Erick Mokaya, CFA

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 46

And so whereas with 3G and 4G, you can get away with latency that wasn't that small, with 5G for applications like AR, VR, if there's autonomous driving involved, you really can't have any latency within that network. And the way to deliver that is to have some of that processing power that historically has been centralized moving towards the edge of the network. And so what we're trying to do at this point, and we have some trials out there, we've had a lot of conversations with numerous stakeholders in the value chain, is figure out how to make our tower sites a preferred location or what we…
American Tower Corporation (REIT) (AMT) Presents at Raymond James 42nd Annual Institutional Investors Conference (Transcript) | Seeking Alpha
What's fascinating about that business is every customer of SAP complains about SAP. There's no one that says, "Oh my God. This is the greatest product ever." Nobody. Yet if I was to ask anyone on the street, "What do you think the renewal rate of SAP is?" You'd be shocked to find out its like 98%. If you remove bankruptcies and mergers, it's 99%.
The Berkshire of Software
New CEO Pat Gelsinger said Tuesday that Intel would rely more heavily on third-party chip-making partners, including for some of its most cutting-edge processors, starting in 2023. But Mr. Gelsinger, on the job a little more than a month, said Intel wasn’t abandoning its historic roots of being both a designer and manufacturer of chips and would retain most production in-house. The company, he said, also is renewing efforts to make chips for others and targeting customers such as Apple Inc. and chip rival Qualcomm Inc.
Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
While customers are hesitant to take vouchers due to the uncertainties over the restrictions, airlines and hotels reckon they are short of cash for refunds given they had committed costs based on the advance revenues from the early bookings.
Airlines, hotels hit with refunds - Business Daily
Besides carrying the burden of connecting rural areas, the utility firm is also suffering as power supplied to government departments and agencies go unpaid. The National Treasury is among the government departments that have not paid a total of Sh3.1 billion worth of electricity bills.
Kenya Power risks losing Sh16bn in rural electrification - Business Daily
With Magufuli seeking to balance budgets, Tanzania’s fiscal deficit, as a share of GDP, narrowed to just two percent in fiscal year 2019/20 compared to 6.5 percent in 2012/13. The narrowing of fiscal deficit also meant his appetite for borrowing waned. When he took over in 2015, public debt stood at 38.8 percent of GDP. By the close of fiscal year 2019/20, that figure had only moved to 47.4 percent of GDP.
Obituary: John Magufuli the fiscal disciplinarian who restored order to Tanzania’s public finances
The broad result was (i) aggregate revenue outturn, which measures the extent to which aggregate revenue receipts reflect the amount originally approved in the budget, greatly improved with collections rising from 85 percent of total revenues budgeted in 2014 to 95 percent in 2016; and (ii) as a percentage of GDP, tax collections improved from 12.8 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2014/15 to 15 percent in 2019/20. At a time when her next-door neighbour Kenya, the largest economy in the East African Community (EAC), has been struggling with declining tax revenue relative to economic output (Kenya’…
Obituary: John Magufuli the fiscal disciplinarian who restored order to Tanzania’s public finances
It is unclear, however, where the money to pay these dividends was coming from.
The collapse of Football Index: what can investors learn? | MoneyWeek
In theory, gamblers who identified promising players early in their career could buy in cheaply and sell on for a profit later as their stock rose.
The collapse of Football Index: what can investors learn? | MoneyWeek
Notice how everything miserable is associated with us. Blacksheep. Black Maria. Black Death. Black Leg. The Black Hole of Calcutta. The Black Maria will takeus to the beach or to the stadium.
Africa Kills Her Sun
You’ll be surprised, no doubt, to receive this letter. But I couldn’t leave your beautiful world withoutsaying goodbye to you who are condemned to live in it.
Africa Kills Her Sun
To us, value is simply arithmetic that entails buying something cheap relative to the present value of its future cash flows, which we measure using normal earnings.
Value: If Not Now, When?
Value is not a factor. It is a timeless and logical approach to estimating the long-term value of a business and determining whether there is a dislocation between the fundamentals and how the market perceives that value.
Value: If Not Now, When?
Chess.com has showcased how investing in a streaming community can provide immense returns over time. Building out from a core group of Chess.com-sponsored streamers, chess has taken Twitch by storm. Throughout February, for instance, Chess.com has been hosting the latest iteration of its signature PogChamps tournament featuring Twitch megastars xQc, Rubius and Pokimane as well as rapper Logic and actor Rainn Wilson. Altogether, Twitch users watched 18.3 million hours of chess in January 2021 — nearly as much as they consumed in the entirety of 2019. And for a brief period last week, chess sur…
Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech
Vodafone launched M-Pesa in India in 2013, but by mid-2019 it had announced its plans to merge its mobile wallet business with an associate company or a third party. Clearly, Vodafone had failed in its attempt to market M-Pesa in India even though India is a rapidly growing emerging market with a gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 8.2% in 2018.
"M-Pesa's Failure in India" by Jackson Lott and Mona Sinha
So Bill, and as I just said, I'm totally ashamed that until this morning I had never heard the name Brian Arthur and never read his 1996 piece on increasing returns in business. And so I thought since it's fresh on my mind and I know it was influential for you that we'd start there with this idea of increasing returns, which really at the time flew in the face of much of economics, which was based on diminishing returns. Maybe you could talk about how you stumbled across this and the influence that it's had on your thinking.
All Things Business and Investing
When you make a game, you don't worry about what users want or what they need, you obsess over how they feel. When your product is a game, people don't just use it, they play it. They find it fun, they tell their friends, they fall in love with it.
Using Emotion to Design Great Products - Colossus
No nefarious lobby is opposed to electric engines in aircraft, and the FAA will assuredly legalize electric engines at some point... there's just the status quo bias that naturally ensues from "well, we have a working system; that system naturally resists change".
Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe
But all this is not something which has happened only in the past. Mr. Mauboussin also gave a live instance of how the EV industry is now going through a new experimentation phase and the number of electric vehicle companies is proliferating as more and more existing players and newcomers are trying to experiment. In the next 10-15 years, the pattern will play out again, with the pruning process taking over in a few years, leaving a few survivors who will enjoy the spoils. That makes EVs a very fertile area for disruption as well as investment opportunities.
IIC 2021: Drivers of Disruption by Michael J. Mauboussin
This process of pruning is the main factor why we see the emergence of few ‘compounders’ in various industries to the detriment of other players who fall by the wayside.
IIC 2021: Drivers of Disruption by Michael J. Mauboussin
And so what we're trying to figure out how to do is to optimize a solution that brings together multi-cloud, multi-operator into one location. And much like the tower industry has developed over time, where it became clear that a neutral host was the most efficient way to deploy a terrestrial wireless network. Our thesis is that a neutral host that brings together multiple cloud players and multiple carriers in one location is going to be the most efficient way to deploy the edge over the long-term.
American Tower Corporation (REIT) (AMT) Presents at Raymond James 42nd Annual Institutional Investors Conference (Transcript) | Seeking Alpha
He reckons that the majority shareholders have sidelined him from Lancet operations, including hiring of executives while diluting his ownership.
Lancet CEO seeks Sh1.9bn pay amid shareholder row
LVMH provides a lesson for other luxury brands: If you focus on the excellent execution of a strong brand story, avoid the urge to promote, and digitally engage with your customer base in tough times, then you will be rewarded in customer desire, larger revenues, high profitability, and ultimately, top market capitalization. The current surge behind LVMH reflects that investors believe the company is well-positioned to lead, even in a pandemic. Do people have that kind of faith in your brand?
Why No Other Luxury Company Compares To LVMH
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.”
‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: Chaos Strikes Global Shipping
Global shipping data from MarineTraffic showed a ship with 197 containers of Peloton bikes and merchandise circled at anchor just outside the Port of Los Angeles between Dec. 22 and Jan. 2., when it was allowed to dock — after Christmas. “The ship, and Peloton’s expected supply time, lost 12 days due to this while their product was nearly within swimming distance of shore,” Import Genius trade data analyst William George said. “This is a crazy illustration of the problem Peloton and other U.S. importers are struggling with.”
Retailers pay more to fly everything from bikes to hot tubs from China as U.S. port backup delays deliveries
In 2020, two of Salesforce’s portfolio companies — nCino and Snowflake — soared after going public. They produced a combined $1.7 billion in investment gains, accounting for 78% of Salesforce’s total increase for the fiscal year that ended in January, according to the company’s fourth-quarter report on Feb. 25.
How Salesforce became Silicon Valley's best late-stage tech investor
Instead of seeking fixed precision, we focus on thinking about how a business could look in five, ten or fifteen years’ time. To do so, we focus on the key assumptions: how much revenue could the business generate at that point in time? How could its margins look? How capital intensive is the business? How will it fund its growth? We’re concerned with the destination of the business and the long-term trajectory that will get it there. Rather than coming up with single point estimates, we imagine different scenarios, in line with the reality that more things can happen than will happen.
Enlightenment March 2021 — European Fund
Other people, they love it. You give them a day off, and they're back out on the field. It's like, "What are you doing? You got a day off for a reason. Get off the field." But it's their happy place. I guess if I could know who's got the non-cognitive grit, who loves it, who has the ability to care about the things that are important to them, the people they're doing with them, and the entity they're doing it for and with.
Grateful for Everything, Entitled to Nothing
“We struggle a little bit, understanding the long term economics and some of the aggregator businesses.
The Transcript 03.01.20
You know, in 60 years, we’ve never made a dollar delivering a pizza. We make money on the product, but we don’t make money on the delivery.
The Transcript 03.01.20
The real proprietary advantage that I know my players carry with them is this deep and fundamental understanding of team. They know what a good teammate is. They know what bad teammate is. They know why their team was good and maybe why their team didn't succeed. They have a really acute understanding of team. They take that into their families. They take that into their communities, and they take that into their workplace.
Grateful for Everything, Entitled to Nothing
If you love the game, it's going to get you through a lot. A lot of people play sports because they love the attention, that they're good at it, they love the crowd, they love to see themself on TV and their name on the back of their jersey. Other people, they love it. You give them a day off, and they're back out on the field. It's like, "What are you doing? You got a day off for a reason. Get off the field." But it's their happy place. I guess if I could know who's got the non-cognitive grit, who loves it, who has the ability to care about the things that are important to them, the people th…
Colossus
Notwithstanding these Covid-19 related challenges, the Bank remains optimistic that the expected economic growth of 7.4% in 2021 is achievable. The Bank also projects annual inflation to close the year at below 10%
Monetary Policy Statement 18 February 2021 Final
When you're really young, it's hard to think abstractly about things. You don't really know what honesty is, or courage, or anything. But at that moment, I really knew what kindness was, and a little bit more about what I had to be as a person.
Esoteric Assets
Our strong cash flow generation allowed us to continue our share repurchase activity in Q4. For the year, we repurchased more than $458 million of Advance stock. And including our quarterly cash dividend, we returned $515 million to shareholders.
Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (AAP) CEO Tom Greco on Q4 2020 Results - Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha
It is not that we are experts in software. It is not that we have a vision of the future. What he literally looks for is your retention right here? Is your revenue here? Can we buy your company here? Okay. We'll buy you. By making it completely process-based, you can hire hundreds of people to keep finding deals for you.
The Berkshire of Software
One of our directors has been calling me irresponsible for years.His thesis goes like this: CSI can invest capital more effectively than the vast majority of CSI's shareholders, hence we should stop paying dividends and invest all of the cash that we produce, even if it means lowering our hurdle rates
letter-to-shareholders---february-15-2021.pdf
I have stopped arguing.I have converted, and with the fervour of the newly converted, Iambusy demonstrating my new-found faith.The obvious first step is to stop specialdividends in all but the most compelling circumstances. That decision was made by our directors at Friday’s CSI board meeting. Wehavemaintained the quarterly dividend for now, but if we are successful in finding better uses for ourFCFA2S, the quarterly dividendwill also be sacrificed
letter-to-shareholders---february-15-2021.pdf
For S&P 500 companies in 2018, tangibles, like real estate and equipment, comprise just 16% of company value, while intangibles, such as IP rights and reputation, are 84%. Since information technology exploded in the 1980’s, intangible asset value has been on a rapid rise. It came to lead tangibles before about 1995, when it was reported that intangibles represented more than twice their value. And it has been on a rapid ascent ever since
$21 trillion in U.S. intangible assets is 84% of S&P 500 value – IP rights and reputation included
No more choo choo, chuckled Mr Chan. Now it seems we are wizz-bang, swoosh, buzz, zing, ka-ching as we turn URAL into the future with high technology projects and innovation in various industries be it logistics, real estate, construction, agri-business or some of the other projects we are looking at.
Official site of OTCQX, OTCQB and Pink Markets
A "Power Law" distribution is also known as a "long tail." It indicates that people are not "normally distributed." In this statistical model there are a small number of people who are "hyper high performers," a broad swath of people who are "good performers" and a smaller number of people who are "low performers." It essentially accounts for a much wider variation in performance among the sample.
The Myth Of The Bell Curve: Look For The Hyper-Performers
It's important to note that due to ongoing uncertainty related to COVID-19 with respect to the duration and extent of the virus' immediate and long-term impact on the global retail environment, we continue to expect the possibility of material impacts on our business results. Accordingly, future results could differ meaningfully from historical practices and results or current descriptions, estimates and suggestions.
Under Armour, Inc. (UAA) CEO Patrik Frisk on Q4 2020 Results - Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha
"what is the thing that we're really passionate about after hours and how do we bring that to the work as well?"
The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet
It felt like I missed the wave because everything that happened in the nineties around Netscape, the internet boom
The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet
And that was kind of the environment where WordPress was starting. It felt very saturated.
The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet
Love or hate Krugman, I’ve always found this a useful little cartoon.
Portrait of a Very Serious Investor