2008 merger, Sirius and XM were locked in a bloody Betamax/VHS-like standards war: each company operated its own satellite constellation and broadcasted on separate frequencies; each had its own radio to receive and digitize signals; each spent extravagant sums marketing their services and mirror imaging the other’s content – Sirius had […]
“A lot of guys watch Bruce Lee movies. Doesn’t mean they can do karate.” – Bobby Axelrod (Showtime series Billions) If I were pitching this stock as a short 9 years ago, here’s what I would have said: Align’s main product, an expensive orthodontic appliance called Invisalign, is a joke. Rendered in plastic, easily replicable, […]
One Clayton Christensen point that I’ve harped on several times before is that as integrated structures within a value chain disaggregate into their modular components, new points of integration emerge to sweep value. In the context of public cloud infrastructure and the range of tools and apps flourishing on top, you might think of solutions […]
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Intercontinental’s multifaceted data and exchange platform began as an electricity marketplace, founded in 2000 by current CEO Jeffrey Sprecher with the backing of two investment banks and seeded by volume from energy majors Shell, Total, and British Petroleum (the collapse of Enron, the dominant electricity broker at the time, fortuitously diverted a […]
Workday’s commanding position in enterprise HCM partly traces back to the design choices it made at the very start. At the time, behind most enterprise software products were long bodies of code interacting with huge relational databases (columns and rows that store customer data) made up of thousands of tables. The complexity of the application […]
You’re a middle manager at the branch office of a vast multinational. And you need an armful of binders for your team. Would it occur to you that a procurement manager at HQ has negotiated discounted rates through Office Max? Even if it did, would you know how to order against that contract? Do you […]
Two years after it was announced, the merger between Dow Chemical and DuPont finally close in August 2017, creating the conditions for a three-way spin-off that will take place sometime in the next 2-4 months. This two-step merger/separation process was part of a grand design to drive scale among the businesses that these two companies […]
Part 1 is about the past. It will give you an overview of what Dow and DuPont were before their 2017 merger. Part 2 is about the future. It gets into the profit potential and valuation of DWDP’s constituent parts. Salient experiences create salient stocks. We zone out to Netflix on our iPhones, order more of […]