Ecofinglobe.com and its statistics from an year ago

I was chancing to look upon my blog’s readership and it has skyrocketed in last few months. To give you an idea of how much the readership for http://www.ecofin.wordpress.com has gone up by, Alexa rating has shown a consistent rise in my webpage ranking (it currently stands at 755139 worldwide and its India ranking is better at 58137. Furthermore, my year old blog stats shows my blog to have averaged 9999 hits way in May 2007. The current count stands at 77791.

Above means nothing if people don’t read posts. Simple page views/hits serve no value absolutely. The most important indicator that indicates the health status of a blog is its post:comment ratio. My blog’s average post:comment ratio is at about 1:2. This means, for every post I put up, I get double the # of comments. This ratio was about 2:1 last year at about the same time and it had not even reached breakeven. So, it is a satisfaction that my blog is a success in terms of these critical metrics.

Thank you, all for making this blog readable! Its only my readers who can turnaround this blog and I hope to keep you as repeat readers so the value of this blog is enhanced further!

Keep visiting back - you know where to look for me: http://www.ecofinglobe.com!

Derivatives, the sub prime mess, US recession, Bear Stearns bailout by the Fed/JPMChase

 We know this story so we will not repeat this again: JP Morgan Chase set to acquire Bear Stearns for a paltry $2 a share - based on the transaction price of March 14th 2008!

http://www.bearstearns.com/sitewide/our_firm/press_releases/content.htm?d=03_16a_2008

http://investor.shareholder.com/jpmorganchase/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=299805&ReleaseType=Current

You can refer to the following article to get the update from the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) on Bear Stearns - NYSE: BSC(http://www.bearstearns.com/) and its survival thanks to the revival package of the Fed and JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120580966534444395.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Blogging guidelines - my two cents

What are the important factors one needs to consider before one begins to blog:

1. First, get over this obsession of Google adsense. 99/100 bloggers I meet first think of making a quick buck on adsense rather than focus on quality of their blogs and its relevance towards the topic(s) chosen! This is really very disturbing statistics.

Research reports to come shortly - aka McKinseyQuarterly style

All our research reports would be in PDF format and we are going to do comprehensive consulting analysis for our readers on myriad topics especially on the business sectors.

All research reports would be made available at http://www.acc101.com

Watch that space for more.

Deutsche Post to tie-up with India Post

I read in the papers today that there would be a definite synergy between Deutsche Post and India Post. I have written about the road to recovery for India Post on one of my earlier posts too.

http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/india-post-the-road-to-recovery-2/

http://www.indiapost.gov.in/

http://www.deutschepost.de/dpag?xmlFile=828&lang=de_EN

http://www.dhl.co.in/publish/in/en.high.html

Lets look at this in further detail.

Will Infosys acquire Capgemini

Yesterday at the dinner table at Tandoor - a posh restaurant on MG Road, this rather interesting topic sprung up at our dinner table conversation.

I stayed mum giving non-commital responses as I myself wasn’t sure if it was ever going to happen.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to examine if there is any merit in this acquisition and I don’t make any attempt at fuelling further speculations. I am merely expressing my freedom of thought and expression in an analytical perspective. My analysis will be filled with numbers - First of all, I am no M&A expert and will be trying my hand at something new here and secondly, I am an MBA (wildcard characters pun not intended!) and cannot speak casually about number driven things like these - I need to put figures to analysis reports so it makes sense else why have this blog in the first place? Let me look at their annual reports and compare notes with people working at both organizations before commenting on this interesting development - even if it was just a rumour.

Watch this space for more as they unfold.

Carlos Ghosn (Renault and Nissan CEO) - a legend

Photo courtesy/source: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2006/04/carlos_ghosn_th.html

Carlos Ghosn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn - is largely credited to the turnaround of Nissan Motors in 1999 when it was down in the red and losing billions of $ to making it turn a profit and into the black making billions of $. That’s not all.

Carly Fiorina’s memoir - Tough choices

http://www.amazon.com/Tough-Choices-Memoir-Carly-Fiorina/dp/159184133X 

For some reason, I have admired Carly Fiorina and publicly so on my peer networking group - Eco_Fin. I somehow felt that this lady had reached the upper echelons of a top US technology enterprise (to be the CEO of HP) by sheer guts and determination.

There are quite a few lady CEO’s who I admire who have made it big.

- Indira Nooyi - Chairman and CEO, Pepsico (NYSE: PEP)

- Carly Fiorina - ex. Chairman and CEO , Hewlett Packard company (NYSE: HPQ)

There was another book of Carly’s titled “Perfect enough” and the reinvention of Hewlett Packard that I had purchased and read up way back in 2003. It was good and spoke a lot of the aggressive and the controversies/hostilities surrounding the merger of HP and Compaq in 2002.

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Enough-Fiorina-Reinvention-Hewlett/dp/1591840031/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7956418-4984732?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173590442&sr=1-1

I have so far not got to read the following books:

- The HP way

- The Toyota way

I will do so shortly.

I am still reading up this book but she highlights the difficulties of her earlier years while at AT&T (American telephone and telegraph - NYSE: ATT), how Lucent technologies (NYSE: LU) was spun off, how the red splash logo of Lucent was conceived, how the baby bells were born etc.

I did not know that she did an advanced management programme at Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT), Boston, MA for an year while taking a sabbatical from AT&T.

TATA-Corus deal is done!

The last week was rife with speculations on the outcome of the TATA-Corus deal!

The deal went to the TATA’s and I am proud that I was once associated with this Indian industry behemoth!

Economic times really summarized this deal well - it was really put in a sequence and the chain of events was really enthralling!

In conjecture, the deal could’ve gone either way - the Brazilian CSN that made a counter-bid for Corus (the erstwhile British Steel) - did not have their say!

Tata Steel - http://www.tatasteel.com/

Companhia Siderurgica Nacional - CSN - http://www.corusgroup.com/en/

The Tata’s outbid them finally and Bombay house was witness to this!

It was not too long ago that the Britishers had denied entry to then Charman of the TATA empire - Jamshedji Tata - and he had built the Taj Mahal hotel at Gateway of India to prove their thinking wrong! It was a fitting reply that Ratan Tata worked out the deal sitting in the confines of the Taj Mahal hotel while the UK watchdog (the UK takeover panel) decided as to who gets to acquire Corus!

The Tata offer was at 608p a share - a whopping 33.6% premium (their original bid was priced at 455p a share) over their original Oct 2006 bid. Corus fell short by 5p! (The Tata’s clinced the deal with a 6.2 billion pound offer!)

It has to remembered that the Steel industry is in a state of consolidation as ratified by Aditya Mittal of the Arcelor-Mittal group http://www.arcelormittal.com/ - the largest steel company in the world!

Moreover, Ratan TATA’s move comes on the sidelines of speculations about who will head the TATA empire once he retires in a few years. Would it be a TATA or an outsider? It is to be seen!

Ratan TATA’s move to acquire a company (Corus) three times the size of TATA steel is a brave move - in my opinion. The kinks of the deal still are being worked out. There are synergies in this deal but it is to be seen as to how it shapes up in the years to come!

One of the British diplomats, had remarked in 1902 that he would eat all the steel that the TATA’s would produce if they produced steel according to British standards/specifications. As Economic times rightly put it, he would be better off now eating his words than all the steel that the TATA’s would produce as the TATA’s leapfrog into the world’s top 10 steel companies with this acquisition!

Below is a quote unquote:

Do you mean to say that Tatas propose to make steel rails to British specifications? Why, I will undertake to eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making.

Sir Frederick Upcott, Chief Commissioner of Indian Railways in 1902.

CNN-IBN’s coverage of the TATA-Corus deal