Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:
It's still no fun to be an airline operator.
That was the short version of the update that American Airlines gave investors this week as the company reported a $780m operating loss for the last quarter of 2021, which we've visualized above.
The grass was greener
That is the 8th quarterly operating loss that American Airlines has reported in a row — a far cry from the 31 straight quarters of operating profits that the airline reported from 2012 to 2019.
The impact of the pandemic can't be overstated. Passenger numbers are still down 20-30% relative to 2019, depending on the day, and although some costs (like aircraft fuel, landing fees and maintenance) have come down, it's been nowhere near enough to compensate. Salaries and wages or the depreciation of assets that are getting older, are a lot harder to quickly reduce.
The latest thorn in the airline's side has been crew cancellations (due to COVID-19) and bad weather. Over the 2 weeks starting Dec 25th, American Airlines had to cancel almost 1,500 flights.
The missing puzzle piece
Despite a tough start to the year, the company is optimistic about 2022, expecting capacity to be down only about 5% from 2019, but with one major question mark: corporate travel.
Justifying getting on a plane for a meeting is a lot harder than it used to be — and that's a problem for the airlines because corporate travel used to make up~40% of revenues. That's a big piece of the puzzle... and it's probably going to be missing for a while.
When it was first getting popular social media app TikTok was good at getting your attention for 5 or 10 minutes with its addictive viral videos, but initially at least, users weren't sticking around for that long.
Now they are.
Just one more video
According to a new report from App Annie, global TikTok users are now spending almost 20 hours a month on the app — more than the average for Instagram and the same as on Facebook.
In the US TikTok is already ahead of both platforms, grabbing an average of 25.6 hours of time from its users every month — equivalent to about 50 minutes of TikTok scrolling, or posting, every single day. For a completely fair comparison we'd need to add time spent from Facebook / Instagram users on the web, but even with that caveat TikTok's trajectory is impressive.
Venture capital poured $330 billion dollars into US start-ups last year, almost doubling the total from 2020, according to the latest data from Pitchbook.
That means the VC landscape has grown more than 7x in the last decade.
Sell me this pen
Much of that funding went to later-stage start-ups, who have demonstrated some kind of traction or product-market fit. That has meant a host of new "unicorns" (start-ups valued at more than $1bn), which has taken the total number of unicorns to more than 900+.
The market has been so hot that some lucky start-ups don't even need to spend much time fundraising... because they are the ones being pitched to. That has meant company valuations of 100x annual revenue in the extreme cases (or more)... which would probably sound like a joke to a time traveling investor from 2010.
1) Peloton continues to fall off its bike, with shares plunging more than 20% after CEO John Foley acknowledged that the company is considering layoffs and production cuts.
2) Incredible data + satire from our friends at pudding.cool, who use data science to generate fake resumes, fake headshots and fake thought leadership tweets.
3) Netflix shares have dropped 23% in early trading, wiping more than $50bn off the value of the company, as the streaming giant expects subscriber growth to substantially slow. We wrote about Netflix earlier this week here.
4) If you're as obsessed with word game Wordle as we are, you'll love the number crunching behind how to pick your first word.
5) Surgeons replace over 1 million knee joints a year in the US, but they do them in mostly the same way they've been done for 50 years. Monogram wants to change that with the latest in custom-fitted implants. Learn about investing in Monogram.**
6) A Tongan man has survived 27 hours at sea after the devastating Tsunami last weekend.
7) Apple TV's show depicting the rise and fall of WeWork (and its founder Adam Neumann) now has a trailer and a release date (March 18th).
**This is sponsored content.
