Ten years ago, Samsung’s executives poured over numbers and set their 2010 sales goal at $140 billion — four times the amount in 2000. Sales will reach that level this year, according to the median estimate of 21 analysts — right on target. The company is aiming to increase revenue again — this time more than tripling it from 2009 to $400 billion by 2020.
Samsung Electronics has already taken giant steps from its early days as a copycat appliance manufacturer. Now, as a consumer electronics behemoth, it has expanded beyond South Korea and the nation’s industrial, conglomerate-run shipyards, steel mills and auto plants.
“Samsung today is in an incredible position to create the evolution of consumer electronics,” says Shaun Cochran, who heads Korean research at brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific, which rates Samsung Electronics a “buy.” To be successful, Samsung — a company with a history of top-down managers and obedient employees — will need to shift strategy, a process for which it has few guideposts.
For the one-time imitator to become a pioneer, hitting the numbers will be just the beginning [Source 1] [Source 2].
Burger King agreed on Thursday to sell itself to the investment firm 3G Capital for about $4 billion, including the assumption of debt, marking the second time in eight years that the fast-food giant has taken itself private. The agreement on Thursday for Burger King Holdings to be acquired by a Brazilian-backed investment firm, like a deal two years ago for Anheuser-Busch that involved some of the same investors, is one of those emblematic transactions that seem to herald the emergence of a new global business player.
The growth of the Brazilian economy in recent years has created a whole new class of wealthy entrepreneurs who are looking for opportunities to invest their fortunes and are not daunted by the idea of trying their luck beyond Brazil’s borders. Traditionally, Brazilian business has been dominated by an often cautious elite based in São Paulo, the country’s industrial and financial hub. But the economic surge of the last decade has changed that.
One thing is clear, though: Brazil’s dominance in all phases of the global beef industry. The country is already the leading beef exporter and now, thanks to the Burger King deal on Thursday, it has another outlet to encourage consumption globally [Source].
Over the last two weeks Intel has bought the wireless business of Infineon for $1.4 billion and McAfee for $7.68 billion, as well as the cable modem business of Texas Instruments for an undisclosed price.
Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, noted that more and more devices were connecting to the Internet, and said the wireless connectivity was a sector where the company saw “growth potential.” Furthermore, Intel CEO Paul Otellini lays out the rationale for this deal in a press release:
Intel’s goal is to expand its mobile and embedded product offerings to support additional customers and market segments, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, and embedded computing devices. Through this effort, Intel will pair WLS’s best-in-class cellular technology with its core strengths to enable the delivery of low-power, Intel-based platforms that combine its applications processor with an expanded portfolio of wireless options—bringing together Intel’s leadership in Wi-Fi and WiMAX with WLS’s leadership in 2G and 3G, and a combined path to accelerate 4G LTE.”
Source.
“The global list of top companies is being replaced by the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook,” says Choi Gee Sung, 59, who — in a partial nod to the recently relaxed dress code — is tieless in his navy-blue pinstriped suit and white shirt with light-blue stripes for his first interview since becoming chief executive officer in December. “Our job is to prepare the organization for the next generation so it can continue to evolve into a truly great company. We need to be on our toes.”
To be successful, Samsung — a company with a history of top-down managers and obedient employees — will need to shift strategy, a process for which it has few guideposts. “Samsung today is in an incredible position to create the evolution of consumer electronics,” says Shaun Cochran, who heads Korean research at brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific, which rates Samsung Electronics a “buy.” “The problem is, in a place like Apple, it’s a culture of trying to be creative as a matter of who they are. At Samsung, the way of thinking has always been, “We can do it faster, better and cheaper [Source].”
2010 is the year of location–at least in blogs focused on social networking, which is a Montana-sized “at least”–and Facebook’s entry into the increasingly crowded field has long been expected. Today, the company officially announced its plans, by the name of Facebook Places.
Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.
The cost of breakfast rises. Raw ingredients for breakfast in much of the rich world have increased in price by 25% since the beginning of June.
Severe drought and wildfires in Russia, the world’s fourth largest wheat producer, have destroyed a fifth of the country’s crop and sent prices soaring. Since the end of June wheat prices have more than doubled. But wheat is not alone. The price of orange juice has also risen recently, probably thanks to bets placed on the likelihood of tropical storms. Coffee prices, which hit a 13-year high, are a result of poor harvests [Source].
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, have injected sums (less than $10 million each) into Recorded Future, a company that goes through “tens of thousands” of websites and looks for related actions and conversations between, for example, Twitter accounts, blogs and websites, and analyzes them in order to spot events and trends as early on as possible [Source].
The purchase of game maker Playdom may help Disney’s brands with the Facebook generation
Four years ago, Bob Iger, the chief executive officer of Walt Disney, tried to build a cell-phone business. Disney created a family-oriented mobile service that included a global positioning system so parents could track their kids. Too few consumers signed up, and the company killed the operation after 15 months. Disney Interactive, the division that ran the ill-fated cell service, is still unprofitable. It lost $55 million last quarter.
Iger retains his enthusiasm for digital business and has switched strategies to buying rather than building. He wants to acquire social games and other online services that come with established customers and talented creators—and can help sell Disney’s famous brands.
“You don’t get the kind of growth we want by building from the inside,” he says.
[Full Story]
The CIA World Factbook is a data nerd’s dream and a crowning achievement in data gathering, highlighting every single country in the world, and presenting myriad facts ranging from GDP to important local industries. It’s also mind-numbingly boring and not terribly useful because there’s simply no way to summarize all that data.
IBM’s data-visualisation researchers leveled their resources at the problem, producing their own World Factbook, a sprawling online tool that lets you create thousands of charts on the fly.
For a similar–and even more ambitious–project, definitely check out the World Development Indicators 2010, which contains details about health, environment, and education of every country in the world.
Google has acquired Metaweb Technologies, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that maintains a massive open database that details all sorts of real-world stuff in an effort to “build a smarter, more connected Internet.”
“The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly,” Google said in a blog post.
Google’s emerging rival Facebook recently announced the Open Graph, a way to map all objects on the web like movies and places and peoples’ relationships to them. The metadata required for this would create a rival structure to what Metaweb has built. And because Facebook has the “like” data recording the preferences of its 500 millions users, it would be in the best position to harness the metadata to create a compelling search product.
Ten years ago, Samsung’s executives poured over numbers and set their 2010 sales goal at $140 billion — four times the amount in 2000. Sales will reach that level this year, according to the median estimate of 21 analysts — right on target. The company is aiming to increase revenue again — this time more than tripling it from 2009 to $400 billion by 2020.
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