3 charts for you today:
The big news in the tech world this week was Salesforce, the customer relationship management giant, completing its acquisition of Slack for $27.7bn.
As we noted in September, on paper Slack is exactly the kind of company that might have "done a Zoom" in 2020 as remote work and biz communication tools exploded in usage and popularity. Thanks to competition from Microsoft (and others) that didn't quite happen, leaving its share price roughly where it was at the start of the year... until Salesforce swooped in with an offer for the whole thing.
Good at selling, better at buying
Salesforce might pay its bills by helping its customers sell and manage client relationships, but its own corporate strategy has been a lot more focused on buying. The Slack deal is Salesforce's biggest yet, and it comes just 16 months since Salesforce splashed $15.7bn on buying Tableau — the analytics and data viz software.
A lot of acquisitions end up being poor deals for the acquiring company. Too much ego, too much "empire-building" on the behalf of management or simply paying too much for the target company means that a lot of deals are often regretted 2, 3 or 4 years down the line. Maybe $27bn and change is too much to pay for Slack, a company that only does ~$230m of revenue per quarter. But, if any tech company has proven it knows how to buy and integrate big deals — it's Salesforce.
The vaccines are coming, but will people take them? According to data from Ipsos, the intentions of people across many countries to get a COVID-19 vaccine, if one were available, have been mostly falling since the summer.
Je suis sceptique
The French population is among the most sceptical. Only 54% of those polled in France totally agree that they would get a COVID-19 vaccine. Scepticism of vaccines in France is undoubtedly influenced by what happened in 2009, when France ordered millions of Euros worth of flu vaccinations, only for many of them to be wasted, as well as the "yellow vest" anti-establishment movement of 2018 that has fueled general government scepticism ever since.
In the US, views on vaccines aren't much more favourable with 64% of Americans totally confident that they would get a vaccine, down from 67% in August. That number hopefully might have gone up in the last week or so as former US presidents, Obama, Clinton & Bush, all agreed to have their COVID-19 vaccinations publicly televised.
With that we're going to predict the next trend of 2021... celebrities getting vaccines publicly or broadcasting them on social media.
Spotify is doing its annual Wrapped series, exploring each users listening habits and telling them, for the most part, that they aren't as cool as they thought they were.
If Spotify did Wrapped a month later, there's a decent chance Mariah Carey would make her way into a lot of people's top artists. We explored the latest data from Spotify to see which classic Christmas hits are already making their way into the charts. Who is on top? Who else, but queen of Christmas music Mariah Carey.
Her song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" has been ruling the Christmas hit list pretty much every year since it came out in 1994. This year it crept into Spotify's global top 200 chart on November 1st, and has risen steadily ever since, now up to #3 on the global chart — routinely racking up 4m+ streams per day.
According to Spotify's data, the other Christmas mega-hits are "Last Christmas" by Wham!, "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande and Michael Buble's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas".
Future proof
A truly successful Christmas album, or single, is a great way for an artist to future proof themselves. One Christmas hit can provide an income for artists long after they stop producing or releasing new music (used to great effect as a plot device in the film About a Boy).
A ballpark figure for how much each stream is worth is around $0.004. So 4 million streams per day is a cool $16,000 in Mariah's pockets (and whoever she has to split it with) everyday. And it's only December 4th.
1) Warner Bros. has announced it will release17 of its upcoming movies simultaneously on streaming service HBO Max and in cinemas.
2) The US economy added only 245,000 jobs in November, well short of analyst expectations for gains of 440,000 — more evidence that the US economic recovery is slowing.
3) South Africa's lottery numbers on Tuesday came out 5, 6, 7, 8, 9... and 10 — prompting an investigation into whether anything nefarious was going on.
4)Kate Petrova published some incredible analysis of 11,000+ reviews of scented candles to see if the COVID symptom "lack of smell" showed up in the aggregate data. She found that average review rating for candles did fall this year, and that "the proportion of reviews mentioning lack of scent grew from < 2% in January to close to 6% in November".
5) Nightowl has helped automate workflows in Slack for teams of 10 to 10,000 — making it the next best thing to cloning yourself.**
6) OPEC and its oil-producing cartel have agreed to increase production by 500,000 barrels per day, beginning in January.
**This is a sponsored snack.
