Apologies for the late send — we had some tech issues — here are your charts for today:
A pair of New York taxi drivers have filed a $2.56 billion lawsuit against New York City, accusing officials of raking in millions of dollars from taxi drivers over debt repayments for taxi medallions, which are the transferable permits that allow taxicabs to operate in New York.
Medallion or smartphone
At one point in 2011 buying a taxi medallion would have cost you more than $1 million, an enormous sum which was often borrowed and paid back over the course of many years of driving.
Once Uber and Lyft showed up, the options for would-be drivers became a lot cheaper. Because you can't "flag down" an Uber on the street (instead specifically requesting they come to you) Uber drivers have never needed a taxi medallion — if you had a smartphone and a car you were pretty much good to go. As ride-hailing grew, the price of a taxi medallion plummeted — by as much as 80%, leaving some yellow cab drivers furious over what they believe were overly inflated prices given the circumstances.
Threat of extinction
The pandemic hasn't been kind to New York yellow cabs. According to data from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, before the start of the pandemic yellow taxis were doing around 200,000 trips a day, fewer than Uber but still more than ride-hailing app Lyft. The pandemic collapsed the entire industry, but ride-hailing has recovered significantly faster — the latest count puts yellow taxi trips at just 50,000 a day. That's roughly a quarter of the volume they were doing pre-pandemic, and just one-tenth of the volume from a decade ago. The yellow cabs of New York are in trouble.
One of the hardest universities to get into, Harvard, just got even harder. Harvard College has just released its admission statistics for the class of 2025, which reveals that just 1,968 applicants have been offered places, from a pool of more than 57,000 — which works out to an acceptance rate of just 3.4%. That's the lowest acceptance rate in Harvard's history.
The increase in applications is partly down to the removal of mandatory standardized testing (the SAT and ACT). The Wall Street Journal reports that over 1,600 four-year colleges did not require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, leading to an increase in applications.
While the 2020 numbers might be exaggerated because of the testing changes, it's certainly true that acceptance rates at highly-selective institutions have been going down. Rightly or wrongly a (good) college or university education has become a pre-requisite for many jobs and industries, and competition for places has only become more intense — and a lot more expensive.
Adobe is a tech giant.
The American software company may not get the media attention of other big tech companies, but in financial terms, it absolutely should. At yesterday's closing price, Adobe, Inc. has a market cap of $246bn. For some context on just how big that is, Netflix's market cap is $245bn.
Photoshop and PDFs are big business
In the last 15 years Adobe has transformed itself into a software powerhouse, more than tripling its revenue since 2010. Although the company is most famous for its PDF-reader and photo-editing software Photoshop, Adobe actually sells an entire suite of software products, all sold with recurring subscriptions, which make up the bulk of Adobe's business.
Back in 2013, Adobe pivoted to that recurring subscription model, and its revenues have grown every single year since, last year reaching almost $13bn, with a whopping 87% gross profit margin.
Pivoting to the subscription model was a genius move for the company, but it doesn't always mean happy customers. This week Adobe grabbed headlines when a few customers on Twitter revealed the huge cancellation fees they were being charged when they tried to cancel their contracts. It turns out many of Adobe's subscription products are year-long contracts that just happen to get billed monthly.
1) Egyptian authorities have seized the Ever Given, the ship that blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week. An Egyptian court has ordered the vessel's Japanese owner to pay $900m in compensation.
2) Fintech company Plaid has raised $425m, valuing the company at $13.4bn — more than triple what Visa was set to pay for the company before the acquisition fell apart a few months ago.
3) The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was halted across the US on Tuesday after concerns about blood clots arose. So far 6.8 million doses of the J&J vaccine have been administered and there have been 6 reported cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot.
4) Build For Tomorrow, a podcast by Jason Feifer, explores the surprising, funny, and sometimes infuriating stories from our past, which can help us understand our world now. Check out Build For Tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.**
5)Fortune magazine has come out with its list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For — Cisco topped the list this year
,6)Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform, is set to go public today. Investor appetite is expected to be strong and its valuation is expected to be $100bn+.
**This is a sponsored snack.
