Category: Company

Go-Jek, Indonesia’s first billion-dollar startup, will invest $500 million to expand ride-hailing and other services to four Southeast Asian countries, taking advantage of Uber’s pullout from the region to make its first international foray.

The Jakarta-based company will enter Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines in coming months, starting with ride-hailing but with the aim of replicating the multiple services it offers back home, it said in an emailed statement.

That will pit Go-Jek directly against larger rival Grab, including in the latter’s home market of Singapore. The Indonesian startup is taking the plunge after Uber Technologies Inc.agreed in March to swap its Southeast Asian business for a 27.5 percent stake in Grab, thereby withdrawing from a hotly contested region of more than 600 million people.

Go-Jek, whose backers include Warburg Pincus and KKR & Co., has evolved from an app to book motorbike taxis to a way to pay bills, order food or buy movie tickets in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. It recently raised funds from investors including Google, Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Temasek Holdings Pte and was valued around $1.8 billion in 2016 by CB Insights.

Read more: Go-Jek Explores First IPO of a Billion-Dollar Indonesian Startup

“Consumers are happiest when they have choice and at the moment, people in Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines don’t feel that they’re getting enough,” Go-Jek Chief Executive Officer Nadiem Makarim said in the statement. “We hope that as we arrive in new markets, we will quickly become everyone’s go-to lifestyle app.”

Grab, aided by $4 billion raised from investors led by SoftBank Group Corp., has also pushed aggressively onto Go-Jek’s home turf. Grab already operates in seven countries and is run by Anthony Tan, Makarim’s former classmate at Harvard Business School.

Read more: Friends at Harvard Turn Rivals Over Ride-Hailing Apps in Asia

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CoStar Group (NASDAQ:CSGP) CEO Andrew C. Florance sold 7,782 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction on Thursday, April 26th. The shares were sold at an average price of $372.34, for a total transaction of $2,897,549.88. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink.

Andrew C. Florance also recently made the following trade(s):

After announcing massive sales growth in its first-quarter results late Wednesday, Uber Technologies Inc. plans invest the better-than-expected gains back into the business and push even harder.

Uber said it logged net income of $2.5 billion on gross bookings of $11.29 billion, or 55% growth compared with the year-earlier period. Net revenue grew by 67% to $2.5 billion. Uber’s bottom line benefited from two significant transactions: its sale of GrabTaxi Holdings Pte Ltd. and a joint venture with Yandex N.V.

Excluding those two transactions, the company posted adjusted losses of $577 million, which is narrower than the past four quarters.

The results beat the company’s internal forecasts and, as a result, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber has no plans of slowing down and will continue to make significant bets in its various business units.

“Given the size of the opportunity ahead of us and our goal of making Uber a true mobility platform, we plan to reinvest any over-performance even more aggressively this year, both in our core business as well as in big bets like Uber Eats globally,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement.

Khosrowshahi could be signalling to investors that he plans to continue to run the company at a loss, even as the company prepares to go public in 2019.

Don’t miss: Uber believes it has SEC nod for earnings approach that mirrors business model

With this quarter’s financial results came two significant changes to the way Uber presents its financial statements to investors. First, the company is moving fare adjustments based on longer- or shorter-than-anticipated rides from the gross bookings line item into what the company calls “contra-revenue.” Removing this cash deducted $230 million from the company’s gross bookings.

Contra-revenue, according to Uber, are the costs such as driver fees, promotions, taxes and other fees that it subtracts from gross bookings to arrive at net revenue.

The other change involves moving promotions across entire markets — such as San Francisco or New York City — and now including it as a sales and marketing operating expense instead of contra revenue. In the fourth quarter of last year, that amounted to a $148 million addition to net revenue.

The San Francisco-based company is privately held, and the financial statements are not audited.

Read: Uber closes self-driving vehicle program in Arizona after fatal crash

Separately Wednesday, Uber said that secretive investors Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital and TPG Capital will seek to buy $400 million to $600 million worth of Uber stock from existing investors at $40 a share. The company says that values Uber at $62 billion.

Japanese tech investor SoftBank Group Corp. 9984, -2.53% , which holds a 15% stake in Uber, bought $6.5 billion worth of the company’s stock in January at a $48 billion valuation.

BidaskClub cut shares of TTM Technologies (NASDAQ:TTMI) from a hold rating to a sell rating in a research report sent to investors on Tuesday, May 1st.

A number of other research firms also recently commented on TTMI. Zacks Investment Research raised shares of TTM Technologies from a sell rating to a hold rating in a report on Thursday, April 12th. Stifel Nicolaus decreased their price objective on shares of TTM Technologies from $20.00 to $18.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a report on Thursday, February 8th. Needham & Company LLC decreased their price objective on shares of TTM Technologies from $22.00 to $20.00 and set a strong-buy rating on the stock in a report on Thursday, February 8th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reissued an overweight rating and set a $20.00 price objective (down previously from $22.00) on shares of TTM Technologies in a report on Thursday, February 8th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have issued a hold rating, three have assigned a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the stock. TTM Technologies has an average rating of Buy and an average target price of $19.50.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Activist investors took control of the board of maternity and baby clothing retailer Destination Maternity on Wednesday after investors voted to replace all four directors with dissidents, including three women, sources said.

While the results had not yet been certified, the company said at its annual meeting earlier on Wednesday that the preliminary vote count showed that all four dissidents were elected, the three sources said.

Investors voted to seat Holly Alden, co-founder of audio accessory company Skullcandy, industry analyst and consultant Anne-Charlotte Windal, former retail executive Marla Ryan and investor Christopher Morgan. They replace Barry Erdos, Peter Longo, Pierre-Andre Mestre and Melissa Payner-Gregor, who is currently interim chief executive officer.

The vote marks the first time in recent corporate history that a majority of women dissident directors have won a proxy contest.

But the bitter fight between the company and the activists also illustrated how difficult it can be to get women onto boards after Institutional Shareholders Services, a prominent proxy adviser, did not back the dissidents. ISS expressed concern that the proposed directors had no public board experience.

Activists Nathan Miller and Peter O’Malley, who own roughly 9 percent of the company, have spent months pushing for the company to improve operations and argued that the maternity clothing company needs more gender diversity. Since September, there has been significant turmoil in the executive suite after Anthony Romano stepped down as CEO. He has been succeeded by two interim CEOs.

The company’s stock price, which had tumbled some 30 percent over the last 52 weeks, climbed 6.6 percent to close at $2.90.

Over the last five years, the stock has fallen from roughly $30 a share.

Large investors in Destination Maternity include Royce & Associates, Renaissance Technologies, and the Vanguard Group.

“In our view, new independent voices and greater diversity will be a tremendous asset for the Company and we are very pleased with the result of this election,” Miller said in a statement.