WSJ By The Numbers - Top 10 for Nov.07
Verizon,
YouTube Aim To Bring Web Videos To Cellphones, TV: Verizon would offer
YouTube videos as an on-demand feature of a TV service it is launching
throughout the nation. The company paved the way for the launch with a
massive upgrade of its network that is expected to cost $18 billion
through 2010. Users watch YouTube videos more than 100 million times daily
on the site. At the end of the third quarter, Verizon had 522,000
customers for its fiber-based Internet service and 118,000 TV customers.
Verizon reported 68 million downloads of games and other mobile content in
the 3rd quarter.
| GM Bets China Will Become Crucial Export Base: China has been a rare bright spot for GM, as it reported profit of $327 million from its affiliates in China for 2005, even as it lost $10.6 billion overall for the year. GM enjoys over 12% market share in China, selling over 600,000 vehicles annually. China is the world's second-largest vehicle market after the U.S., and one of its fastest-growing. | $327M GM Profits in China |
|
Four Seasons Chief Offers To Take Hotel Firm Private: The proposed $3.37 billion acquisition of Four Seasons Hotels by private investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Bill Gates underscores a truth about today's lodging industry: Companies no longer need to actually own hotels to command a rich price. Four Seasons employs a model that generally restricts the company's long-term equity stake in each property to less than 20%. The $15.5 billion offer for Harrah's Entertainment Inc. by Blackstone Group, Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group last year is one of the largest leveraged buyout offers in history. |
$3.37B Four Seasons Buyout |
|
In Google Test, Newspapers Move to Widen Ad Base: This week more than 50 daily newspapers will begin selling ads in their newspapers through Google's Web site as part of a three-month test. A recent study by the American Press Institute found many newspapers reach only a small portion of the advertisers in their market. The study cited the example of Virginia's Richmond Times-Dispatch, which had about 3,500 local advertisers, out of a base of 16,000 potential advertisers. The current Google test participants are estimated to represent an audited daily circulation of about 15 million. |
15
Mil. Google Newspaper Ads Test Reach |
|
News Corp. Seeks to Expand MySpace Into Asia: MySpace has 125 million users world-wide, with over 55 million monthly U.S. unique visitors. In Japan, there were about 7.16 million subscribers to social-networking sites as of this past March, and that number is expected to rise to 7.51 million by March 2007, according to government data. Mixi is Japan's most popular social-networking site by subscribers. |
125
Mil MySpace |
|
Wall Street's Green Christmas: Bonuses for investment bankers and traders will rise 15% to 20% this year, according Options Group, and, another survey by Johnson Associates puts the bonus increase at 10% to 15%. In the U.S. securities business, this year's pretax profits are expected to rise 45% to $25.6 billion, the highest level since the peak bubble year of 2000, when they reached $31.6 billion, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. In the first nine months of 2006, the number of employees at Goldman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, Lehman and Bear rose 5% to 173,200. |
$25.6B Wall Street Profits |
|
E-Sabotage Migrates To the Cellphone: U.S. consumers will receive about 800 million spam text messages this year up from 500 million last year, according to Ferris Research Inc. of San Francisco. More than an inconvenience, consumers are charged for receiving text messages and a flurry of fakes can be a persistent interruption causing one's phone to go off with each successive piece of spam. There are more than 600 known computer viruses for every known mobile virus, according to Symantec. |
800
Mil. Mobile Text Spam |
|
WSJ By The Numbers - Metrics 2.0 |
|
