AMZN - Amazon.com, Inc.
1,878.50 +0.23 (0.01%)
After hours: 7:54PM EDT
| Previous Close | 1,913.90 |
| Open | 1,911.84 |
| Bid | 1,879.35 x 1000 |
| Ask | 1,881.50 x 3000 |
| Day's Range | 1,872.45 - 1,916.39 |
| 52 Week Range | 1,307.00 - 2,050.50 |
| Volume | 2,758,347 |
| Avg. Volume | 4,129,342 |
| Market Cap | 924.732B |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 1.73 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 78.41 |
| EPS (TTM) | 23.95 |
| Earnings Date | Jul 24, 2019 - Jul 29, 2019 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | N/A |
| 1y Target Est | 2,246.75 |
- Yahoo Finance•3 hours ago
Streaming boom becomes 'holy grail' for resurgent music industry
Streaming services are driving growth in the music industry as questions persist about whether artists and songwriters are getting their fair share of the pie.
- TechCrunch•19 hours ago
Amazon Prime Day 2019 expands to become a 48-hour sale on July 15-16
Amazon is preparing for its longest Prime Day ever. The company announced today it will host a 48-hour Prime Day sales event this year, starting at midnight on Monday, July 15 and extending for two full days. The Amazon sales holiday -- its own version of a Black Friday-type sale -- will feature over a million deals worldwide, including what it claims will be the biggest Prime Day discounts on Alexa devices to date.
- Engadget•20 hours ago
Apple's Seattle workforce will quintuple by 2024
Apple is doubling down on the number of employees it plans on hiring in its new Seattle site. The new roles would focus on software and hardware and effectively multiply Apple's existing workforce by five. Currently, there are roughly 500 Apple employees in Seattle, focused mainly in its retail stores and machine learning hub.
- Bloomberg•16 minutes ago
Micron Resumes Some Huawei Shipments Despite Trump Blacklist
(Bloomberg) -- Micron Technology Inc., the largest U.S. maker of computer memory chips, said it resumed some shipments to China’s Huawei Technologies Co., appearing to find a way around an export ban that threatens growth for the semiconductor industry.Micron, which explained the decision Tuesday as it reported earnings, studied the export restrictions and determined “a subset” of products it sells to Huawei are not subject to the rules, Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra said on a conference call. That sent stock surging as much as 11% in extended trading.Micron was forced to halt shipments to one of its largest customers after the Trump administration banned Huawei from buying American technology. Micron makes chips used as the main memory in computers and as storage in mobile devices. Sales to the Chinese telecommunications company generate about 13% of Micron’s annual revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“We began those shipments in the last two weeks,” Mehrotra said. The company completed its own review of the various and complex restrictions on supplying the Chinese company and made its own decision, he said, without providing further specifics.Micron’s announcement helped other chip shares gain. The Boise, Idaho-based company’s stock had been among the most hardest hit this year by concern that a trade war between would cut U.S. companies off from their largest market, China. Mehrotra also said there are signs that demand is increasing as his customers work through their stockpiles of unused parts.Micron may be the first company to go public about continuing some level of business with Huawei after looking closely at the rules, according to Cross Research analyst Steven Fox. Even when companies have headquarters in the U.S., they may be able, through ownership of overseas subsidiaries and operations, to classify their technology as foreign, he said.“It’s one of those things that’s very hard to calculate,” Fox said. “There’s a partial amount of shipments that you should think about, not just with Micron, but with other companies in the supply chain too, as continuing.”Micron and others may be taking advantage of a loophole, according to Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. If less than 25% of the technology in a chip originates in the U.S., then it’s not covered by the ban, he said. That could lead to the transfer of patents to overseas entities, something the U.S. government would oppose, he said.Cassidy said he’s concerned that President Donald Trump’s administration might see the resumption of shipments to Huawei as undermining its goal of putting pressure on the Chinese in trade negotiations and take other actions.The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a resolution Tuesday designating Huawei and fellow Chinese equipment maker ZTE Corp. as threats to national security.Mehrotra has been telling investors that a much broader set of customers will help insulate the industry from the brutal downturns that have wiped out profitability in the past. He said that data-center owners, such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, who had cut orders as they worked through stockpiles of unused components, are now starting to order again.Earlier, Micron Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said the company’s revenue will be $4.5 billion, plus or minus $200 million, in the period ending in August. Analysts, on average, projected $4.56 billion. Micron reported sales fell 39% to $4.79 billion in the fiscal third quarter, topping analysts’ estimates of $4.68 billion.Profit, excluding certain items, was $1.05 a share in the period ended May 30. Analysts, on average, estimated 78 cents a share. The company projected adjusted profit of 45 cents a share, plus or minus 7 cents, in the current quarter. Analysts estimated 63 cents a share.Last quarter, the company said it would idle 5% of production for DRAM and NAND memory chips because of weaker demand and reduce its planned capital expenses in the fiscal year to about $9 billion. Micron said Tuesday it intends to “meaningfully” reduce its spending on new plants and equipment in its fiscal year 2020, in order to align increases in supply with demand levels.(Updates with comments from analyst in the sixth paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Alistair BarrFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg•1 hour ago
FedEx's Disappointments Are Piling Up
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- FedEx Corp. has managed to fall out of a basement window.Expectations heading into the parcel-delivery company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report on Tuesday were low. In the past six months, the company cut its 2019 outlook twice amid a weakening global trade backdrop; announced a series of puzzling executive departures; became a candidate for inclusion on China’s list of unreliable entities; and dropped Amazon.com Inc. as a customer for its domestic air-delivery unit. And yet FedEx found a way to pile on further, forecasting its first annual decline in adjusted earnings per share in more than five years. FedEx said it expects a mid-single-digit percentage-point drop in its fiscal 2020 EPS, after adjusting for certain retirement plans and the ever-escalating budget for integrating the company’s acquisition of TNT Express.(1)And it could be an even sharper slide than FedEx is predicting. The company’s guidance assumes moderate U.S. economic growth, “no further weakening in international economic conditions from the company’s current forecast and no additional adverse developments in international trade policies and relations.” Those are huge variables. The U.S. is reportedly willing to suspend an escalation of tariffs on Chinese goods to enable talks between the two sides, but anything can happen on that front. China, meanwhile, is reportedly contemplating blacklisting FedEx over the misrouting of packages destined for Huawei Technologies or involving the company’s products.To the extent that its crystal ball is working, FedEx warned that macroeconomic weakness and trade uncertainty as well as the “strategic decision” not to renew the Amazon contract would pressure operating income at its Express air-delivery unit. FedEx has said the e-commerce giant only accounts for 1.3% of its overall revenue and on Tuesday said the negative impact to its operating income from this change will reverse in fiscal 2021. But the e-commerce giant and its logistics aspirations are likely to have reverberating and lasting effects on FedEx's network.Exhibit A could be a report from the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that FedEx is offering steep discounts to entice other online merchants to fill its planes with their e-commerce shipments. FedEx on Tuesday pushed back on that report, saying it hadn't made any pricing changes recently and that it's seen strong growth in demand since a change last year. Even without extra discounts, e-commerce deliveries typically yield less than good shipped to businesses or urgent legal documents and medical supplies. FedEx warned of an ongoing shift to less-profitable services as another factor weighing on its Express unit.FedEx expects operating income at its Ground unit to grow in fiscal 2020, but investors are focused on margins, and there was little in the company’s earnings report to give them hope that the multiyear slide on that front had come to an end. FedEx cited higher costs since it started offering delivery six days a week in January as one drag on its fourth-quarter results. Well, FedEx plans to roll out seven-day-a-week delivery by January 2020. The amount of investment required for FedEx needs to equip its network to profitably handle the deluge of e-commerce shipments isn’t shrinking, either. The company expects to spend another $5.9 billion on capital expenditures in 2020, short of the $6.2 billion analysts had been expecting but up from $5.5 billion in fiscal 2019.Expect that capital-expenditure budget to come under scrutiny. FedEx appears to already be anticipating it: “While we are adjusting our costs to mitigate revenue weakness and market shifts, we will continue to invest in areas that expand our capabilities, improve our long-term efficiencies and reduce our cost to serve,” CFO Alan Graf said in the earnings press release. On a call with analysts, FedEx said there were a number of good projects that didn't make the cut. But it remains unclear what kind of return FedEx is getting for all of this spending, or if it’s just throwing money at its challenges. Much of its spending over the past few years has been earmarked for new aircraft purchases, but you could make the argument the Express fleet should be rethought, rather than just replaced. Pressed by analysts on the company’s last earnings call, Graf said he wasn’t going to let “one bad quarter decide how we're going to manage this business for the next five years.” But what about a string of bad quarters? FedEx is now looking at two disappointing years.(1) FedEx now expects to spend $1.7 billion cumulatively through fiscal 2021 to integrate the $4.4 billion acquisition of TNT. That's up from a forecast of $1.5 billion only three months ago and compares with an initial prediction of $700 million to $800 million in integration expenses.To contact the author of this story: Brooke Sutherland at bsutherland7@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Brooke Sutherland is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies. She previously wrote an M&A column for Bloomberg News.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Motley Fool•2 hours ago
FedEx Partners With Dollar General for Package Pickup and Drop-Off
The carrier is positioning itself for an e-commerce boom to come.
- Bloomberg•2 hours ago
DOD Tech Chief Prepares for `JEDI' Cloud Amid Court Battle
(Bloomberg) -- The Pentagon is preparing for the rollout of its controversial cloud services program even though the requirements of the $10 billion contract are still being challenged in court by Oracle Corp.Dana Deasy, the Pentagon’s chief information officer, asked department leaders for recommendations about how they plan to use the contract and told them not to initiate any other cloud agreements without his consent, according to a copy of the memo obtained by Bloomberg News.Deasy sent the memo dated May 20 to a wide range of Pentagon officials outlining guidance for the “fourth estate” -- the Defense Department agencies that provide human resources, services contracting and other support services to the military -- to identify technology programs that could be transitioned to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI, and to a preexisting cloud program called milCloud 2.0.The memo sheds insight on how the Defense Department is moving ahead with implementation of the JEDI cloud program even while a legal dispute raises questions about the contract’s terms. Asked whether the Pentagon’s choice for the JEDI award is contingent on a decision in the Oracle lawsuit, Deasy told a group of reporters at a breakfast on Tuesday that “they are two disconnected events.”He added that the JEDI award will likely be decided “sometime toward the end of August.”Deasy’s memo also said that departments that have already gained approval to migrate data to other computing storage centers may continue, but must “evaluate JEDI as the General Purpose cloud solution at the end of the period of performance.” The memo also contained a list of more than 50 expected data center closings. The Defense Department has said JEDI should become the department’s general-purpose cloud to store the “majority of systems and applications.Defense Department spokeswoman Elissa Smith confirmed the authenticity of the memo and added that the Air Force, Army, and Navy have also “begun identifying and prioritizing programs and migrations to JEDI.”Deasy said Tuesday that over the last six months his team has contacted U.S. regional commanders, such as the U.S. Central Command, for a series of “cloud-awareness sessions.”“There is a significant amount of pent-up demand just waiting to use the capability once it comes online,” Deasy said. The U.S. Transportation Command that’s in charge of maritime, aviation and land transport has developed a set of tasks they want to migrate to the Jedi Cloud “as soon as that contract is awarded.”Contested ContractThe contract has been contested by Oracle, which the Pentagon eliminated from the bidding in April along with International Business Machines Corp. for not meeting minimum criteria. That move left Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as the last remaining competitors.Oracle filed a lawsuit in December in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims alleging that the Pentagon crafted overly narrow contract requirements and failed to investigate relationships between former Defense Department employees and Amazon. In May, Oracle filed an amended complaint alleging that Amazon offered two former Pentagon employees jobs while they were working on the contract.The Government Accountability Office and an internal Pentagon investigation determined the conflict of interest allegations didn’t compromise the integrity of the procurement. Oral arguments in the court case are expected to occur in July.(Adds that a lawsuit raises questions about the contract's terms in fourth paragrah. The full name of JEDI was corrected in a previous version of the story.)To contact the reporters on this story: Naomi Nix in Washington at nnix1@bloomberg.net;Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Larry LiebertFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Motley Fool•4 hours agoIDC: Smart-Home Market to Soar Through 2023
Nearly 1.5 billion smart-home devices are expected to ship in 2023.
- Motley Fool•4 hours ago
Amazon's Prime Day Will Stretch to 48 Hours in 2019
The e-commerce titan aims to take it up another notch with its fifth annual sales event.
- Bloomberg•4 hours ago
Shopify Tumbles as Euphoria Is Put to the Test
(Bloomberg) -- Shopify Inc.’s biggest drop of 2019 shows the e-commerce stock is testing the limits of what investors are willing to pay for rapid revenue growth.The shares fell 8.9% in New York on Tuesday, their biggest drop since Dec. 14, after more than doubling from the start of the year. That run-up created more than $25 billion in market value as investors looked past rising competitive threats and focused on fast-growing sales and new online checkout products. The money-losing company’s shares now trade at around 21 times estimated sales, more expensive by that measure than any technology stock in the S&P 500 Index.That’s making Wall Street squeamish. At least five analysts have downgraded the company in the past two months. In almost every case, the lofty stock price was the top concern.“We now see more limited upside to shares over the next 12 months,” Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian said in a Tuesday note downgrading the stock to neutral from buy. He cited a “premium valuation.”What started as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke’s effort to sell snowboards on the internet has grown into a business projected to generate more than $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019. In addition to online sales, Shopify now competes with companies like Square Inc. at the point of sale in brick-and-mortar stores. Last week, Ottawa-based Shopify said it plans to spend $1 billion on a chain of fulfillment centers that would pit it even more directly against Amazon.com Inc.Shopify’s break-neck expansion has come at the cost of profitability. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit on a GAAP basis and isn’t projected to until 2020, according to analyst estimates.While investors have surely been attracted to Shopify for its revenue growth, which is projected to exceed 40% this year, they also prize its execution. The company hasn’t missed sales estimates in the 16 quarters it has reported financial results as a publicly traded company.“The reason I think the shares have done so well, independent of the real strong and favorable environment for software stocks, is that it’s lived up to its promise and then some,” Tom Forte, a DA Davidson analyst, said in an interview. “They now have a lengthy track record of execution and being shrewd when it comes to capital allocation.”Forte remains bullish on Shopify and says increased U.S. regulatory scrutiny of Amazon and other tech giants could create additional opportunities for Shopify, making the fulfillment center push critical.Notwithstanding the recent downgrades, most analysts remain optimistic. Shopify’s U.S.-traded shares have 15 buy ratings, 11 holds and two sells, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The stock has gained almost 1,600% since its May 2015 initial public offering at $17 a share.Bearish bets have fallen to the lowest level in more than a year, according to IHS Markit data. Shares on loan to short sellers account for just 2.1% of the float, down from a high of nearly 10% in October.Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management sold some of its small stake in Shopify earlier this year based on the stock’s performance, according to Chief Executive Officer Ross Gerber.“We don’t have a large position,” he said. “If I did I would sell a little more for sure.”At the same time, Gerber said he still “loves” the company and is surprised that it hasn’t been acquired by a bigger rival like Amazon yet.(Updates shares in second paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Jeran Wittenstein in San Francisco at jwittenstei1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Richard Richtmyer, Morwenna ConiamFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Motley Fool•4 hours ago
Amazon Wins ‘.amazon’ Domain Name, Aggravating South American Region and Undermining Digital Commons
Who has the right to use an Amazon domain name? The people who live there or a company with the same name? ICANN has sold out the Brazilians.
- Bloomberg•5 hours ago
Roku Extends Slide as Analysts See Retreat From Red-Hot Run
(Bloomberg) -- Roku Inc. shares fell on Tuesday, with the stock retreating further from record levels in what analysts said was a reaction to the company’s massive year-to-date advance.The stock dropped as much as 6.6% in what was on track to be its fourth straight decline, its longest losing streak since a six-day decline in April. Roku, a platform for video-streaming services, has lost about 12% over the four-day slump.Even with the recent losses, the stock is up nearly 250% from a December low, and it hit record levels last week.“There are plenty of examples of high-growth companies that are well positioned in popular sectors, where investors get ahead of themselves,” said Tom Forte, an analyst at D.A. Davidson who has a buy rating on the stock.“Roku is in a very favorable position, where it can exploit the large investments being made by participants in the video category -- not just Netflix, but also Amazon, Apple and Disney,” he told Bloomberg in a phone interview. “As video ad revenue gravitates to where the eyeballs are, to [over-the-top] services and away from legacy, linear television, I think it has the ability to grow into its valuation.”Roku’s stock has long been in a tug-of-war between its high levels of growth and a valuation that analysts often see as excessive. The stock can be extremely volatile, moving more than 20% following each of its past four quarterly results.Roku’s second-quarter results are estimated to come out on August 7, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Currently, analysts expect it to report revenue growth of more than 40%, a pace that’s expected to continue in the subsequent quarter, and then stay above 30% for the next two quarters.This growth is seen as fueled by the company’s continued popularity with consumers at a time when streaming video has become a dominant part of the entertainment landscape. According to a Citi analysis of over-the-top services, the Roku Channel was the seventh most popular channel in May, up from ninth place in April.“The market clearly believes Roku has nearly unlimited growth potential,” wrote Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter in a report dated June 24.He added that while the company had built “an exceptional platform” and “has positioned itself as best in class for OTT advertising,” these factors were “fully priced in” the share price.Wedbush has a neutral rating on Roku, but on Monday boosted its price target to $105 from $65.To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Vlastelica in New York at rvlastelica1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Steven FrommFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks•6 hours ago
What to Expect from Nike's (NKE) Q4 2019 Earnings Results
Welcome to the latest episode of the Full-Court Finance podcast from Zacks Investment Research where Associate Stock Strategist Ben Rains dives into what investors should expect from Nike's (NKE) Q4 fiscal 2019 financial results that are due out Thursday.
- Business Wire•6 hours ago
Amazon and Seattle Public Schools Team Up to Bring Computer Science and Robotics to 30 Title I Schools
Amazon funding Amazon Future Engineer Robotics grants – including access to computer science education, FIRST robotics program registrations to start a robotics team, and a tour of
- Zacks•6 hours ago
Buy Shopify (SHOP) Stock Amid Analyst Optimism?
Shopify (SHOP) has been making noise as a possible Amazon (AMZN) alternative,
- Market Realist•9 hours ago
Slowdown Fears Ignite after Housing and Consumer Confidence Data
On June 25, the soft economic data isn't an isolated case. We have been getting a flurry of dismal data points. The US economy added only 75,000 non-farm jobs in May.
- Market Realist•9 hours ago
Another Retailer Crumbles in China as e-Commerce Sales Rise
French retail giant Carrefour has agreed to sell an 80% stake in its China operations for ~$705 million to Suning.com, an Alibaba-backed company. While China represents a massive opportunity with its almost 1.4 billion population, it has not been an easy market for foreign companies, at least when it comes to retail and e-commerce.
- Zacks•9 hours ago
JetBlue Slaps Infringement Charge on Walmart Over Jetblack
JetBlue (JBLU) believes, Walmart is trying to cash in on the carrier's goodwill by using the name Jetblack for its personal shopping service.
- Investing.com•9 hours ago
StockBeat - Roku Slumps as Amazon Competition Heats Up
Investing.com – Roku slumped Tuesday on fears the streaming device company is set to face stiff competition from Amazon after the e-commerce giant launched new smart TVs.
- Bloomberg•9 hours ago
These Jobs Are, Like, So L.A.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- What do people do for a living in the New York-Newark-Jersey City metropolitan area? If you rank the sectors with the most jobs, it’s health care, retail, leisure and hospitality — which rank near the top almost everywhere. A more revealing way to sort things is by employment location quotient, which is provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data and measures how much more prevalent an industry is in one area than in the nation as a whole. These are, in effect, the New Yorkiest industries:The list goes to 19 because when it went to 20 I got warning messages from Bloomberg’s in-house charting app that the graphic was too big. Which made me sad, because the next two “industries” in the ranking were the oh-so-New Yorky theater companies and art dealers. These are all what are known as four-, five- and six-digit industries under the North American Industry Classification System, meaning not broad sectors but narrow and sometimes very narrow ones. I weeded out overlap, so there should be no double-counting of jobs in the above numbers. Someone who really cared about about design and readability wouldn’t try to squeeze so much into one table, I know, but I was more interested in the gloriously true-to-cliché but also quite informative picture of the New York-area economy that such a long list provides.Related: Where Microbrewery Jobs Are OverflowingFinancial Jobs Aren’t Just in New YorkA Booming Local Health-Care Industry Isn’t Always a Good Thing The Internet Is Everywhere, But Internet Jobs Aren’tThere’s journalism, represented by the two parts that I’ve been working in since coming to New York in 1996 (news syndicates and periodical publishers), and its relatives in advertising and public relations. There’s high finance. There’s fashion. There’s books. There’s music (that’s the kind of record production they’re talking about). There’s performing arts. There’s fashion. There’s the diamond guys. There’s the newsstands. There’s the photo-equipment stores, or at least the photo-equipment wholesalers. And there’s … libraries and archives, for which the best explanation seems to be that the New York Public Library is a private nonprofit that gets funding from the city, meaning that its employees are almost certainly included in the by-industry data (which excludes government workers) while public library workers in most cities are not.Here’s the same exercise for the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim. It delivers on the clichés as well, with agents — of course! — coming in first place.Just missing the cut here was “other aircraft parts and equipment,” a remnant of an industry that used to be a very big deal in the Los Angeles area but has been decimated since the early 1990s.(2) Overall the list is a mix of well-paid entertainment industry work and grittier, less-well-remunerated manufacturing and wholesaling jobs (although pay is pretty good in doll, toy and game manufacturing, thanks to the presence of industry leader Mattel Inc.’s headquarters in El Segundo). This preponderance of blue-collar industries won’t come as a surprise to people in the Los Angeles area — which is also home to the country’s two busiest ports, among other things — but it doesn’t exactly accord with the area’s global image. Oh, and the high location quotient for HMO (short for health management organization) medical centers is a California-wide thing: Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland-based nonprofit HMO(3) that runs its own network of hospitals, has a 50% share of the state’s health insurance market. Here are the top-location-quotient industries in the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin:They still make a lot of stuff in and around Chicago! Manufacturing employment in the area is not what it used to be, with a 39% decline since 1990 compared with 27% nationwide, but it’s been mostly rising since 2010. There are also signs here of Chicago’s role as a mid-American economic hub: the commodities markets, the professional organizations, the credit bureaus. There’s not much sign of likely growth industries of the future, though — and to some extent, that’s true of all three of the biggest metro areas.One can make these lists for every U.S. metropolitan area, and even every county, using the BLS’s QCEW data viewer. The agency suppresses local industry data when it might reveal details about individual employers, so smaller areas will often deliver less accurate rankings. Still, it’s a wonderful way to explore the nation’s far-from-uniform economic geography, as I’ve been doing in my columns for the past few days. And I really should stop there, but as I was looking through a few other metro areas’ most distinctive industries, I came across this great top 10 for Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue: One can find all the Seattle area’s iconic modern corporations reflected here: aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co. (which moved its corporate headquarters but not much else to Chicago in 2001), software giant Microsoft Corp., “electronic shopping and mail-order house” Amazon.com Inc., coffee juggernaut Starbucks Corp.(4) But signs of the area’s past are apparent, too, in the form of fishing, seafood packaging, the port — and the by-now-totally-retro monorail. Local economic data can tell some very interesting stories.(1) Worse than decimated, actually. Employment in transportation equipment manufacturing in the Los Angeles area is down 65% since 1990.(2) The preferred term for what Kaiser does now seems to be integrated managed care consortium, but the acronym IMCC hasn't really caught on.(3) Starbucks headquarters employees do not appear to be included in the tally for coffee and tea manufacturing, but workers at its "flexible roasting plant" in the Seattle suburb of Kent probably are.To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Market Realist•10 hours ago
Should You Be Paying Attention to Recession Pundits?
On June 24, CNBC reported that UBS believes that the global economy could be headed for a recession if the upcoming meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Japan fails to make any headway.
- Zacks•10 hours ago
Tech Giants Serve Underbanked Community, Rattles Banking Space
Tech giants like Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Square (SQ) and others are providing financial flexibility to the underbanked customers with the help of their offerings.
