Liberty

Welcome to the club :)

They tried to buy Jacobson but Norbert Dentressengle got it. This made them study Norbert, and this eventually led them to buy the whole thing (getting Jacobson in the end). They bought Norbert for 9.1x 2015 EBITDA, and seem to think that they can keep growing it and use some of their IT over there to improve efficiency (it's all about reducing empty loads, optimizing pricing, saying no less often for lack of capacity, predicting patterns so you can have the right supply, increasing cross-selling, etc).

What do you think of Radiant management?

Don't mind this being discussed there also. These are very similar companies with minor differences. If there was a place to discuss all the players in the industry and find the best one, that would be a good to have Why couldn't you start a thread in General discussions and title it something like "Logistics - Looking for the Industry Best"? This could be done for any industry or group of companies where we wanted to discuss a particular sector.....just a thought cheers Zorro I think that's probably best, because the Radiant thread could get quite messy as soon as we get into the specifics of each company..

So you just eyeballed it in 5 minutes, eh? When the Norbert Dentressengle acquisition closes in a few months they'll be at close to 9bn in revenue, and they're guiding to 625m in EBITDA for 2015 (but profitability will look bad as long as they keep investing this heavily in cold starts and the IT/HR platform, but once that's done, these fixed assets will be able to support a much bigger company, so they should get nice leverage out of it going forward). I don't think it'll take 6-7 years to get to 12bn. Wouldn't be surprised if they reached that in 2016 (they just raised more for new acquisitions). A lot of the newly acquired revenue is in contract logistics, which has a better margin profile and higher barriers to entry. Anyway, it's an interesting one.

The Radiant Logistics thread probably wasn't the best place to discuss this company, so I'm creating this separate one.

If I'm not mistaken, that from February of this year. Since then, XPO has acquired Norbert Dentressangle and that alone should allow them (when it closes) to beat their 2017 guidance.

I've also been studying the space lately. I like it very much so far. I had looked at CHRW a few years ago, but decided to pass. XPO seems to be the most interesting one these days. Scale seems to matter a lot because of network effects (in each mode, and cross-selling between modes to the same customers), and I think ultimately we might see a few very big winners, kind of like in the cable industry. Is XPO the TCI of the space? Good question.

Not sure what the original source is, I found it via twitter: https://twitter.com/2ndadopter/status/606160341785939968

Putting this here, but applies to other Malone businesses:

I'm not familiar with either platforms loyalty program. But my understanding is the gift card business is not likely going to change. People will buy gift cards. And then there's the loyalty business which is like storage of the customers "credit". Essentially, this is a business of managing the merchants "credit" in a network. For now I am not seeing how apple pay will affect this ecosystem. Now I did invest in blackberry so take my words with a grain of salt ! Again. Love to hear your valuation of this business , earning power. On a very conservative basis. Thanks. Gary If you can pay for things pretty much everywhere with Apple Pay the way you can with a credit card, wouldn't it be easy to have digital gift cards that are basically being either credited to an existing account, or that are a separate virtual card inside your virtual Apple Pay wallet? It could even be given to people as physical gift cards that you scan into your iPhone, in the same way that if you get an iTunes/App Store gift card, you can scan the barcode in the back and your iTunes account gets credited. I don't know much about Ackroo, but if I was looking at the industry, this seems like something important that is going to play out over the next 3-5 years. I will certainly pay attention to Apple Pay, etc, to learn more. I think the key here is if the rewards / giftcard is based on Apple's currency or Merchant's own currency. So yes it's all $, but in the case of gift card or loyalty program, the currency is that of the merchants. And Ackroo's service is to manage this - almost like a bank, except it is a private one, over its private network. Now comes Apple Pay - which is a great payment service that competes with cash and other major credit cards. But will Apple be managing the merchant's currency ? I think that's a key point to find out more (I don't have an answer at this point). Interesting you looked at the industry - did you look at WEX (formerly Wright Express). It is in the fleet business... Anyway, digressing here. Very good question about points and other alternative currencies (miles, etc). The answer is "we don't know yet", but if I had to bet on it, I'd say that Apple will offer the ability to use any kind of currency you want with their loyalty program, if only because that's a very common thing and their offering would be incomplete without it. I don't think their primary concern is charging a tiny management fee for points or whatever, what they want is to make the user experience as good as possible so that people pick their products and stick with them, and managing all your miles and points within your phone or Watch sounds like something that will please many of their customers and encourage the use of Apple Pay overall.

I'm not familiar with either platforms loyalty program. But my understanding is the gift card business is not likely going to change. People will buy gift cards. And then there's the loyalty business which is like storage of the customers "credit". Essentially, this is a business of managing the merchants "credit" in a network. For now I am not seeing how apple pay will affect this ecosystem. Now I did invest in blackberry so take my words with a grain of salt ! Again. Love to hear your valuation of this business , earning power. On a very conservative basis. Thanks. Gary If you can pay for things pretty much everywhere with Apple Pay the way you can with a credit card, wouldn't it be easy to have digital gift cards that are basically being either credited to an existing account, or that are a separate virtual card inside your virtual Apple Pay wallet? It could even be given to people as physical gift cards that you scan into your iPhone, in the same way that if you get an iTunes/App Store gift card, you can scan the barcode in the back and your iTunes account gets credited. I don't know much about Ackroo, but if I was looking at the industry, this seems like something important that is going to play out over the next 3-5 years.

How do you think an Apple Pay loyalty program platform (as is rumored to happen soon) could affect the business? Same question for the eventual Android Pay.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/apples-tim-cook-delivers-blistering-speech-on-encryption-privacy/

You're taking it out of context. He means that when this topic is usually covered, it is badly covered, so you can ignore the media's alarms about record margin debt because they are looking at the absolute numbers, which you can't parse properly on their own. Unless you think that relative margin debt should go down as the market goes up over time. Otherwise, today's nominal margin debt must be just crazy compared to the nominal amount in 1980...

Relative margin debt: http://econompicdata.blogspot.ca/2015/06/ignore-margin-debt-alarm.html (thanks Bluegrass Capital)

WSJ on possible LBTYA and VOD deal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/liberty-globals-reach-for-vodafone-could-fall-short-1433262523

Looks like Samsung Galaxy S6 isn't quite bringing the fight to the iPhone the way that many people predicted when it came out... Sales estimated at 6 million after 20 days on market, vs 10 million iPhone 6 sales on first weekend when it came out. And the iPhone 6 is getting late in its yearly cycle, so in theory the Galaxy should be best able to compete right now, and it'll lose some ground when the iPhone 6S comes out this September... http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/06/02/galaxy-hasnt-edged-out-iphone/

Amen!

Doug Kramer from Horizon Kinetics has joined twitter @HorizonKinetics Not sure if he's the only one posting from the account or if others will use it too, but thought it might interest people who like FRMO to know about it.

I think they recently did a small price increase on it, but that's from memory so I could be wrong.

Ok. Didn't make sense to me because I didn't read the whole article. Thanks for clarifying.

I just read the intro, so I could be missing something, but on average, all introverts vs all extroverts, the premise is probably correct. Recipe for being rich: 1. Think a lot 2. Judge people while doing it 3. Tell everyone along the way 4. $$$ I have no idea what your post means.

The Atlantic has a profile of Malone: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/john-malone-time-warner-cable-charter-communications-and-tech/394505/