The latest third quarter sales announcement showed that Samsung had a 26% jump in profit by both sales of smart phones and memory chips. Profit margins have been at historic highs, which made me concerned whether Samsung could do it better or not. Its rapid rise could see that it was becoming the biggest smartphone maker all around the world.

The LS asset management, Kim Sung-soo said, “Like Nokia, Samsung may hit a limit in increasing market share. Apple is also fighting back, signalling an uphill battle for Samsung.” As known, Apple is one of the biggest competitor compared with Samsung in smart phone market. I think that the increasing competition is not a problem to stop the growth of Samsung. More innovative products can help it to sustain the growth rate.

By the way, this just makes me remind of something related. On October, 2013, Samsung Electronics has apologized to Chinese consumers because there was a quality problem with those products which were sold in China. Undeniably, China has become a massively important market for many global brands, including Apple and Samsung. Samsung decided to provide free repairs to solve this problem and I think actually this thing did not exert many negative effects on the growth of sales of Samsung.

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24665480

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24634589

As we all known, there is a big luxury retail firm called Kering, which was PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute). Kering owns many famous luxury brands, including Gucci, YSL, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. To be honestly, I prefer YSL rather than Gucci. The latest earnings announcement showed that the sales of Kering grew to only 5.6%, which was totally under the expected growth, 8%. The most important reason was that the sales of Gucci really made shareholders concerned, because it its sales growth just fell to 0.6% in the third quarter. Compared with sales of LV, the operating profits of Gucci were only half from 2012. Besides, the sales of Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta was going to increase year by year steadily. It seems that the position which Gucci had in the luxury world is going to change.

From my perspective, the change of this situation is not only because of the decrease of demand for luxury, but also there are to many competitions in luxury market.  Kering also owns Puma and Alexander McQueen, which make me think that there are also many internal competitors in the same retail firm. Citi analysed that the reasons which attributed Gucci’s weaker performance was its own disruption as Gucci attempted to take itself further upmarket. However, I disagree with that at some extent. It was still due to a decline in demand, and also customers’ performances.

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24670183

Instagram is a fun and easier way to share photos with parents, friends and colleges and it is really popular among the teenagers. I am one of the big fans and I prefer Instagram rather than Facebook because of less advertisments shown on the main page.

On 10th April, 2012, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they had agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team would join Facebook, too. It took Facebook about $1billion, but after that, Instagram never got profits to give them to Facebook. There was hostility between Instagram and Twitter afterwards that Instagram did not allow to show any Twitter images on the website and Twitter added some collections of filters. Many experts were studying Instagram’s methods of income generation and they believed the most obvious way was to add advertisements in Instagram.

On 3rd October, 2013, the co-funder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom said that the photo sharing services must fund itself. Social media advertising is a booming business in the US. According to research firm eMarketer, advertisers will spend $9.5 billion on social network advertisements worldwide this year. Some high-quility and interesting advertisements may be asserted in photos or videos in the future. If users of Instagram do not like some of displaying advertisements, they can hide those and report why people do not like them so that Instagram can improve the social media advertising. Actually I think this would be a good experimental way to test whether users like those displaying advertisements or not.

Many people are keen on APPLE products so much. One of my friend told me that do not buy iPhone 5C, when I expressed that I wanted to change my cell phones. So I just surfed online to check the products information and also customers responses. What I found was that iPhone 5C had very low sales and its price also drops so much.

Just two weeks after launch, three big electronics retail channels in the USA, i.e. Walmart, Radio Shack and Best Buy promoted the iPhone 5C. The official price with contract is $99 and Walmart dropped the price to $45 which would last to “Christmas”. Best Buy said that the device would sell for $50 with contract after using a gift card. It was kind of 50 percent discount. Moreover, Best Buy also took almost the same promotion to Samsung Galaxy S4. However, the period was only from 4th to 7th Oct. Radio Shack announces the same promotion on the same day too. The only difference was that discount period would end on 2nd Nov.

I had not realized that the price of iPhone 5C could be so low before it released, but now, I believe it may keep dropping in future as currently envisaged. Some sources said that the price drop may be because commission agent changes the sales policy. One iPhone 5S bundled five iPhone 5C before, and now only three iPhone 5C can be bundled. The subsides from iPhone 5S are distributed in very low prices. Although the iPhone 5C has low selling price, APPLE can still get high profits. Because of marketing policy, APPLE cannot change the selling price, but dealears can.