What does J. C. Penney stand for? What's their unique position in the marketplace?

‘Customers tell us they enjoy shopping with us, always something new, some excitement’ says Myron E. (Mike) Ullman, III, CEO.

In 2011, J.C. Penney did business at least once with over 50% of the families in America. They have enjoyed a 111 year old tradition of being a trusted destination for high quality goods at prices affordable for the American hardworking family. A friendly smile and the golden rule approach to taking care of customers have served for generations all under one flag, J.C. Penney.

While the business climate today is very different and more competitive than it's ever been, the values and principles of J.C. Penney business have not changed. Their business is built around having strong private brand merchandize, high quality, and relevant style at compelling prices.

Brands like Arizona, Worthington, Stafford, St. John's Bay and Xersion have been the core of J.C. Penney's assortments and a reason for frequent business to stores and online. Many customers believe these proprietary and exclusive brands are actually national brands. J.C. Penney has most desired national brand partners and compete head-to-head for the best assortments and presentations. Their most prominent partners include Levi's, Nike, Van Heusen, Carter's, Vanity Fair, Dockers and many others.

With Sephora, the world's leading beauty destination now in 446 of our stores, Liz Claiborne, the most popular women's apparel brand, Liz Claiborne in men's, Mango , the only fast fashion brand in the U.S. department store, Modern Bride in jewelry, Royal Velvet in home, Joe Fresh , Jonathan Adler and many more, there is always something to discover.

Myron E. (Mike) Ullman, III also added, ‘Thousands of customers have told us they are excited that J.C. Penney they love and appreciate us back. They make it clear they want to see us as leader in our community. It's with these things in mind that our team is enthusiastic about having the unique opportunity to restore our Great American icon to its rightful place’.

Second half of 2013:

J.C. Penney is going to continue to drive traffic conversion with occasion specific promotions and the right merchandise. First, they are going to continue to improve their assortments with better balance with private national brands and exclusive brands.

In kids, the Disney shops will open inside J.C. Penny in early October. There will be visible product changes in men's in the same period with important improvements in strong selling Dockers and Hager brands. In addition to St. John's Bay, J.C. Penney is beginning to see strength across several of their private brands including jcp.home, Cooks and Ambrielle.

Second, J.C. Penney is working quickly and forcefully to strengthen their marketing and messaging to restore customer loyalty and excitement. This includes positioning J.C. Penny as a primary destination for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and it's the same momentum throughout the holidays. They are also bringing back tiered J. C. Penney rewards program in order to build customer loyalty and regain the traction that had lost when the company discontinued these successful sales drivers.

J.C. Penney is focusing its efforts on regaining customer loyalty by offering trusted brands, award winning service and the affordability that America's families can depend on.

Facebook: Building Knowledge Economy & Thoughts about Second Half of 2013

Building the Knowledge Economy:

Let’s talk about building the knowledge economy and what that means for Facebook’s core business. A lot of new businesses have signed up to advertise with Facebook, so they now have more than a million active advertisers. Their newsfeed ads products are working well for advertisers. One of the things, Facebook likes to watch most closely is the quality of their ads and people sentiment around them.

Right now, ads on average make up about 5% or 120 stories in newsfeed, they haven't measured a meaningful drop in satisfaction when they ask people about their experience with Facebook. Mark says, ‘We are comparing that to the result we get when asked the same question to people using a version of Facebook with no feed ads at all’.

Now that said in recent studies people have been telling that they notice ads more, so Facebook is going to invest more in improving the quality. Their top priority is to expand the number of marketers and overall demand in their system rather than just increasing the number of ads that they show.

See Also: Facebook: Progress Report

Thoughts about the Second Half of 2013:

Facebook expects newsfeed ads to remain the main driver of revenue growth in the second half of the year and believes to have a great opportunity to continue to drive long-term growth by improving the quality and relevance of ads. However, remember that newsfeed ads really began to contribute to Facebook’s revenue in the third and fourth quarters last year which will make more difficult year-over-year comparisons in Q3 and Q4 relative to Q2.

Looking at expenses, consistent with what was said previously, Facebook plans to invest in their business and continue to expect that total non-GAAP expenses including cost of revenue but excluding stock comp will likely grow in the neighborhood of 50% for the full year 2013 compared to 2012. And they also continue to expect that this full year-over-full year expense growth rate will be faster than their year-over-year revenue growth rate for the full year 2013 compared to 2012.

In terms of Facebook’s tax rate, they expect that Q3 and full year non-GAAP tax rate will be a few percentage points higher than their Q2 rate. And finally, they expect 2013 CapEx to be in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion. This is down from Facebook’s prior estimate of $1.8 billion due to a combination of the efficiency gains and changes in timing of purchases.

See Also: Facebook: Operations and Financials as of Today

Facebook: Progress Report

What are the big changes Facebook wants to make in the world over the next five or 10 years?

Facebook made some really good progress this Q2 with the growth and engagement of their community, the release of new products like Instagram Video and advertising growth especially on mobile.

Facebook now has more daily actives on mobiles and on desktops, nearly half a billion people use Facebook on their phones every day and soon Facebook will have more revenue on mobiles and on desktop as well.

Now that Facebook has connected a billion people, what are the next big ambitions?

There are three main goals Facebook would like to achieve: connect everyone, understand the world and help build the knowledge economy. Connecting everyone is about growing their community to reach the next five billion people.

Facebook’s mission is to give all people the power to share and make the world more open and connected and that means everyone, not just people in developed countries. Most people in the world don't yet have smartphones or data access but Facebook knows they want to be connected. So Facebook is focused on making this possible, while also strengthening engagement within their existing community.

Understanding the world is that helping people share not just day-to-day updates like text messages and photos but also building up long-term knowledge about the world about what people are interested in; which restaurants are good, which hotels your friends have stayed at and so on. Facebook should be able to build intelligent services that help user network to answer lots of questions for people that no other service can.

And Facebook wants to lead the community to create a graph of all that understanding to power this intelligence. Building the knowledge economy is about helping people create companies and jobs using information.

 

The way Mark Zuckerberg sees advertising products, Facebook isn’t just building a strong monetization engine for itself, but also creating tools to enable new growth, jobs and businesses, door platform and to support a larger economic shift in the world based on knowledge and information.

‘I am proud of the work we are doing here to help developers to create apps to help local businesses find customers, to help great brands tell their stories and this is a core part of our mission’ says Mark.

Now let's talk about the progress Facebook has made in each of these areas, starting with connecting everyone.

The Facebook community has grown steadily this quarter adding 45 million new monthly actives and the number of monthly actives is steadier, increasing across demographics in the countries. Now 61% of monthly actives are daily actives and now the ratio has just continued to increase.

In Facebook’s most penetrated markets like the U.S. more than 70% of monthly actives use their services daily and now more than 700 million people worldwide use daily as of today.

See Also: Facebook: Operations & Financials as of Today.

     

As more social services get created, one question is How that Affects the Sharing and Time that People Spend on Facebook?

You could naively assume that more new services mean people spend less time on Facebook but that isn't happening, in fact people on average are spending more time on Facebook than ever before. It's possible that because the market is expanding due to mobile even the time spent per person increases on Facebook maybe their market share could decrease, but that doesn't seem to be happening either.

According to third-party metrics by comScore and Nielsen, Facebook’s share of time spent in the U.S. is either steady or increasing and we believe it's either steady or increasing everywhere else as well.

Some product like video fit into the flow of what people are doing and they take off quickly. Others like graph searching home are completely new kinds of product and they are just going to take a longer to develop. I think it's the right strategy to have a balance of long-term foundational new products ones that fit immediate demand. Facebook is committed to building all of those in to market leading products.

See Also: Facebook:Building Knowledge Economy & Thoughts about Second Half of 2013

Instagram:

Instagram is growing quickly as well, so if you combine the two services together we believe the engagement and share time spent are likely growing quickly throughout the world.

The newest product that Facebook is most excited about from their last quarter is Instagram Video, adding video fits really naturally with the Instagram mission of capturing and sharing the world's moments. It's off to a great start. People are already uploading hours of video to Instagram every minute.

Instagram has always been about helping people capture moments in the way they're proud of, filters were necessary for photos and when Instagram started most phone cameras weren't good enough to take high quality photos. Separately Instagram continues to grow rapidly with impressive engagement and Facebook announced last month, they had over 130 million actives using the service.

Eminem Quotes at its Best

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity. To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment. Would you capture it or just let it slip.

I don't care if you're black, white, straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, short, tall, fat, skinny, rich or poor. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Simple as that.

Love, when spelled backwards and read phonetically, reads EVIL.

Don’t do drugs, don’t have unprotected sex, don’t be violent. Leave that to me.

Cause sometimes, you just feel tired. Feel weak. And when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up. But you gotta search within you. You gotta find that inner strength, and just pull that shit out of you. And get that motivation to NOT give up and NOT be a quitter. No matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.

Behind every successful person lies a pack of haters.

If you have enemies, good that means you stood up for something.

Love is just a word, but you bring it definition.

Damn. How much damage can you do with a pen?

If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something. 

When I say I'll murder my baby's mother, maybe I wanted to but I didn't. Anybody who takes it literally is 10 times sicker than I am.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned.

The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

I have the right to remain violent. Everything I say can and will be used against you.

You can try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay 'em,
But you won't take the sting out these words before I say 'em.

Now I don't ask nobody to share my beliefs, to be involved in my beefs, I'm a man, I can stand on my feet, So if you don't wanna be in 'em all I ask is that you don't open your mouth for an opinion ‘coz I won't put you in 'em.

The Rise of the Titan, Mr. Raghuram Govinda Rajan

Indian Media and the whole of India kept their eyes wide open when the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India ‘Raghuram Govinda Rajan’ the man expected to stop the steep decline of Rupee against Dollar took charge on 4th September 2013.

When asked about the falling Rupee, Mr. Rajan replied that all the gloom and doom are overdone. He said that ‘Our task today is to build a bridge to the future, over the stormy waves produced by global financial markets. I have every confidence we will succeed in doing that’. Rajan also said that his primary focus would be on the transparency and predictability in the Central Bank’s functioning.

When a reporter asked that him, will RBI ever be able to stop the decline of Rupee? To this Mr. Rajan smartly replied that a Central Bank can Never Say Never. He said that people should have a clear knowledge about the Policies of the Reserve Bank of India and how the Policy actually works out. Rajan has set the date of September 20th to review the next policy. He has postponed the original date so as to consider all the major developments in the deal.

But a major question arises: What would be the actual steps taken to break the Rupee fall? To support the Rupee, Mr. Rajan yesterday announced steps such as; enhanced limits for exporters to re-book cancelled forward exchange contracts. He also announced plans to revise and strengthen the monetary policy framework. The other major plans were to focus on export revenue and inward remittances.

When asked about New Banking Licenses, Mr. Rajan expects them to be issued by early January next year. All Major Corporates like Tata Sons, L&T, Reliance Group, Aditya Birla Nuvo, Bajaj, Shriram and Religare have sought for banking licenses. With major competition in the banking industry, with the emerging Private Sector, Public Sector, Co-operative and Foreign Banks; the addition of the above mentioned giants would be a boom to the industry, predicts Rajan.

Rajan, who is a Graduate of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) New Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Gold Medalist at the IIT and IIM says that, he hopes to do the right thing and get Indian Rupee to an economically stable position.