Tag: may 4 2021

Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google and Youtube, saw first-quarter sales rise to a record $55.31 billion, spiking 34 percent year on year, with profits soaring 162 percent to almost $18 billion, the company reported. People bunkered at home spent more time shopping online, ordering food deliveries, and watching YouTube videos, analysts said, which convinced...

Encouraged by a successful vaccine campaign and consumers’ eagerness to spend, U.S. businesses will increase their advertising outlay by 15 percent this year to $250.7 billion, not including political ads, a global ad-buying firm has predicted. The rate of growth in ad spending is likely to be the fastest since World War II ended 76...

As we have been reporting, landlords with small holdings, typically individuals or couples, are banned by government orders from evicting tenants unable to pay rent. But in the new ABnormal, with no money coming in, they have to pay taxes, mortgages, and insurance payments.  Such landlords often are immigrants and nonwhite and have invested in...

Several venture capital firms have booked returns in recent months not seen in 20 years or more, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Among the big U.S. winners: Sutter Hill Ventures bet less than $112 million on cloud computing firm Snowflake and, in March, cashed out with a profit of almost $12 billion; Sequoia Capital...

In March, foot traffic in 52 shopping malls monitored by research firm Placer.ai was 86 percent greater than a year before. Although that figure is still 24 percent below that of March 2019, mall owners expressed relief when interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. “There’s no question things are better,” William Taubman, president of Michigan-based...

Sales at McDonald’s U.S. restaurants open since the beginning of 2020 grew an average of 13.6 percent year over year, beating analysts’ projections and helping to shore up global sales, which rose 7.5 percent during the period, the company announced. U.S. sales were bolstered by meals celebrities promoted, such as musician Travis Scott, new menu...

Spending on nonresidential construction fell 1.1 percent in March from February, its fourth consecutive month of shrinkage, and reaching a 12-month decline of 7.4 percent, the Associated General Contractors of America (AGCA) reported. Projects were delayed or canceled as demand for office and retail space has slowed, government agencies are running deficits, materials are fetching...

The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) says that 500,000 of the sector’s workers still will be unemployed when this year ends. According to AHLA projections, states hit hardest by the loss of hotel jobs through this year are: California, losing 67,169 jobs; Florida, out 39,560 jobs; New York, with 38,028 lodging workers idle; Nevada,...

The combined yearly revenue of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft is $1.2 trillion, according to a New York Times analysis of earnings figures the companies reported last week. In less than a week, the five tech giants collect more in sales than McDonald’s does all year, the NYT noted. During 2020’s shutdown, people used...

With prices for raw materials climbing, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and other makers of consumer staples have laid plans to pass those greater costs to consumers. We had predicted back in our 4 August 2020 issue that inflation – caused in part by supply-chain disruptions and then pushed up by higher demand as economies...