About this weblog

What you need to know: This weblog captures key data points about the global telecoms industry. I use it as an electronic notebook to support my work for Pringle Media.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Amazon Accelerates Through Fourth Quarter

Stripping out the impact of currency movements, Amazon reported a 36% year-on-year increase in net sales for the fourth quarter to 60.5 billion US dollars. That compares with a 31% increase across the whole of 2017. Amazon forecast that net sales will grow between 34% and 42% year-on-year in the current quarter to between 47.75 billion and 50.75 billion dollars.

Amazon Web Services' revenues jumped 45% in the fourth quarter to 5.1 billion dollars. Amazon said more than five billion items shipped with Prime worldwide in 2017, as more new members joined last year than in any previous year, both worldwide and in the U.S. source: Amazon statement

Monday, February 5, 2018

Apple Cranks Up Double-Digit Growth

Apple reported a 13% year-on-year increase in revenue for the quarter ending December 30th to 88.3 billion US dollars, fuelled by a 13% increase in iPhone revenues. Apple forecast its revenue will be between 60 billion and 62 billion dollars in the current quarter, which would represent a year-on-year increase of between 13% and 17%.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said. “We’ve also achieved a significant milestone with our active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January. That’s an increase of 30% in just two years, which is a testament to the popularity of our products and the loyalty and satisfaction of our customers.” source: Apple statement

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Facebook Flags Up New Strategy

Facebook reported a 47% year-on-year rise in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2017 to 12.97 billion US dollars, as the number of daily active users rose 14% to 1.4 billion.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, warned that the social network is now looking to reduce the time people spend passively consuming entertainment: "In 2018, we're focused on making sure Facebook isn't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being and for society. We're doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people's time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term."

"The biggest impact on the focus on meaningful interactions, as Mark mentioned, will be in areas like passive video where from a business perspective, we monetize less on the time spent basis. So if you think about it in terms of things like posts, views in News Feed which drives impression growth, we think this will have a less of an impact," said Facebook's CFO David Wehner. "[Still] we have good opportunities to grow the business across both Facebook and Instagram in 2018. We continue to improve the effectiveness of our ads which helps drive ROI for advertisers and demand for our ad products. On the supply side, we expect we will be able to continue to grow ad impressions at a modest pace.... In 2018 we expect constant currency ad revenue growth rates to decelerate consistent with the trends we have seen over the past year." source: Facebook statements




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