According to Gartner, worldwide dollar-valued IT spending growth in 2016 is expected to register a slight decline of 0.3% over the year. Despite the weak forecast on enterprise spending, Billion Dollar Unicorn Infor appears to be doing rather well.
Three years ago, Rocket Fuel (Nasdaq: FUEL) went public with a market cap of about $2 billion. But today, its valuation has crashed to less than $90 million as it fails to deliver on revenue growth and profits. >>>
It is close to a year since collaboration software maker Atlassian made a successful debut on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticket TEAM. Let us see how this legitimate Billion Dollar Unicorn is faring under public scrutiny. >>>
A recent report by Machina Research estimates the total number of Internet of Things’(IoT) connections to grow 16% annually from 6 billion in 2015 to 27 billion in 2025. Nearly 71% of all IoT connections today are connected using a short range technology such as WiFi. That number is projected to grow marginally to 72% by 2025. By 2025, 11% of connections are expected to use Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connections such as Sigfox, LoRa, and LTE-NB1. During the same period, the total IoT revenue opportunity is estimated to grow from $750 billion in 2015 to $3 trillion in 2025.
According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, domestic digital advertising revenue in the US grew 20% to $59.6 billion in 2015 driven by 66% growth in the mobile segment to $20.7 billion. Social media advertising at $10.9 billion was the second fastest growing segment with a 55% growth rate. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Sprinklr is a fast growing company helping companies manage their social media advertising spend.
This year, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) has spent close to $5 billion on acquisitions, with the largest one being the $2.8 billion acquisition of e-commerce platform Demandware. Its most recent acquisition is that of marketing data startup Krux. >>>
Slack appears to be on an on-again-off-again relationship with the stock market. At the end of last year, the company appeared to be gearing up to go public in 2016. But more recent news reports and comments by the management suggest that the stock market is quite a mile away for the enterprise chat services vendor.
In the recently reported quarterly results, alternate energy products provider Energy Recovery (NASDAQ: ERII) had a difficult run. But the market is still hopeful of its future. With investment in product development and talent, the company believes it just needs time to prove its worth.
According to market research, the Chinese car market is the biggest passenger car market in the world. It attained that honor back in 2009 and has kept the crown since. In 2015, the number of cars sold in China grew 5% over the year to 24.6 million units. Compare that with the 17.2 million vehicles sold in the US. Analyst SinoMarketInsight estimates that the country is also seeing the growth in used car sales at a steady clip and used car sales in the country are projected to grow 17% annually to 9.57 million units in 2017. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Guazi is the leading player in the online arena of this industry.
The social media sector, Facebook in particular, has set the trend for high valuations even without revenues or even monetization models. But not all these unicorns can expect to sustain such high valuations. >>>