globalnews

Thursday, 24 April 2014

Messi won't find another club like Barcelona, says Iniesta

The midfielder believes his team-mate would be wrong to consider his future and hopes he stays in Catalonia for the rest of his career

Andres Iniesta says Lionel Messi would fail to find another club like Barcelona if he chose to leave Camp Nou this summer.

The Argentina star has cut a frustrated figure at times this season and produced several underwhelming displays as the Blaugrana's campaign has stuttered in recent weeks.

Reports have even suggested Messi could be tempted to seek a move elsewhere as a result of his unhappiness with his current contract, but Iniesta has warned his team-mate against making a hasty decision.

He told Sport: “The club will never have a player like Messi, but Messi will also never find a club like Barca. I therefore hope that he ends his career at Barca."

The reigning La Liga champions lost to Atletico Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals before being beaten by Real Madrid in the final of the Copa del Rey last week.

The club's quest to retain their league title is also now out of their hands, as they trail the two Madrid clubs in the table, but Iniesta says their footballing philosophy must remain the same.

Iniesta said: “Style is non-negotiable, but you can make changes. The league is very difficult because it does not depend on us, but it is not impossible.”

Suarez excited by Liverpool talent

The Uruguay star has praised the likes of Raheem Sterling and Jon Flanagan and says they will go from strength to strength next term

Liverpool striker Luis Suarez says he is excited by the potential of the club's current crop of young stars and backed them to go from strength to strength next season.

With three games of the Premier League season remaining, the Reds are on the verge of their first league title since 1990, with the Uruguayan's 30 goals playing a huge part in their success.

He has been ably supported by a crop of young talent, however, including the likes of strike partner Daniel Sturridge, teenage attacker Raheem Sterling and full-back Jon Flanagan and Suarez believes that they could go into the Champions League in stronger shape.

"Yes, there is a lot of potential," he told Perform. "There are very young players such as Sturridge, [Philippe] Coutinho, Luis Alberto that hasn't played much, Joe Allen, Flanagan.


	LIVERPOOL LATEST
3/1	Luis Suarez is 3/1 with Bet365 to score two or more goals against Chelsea

"All of them are young players that are in a good team; they have played a lot this year and, with a couple of good players that could bring experience to the team with European experience, it could help us."

Another man to play a key role in Liverpool's success is Gerrard. The club captain has flourished in a new, deeper role in midfield and Suarez paid tribute to the 33-year-old for everything that he has done at the club.

"It is clear that, as a player, everyone in the world knows what he is," he observed. "He brings a lot to the group and really is a true skipper in every way.

"He always respects others' decisions because, despite being the captain and having been at the club for more than 15 years, his word is not greater than any other one. He respects others' decisions and that's how good he is - also as a person off the pitch, as a friend, he has proven a lot during all that I experienced.

"He helped me during the summer and I have only words of gratitude for all he did and he will be always present as an important person in my football career."

APPLE BEATS ON EARNINGS, ANNOUNCES STOCK SPLIT; STOCK EXPLODES HIGHER

Today, Apple delivered one of its most interesting earnings reports in a while.

Just when the world was ready to bury Apple, the company delivered a strong beat on revenue, earnings per share, and, perhaps most important, iPhone sales.

Let's get right to the big numbers everyone cares about:

Revenue: $45.6 billion, up 4% year over year, versus $43.6 billion expected by analysts.
EPS: $11.62, up 15% year over year, versus $10.16 expected by analysts.
iPhones: 43.7 million, up 17% year over year, versus 37.7 million expected by analysts.
iPhone ASP: $596 versus $610 expected by analysts.
iPads: 16.35 million, down 16% year over year, versus 19.7 million units expected by analysts.
iPad ASP: $465 versus $430 expected by analysts.
Macs: 4.1 million versus 4.03 million expected by analysts.
iPods: 2.76 million versus 2.99 million expected by analysts.
Gross Margin: 39.3% versus 37.7% expected by analysts.
Q3 Revenue: $36 billion to $38 billion versus $38.1 billion expected by analysts.

Apple also announced a 7-for-1 stock split, and an increase in its buyback program and dividend.

On the earnings call, CEO Tim Cook explained the buyback by saying that he thinks Apple is massively undervalued. He believes it has a bright future ahead and that the share repurchases are a sign of the board's faith in Apple's future.

He also said the company was splitting the stock to "make it more accessible to a larger number of shareholders." That sounds as if Cook wants the share price to be more affordable for average mom-and-pop investors.

Right now, the shares are about $524, which puts them out of range for most people.

So, now that we've gotten the hard numbers out of the way, let's talk about the most interesting things from this report and the earnings call.

The iPhone was way ahead of expectations. Cook said each category of the iPhone outsold the previous year in that category. In other words, the 5S outsold last year's 5, the 5C outsold last year's 4S, and the 4S outsold the 4 from last year.

Cook didn't get into product mix, but it seems as if the iPhone 4S was the real star for Apple. The average selling price of the iPhone was down $41 sequentially, the biggest-ever drop in the company's history. On the call, Cook said the 4S was selling well in greater China.

Cook ripped through a bunch of numbers regarding the iPhone business around the world.

Through the first half of fiscal 2014, Cook said, iPhone sales in Brazil were up 61%, in Russia up 97%, in Turkey up 56%, in India up 55%, and in Vietnam they were up 262%. Cook pointed out that these are not "historic strongholds" for Apple.

He said Apple had record iPhone sales to the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) for the quarter.

Digging into greater China, Cook said Apple had record revenue over $9.8 billion in the region. He said iPhone sales were up 28% in the area. And he said that 85% of the people who bought iPhone 4Ss were new to the iPhone. Of the people who bought the 4S or the 5C in China, over 60% were coming from Android.

Cook was asked about upgrade policies in the U.S. and whether they were hurting Apple. He said there was "some pressure" from strict upgrade policies in the U.S. He said that those policies are changing and could benefit Apple in the future.

But then Cook went another direction and said there are 1 billion smartphones out there right now. Eventually, all mobile phones will be smartphones. And he said the big opportunity for Apple remains in winning new customers. His comments on Android users in China suggest there is also an opportunity to take Android users.

Analysts had been saying that the future of the iPhone was all about upgrades. Growth from new customers would be nil. Cook's comments dispute their theory. He clearly thinks Apple can grab new users.

However, it's the iPhone 4S that's driving the growth, which suggests that Apple might want to lower prices on the iPhone in the future.

Moving away from the iPhone, the iPad was the other standout in the quarter — but not in a good way.

Apple's iPad business was down 16% on a year-over-year basis. On the call, Cook said it was above Apple's internal expectations, but he realizes that it missed most analysts' expectations. He blamed part of the miss on analysts not understanding the difference in channel inventory this year versus last year.

So, what does channel inventory mean? Apple sells products into stores, but that doesn't mean they go into consumers' hands. There was a difference between how many were in stores last year versus this year. Cook attributed some of the decline to that.

It wasn't exactly a great answer, and analysts wanted to know more.

So Cook gave a big-picture answer on the iPad. He said it's the fastest-growing product in Apple's history. Apple has sold 210 million iPads since launch, which is almost double the iPhone at the same point in its life. He also said that it's seven times what the iPod was at this point in its life. He said customer satisfaction was 98, which is unheard of. He said it's 95% of the U.S. education market. It's in virtually all of the Fortune 500 companies. He says engagement is off the charts and well ahead of Android.

And so, if you look at the iPad from that perspective, it's still a strong, healthy business and it has a bright future, says Cook. He still thinks the tablet will surpass the PC in the coming years, and he thinks Apple is positioned to benefit.

It's not the most convincing answer, but really, the iPhone is what matters for Apple. It should roll out a lower-cost model, a higher-cost model, and a model with a giant screen this fall, to take advantage of what is clearly very strong global demand.

Facebook Earnings: The Social Network Enters A New Era Of Slow Growth

Two seemingly contradictory things are happening at Facebook right now, we learned from the social network's Q1 earnings call.

The company is growing really fast — revenues were up 72%, and ad revenue was up 82%.

But growth in key areas is slowing, or about to slow, dramatically. The desktop side of Facebook looks like it may have entered a terminal decline (forgive the pun). And the rate of ad revenue growth is about to decline precipitiously, CFO David Ebersman warned, due to tough comparable numbers from the year before. (Business Insider has been warning about this for a while.)

The new "slow growth" era of Facebook will be compounded by the fact that both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg said that autoplay video ads and ads on Instagram — both sales products that analysts had presumed would add hundreds of millions in new revenue — won't be happening any time soon. Both those products will be slow to monetize as Facebook is moving very slowly on them, Sandberg said.

The fact that both video ads and Instagram won't add meaningful revenue any time soon was a surprise. Observers have been expecting ads in those products for more than a year now.

So the takeaway seems to be, that revenue until now has grown really fast. But in the future? Not so much.

Here are the highlights:

Revenues: up 72% to $2.5 billion (analysts expected $2.36 billion) that's a nice beat.
Earnings per share: $0.34 (analysts expected $0.24) that's a huge beat.
Revenue from advertising was $2.27 billion, up 82% vs Q1 2013.
Mobile advertising revenue was 59% of ad revenue, up from 30% in 2013.
Payments revenue was $237 million.
MAUs: 1.28 billion
CFO David Ebersman stepping down later this year; will be succeeded by David Wehner formerly of Zynga.
Cash was $3 billion - looks like those recent acquisitions of WhatsApp and Oculus have yet to hurt the balance sheet.

The stock went up more than 5% on the news after hours.

Now for some charts!

Note that Facebook's desktop business is essentially stagnant, maybe even in decline.

All its growth is coming from mobile. This chart from analyst Ian Maude shows that:

Ian Maude

Maude attributes that mobile revenue growth to mobile app install ads — and we'd agree. These are the poorly understood ads that drive app downloads. Most people just see the non-app ads for brands and local businesses — but app ads, because they monetize instantly, are more valuable.

This chart from Maude backs up the case that on desktop, Facebook is essentially over:

Ian Maude

These users are U.S. only. But the U.S. trends ahead of everyone else when it comes to Facebook because the company was born here and its highest percentage of user penetration is here.

This chart, also from Maude, shows that revenue per user is also down on desktop:

Ian Maude

Revenue:

Facebook

Here's the ad revenue split over a longer timeframe (from BI Intelligence):

Business Insider Intelligence

Here are the monthly active users:

Facebook

The mobile monthly active users:

Facebook

And the mobile-only people:

Facebook

And here's how those users split, from Business Insider Intelligence:

Business Insider Intelligence

Here's Zuckerberg's formal statement on the numbers:

"Facebook's business is strong and growing, and this quarter was a great start to 2014," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "We've made some long term bets on the future while staying focused on executing and improving our core products and business. We're in great position to continue making progress towards our mission."

Now some highlights from the Q&A with Wall Street analysts.

(Facebook chose some rather stuffy classical music for those of us on hold for the conference call.)

The call begins ...

Zuckerberg: Starts with the user numbers. Then the acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus and the Internet.org effort.

"These are important efforts that will help us achieve our mission over the long term."

"Our core FB app has an audience of over 1 billion people."

Next set of apps such as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp: IG reached 200m MAUs this quarter. "Monetization isn't our near term priority here."

Wants 100 million users on each new app before revenues are attached. Paper is an example.

Internet.org: Basic update on progress.

Next, "Understanding the world." Says FB has unique data that others don't. More to come at F8 developers conference.

"Our mobile app install ads have been one of our best performing products to date. Launched in January of last year."

"Advertising and the ability to reach people more broadly is one of the most important" things FB does.

He thanks CFO David Ebersman who is stepping down after five years. "I've learned a lot from Dave both personally and professionally and I'm grateful for everything he's done."

Sandberg: Also thanks Ebersman. "Great people build great teams and that's what David has done."

Ad revenue growth 82%, strongest ad rev growth rate in 3 years.

Saw growth from existing advertisers as well. Particular strength with SMB and DR. And packaged goods.

Sandberg touts Canadian advertiser Sport Chek that pulled all its paper coupons in favor of Facebook ads — and saw positive ROI.

Ad targeting will improve. 10 times more advertisers are using custom audiences than last year. Ben & Jerry's is an example.

Simplifying ad tools: Self-serve ad tools are now available to SMB's. Buy now and install now buttons improve responses.

Ad network test is positive - but won't have meaningful results this year.

Ebersman: Made a personal decision to get back into healthcare where he worked before Facebook.

Now we're into the nitty-gritty numbers. Desktop rev up 8%.

Decrease in ad impressions due to cont'd shift in mobile use. Price per ad went up as fewer ads are seen in mobile.

Shift to desktop is a significant headwind to payments because payments in games business are mostly desktop.

Neither WhatsApp nor Oculus deals are yet closed, and haven't his FB's numbers yet.

Bad news! "Our y-o-y comparables will get more challenging from here. Over the rest of 2014 our y-o-y ad revenue growth rates will decline ... and be meaningfully lower y-o-y."

Questions!

Expenses:

Ebersman says Q1 is lighter on expenses that usual quarters. Benefits from one time events.

Browser tech and native apps, HTML5:

Zuck: "Timing matters a lot. "There's nothing wrong with the standard of hmtl5 technically. ... both Apple and Google have made it easier to build hi quality experiences in their proprietary formats than in open web formats ... our bias would have been to push on html5 ... we haven't walked away but a large no. of people have accessed FB on the open web but ... we see the best path .... in the native app experience."

Messaging:

Zuck: People want experiences to be defined to one medium or app. "You'll see us do more things in private content. ... growing." "The Facebook app by itself is the furthest along. The core of our business." Messenger, IG, and WA: M and IG are both greater than 200 million MAUs. WA: The immediate priority will be getting them to 1 billion people.

Facebook Creative Lab apps are just getting started. Those are further along than IG was. IG "is a few years away from being an important business for us."

Re-engaging lapsed users and user overlap:

Zuck: decline to answer ... no sign of user fatigue on FB. 63% of MAUs use it every day.

Where will growth in app install ads come from?

Zuck: We saw more diversity in clients now. Not just games. Anyone who needs an app, we're the no.1 delivery vehicle for that.

Sheryl: Mobile app install ads prices are up. No specifics.

Where the heck are the premium video ads?!

Sheryl: Really big opportunity ... also a lot more video from consumers in news feed ... we have a current product in the mkt it's a click to play video ad ... going really well ... we're in early conversations for a cpm autoplay video ad ... we want to see autoplay videos be pretty common in the news feed before we push hard in the ad biz ... we won't see a material contribution from it this year.

Another Q about app ads:

Sheryl: Our mobile ad rev is v. broad based. DR, brands, SMB, developers ... we're pretty distributed there.

When will IG be monetized?

Sheryl: Passing 200m, it's also a great ad product, tons of demand because pictures themselves are so visually appealing ... we've seen some great results .... Levi's running beautiful pics targeting 18-34 in U.S., reached over 7m people. drove 24% lift in ad recall, which was 3X control group. "We're v focused on consumer growth and we're moving v slowly on monetization ... we really want to grow it slowly and deliberately."

Sheryl: Nearby Friends is being rolled out slowly.

Did an analyst just suggest that WhatsApp was based in Russia? It's based in Mountain View, Calif.! So no, turmoil in Russia won't affect that app. [Analyst may be confused that Russian Facebook clone VK was recently taken over by Putin allies.]

Payments, whats happening?

Sheryl: We've had a payments biz for a while ... nothing new to announce there.

How low will this y-o-y decline in ad rev growth be?

Ebersman: 82% growth caused by ramp in news feed ads ... meaningfully different ... newsfeed ads really ramped in Q2 ... but there are lots of things that will drive growth: users, more mktr demand.

And we are out!

The context:

It was a huge quarter for Facebook. In the last three (fiscal) months the company has bought messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion and virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR for $2 billion. It has opened the door for video advertisers, and begun carving out its messaging business into a separate app, Messenger. Lastly, the company has begun rolling out an off-Facebook advertising network.

At the same time, Zuckerberg has begun to outline his vision for the future of Facebook, "unbundling the big blue app.

Amazon Is Testing Its Own Delivery Service

Amazon could be rolling out its own private delivery network to make more same-day deliveries and have more control over shipping expenses (which grew 29% last year), The Wall Street Journal reports.

The company is currently testing the use of Amazon trucks driven by Amazon-supervised contractors to bring customers' packages "the last mile" to their doorsteps in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, WSJ's Greg Bensinger reports.

Right now, UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service deliver an overwhelming majority of Amazon's packages. Last Christmas, shipping delays caused Amazon to have to offer many affected consumers $20 credits. With its own trucks, Amazon would have much more control, like offering deliveries late at night or early in the morning when traffic is lighter.

Amazon apparently began to roll out its delivery network late last year, with packages labeled "AMZL" and "AMZN_US," codes designating the company's in-house delivery network.

Amazon also recently published the following job posting on its site:

Amazon is growing at a faster speed than UPS and FedEx, who are responsible for shipping the majority of our packages. At this rate Amazon cannot continue to rely solely on the solutions provided through traditional logistics providers. To do so will limit our growth, increase costs and impede innovation in delivery capabilities. Last Mile is the solution to this. It is a program which is going to revolutionize how shipments are delivered to millions of customers.

The idea of same-day delivery with its own trucks isn't new for Amazon: Right now, the company's AmazonFresh grocery delivery service can bring customers in Seattle, San Francisco, or Southern California fresh produce and other products the same day that they order.

Amazon declined our requests for comment.

Thomas Page had no experience in the tech industry

Thomas Page had no experience in the tech industry or in venture capitalism when he sat down for his first job interview, a meeting with Sequoia Capital's billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

But he sure knew how to play poker, and that's what caught Moritz's eye.

Page is now the co-founder of Blonk, which makes an app that claims to be the "Tinder of job hunting."

In a recent blog post, Page details how his first job interview experience led him to where he is today.

A professional poker player since 2004, Page decided to quit the game in January 2013, despite being rather good at it.

He says he's rated among the top 500 poker players in the country and made $6,500 in his first month of playing the game.

Page moved to Silicon Valley from Wolverhampton, England in 2012 with no technology or business experience. But he felt several of his poker skills could translate well to the industry, and here's the email he sent Moritz last year:

Hi Mr Moritz,

My name is Tom Page, I’m 26, I’m originally from Wolverhampton, England, but I graduated Oberlin College in 2008 with a degree in Economics and Philosophy.

I played online professional poker for 6 years, and was ranked within the top 500 players in the world.

For numerous reasons, I decided I didn’t want to play poker professionally forever and entered the world of technology last year.

I founded www.playtagit.com formed a team, made a bunch of mistakes, learned a lot and was moderately successful, but am in the process of selling the software and moving on.

I want to get involved in Venture Capital, and am willing to do whatever it takes you to get started.

When given the opportunity I believe I’ll excel for these reasons.

To those that played poker against me, they know that I am able to make good strategic judgments, and that I am reasonably clever, but most importantly I also work very hard. These traits were at the roots of my poker successes.
I’m a genuinely social, outgoing individual which causes me to meet and get to know a lot of people personally, which results in building a very strong Rolodex.
I myself, invested in other poker players. I personally found and attracted the best deals that were available by specializing in specific forms of poker. A world that is not far away from operating within Venture Capital.
I brought more to the table in terms of value than other players. That itself, gave me a real life grasp of the formula that one needs to go through in order to be a successful tech VC.
I strived long and hard at learning the craft of poker. I would like to use these skills to try and become a very good venture capitalist.

Would you be willing to meet with me and talk more?

Thanks,
Tom

Page received an email from Moritz that day, agreeing to an interview the following Friday. To prepare, Page watched every interview and read every article he could find about Sequoia.

"It was a fierce conversation," he recalls on his blog. "I decided to ask him the toughest questions I could. I wanted to see how he would react."

Page didn't end up getting the position with Sequoia Capital, but his meeting with Moritz is part of what led him to co-found Blonk. After the interview with Moritz, Page played poker to raise some more money, which he used to get Blonk started.

"One of my co-founders was asking each of us about [our] first job interviews," he wrote. "And it brought a smile to all [of] our faces when I told my story of not having a clue and being interviewed by a billionaire

Larry Page Tried To Sell Google For $1.6 Million — $358 Billion Less Than It's Worth Today

Today we published a long story on Larry Page, the CEO and co-founder of Google.

It's about two things:

Even though you've always heard about Google as being co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Page is the guy history really needs to zero in on as the visionary behind the company.
Like Steve Jobs, Larry Page was his company's first CEO, but got booted from the position. Like Steve Jobs, he came back years later after an important maturation period.

The story couldn't be about everything, so we had to cut some stuff from it. For example, we cut the story about how, in 1997, Page almost wanted to sell Google for $1.6 million.

We learned the story reading Steven Levy's excellent book on the history of Google, called In The Plex.

In 1996, a vision for how to organize the Internet came to Page in a dream, while he was a graduate student at Stanford. He turned that vision into a search engine he called BackRub.

By 1997, it was obvious to Page that BackRub was going to be a widely adopted commercialized product.

In January 1997, Page offered to sell BackRub to an Internet portal called Excite for a total of $1.6 million. In a letter to Excite’s primary investor, Vinod Khosla, Page said BackRub would boost Excite’s traffic by 10% and its ad revenue by $47 million over a year.

Page said he could work at Excite for seven months before he had to come back to Stanford in the fall. Page said he’d take $600,000 in cash and $700,000 in stock. The remaining $300,000 would go to Stanford.

Page didn’t mention compensation for Brin, by the way.

Khosla made a counteroffer of $750,000. Then, in a meeting with Page, Excite’s CEO George Bell said that BackRub was too effective of a search engine. It would send users off the site too quickly. Bell believed that would be bad for Excite’s advertising business. He wanted a search engine that was only 80% as good as Excite’s competitors.

The deal never happened, obviously.

Today, Google is worth $358,858,000,000 more than Page wanted to sell it for.