Understanding Xiaomi's Valuation Vs. Apple, Amazon

This article is exclusive to Half Bridge Business Review. 

By Sarfaraz A. Khan and Iffat Zehra

Xiaomi Inc., often dubbed as China's Apple, was originally set up by Lei Jun in 2010 and launched its flagship phone a year later. Besides, Xiaomi also offers other consumer electronic products such as television set-top box called MiBox, a tablet computer called Mi Pad and Android based smart TV.

It's the smartphones, however, in which Xiaomi has made its name by offering high-end characteristics, complemented by a low price. The company's most expensive phone, Xiaomi Mi4 Quad-Core with 3GB RAM, is priced at $475 on its website (image below). By comparison, the price of Apple's iPhone 6 starts with $864 in China.

China's JD.com Is the New Amazon in the E-Commerce Jungle

This article was originally published by TheStreet on August 19, 2014

By Sarfaraz A. Khan

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- JD.com (JD_) , one of the biggest players in China's e-commerce market, posted its second-quarter results last week --its net loss increased by more than 20 times from the same period last year. Yet, its shares climbed by 2% when the markets opened on Monday.

Why? Because JD.com's business model makes it very familiar to anyone who knows Amazon (AMZN_) . JD.com sells a vast variety of products to consumers, often at lower prices than conventional brick and mortar stores. Hence JD.com's shares trade like those of Amazon, purely on growth. As long as JD.com manages to grow its revenues at a robust pace, its shares will likely continue going higher.

JD.com's shares have climbed 44% since its IPO in late-May, currently hovering around $30. For the third quarter, the company has forecast growth of between 55% and 61% from last year.

Google’s Move Will Spark a New Price War

Google (GOOG) has ramped up the competition in cloud computing through the announcement of the general availability of Compute Engine. Google’s Compute Engine was initially launched about one and a half years ago but it was only available to some of its clients. With this push with cloud computing, Google seems intent on drawing large corporate customers as it aims to broaden its revenue base in the long run. Through its powerful brand, aggressive pricing and attractive features, Google believes that it will be able to emerge as a new major player in this market.

Google, however, has a long way to go before it becomes a real threat to the total dominance of Amazon (AMZN). The Compute Engine comes with agreement of performance, which guarantees that through this, the high volume workload will continue working 99.95% of the time, which is significantly above what is generally considered as the industry standard. In addition to that, the company has also cut the prices of its most popular Standard Instances, where clients can use Google’s computing power, by 10% in all regions. Moreover, the prices for Persistence Disks service have also been reduced by a massive 60% per gigabyte.

Besides the price cuts, Google has also added some new features to lure customers such as …. read full article at GuruFocus

Netflix Is Overvalued But Has Enormous Potential: Is It A Buy?

From Seeking Alpha

The rise of Netflix (NFLX), or other companies offering video streaming services such as Amazon (AMZN), is the biggest threat to the status quo of American cable. In its last quarter, Netflix was able to add 630,000 domestic streaming subscribers, which was in line with its guidance of 230,000 to 835,000 additions and an improvement from 530,000 additions reported in the same quarter last year. The company's total domestic streaming base has now reached 29.8 million. Netflix is eyeing 700,000 to 1.2 million net additions in the current quarter. Therefore, we can safely assume that Netflix's domestic subscriber base will easily cross the 30 million mark when it reports its next quarterly results.

Traditional Cable Television On The Back Foot

Essentially, every additional streaming subscriber of Netflix, Hulu or Amazon is a loss to traditional cable television companies such as Cablevision Systems (CVC). I have been a believer in the idea that the future of television lies on the broadband, but to my surprise, the head of Cablevision has also said something to this effect. In a recent interview to Wall Street Journal, James Dolan, the CEO of Cablevision said that "there could come a day" when broadband would dominate the industry. While analysts have been pointing out the changing landscape for a long time, but a head of a cable company has never made such comments. I believe this implies that Cablevision's current business model is approaching obsolescence ….. Read More

Earnings Review: Looking For Positives In Amazon, eBay And Groupon

From Seeking Alpha

The e-commerce behemoth Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has recently reported its earnings in which it missed the revenues estimates but easily beat the earnings expectations, which were already very low. Its rival eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) also reported its quarterly results in which it also missed the top line estimates. Both of the companies are facing difficulties in the international operations. Ebay has been doing a major overhaul of its seller fees to become more competitive. Meanwhile, the value of Amazon's stake in LivingSocial continues to fall while its rival Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) has added billions to its market cap. Both Amazon and Groupon are ... read more
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