Amtek Engineering (M1P.SG) off 1.9% at $1.01, extending 20.8% loss yesterday on debut, as investors still wary of contract manufacturer’s IPO valuations.
But downside likely limited with Morgan Stanley Asia helping to stabilise share price. Underwriter bought 8.3 million shares at $0.99-$1.05 each yesterday, expected to continue purchase during Amtek’s first month of listing if price weakens further.
Morgan Stanley’s head of Asia energy marketing, Alan Koh, will be leaving his position in Singapore, the second-largest US securities company said today.
Koh declined to comment on his departure or say where he is going when contacted by mobile phone. A spokeswoman at Morgan Stanley’s press office in Hong Kong, who asked not to be identified due to company policy, confirmed Koh is leaving.
Koh was one of 212 executives globally appointed as managing directors in December, according to Morgan Stanley’s website.
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The Palm Pre and Pixi are likable enough smartphones, but its their platform, webOS, thats Palms real carrot to dangle in getting buyers to bite. Nokia has been named as alternately a likely and not likely prospect, while Morgan Stanley believes Motorola, RIM and HTC are also good options.
– Palm, the struggling creator of the Pre and Pixi smartphones and their well-liked mobile platform, webOS, is looking for someone to purchase it,
Reuters reported April 11. Since then, the name of just about every
handset manufacturer and PC maker has been mentioned as a possible fit.
What analyst…
Morgan Stanley predicts that within five years more users will access the Internet using mobile devices than via desktop PCs. The change is part of a new tech cycle, encouraged, in part, by Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon.com, as well as devices such as Apple’s expected tablet PC.
– Within five years, more people will be connecting to the Internet via mobile
devices than via desktop PCs. This good news for carriers, handset makers and software
developers comes from Morgan Stanley’s quot;The Mobile Internet Report, quot;
released Dec. 15.
Other key points in the 424-page r…
There were some interesting comments from analyst Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley about where he thinks the US light vehicle market could be headed in 2010. 12.8m units? I guess that is a pretty strong rebound on around 11m units this year, if not exactly cause to break into a chorus of ‘let the good times roll’. At least the sky hasn’t quite fallen in.
I would expect him to be pretty confident before giving a forecast like that, which is significantly above some of the others I have seen.
If it’s 12.8m for the year, there’s an implied SAAR that could well be up towards 14m by the end of the year.
There is still the small matter of the recession – far from over – working through and the fact that lending by the banks is going to be way off where it was a few years ago. Can sentiment turn around that quickly? I reckon 12.8m in 2010 looks a little high, but it will be interesting to see where the forecasts go over the next few months.
US: US car market poised for ‘strong rebound’ – Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is setting aside a huge sum to pay out bonuses despite posting its third consecutive quarterly loss and admitting it is disappointed with key departments.
Morgan Stanley is setting aside a huge sum to pay out bonuses despite posting its third consecutive quarterly loss and admitting it is disappointed with key departments.
The US bank’s latest results show it is allocating $3.9bn (£2.36bn) for paying out to staff, 72% of its net revenues. That dwarfs the percentage of revenue set aside by arch rival Goldman Sachs, where workers are on track for large bonuses after record results last week.
Morgan Stanley extinguished the tentative flames of optimism among US banks today when it posted a loss of $159m for April to June and said it was not satisfied with its performance in fixed income trading and in asset management.
News of the bank’s loss unsettled traders on Wall Street, whose view of the banking sector’s prospects was brightened last week by Goldman’s surge in profits and further upbeat news from JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America.
Goldman said last week that it was dedicating 49% of its revenue to paying its staff, amounting to a compensation fund of $6.65bn.
Further reading of Morgan Stanley’s results showed its compensation pot was not only much bigger as a percentage of net revenues of $5.4bn, but that it had jumped 26% from $3.1bn a year ago.
“It was a very good quarter to be a Morgan Stanley employee,” said analyst Brad Hintz at Sanford C Bernstein & Co. “I’m not so sure it was so good to be a Morgan Stanley shareholder.”
Although big bonuses to bankers are arousing controversy in the wake of the credit crunch, bumper payouts seem here to stay as firms continue to battle to attract the most talented staff.
The hefty bonus pot at Morgan Stanley echoes its comments that it needs to woo more top performers to its trading floors.
John Mack, chairman and chief executive, said that it was one way the loss-making bank was “taking steps to deliver better results” in its underperforming departments.
“These initiatives include hiring to add key trading and investment management talent,” he said.
The bank was hit in the latest quarter by a charge related to repaying government loans known as Tarp. The disappointing performance from Morgan Stanley was accompanied by downbeat news from San Francisco-based Wells Fargo and tempered optimism about a recovery in the financial sector.
The world seems all a titter that teens don’t use Twitter
Was the whiz-kid correct? Two teens give opposing views
Teens spurning Twitter was one of the bombshells from 15-year-old Matthew Robson that the media highlighted in a report he wrote for investment bank Morgan Stanley.
However, it wasn’t really breaking news that teens don’t use Twitter.
• Last November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found the median age of Twitter users in the US was 31, higher than 26 for Facebook and 27 for MySpace.
• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.
In a battle of the teen prognosticators, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, writing on TechCrunch says that teens don’t use Twitter because it’s a completely open network and anyone can see your status updates. Teens prefer the privacy of closed networks such as Facebook. Brusilovsky said it makes teens feel “unsafe”.
It’s probably more about teens wanting to establish a privacy perimeter from the prying eyes of adults rather than a safety issue.
That’s not entirely true. Twitter users can protect their updates so only followers they approve can follow their updates.
Also, as David Meyer points out on ZDNet, Robson only referred to updating Twitter via SMS. However, as Meyer points out, Twitter is now used mostly via a range of desktop applications and internet apps on smartphones. Also, up until recently Twitter was MIA in the UK via SMS because Twitter and the carriers couldn’t reach an agreement on pricing.
A number of bloggers, including my wife Suw, took Morgan Stanley and the media to task for mistaking anecdotes from a 15-year-old for hard data.
Neither Morgan Stanley nor the media seem to be able to tell the difference between anecdote and data. This “research note” is more note than research, and it should not be taken to be representative of all teens. A teenager in a rural setting, or in an inner city estate, or one who feels socially excluded from web culture will have a very different experience than a teen who’s well-connected enough to get himself an internship at Morgan Stanley.
Beyond criticising Robson’s methodology, there is something more interesting going on here. As comScore’s Sarah Radwanick pointed out, as technology becomes more common, teens and college students aren’t the only people in the population that can be considered “technologically inclined”. She said:
…trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.
It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are “digital natives”. Charlie Beckett, director of journalism thinktank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native:
As Matthew Robson describes, most teenagers use a variety of digital devices, but when you talk to people who work with teenagers they describe a much more complex picture of what they actually do.
The same teenagers who have literacy problems have media literacy problems. Many of the teenagers apparently comfortable with new media are in fact only using a very limited range of applications and in a very limited way.
Other researchers indicate that teenagers are getting just as frustrated as the rest of us with the complexity and cost of many online and mobile applications.
Report on young people’s media habits written for investment bank by teenage intern causes huge interest in the City
A research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that described his friends’ media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.
The US investment bank’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, to write a report on teenagers’ likes and dislikes, which made the Financial Times’ front page today.
His report, that dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it”, said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley’s European media team.
“We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.” He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team’s usual research.
His colleague, Julien Rossi, added: “It’s an interesting starting point for debate.”
The rapid surge of interest in social networking and messaging sites has prompted speculation that sites such as Twitter or Facebook could be taken over. But Robson’s report, which was sent to Morgan Stanley’s clients as a research note last Friday, suggested that such a move could be folly. He said teenagers were using more and more media, but they were unwilling to pay for it.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
He warned that traditional media – television, radio and newspapers – are losing ground.
No teenager Robson knew reads a newspaper regularly since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV”. The only newspapers that are read are the cheaper tabloids and freesheets.
His peers are also put off by intrusive advertising so they prefer listening to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm to traditional radio. Teens see adverts on websites – pop ups, banner ads – as “extremely annoying and pointless,” Robson said. However, “most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content”.
He stressed that his peers were “very reluctant” to pay for music and most had never bought a CD, with a large majority downloading songs illegally from filesharing sites.
Money and time are instead devoted to cinema, concerts and video game consoles. Downloading films off the internet is not popular as the films are usually bad quality and have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a risk of viruses, Robson said.
Game consoles like Wii, which are now able to connect to the internet and offer free voice chat between users, have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.
His report came as media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This annual event is a chance for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to discuss the latest business and technology issues in a relaxed atmosphere.
When interviewed at the event, Murdoch appeared to rule out making a bid for the micro-blogging site Twitter. Asked if he was considering buying Twitter, Murdoch said, “No.” Asked about selling MySpace, he replied, “Hell no.”
Report on young people’s media habits written for investment bank by teenage intern causes huge interest in the City
A research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that described his friends’ media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.
The US investment bank’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, to write a report on teenagers’ likes and dislikes, which made the Financial Times’ front page today.
His report, that dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it”, said Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley’s European media team.
“We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day.” He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team’s usual research.
His colleague, Julien Rossi, added: “It’s an interesting starting point for debate.”
The rapid surge of interest in social networking and messaging sites has prompted speculation that sites such as Twitter or Facebook could be taken over. But Robson’s report, which was sent to Morgan Stanley’s clients as a research note last Friday, suggested that such a move could be folly. He said teenagers were using more and more media, but they were unwilling to pay for it.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
He warned that traditional media – television, radio and newspapers – are losing ground.
No teenager Robson knew reads a newspaper regularly since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV”. The only newspapers that are read are the cheaper tabloids and freesheets.
His peers are also put off by intrusive advertising so they prefer listening to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm to traditional radio. Teens see adverts on websites – pop ups, banner ads – as “extremely annoying and pointless,” Robson said. However, “most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content”.
He stressed that his peers were “very reluctant” to pay for music and most had never bought a CD, with a large majority downloading songs illegally from filesharing sites.
Money and time are instead devoted to cinema, concerts and video game consoles. Downloading films off the internet is not popular as the films are usually bad quality and have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a risk of viruses, Robson said.
Game consoles like Wii, which are now able to connect to the internet and offer free voice chat between users, have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.
His report came as media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This annual event is a chance for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to discuss the latest business and technology issues in a relaxed atmosphere.
When interviewed at the event, Murdoch appeared to rule out making a bid for the micro-blogging site Twitter. Asked if he was considering buying Twitter, Murdoch said, “No.” Asked about selling MySpace, he replied, “Hell no.”
