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. >>>
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare was a big push for healthcare IT companies like athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN). As these subsidies and regulatory pressures decline, athenahealth is shifting its focus to develop services that enhance end-customers’ productivity. >>>
The election results are out and we have a new President. During his campaign, President Elect Trump had spoken quite vehemently on his views about trade relations with China. And now, that he is in the Office, Chinese companies are worried about the possible trade disruptions that may occur between the United States and China. Given the surprising election results, analysts are still skeptical of forecasting how the stock market will fare in the near future. But on the day following the announcement of the results, Chinese e-commerce player Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) saw its shares fall 3%.