The Stock Market is Unkind

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

The Stock Market is Unkind

Yahoo made $6.3 billion on the Alibaba stock IPO. It's quarterly revenue was $1.094 billion of which more than $200 million in mobile ad revenue. Investors want it to stop making acquisitions (but $3 bill in cash means it will buy something) and to merge with AOL.

McDonald's revenue plunged 30%. Coca-Cola is flat. IBM< Verizon and AT&T are all off. Wall Street just isn't forgiving. (The communications sector is down.) Maybe in today's economy - global and US - this is the best they will see.

The Street doesn't like Angie's List either. Is that because they have earnings even if they are losing money?

In the midst of all this, MITEL took a swipe at buying Shoretel. According to rumors at Connections, by this time next year, quite a few payers will be gone, acquired. One rumor is that RC will buy up a small Cloud Comm company just to get into the enterprise space. That would mean that the enterprise space would have to be redefined as 50-100 seats (as even this is a large deal for many HPBX providers).

Companies are sitting on a lot of cash, revenues are flat, but Wall St. still wants to see revenues grow. How when disposable income is declining? How when sales is changing? When the advertising machine is broken, mass marketing lost its influence. Hard to sell to the masses when you can't reach them.

Social Selling and Content Marketing are new and despite all the gurus giving advice to the Fortune 500, to quote Gary Vee, "This shit is hard." They are having a tough time adjusting to:

  • social influence (like not drinking soda);
  • retention being as important as acquisition;
  • the importance of customer service
  • direct sales not hitting quota;
  • story telling is paramount like this ad!

Everything is changing. The best examples of how hard it is right now is to look at HP, Dell, Oracle, Cbeyond and EarthLink.



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