Texas Instruments: Valuation

I value Texas Instruments at $32 per share. As we have seen in the last few weeks, the strengths are a good management, its analog strategy, the HPA growth and manufacturing efficiency. Its weakness is the wireless business. The growth drivers do not have the ammunition yet to drive the company out of the rut

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 11)

SM: Pretty much your customer base of 2.4M customers stick around. Do you see much churn? JH: I have been here three years, so 12 quarters; 75-77% of our revenue in each of those quarters is from repeat customers. That is a really good testament to the loyalty of our customers. I get asked a

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Texas Instruments: Wireless Business Outlook

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the past two segments on TI, I have presented my perspective of TI’s wireless strategy. Let us now look at how this will impact the company’s revenue outlook over the next few years.

Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 10)

SM: Zazzle and CafePress are not going after personal memories or families. JH: Not in the same sense. It is personal publishing. They use different backend technology, being heat transfer method versus digital print technology. From a ecommerce standpoint, there area lot of similarities. We advertise online, run a ecommerce company, own our manufacturing and

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Texas Instruments: Mobile Market Strategy

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author I mentioned in the last segment of this series that I was not happy with TI’s wireless and mobile market strategy. Let me try to explain why.

Texas Instruments: Wireless Woes

By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author In the last two parts of this series, I looked at TI’s position in the analog and DSP markets. We also concluded that the OMAP was central to TI’s wireless strategy. I am afraid that TI has put all its eggs in this one basket, and has perhaps miscalculated the

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 8)

SM: Why didn’t Flickr elect to work with you? JH: At the time we were competing with Yahoo Photos, and Flickr chose a small company who is producing product as their outsource manufacturer. That small company has signed up a number of sites who in the early days thought they were competing with Shutterfly. They

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Shutterfly’s Strategy: A Conversation with CEO Jeff Housenbold (Part 7)

SM: Travel is a “context” that has great relevance for your business. JH: We think about that opportunity a lot. What is nice about our business is our customers engage with us frequently throughout the year. We drive our business in a couple of ways. First, you have your typical holidays.