Good morning! Wishing a happy and healthy Easter weekend to all who celebrate. Today we’re exploring:
Chickening out
The 2 day Sweetgreen-Chipotle war is over after the salad maker agreed to change the name of its latest menu offering, the “Chipotle Chicken Burrito Bowl”, after Chipotle filed a lawsuit accusing the chain of copyright infringement.
The move makes sense for Sweetgreen. The company's shares had closed 6% down on the day Chipotle staked its claims that the promotional materials for the product used the fast-Mexican chain’s iconic font and that the new “very similar and directly competitive” bowl could confuse customers.
Wilting
Sweetgreen was dreamed up back in 2007 by 3 college students who’d grown tired of the nutritious-but-overpriced or cheap-but-unhealthy options they’d encountered while at school. The company’s seen impressive growth since, from its debut store in Washington DC, to becoming the “first-ever restaurant unicorn”, and an IPO in 2021. Getting the financials into the green, however, hasn’t come easily.
Even though its salads and sides aren’t particularly wallet-friendly, Sweetgreen's bowls can easily cost $15+, the company is yet to turn its sales into profit. Despite revenues of $470m in 2022, Sweetgreen posted an operating loss of $193m, building on the $134m loss the year before. Even with the resolution of the lawsuit the company’s shares are still down ~85% since going public.
The price of paradise
Hawaii’s lawmakers are considering passing a bill that would require tourists to pay a $50 annual fee to visit the state’s parks and trails.
Hawaii's natural beauty has seen its popularity soar in recent decades, with the island state welcoming more than 10 million visitors for the first time ever in 2019. That’s some 7x the island’s population of 1.4m. The fee — intended to help take care of the island’s natural resources — follows in the footsteps of similar taxes in popular destinations such as Venice, the Galapagos Islands, Palau and elsewhere.
Take a hike
One reason the bill is gaining steam is because of the changing habits of tourists, who collectively parted ways with $13.1bn on their vacations in 2021. The government points to the falling popularity of golf and rise in hiking as an example. Indeed, the number of rounds of golf played (yes, Hawaii’s local government keeps track of this) has fallen 40% since the turn of the century, whilst hiking is now the go to activity on the island, putting increased strain on trails and paths.
The $50 fee, which happens to match the recommended donation to get your name in the ballot for a spot in the famous Hawaii Ironman, would particularly help maintain the lesser-known spots which have suddenly become busy thanks to sharing on social media. It’s not quite as much as the $200 tax that the sought-after Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan charges per day.
Samsung expects its quarterly profit to fall some 96% in the first 3 months of this year, as sales dropped and demand slowed for the world's biggest maker of televisions, tablets and smartphones. Samsung's plan is to cut its chip production, an ironic shift in strategy after global supply chains battled a chip shortage for much of last year.
Volume vs. value
One bright spot came from sales of its new Galaxy S23 phone series, which jumped 50% on its predecessor. That will help Samsung cling onto its crown as the largest smartphone producer — a title it's duelled over since 2012, fighting off fierce competition from Apple, Nokia and the ever-growing list of low-cost Chinese producers like Xiaomi and Huawei.
Though Samsung typically sells more phones, it is still Apple that’s extracting the most from its customers. Estimates from Counterpoint Research show that Apple collected a whopping 85% of the industry’s operating profit last year, everyone else, Samsung included, split the remaining 15%.
• Global venture capital funding fell 53% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2023.
• A 5th grader picked up on an error in his science book and received a letter of thanks for bringing it to the publisher’s attention.
• Founded by robotics and AI leaders from Microsoft and Nokia, Ally Robotics have designed a radically cheaper and more user-friendly robot that can learn simply by watching humans perform a task — invest in Ally Robotics today.**
• Every check you take: Diddy claims he’s still paying Sting “$5k-a-day” for sampling The Police, 26 years later.
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• Charting the 10 busiest airports in the world by passenger traffic (the US has 4 of the top 5).
• How Europe has seriously cut back on its winter energy usage.
• See if you can beat the Chartr office top score of 7 from 8 on this logo color-matching quiz.
Quick cut: Which long-running TV show, once again hitting the headlines for its prophetic powers, were we charting about below? [Answer below].
