Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash

Post by rogerdpack » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 2:04 AM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #225

sbierwagen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A public company like Walmart, there's some people doing some math here. http://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-reports-another-big-loss-... Yahoo also reported that it's writing down $482 million in charges related to the declining value of Tumblr, the social-blogging service that Yahoo acquired for $1.1 billion in 2013. http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8910999/microsoft-job-cuts-... and the company is writing off $7.6…

My own observation is that the bets hardly ever pay off. Microsoft/Nokia is a great example but there are plenty of others. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but I have trouble thinking of one counter example.

Post by rogerdpack » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 2:09 AM UTC

__derek__ wrote: post #141

rogerdpack wrote: post #92

I figured out what is going on here. Walmart thinks to themselves "we want to be like amazon, we want to be huge online" and then jet comes along and is something of an almost competitor to amazon, so corporate thinks "oh we should snap this up" but...my gut reaction here is this is going to be a terrible deal for walmart, what are they going to do, keep dumping $500M/yr for it at a loss or what? Pretty desperate, bu…

Walmart.com has much higher sales than Jet. It already is huge online, even if it's not Amazon huge. If anything, this is about pruning competition and buying potentially useful IP.

Post by bunderbunder » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 2:24 AM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #96

rogerdpack wrote: post #92

I figured out what is going on here. Walmart thinks to themselves "we want to be like amazon, we want to be huge online" and then jet comes along and is something of an almost competitor to amazon, so corporate thinks "oh we should snap this up" but...my gut reaction here is this is going to be a terrible deal for walmart, what are they going to do, keep dumping $500M/yr for it at a loss or what? Pretty desperate, bu…

If you're a cynical person that is an easy thought... but something tells me a 3B acquisition of a company that is losing money in so many places isn't a decision taken lightly. A public company like Walmart, there's some people doing some math here.

Post by AndrewKemendo » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #234

camelNotation wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart has something Jet.com needs: one of the world's most advanced product delivery systems. Every Wal-Mart store is a distribution center waiting to happen. They are enormous and they are everywhere. Jet.com has something Wal-Mart can use to rocket its online presence forward: advanced online infrastructure, patents, a wealth of technology experts, and users. Together, Wal-Mart can beat Amazon at its own game by…

jet.com has no: - reviews of products - no customer q&a section - no 3rd party seller ratings These are rather basic features in an ecommerce site. So no, I don't think the guys from jet.com are experts at all.

Post by acjohnson55 » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 3:04 AM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #192

emagdnim2100 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "zero out," do you mean they were previously valuable and then dropped below their strike price after accounting for the > 1x preference? That sucks and I'm sorry it happened to you. It's still pretty unusual though. Curious to hear - were any of the following factors in play: (i) the company was struggling to stay afloat, (ii) the company was located outside SF/NYC, (iii) the company had less-experienced founders…

The company was sold and my purchased shares were worth $0.00. The founders had secured, until I joined, funding coming in without any preferences at all, or so management told me repeatedly. I don't know when that changed, or maybe management was lying to me all along.