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“It’s a big bet,” says Douglas McCabe at Enders Analysis, a research firm. Digital news publishing is not yet a strong and sustainable business. Mr Döpfner paid more than $1bn for Politico, Springer’s biggest-ever acquisition, and top dollar for Insider, too. Although both made money last year, it may be a while before Springer sees a return on those investments.
Consumer tech revenue growth ground to a halt by the end of 2022.
Changes in technology and user behaviour are creating risks for incumbents.
Shareholder pressure is driving efficiencies, but high costs are an inevitable response to growing challenges.
Adam said “TNT Sports offers a very similar proposition for consumers, just without the brand-recognition of BT Sport, as the TNT brand will have little resonance with consumers this side of the Atlantic, which they will no doubt want to address with a launch marketing campaign."
“The consolidated rights portfolio will provide a wider offering, but BT Sport is bringing most of the value to the joint venture. Eurosport’s most high-profile rights, the Olympics, only lasts for two weeks every two years and its output is overshadowed by the free-to-air coverage on the BBC.”
Alice Enders at Enders Analysis says: “What they’re saying is the New York Times must take a position on the issue of children and their right to transition and defend it hook line and sinker, and I’m not sure that’s appropriate.
“I just don’t see how it really advances the case of trans children and their rights to assert that the New York Times has to come down on this issue in a doctrinaire way.”
Although pandemic restrictions are now a distant memory, the aftereffects linger in the retail sector despite the recovery of in-person retail since H2 2021.
Between pre-pandemic 2019 and post-pandemic 2022, volumes are down for fuel and stores selling food, clothing and household goods, exacerbated by inflation, which is also reducing real disposable incomes.
Online sales settled to 26.5% of retail sales in 2022 (excluding fuels), up from 19.2% in 2019. Online volumes remain well above 2019 levels, and long-term prospects are bright with higher road fuel costs and hybrid work-from-home.
Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard is in trouble. US, UK, and European regulators may make the deal impossible for Microsoft—and a disaster for Activision and the wider industry.
Sony’s late improvement in PlayStation 5 sales is only just enough to reach its target numbers for the year. It needs a more dynamic approach to a rapidly changing industry, and a less dogmatic message to consumers and regulators.
Netflix Games is more than a trial—it’s on track to become a major games platform.
James Barford said: “We can see the strong strategic logic that Vodafone could do better if the individual country operations were run truly locally and independently, which is hard to achieve in a corporate structure without real autonomy. Is the current management likely to do that? It would be quite a reversal.”
Joe Teasdale, said: “The economics of AI chatbots are tough, with the free ChatGPT service constantly at capacity. So the golden era of ‘anybody can get an immediate, high-quality AI response for free, with no ads’ may be short-lived.”
“Google has a high bar for launching these kinds of products because of their low tolerance for reputational damage, and we have seen why last week with that embarrassing slip-up,” says Niamh Burns, online research analyst at Enders Analysis.
“But this kind of inaccuracy is a chatbot problem, not a Google problem. There’s no reason to think that ChatGPT is any more likely to generate accurate answers, and I’m not convinced any chatbot is ready to handle hundreds of millions of requests without some serious unforeseen issues.”
She added “People don’t click on ads because they are answering the kind of basic informational question a chatbot can answer."