The soup market must be simmering if from (NYSE: ) is any example.
Its quarterly earning jumped from $146 million in 2006 to $217 million, attributed in part to an increase in marketing and a price hike. EPS rose from $.35 to $.
55 in the same interval.
Two sectors performed particularly well for the company. Its low-sodium soups exceeded expectation.
(Why do I envision legions of Campbell's consumers reaching for their saltshakers? We shop with good intentions, but..
.) The V-8 brand also pulled in healthy numbers, which reinforces my contention that the best vegetable is one that can be mixed with vodka.
The only decline reported was in the competitive salsa market, where the Pace brands declined.
Another Campbell brand, Godiva Chocolatier, was up, primarily due to Asian sales. The Midwest's Valentine's Day snowstorm (aka Massacre, if you're a florist), was blamed for some loss of sales.
Adding to the sustained value of the stock is Campbell's stated intention to with the proceeds of the recent sale of its UK holdings.
The company boosted its year-end forecast slightly to $1.94-$1.97.
The boomer generation is limping toward retirement with pockets full of cash and bodies full of ailments, putting any drug company with top-drawer medications and solid patents in line for a windfall.
Today's shakeup at 's (NYSE: ) drug-pipeline management, with the announced [subscription required], suggests the company isn't happy with the lack of success in restocking its shelves.
Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, realized 64% of its 2006 revenue from its top nine sellers. Unfortunately, the patents for those :
If anyone wonders why (NASDAQ: ) paid $6 billion for (NASDAQ: ), they need look no further than the for first quarter 2007. In these three months alone, 3 million people joined the broadband revolution.
Read that as three million more potential YouTube visitors, Second Life devotees, advertisees. This represents almost 6% growth in this quarter alone, bringing the total of U.S.
broadband subscribers to 56.2 million.
Of that audience, 55% buy through their cable company, while the telephone industry pulls in 43%.
For this quarter, though, the telephone side accounted for 51% of the growth. In fact, the telephone companies have led cable in acquisitions in each of the last 10 quarters.
Leading the pack overall is (NYSE: ) with 12.
8 million subscribers, followed closely by (NASDAQ: ) at 12 million. (NYSE: ) and (NYSE: ) both have more than 7 million subscribers. Others with over a million are Cox, Charter, Cablevision, (NYSE: ) and Embarq.
Top performer for the quarter? AT T, with almost 700,000 new subscribers.
Tired of carrying around a stack of plastic cards?
Hope may be on the horizon, and it could be bad news for (NYSE: ), VISA and others.
has launched a service that allows users to link their driver's license, via the info on its magnetic strip, to their checking account, thus allowing them to . The program test began in Texas early this year, and will soon expand to convenience stores in the region.
This is bad news for Visa, et.al., for two reasons.
First, NPC is undercutting the competition by charging only $.15 per transaction instead of the percentage demanded by the national cards.
The second problem is that this destroys branding of the product.
Unless the BMV can be convinced to offer gold or platinum driver's licenses, commoditization of consumer credit may well follow.
This could be only the first step in making use of the new standard for driver's licenses that standardizes mag strip contents. If the market can gain access to the individual recognition and authentication features of the BMV system, the , ATM access, or even federal benefits such as welfare and Medicare.
Posted May 17th 2007 8:20PM by
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In 2009, UHF television stations will abandon analog frequencies as they shift to digital.
The frequencies that they will abandon and the result could shape the internet and wireless industry for decades to come.
These frequencies, in the 700 mhz range (channels 52-68), are desirable because they travel long distances without interference. Any company wanting to build a national wireless broadband network would find UHF the perfect foundation.
In an age of growing connectivity, the profit potential of owning such a backbone is enormous.
The players are already lined up to . As you can imagine, the cell phone companies will be players, if for no other reason than to keep new competitors out of their market.
Other bidders may include satellite television providers such as DirecTV, and (NASDAQ: ).
Posted May 17th 2007 7:32PM by
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Understand that Engadget is our sister blog, a star in the AOL constellation, with great writers that push the envelope every day to bring readers the very latest, hottest tech news. Yesterday, that drive came back to bite them in the ass when, acting on a tip from a reliable source, they blogged, and then were that the
Unfortunately, in the interval, (NASDAQ: )'s stock lost an estimated $4 billion in about six minutes. Within half an hour of the blog's retraction, the stock had recovered almost its full value.
Posted May 17th 2007 3:25PM by
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When took over "The Price is Right" in 1972, The U.
S. was negotiating with North Vietnam for a cease-fire. Nixon was about to defeat George McGovern for a second term in the White House, even while under the cloud of the growing Watergate scandal.
Mark Spitz had just won seven Olympic gold medals in swimming. ATARI was launched. David Bowie unleashed "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
"
I have to stop for a moment to digest the vision of Bob Barker and David Bowie (in high androgyny) side by side.
In other words, the dude is ooooold. His hair was white before Anderson Cooper had any.
The Cadillac DeVille he might have given away would have cost $6,168.
So how did the avuncular Barker last 50 years on . (NYSE: )?
By tapping into two wellsprings flowing through American society -- our obsessive need to have more stuff, and our hope that someone would magically give us the stuff we wanted. Before the government took on the role of sugar daddy, we looked to television for such beneficence.
While greed was the subtext, the show never made us feel stupid.
Bob didn't care if we knew the capital of Paraguay, as long as we had a notion what a walnut dinner set from the good people at Thomasville cost. He also never treated his contestants as idiots, although many were. His bulletproof alabaster smile was something viewers could count on, year after year.
Barker and his show seem like relics of another age, the age of limitless abundance. But damn, he made consumerism fun. I hope, behind the curtain labeled "retirement," Barker finds the treasure of his dreams.
When you're the undisputed champion, people are always .
The mantra of the 00s is convergence, and (NYSE: ) is teaming with (NYSE: ) in one of the most useful convergences yet. The companies announced plans, confirming a last September, that Sony will 
The British newspaper, The Telegraph, over the weekend that (NASDAQ: ) may be taking another run at , for as much as $1 billion. Bebo, launched in 2005, has become the MySpace of the U.K.
After dueling with Daimler and losing again, Kirk Kerkorian has decided to take on someone his own size: himself. In a move that has analyst's opinions all over the map, Kirk Kerkorian's (NYSE: ) for its two best properties. The and the under-construction could fetch as much at $12 billion.
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