Tag Archives: TWTR

Twitter (TWTR) Q1 2017

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Anthony Noto – Chief Operating Officer

Politics driving up user growth

“Audience growth in Q1 was driven primarily by organic growth, reflecting some seasonal strength followed by product improvements and marketing. Contributions to growth from product improvements importantly have been growing steadily for the last four quarters…There also is some evidence that we benefited from our new and resurrected users following more news and political accounts in Q1, particularly in the U.S. That’s a really positive thing..”

They expect Improved ROI to drive up advertising revenues in the near term

“the first thing I think that’s really important to understand and something that we’ll continue to benefit and talk about over the next several quarters is just the four consecutive quarters of DAU (Daily Active Users) growth with an acceleration again this quarter to 14%. That’s on a year-over-year basis. …The current revenue trends that we’re reporting reflect budget decisions based on trends in audience and pricing of 6 months to 12 months ago when we were not seeing the significant acceleration in user growth or the more than 60% year-over-year decline in cost per engagement. The good news is we’ve been out aggressively telling the story of that improved ROI. Early feedback has been positive. In fact, we signed 32 additional upfront deals since our last earnings call. While these represent a small portion of our total expected revenue, we’re seeing momentum in the number of upfront commitments signed. That said, advertisers have long allocation processes that take 6 months to 12 months to turn around, so we have a lot of work left to do.”

Live streaming to younger audiences

“…we had 800 hours of live streaming programming in Q1, up from 600 hours in Q2, and again that’s across sports, e-sports, news, and entertainment…50% of our audience in live streaming is less than 25 years old and over 50% is international.”

Jack Dorsey – CEO

What people use Twitter for.

“..we’ve seen for ten years that people go to Twitter first to see what’s going on and to see what’s happening and what people think about what’s going on and what’s happening. We want to get to a place where we’re the first place they hear of something. Twitter is the first place they hear of something. And that means that we need to get really good at connecting all the dots and all the data that we have to make sure that we’re building something that’s really relevant so that when we notify someone, it’s something that is deeply impactful to them, is relevant, and is important. And they go into an experience where they can dig even deeper and see what’s really happening.”

 

 

Twitter 4Q16 Earnings Call Notes

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Jack Dorsey

Reversed and reaccelerated usage

“We started 2016 by resetting and focusing on why people use Twitter. It’s the fastest way to see what’s happening, and what everyone is talking about. We reset and refocused on our strengths, and we achieved one of the hardest things to do for a consumer services scale. We reversed and reaccelerated our usage. We’re thrilled to report that daily active usage accelerated for the third quarter in a row, and we see that strong growth continuing.”

Impact continues to grow

“The whole world is watching Twitter. While we may not be meeting everyone’s growth expectations, there’s one thing that continues to grow and outpace our peers: Twitter’s influence and impact. You don’t go a day without hearing about Twitter, how it is used as the fastest way to send a message to the world in an instant, how it carries some of the most important commentary and conversations, how it mobilize people into action. That’s powerful, it’s valuable, it’s fundamental, and it’s the reason we’re all here fighting so hard for the service and company we love. It’s been hard, it will continue to be hard, and it’s all worth it. Twitter changed the way the world communicates. And we’ll do it again.”

President’s use of twitter shows the power of the platform

“Sure. Thank you. Mark. On your first question what I would say is that the President’s use of Twitter has broadened the awareness of how the platform can be used and it shows the power of Twitter. When he tweets, it sparks conversation and discussion. So at a macro level discussion on the platform really helps us be the best at showing what’s happening in the world and more discussions strengthens our key differentiators in comprehensive and fast.”

Hard for one person to drive impressions growth

“As it relates to impressions growth, which is another area we look at, as I mentioned earlier, the magnitude of the impressions of the platform is so large, it’d be very hard for an event or a single person to drive sustained growth in impressions growth. All of that said, having the world’s leaders on our platform, talking about global issues, people being passionately expressing their points of view, that’s all positive for Twitter, and that’s what we’re focused on. ”

We can break news faster than any other service

” as I look into 2017 and we look at what we can do, I just think the superpower we really provide the world is we can break news and get information to people faster than any other service in the world. And in order to do that, people have to do just a ton of work right now to dig through everything that may not matter to them to find something that really does. And that’s why I am excited about really making sure that we apply artificial intelligence and machine learning in the right ways and that we really meet that superpower of being that little bird that told you something that you couldn’t find anywhere else. And that when you get into the application and when you get into the service, that it is as easy as looking out the window to see what’s going on. And we have a lot of work to do.”

Anthony Noto

Weak revenue trends are lagging previous engagement declines

“We do believe that is a matter of when, not if. The budget allocations that are reflected in our guidance they really reflect our audience and pricing trends 6 to 12 months ago when we had no growth in audience or even a decline in audience, and the headlines really questioned our abilities to sustain our audience growth. Those long lead times caused the outlook to reflect 6 to 12 months ago, and the benefit that we’re seeing today to be on the comps 6 to 12 months from now. So what are we doing to (18:50) the audience growth and the engagement growth, we’re sitting down with branded advertisers and we’re sharing with them the positive trends. We’re taking them through the increased inventory, the higher scale, the greater growth, all of which we think can lead to better ROI and helping them run through their models, so that we can get better allocations over the next 6 to 12 months.”

Twitter 3Q16 Earnings Call Notes

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Twitter (TWTR) Q3 2016 Results
Jack Dorsey

Not going to comment on market speculation re: sale

” Before I talk about our results and strategy, I want to address the recent market speculation quickly by saying that our board is committed to maximizing long-term shareholder value. I don’t plan to comment any further on this topic.”

We’re focused on building the most useful open and comprehensive news network

“we’re focused on building the most useful open and comprehensive news network on the planet and this is the faster way to see what’s happening and our product is already revolutionary and we’re focused on improving it every single day. We’ve been making hundreds of small changes as quickly as we can that will continue to compound and more usage and the people are showing us that these changes are working. We’re seeing more people wanting to use Twitter and to use it more often. So we’re focused on the most the areas of the product that people spend the majority of their time in which is a home timeline and notifications, making sure that the home timeline becomes more and more relevant. You open up Twitter and you see exactly what’s happening.”

Anthony Noto

Driving for GAAP profitability in 2017

“First, I think it’s really important for everyone to understand, we are focused on driving towards GAAP profitability in 2017. We are cutting costs that are non-core to our key objectives of driving audience engagement and monetization growth. It’s also, I think, critical to understand that we’re fully funding our most important initiatives that are driving those metrics and that are doing that today. As it relates to the broader objective, once a company gets to our scale and growth, it’s appropriate to drive long-term margins and GAAP profitability. We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve already generated over $330 million of free cash flow in 2016, and that’s defined as operating cash flow less CapEx.”

Adam Bain

Marketers want to see audience growth

“marketers are looking for audience growth and audience engagements sustained over time. We’ve now had two quarters of that kind of growth and it’s accelerating. That should help us greatly in our conversations that we’re having with marketers.”

Twitter 2Q16 Earnings Call Notes

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Twitter (TWTR) Jack Dorsey on Q2 2016 Results

Focusing on the quality of the experience for live streaming

“we are making sure that first and foremost that we focus on the quality of the experience and that the experience stays up. So we’re putting a lot of thought and effort into our architecture and infrastructure around live-streaming. We’re doing a lot of this both on the individual side with Periscope, but also on the premium content side.”

Balancing safety and freedom

“This is Jack. This is really, really important to me and to everyone at the company. So, I want to address both freedom of expression and safety together here, since the two intertwine. We are not and never will be a platform that shows people only part of what’s happening or part of what’s being said. We are the place for news and social commentary. And at its best, the nature of our platform empowers people to reach across divides, and to build connections, to share ideas and to challenge accepted norms. As part of that, we hope – and we also recognize it’s a high hope – to elevate civil discourse. And I emphasize civil discourse there. Abuse is not part of civil discourse. It shuts down conversation. It prevents us from understanding each other. Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment if they speak up. No one deserves to be the target of abuse online, and it has no place on Twitter. We haven’t been good enough at ensuring that’s the case, and we must do better. ”

Been using deep learning in on boarding

“We’ve been applying a lot more machine learning and deep learning to our on-boarding, so we can match people faster to their interests. And we believe that that interest drive is really important to us and unique to us. ”

Have a very large global audience

“we have a very large global audience. We have obviously over 300 million logged-in users. We just reported 313 million. We have more than 500 million plus logged-out users, and then we have a very large syndicated audience.”

We know what our users care about by who they follow

“logged-in users explicitly express their interests, what they care about, if they’re a Red Sox fan, if they’re a Jets fan, if they’re Republican or Democrat, based on who they’re following. And therefore, we can tailor the content that we’re delivering to them based on their specific interests. ”

Anthony Noto – Chief Financial Officer

Saw better engagement across a number of metrics

“Our engagement metrics did improve across a variety of different metrics that we look at. In the past, we’ve talked about the importance of daily active users, and that grew. And the DAU to MAU ratio remained stable. We also saw an improvement in user active minutes, up double-digits. We saw an improvement in tweet impressions, up double-digits as well on a year-over-year basis. Searches also increased double-digits year-over-year, and then last, DMs increased at a double-digit rate year-over-year. So, strong performance on engagement across all the metrics that we look at.”

Limited opportunity to increase ad load, but opportunity to increase yield

” I think it’s also important to note that for the U.S. home timeline, while the incremental benefits from ad load itself are more limited given where we’re at, there is a significant opportunity to increase yield over time by driving improvements in targeting, creative and measurement that Adam talked about.”

Adam Bain – Chief Operating Officer

We’re a video centric platform

“On the video side, we have become a video-centric platform. Video is now the number-one ad format in terms of revenue on Twitter. It’s interesting, because just a year ago, those set of products did not exist. So, we’ve seen a continuation of some of these trends overall, where promoted tweet advertisers were upgrading into video.”

Online video budgets are a new ad category

“There is a whole new set of video budgets out there today. These are these online video budgets. It’s about a $10 billion marketplace in the U.S. These are video budgets that today we basically don’t qualify for, since the spend is going in other areas. There’s a set of products and features that we’re in development on to land those budgets. We have some good signs of early success around video, and especially around these online video budgets in terms of incrementality.”

Direct response is a $130B marketplace

“On the direct response side of the business, this is a $130 billion or so marketplace. It’s one again that we have very little share of today, and we have a product-driven approach over a multiple set of quarters to improve the ROI, in terms of better creative targeting measurement for our DR advertisers. Both of those opportunities will get us out of just the social category into other large categories that we compete.”

Twitter priced at premium in terms of CPE but ultimately justified by ROI

“I think, overall, as we look at it, there certainly is increased competition for social marketing budgets, and we are effectively priced at a premium in terms of a CPE. We’re doing a bunch of work to help bring both prices down and improve ROI for those advertisers. Ultimately, it comes to hitting that ROI target. There are some advertisers, though, that just look at price that are more sophisticated advertisers that look at value and the price to value exchange. We do think that while we have a premium, that premium is justified overall in the market.”

Miscellaneous Earnings Call Notes 4.28.16

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General Electric (GE) Jeffrey R. Immelt on Q1 2016 Results

Saw improvements in our business in China

” We’re in the midst of a challenging Oil & Gas market. However, we are things sustained strength in Aviation and Power markets. Healthcare is rebounding. I was in China last week and saw improvements in our business. Most of the portfolios are strong and we’re delivering. There’s plenty of business out there to achieve our goals.”

McDonald’s (MCD) Stephen J. Easterbrook on Q1 2016

All Day Breakfast came out hard and then settled but is still exceeding expectations even at the settled stage

“we clearly came out of the tracks hard with All Day Breakfast. It exceeded our expectations through the launch phase, and then hit a more settled rate. Frankly, it’s still exceeding our expectations through the settled stage as well. So we’re incredibly encouraged.”

Honeywell International (HON) David M. Cote on Q1 2016 Results

I’m hopeful for a rebound but we’re not going to count on it. Europe did better than expected

“I’m hopeful that there is a global economic rebound, but we’re certainly not going to count on it. If there was any region that surprised me in this past quarter, it was Europe did a lot better than I expected. I don’t know if this is just a one-time bounce or something that’s going to stay consistent, but I was quite encouraged by seeing that. It was a nice surprise. I mean, we’ll see how much that turns into something. But right now, we’re going to stay with this whole idea that this is a slow growth global environment and it’s just the smart way to plan. And you see that reflected in how we are forecasting the second quarter and how we’re forecasting the total year. I just don’t think there’s any percentage right now on being bullish about it. If it happens, great. I think there’s a greater chance it happens than there is that it doesn’t. But that being said, I don’t see any percentage in being bullish about it.”

Flight hours is the most important driver of the aerospace cycle

“I’d say it comes back to flight hours again. They fly a lot. And that’s really – I’ve said many times the biggest Aerospace driver we have is flight hours. And it’s not tied to OEM schedules or airline profitability or any of that generally. The long-term trend is going to be driven by flight hours. If they’re flying, everything ends up working out. Whatever short-term disruptions or benefits, whatever you’re seeing, over time flight hours ends up being the driver. Flight hours continue to climb, and that’s a good phenomenon for us.”

LyondellBasell Industries’ (LYB) CEO Bob Patel on Q1 2016 Results

Olefin and polyolefin markets are tight

“Looking forward, we see olefins and polyolefins markets remaining tight during the near-term. There are heavy turnaround schedules in both the US and Asia. The recent rise in crude oil prices provides tailwinds for both pricing and demand, as customers no longer feel incentives to delay purchases, in hopes of future declines in product prices.”

Procter & Gamble’s (PG) Q3 2016 Results

Jon Moeller

It’s not enough just to gain market share

“The reason that we’ve talked a little bit about not following share out the window, we can be gaining shares in categories that are declining, and that’s not going to grow our top line. What we need to be doing as innovation leaders in our categories is getting the market growing through that innovation and gaining a share of that growth.”

Twitter’s (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey on Q1 2016 Results

Acquisitions have been critical in creating value for the internet sector for two decades

“The first point I would make is that acquisitions have been critical in creating value for the Internet sector, consumer Internet sector over the last two decades. Many of our competitive peers have bought assets at very early stages that have resulted in billions of dollars of value and Twitter has been the same”

Goal is to be one stop shop for advertising

” At end of the day, our goal is to be a one-stop shop for advertising. And having both owned and operated inventory, third party inventory and ad text stock that can serve both of those constituencies is really critical.”

United States Steel’s (X) CEO Mario Longhi on Q1 2016 Results

Favorable trade case results are boosting the domestic steel industry

“Last year, we successfully advocated for the passage of the Level Playing Field Act in the trade adjustment assistance bill. This represents the first time in decade that U.S. trade laws were revised and clarified to align with the original congressional intent. The interpretation and enforcement of these new laws has already been reflected in preliminary determinations in the three major trade cases we elected to pursue with other steel companies in 2015. Yesterday, we announced another step in our efforts to have the rule of law enforced. We filed a complaint with the U.S. international trade commission to initiate an investigation under section (337) of Tariff act of 1930 against the largest Chinese steel producers and their distributors. The 337 complaint alleges illegal unfair methods of competition and seeks the exclusion of all unfairly traded Chinese steel products from the U.S. market. I would like to emphasize that the remedy under section (337) is not a tariff, it is an exclusion of products from the U.S. market. Our complaint alleges three clauses of action, the illegal conspiracy to fix prices, the theft of trade secrets and the circumvention of trade duties by false labeling.”

Third Point 2Q16 Investor Letter Dan Loeb

One of the most catastrophic periods of hedge fund performance since this fund’s inception

“Unfortunately, many managers lost sight of the fact that low net does not mean low risk and so, when positioning reversed, market neutral became a hedge fund killing field. Finally, the Valeant debacle in mid-March decimated some hedge fund portfolios and the termination of the Pfizer-Allergan deal in early April dealt a further blow to many other investors. The result of all of this was one of the most catastrophic periods of hedge fund performance that we can remember since the inception of this fund”

Volatility is bringing excellent opportunities

“As most investors have been caught offsides at some or multiple points over the past eight months, the impulse to do little is understandable. We are of a contrary view that volatility is bringing excellent opportunities, some of which we discuss below. We believe that the past few months of increasing complexity are here to stay and now is a more important time than ever to employ active portfolio management to take advantage of this volatility. There is no doubt that we are in the first innings of a washout in hedge funds and certain strategies. ”

Texas Instruments’ (TXN) Management on Q1 2016 Results

Kevin March

Inventories were up because we expect higher shipments

“We expect that material is going to ship over the balance of the year. And between the increased shipments in 2Q and the shipments of that personal electronics material, we’ll see the days of inventory drift back down comfortably inside our model, very similar to what we saw last year. If you go back and take a look last year, we were also a little bit higher in the first quarter, anticipation of second quarter growth, and then days drifted down as we came through the year.”

Dave Pahl

Weakness came in as expected but broad based strength in other areas

” that portion of demand where we saw weakness came in about as we expected. The strength was more broad-based, and we continue to, obviously, to see strength in automotive and then the improvement in industrial and comms equipment. So, very, very broad-based strength that we saw. So the second part of your question was sequentially. What we saw from the trends there, no surprise that automotive remained very strong, and it was driven by infotainment as well as the hybrid electric and powertrain systems. Industrial, again we had growth across almost every sector inside of industrial. Personal electronics down, with most sectors declining”

Group 1 Automotive’s (GPI) CEO Earl Hesterberg on Q1 2016 Results

Vehicle inventory stood at 85 days vs 69 days in 1Q15

“The U.S. new vehicle inventories stood at 31,400 units which equates to an 85 day supply compared to a 69 day supply for the first quarter of 2015. Luxury brand inventories drove much of the year-over-year increase. We have adjusted orders and expect to bring inventory closer to our target level of 60 days by the end of the second quarter. ”

Oil companies still have a long way to go in restructuring their balance sheets for what’s happened to oil prices

“our new vehicle sales in Houston, we held a 1% decrease for the quarter, so we’re fighting it pretty well, but I attend a lot of meetings and I’m various Boards with these oil company executives and they still have quite a way to go in restructuring their balance sheet and that’s what happening now.”

Hasn’t been a big consumer confidence problem outside of energy impacted markets

“No, I don’t really see weakness outside of the energy belt. David I’d say people are reacting to the fact just not growing as significantly as it had been in recent years. So when it’s flat without it only grow 1% or 2% or 3%, I think it feels for a lot of people like it’s just very slow. But I wouldn’t say I have seen any big consumer confidence crisis anywhere outside of the energy impacted market.’

AGCO (AGCO) Martin H. Richenhagen on Q1 2016 Results

2016 farm income expected to remain below 2015 levels

“estimates call for 2016 farm income to remain below 2015 levels. In North America, relatively young machinery fleet and dealer efforts to reduce inventory levels have contributed to continued decline in industry sales through the first quarter. Weaker demand from the row crop sector resulted in significantly lower industry retail sales of high-horsepower tractors, combines and sprayers.”

Twitter 4Q15 Earnings Call Notes

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Twitter’s (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey on Q4 2015 Results

Twitter is a second screen

“Twitter has always been considered a second screen for what’s happening in the world. And we believe we can become the first screen for everything that’s happening right now. And by doing so, we believe we can build the planet’s largest daily connected audience. A connected audience is one that watches together, and can talk with one another in real-time. That’s what twitter is provided for close to 10 years now, and it’s what we will continue to drive in the future.”

2016 is a year of recruiting

“2016 is definitively going to be a year of additions. My primary focus is on recruiting. And recruiting more to our leadership team, we’ve had some major wins with Omid joining our company and Leslie our CMO. Around the restructuring of the leadership team, we’ve been thinking about this for a lot and looking for opportunities to consolidate some strengths in areas around the company.”

Had an integrated campaign across TV and performance based advertising

“We’ve learned two important things in the fourth quarter. It was the first time we had an integrated campaign across both television advertising, as well as performance-based advertising. On the television advertising side of the equation, that has a longer impact, but we were able to really deliver a very clear messages that moments was a new way for people to use Twitter and to get the best of Twitter in instant.”

Moments is a fantastic way to tell a story

“Moments is proven to be a fantastic way to tell a story. This is a collection of tweets in chronological order. We are seeing a lot of positive activity with Moments in the timeline and people tweeting Moments. When a Moments is in a tweet, it’s opened with higher than average click-through, which is really awesome. So we want to focus a whole lot more energy on enabling people to tweet out Moments, but also more people to create these Moments as well. But it all goes back to that focus on the timeline and making the timeline better and better and better and better.”

We’re valuing live and fast

“Absolutely, and thank you for the question. So we do have those focus around live, because we do think that’s the easiest way to explain more of the logged out audience experience around Twitter, the very easy way to see the value instantly, and we will continue to push our marketing efforts under Leslie now to make sure that we’re showing that value fast.”

I’ve set up a structure that works for me balancing two companies

“So I have set up a structure that is working very well for me, so that I can spend meaningful time at both companies, and I have enough flexibility in the schedule. So that if there is something that needs more attention at one company, I can devote that attention, and I’m always connected to the leadership teams at both companies non-stop.

So we have a structure that allows me to see what’s happening in the week, we set off the week together at both companies and we have checkpoints. And then the balance of my time is really spent on recruiting, that is going to be the number one focus for me and that’s where we’re going to show a lot of momentum at Twitter is recruiting.”

Looking to add key people to the board

“We’re looking to add to the Board and part of that recruiting effort is also to our Board. We’d like to move fast on this. And we are looking for a public company experience, significant financial experience, international policy experience, and also media experience. ”

We are focusing on products

“we are focusing a lot of our energy on refining the core products, and looking at what is confusing about the service. What is inhibiting growth?”

Anthony Noto

Ad load is up but driven by demand

“Sure, ad load has increased meaningfully since the beginning of the year. And it’s been driven by international ad load increasing more than domestic ad load. Our domestic ad load has also increased. That said, while we have increased ad load, we’ve increased it, because of demand. We’ve benefited from tremendous growth in a number of advertisers and spend per advertiser throughout 2015.”

Twitter at Barclays Conference Notes

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Twitter’s (TWTR) Management Presents at Barclays Global Technology Brokers Conference

Anthony Noto

Jack can change things that the rest of us wouldn’t be able to

“having Jack back is not just a function of pushing us and giving us license to drive things, but he can probably get away with changing things that the rest of us couldn’t, things like going from favorites to likes with hearts. And there has been talk about 140 characters being questioned now and things like that. And so it’s great to have a founder around that give cover for some of those changes.”

A trip down memory lane for the failed e-commerce holiday season

“Back in late ‘99 and 2000, the industry dubbed that holiday season as the e-holiday Christmas. And everyone was really articulating a view that consumers would go online and they would shop more online, because of the better value proposition than shopping in store. And that value proposition was a combination of better selection, better pricing, more convenience, you don’t have to go to the store, you can shop from home and then overall better information environment. And lo and behold everyone went online to shop in 2000 and the selection was probably better, the pricing was probably better, but they couldn’t deliver the product on time, the wrong product showed up, it showed up after Christmas, returns were challenging, the product was broken. And ultimately, the value proposition didn’t deliver. And in 2001, the number of people that shopped online went down. And it wasn’t ready for mass appeal, because it couldn’t deliver on its promise, on its value proposition.”

Focused on curation and relevancy

“I would say there are two dimensions that we are focused on that would help satisfy both of those use cases. One is curation and one is relevancy versus recency.”

Twitter 3Q15 Earnings Call Notes

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300m MAUs

“We continue to grow the number of people who use Twitter, now totaling 320 million monthly active and 307 million excluding SMS Fast Followers.”

Smaller nimbler teams

“As part of this focus we made a decision to reduce our workforce by about 8%. While this decision was difficult, we strongly believe we can move faster with this new org structure and smaller nimbler teams.”

Moments re-reverses the chronological timeline

“Moments represents a real fundamental shift in our thinking and the reason why is a lot of Twitter is organized by a reverse chronological timeline. We make people do a bunch of work to find the right accounts to follow and then they actually see the world through those accounts. What Moments does is you can open it up, you can actually see everything that’s happened in the world, that’s most meaningful, it’s organized by topics, so you see topics first. You tap in to each one of those Moments and you can actually see really unique insight and commentary on the particular event that you’re interested in.”

Need to roll out measurement tools for advertisers

“The biggest opportunity in the near-term I believe is on the measurement side. For five years we just haven’t had any third-party measurement and attribution. I talked a little bit about some of the reasons why. It was hard for or almost impossible for third-party measurement attribution systems to measure mobile in-app activity accurately and connected downstream to the conversion.”

Conversations with CMOs have never been stronger

“Our conversations with agencies and also with CMOs have never been stronger. They also look at us as a strategic partner and not just the media partner and that’s really important, whereas other people just come in and talk about ad inventory or their scale. We can come in and talk about that and certainly now showing an audience size both on Twitter and across the network of over 700 million people, but we also come with analytics and insights, things around customer service or comps and PR, all these things that feed into the marketing engines of each one of these companies.”

People tune into Twitter when they are watching TV and vice versa

“We’ve seen great traction in terms of historically when people are watching TV, they also are tuning into Twitter, sometimes exclusively into Twitter. When people are having a conversation about a TV program, it will increase the chance that people turn into linear television. ”

Make twitter easier for people to understand and to tweet

“what you’ll see from us is against two themes and this is going forward, which is really how do we make Twitter even easier to understand for more people, so that we continue to see more of that usage, people can bring it up and see everything that’s happening in the world immediately. But also how do we get more power to people who are using it to tweet. And that’s not just Twitter but also our properties like Vine and Periscope. How we giving creators more tools to be more creative and to express themselves in a different way”

Miscellaneous Notes Week of 9.17

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Stronger than expected turnout at Credit Suisse Basic Materials conference

John McNulty – Credit Suisse Analyst (From Dow Presentation Transcript)

“Okay. If you all take your seats we’ll get on with the presentation for today. Yesterday was a big day for us actually for what it’s worth, those keeping track, I mean, the rooms are certainly more full than we’ve seen them actually. We are – attendance was up about 45% for our first day, yesterday. So apologize if there are logistical issues, because it’s a bigger crowd than even we had expected, but it’s a nice problem to have.” –Credit Suisse (Investment Bank)

Sirius’ CEO was bullish on car sales

Jim Meyer – CEO Sirius XM

“I spend a lot of time with the senior executives in the automotive industry and all of them along with me are pretty confident that what the next six or 12 months looks like in auto sales. And we see them continuing strong.” –Sirius XM (Satellite Radio)

40% of millenials do not have a TV and 20% say they are considering cutting it

Lowell McAdam – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

“40% of millennials do not and have never had a TV in their home and another 20% have said they have got it, but they don’t use it that much and they are considering cutting it.” –Verizon (Telecom)

Verizon doesn’t think Apple’s installment plan is a threat to them

Lowell McAdam – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

“They love to have people stay on iPhones forever. And if I look at it from our perspective, from a cash flow perspective, it is – it’s a relatively positive, marginally positive I guess. So, it’s not a threat. It’s similar. I think about it the way I think about bring-your-own-device, which we have been doing for quite a while. Apple today is a very small piece of our distribution. So, it’s not going to shift the way we do business in anyway. And right now, it doesn’t look like a threat to us.” –Verizon (Telecom)

Fifth Third echoed that credit remains benign

Tayfun Tuzun – Chief Financial Officer

“We are operating at very low levels of charge-offs in historical terms and ongoing quarterly improvement every year in charge-offs will be difficult to achieve, but nevertheless credit should generally remained benign.” –Fifth Third (Bank)

You have to optimize your business to perform well over the course of a whole cycle

“If there is one lesson that we as managers have learned during the crisis it’s the importance of relentless focus on through the cycle performance. Business models created for the present part of the business cycle that are not grounded in long-term fundamental value creation will outperform for a period of time, but will not increase the value for shareholders who have longer time horizons, as they are now sustainable.” –Fifth Third (Bank)

Sustainability is the key focus

“I wish I could tell you that it is possible to tailor our strategy in a very timely manner to every turn of the business cycle, but it is not. Therefore sustainability has to be the key focus. Our top goal is to perform well throughout the full cycle.” –Fifth Third (Bank)

Necessity has been the mother of invention in driving more efficiency in the oil industry

Bob Gwin – Executive Vice President-Finance and Chief Financial Officer

“necessity being the mother of invention that, I think, is largely true across industry. Very proud of our folks driving efficiencies, working very hard to drive down costs, increase in our oil production everything operationally has gotten better. Now that obviously for a macro perspective, continues to put pressure on commodity prices as we see the resiliency of U.S. production. But our view is that we’re going to see that – we’re starting to see it roll over a bit and that – in this era of prices with this double dip and without a real strong outlook on the underlying commodity, we see that the need to continue to focus on cost and the need to continue to focus on driving returns” –Anadarko (E&P)

The focus is on returns, not growth

“The focus right now is not on growth, it’s on returns. We don’t look at growth as being a deliverable that’s going to be valued by the market or by our shareholders, rather growth will be – the growth rate will come out of the capital allocation work that we do” –Anadarko (E&P)

HCA thinks of itself as the preferred healthcare provider in the markets they operate

Bill Rutherford – Chief Financial Officer

“we want to be the preferred healthcare provider in the markets that we operate and we create what we think is a high value integrated delivery system. It’s anchored by our hospital network, supported by outpatient centers, ambulatory surgery centers, we have 120 surgery centers, outpatient imaging, physician clinics, we employ close to 4,000 physicians in our marketplace, freestanding EDs and urgent cares. So, we deploy access points in the marketplace. So, there are multiple ways patients can access the HCA network in multiple service dynamics. And then we develop deep service line capability generally organized around patient conditions in cardiology, in women’s services things or orthopedics, oncology, neurosciences, emergency room and we developed deep service line capability.” –HCA (Hospitals)

We may get more medicaid expansion post 2016 when it’s not so politically charged

“I don’t see much movement until post-2016 election, once we have someone else as President and the office maybe Medicaid expansion becomes something that’s more state-driven rather than considered Obama Care.” –HCA (Hospitals)

An exchange enrollee is worth much more than medicaid

“the one thing you do have to remember as Bill pointed out, our significant benefits have come through the insurance exchange. I mean if you just look at the pricing differential on what you get on an exchange enrollee versus a Medicaid enrollee it’s three times on an exchange. So remember if we get one exchange to three Medicaid, we benefit substantially more.” –HCA (Hospitals)

Union Pacific is optimistic that ex-energy volumes look not too bad

Rob Knight – CFO

“And as we look at the macro, it actually sort of — I think it speaks to what we’re seeing at the macro level, clearly the energy related activities are a drag on our volumes right now. But the rest of our business volumes are ever so slightly and we’re very cautious, we’re not getting exuberant here, but are on the positive side of the volume trends. We’re watching very carefully, things like our intermodal business. Our intermodal is roughly half international, half domestic. If you look at our third quarter numbers, our international is down about 7%, our domestics flattish, and what we’re seeing in our international space and our intermodal world is a cautiousness, as people are cautious not to build inventories too high.”

“We think the peak season that we would normally experience is a couple of weeks still in front of us, so we would hope to see some improvement in that space, if that holds. While we don’t think it’s going to be a rocket ship kind of peak. We do expect it’s going to build, but there is clearly some cautiousness in the space with people not wanting to overbuild inventories and I guess [indiscernible] away we would feel about the macro economy cautious, steady as she goes, things are positive when you separate all the energy challenges we have.” –Union Pacific (Railroad)

Twitter is full steam ahead under Jack Dorsey

Anthony Noto – Chief Financial Officer

” we’re focused on what we control which is executing on the business, we haven’t missed a step since the transition to Jack, we’ve been full steam ahead.” –Twitter (Social Media)

Twitter 2Q15 Earnings Call Notes

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stumbles are unacceptable and we’re not happy about it

“product initiatives we’ve mentioned in previous earnings calls like instant timelines and logged out experiences have not yet had meaningful impact on growing our audience or participation. This is unacceptable and we’re not happy about it.”

We need to do three things to right the ship

“Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to get a deeper understanding of where I need to focus our team. We need to do three things. One, we need to ensure a more disciplined execution. Two, we need to simplify our service to deliver Twitter’s value faster. And three, we need to better communicate our value.”

What should you expect twitter to be?

“You should expect Twitter to be as easy as looking out your window to see what’s happening. You should expect Twitter to show you what’s most meaningful in the world to live it first before anyone else and straight from the source. And you should expect Twitter to keep you informed and updated throughout your day.”

MAUs grew just 12% y/y

“We reached 304 million MAUs in Q2, excluding SMS Fast Followers, compared to 302 million MAUs in Q1 for a growth rate of 12% on a year over year basis. Total average monthly active users, which as a reminder includes SMS Fast Followers, reached 316 million for the quarter, reflecting year over year growth of 15%.”

Twitter remains too difficult to use

“we have not delivered on meeting the new potential user’s expectations of Twitter when they try the product. Simply said, the product remains too difficult to use. As Jack mentioned, we need to simplify the product so everyone get value from Twitter faster. In short, we have not communicated why people should use Twitter, nor made it easy for them to understand how to use Twitter. This is both a product issue and a marketing issue.”

Ad load 1/3 of potential

“ad load, as measured by total ad impressions divided by total tweet impressions is approximately one-third of what we see as the long-term potential.”

Slowing growth rate in users, constrains ad supply growth

“because our growth rate in users is slowing quite dramatically. We’re giving you a sense in our load factor that there are scenarios where we can have a significant increase in daily revenue demand and specific mix shift towards one particular type of ad category. And if that happens, we could be more constrained than we have been in the past from a supply standpoint.”

The number one reason people don’t use Twitter is because they don’t know why they need it

“The number one reason from our market research that users don’t use Twitter because they don’t understand why to use Twitter. They don’t understand the value that Jack and I both talked about and we need to clearly communicate what that value is.”

We don’t have any update on the CEO search

“I know this is a trending topic on Twitter around the CEO search, but unfortunately we do not have an update to provide today. The search committee does feel the urgency of the search, but it is doing its work to make sure that we arrive at the best answer. And we’ll have updates when there is something meaningful to share. My focus is entirely on raising the bar of our execution and making sure that we’re focused on the right things. And as I said in my prepared remarks, it’s really around simplifying our service and making sure that people can get in and get to the value of Twitter faster and in a more immediate way”

Need to allow our teams to “ship product” faster

“focus has to be around not just particular individuals, but the best team dynamic. And great teams love shipping products to people who will use them on a daily basis And our focus is entirely around making sure that we unblock our team from shipping products faster, in a better way..So we definitely need to do a better job in ensuring an execution discipline to allow for people, enable people to ship faster. And I think our shipping cadence has improved over the past six months and we will continue to show improvements there.’

We need to provide a graceful entrance for people to get value from Twitter

“We need to make sure that we provide a really graceful and unfolding path to get to more value faster for anyone that comes into the service. And that means they don’t have to consider what Twitter is, they just have to consider what they are there for.”