Where does Walmart stand in the market?

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is branded as Wal-Mart. WMT is an American multinational retail store company which is engaged in operating one of the biggest store chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company has proved to be a tough competitor for Amazon, Target, and EBay etc. in the market. Despite of the fact that company does not offer the least prices when compared to Amazon, it is trying to catch up with Amazon for its survival. Despite of cutting back on prices, the company has been struggling in recent times.

A well reputed journalist of Fool.com said “Wal-Mart has not delivered the goods lately for investors, but its entry into grocery delivery just may be what turns it around for the king of retail. After seven consecutive quarters of falling traffic in U.S. stores, Wal-Mart cut its earnings guidance for the full year and said growth in online sales would slow.” But the company believes that introducing online grocery shopping might re-boost the sales of the company with both in-stores and home delivery options available.

Since the time of recession and inflation, the company has had a very rough phase as sales growth has been harder and harder to come by for Wal-Mart Stores. Fool.com reports “Whether due to high gas prices, stagnant wages, or cutbacks in the SNAP food stamp program, comparable-store sales have stayed stubbornly near the flat line for the past couple of years.” However the main question is what is the future of Wal-Mart? Can the company rejuvenate its business in the near future? Or will it be too hard for the company?

It is still hard to either predict or expect anything from Wal-Mart as their current progress and status does not lead anywhere. Whether the company will flourish in the near future or it will still be struggling to keep up with the market pace.

Bed Bath & Beyond performing well in the market

Bed Bath & Beyond is headquartered in New Jersey, United States which is a dream store for every woman living in United States or in any foreign country. Being founded in 1971, Bed Bath & Beyond started to captivate the market with its excellent quality and beautiful designs in almost everything a household requires. It is the dream for every woman to decorate the interior of their houses as perfect as they can.

Despite of not posting good results and going through a bad patch since the start of 2014, the company has managed to get back on track as its stocks has increased by 25 percent starting July. Since July, the housing recovery has gained steam which has helped the company to benefit as much as it can. According to Forbes, “the company’s margins remain a concern; its revenues have grown steadily amid an uncertain retail environment. Its strong market position in the home goodsindustry has helped Bed Bath & Beyond take advantage of the rising home sales.”

Moreover, the selling of new homes as well as existing homes have also noticed a significant improvement which has further increased the demand of refurnishing of home related and décor items in recent times. Furthermore, rising consumer confidence and falling unemployment rates have encouraged buyers to open up their wallets.

BedBath & Beyond is performing well in the market because of many reasons. The new and existing homes sales have significantly improved and increased in the past months. Also the mortgage rates have been low which further resulted in an increase in the home sales which later had to be refurnished benefitting Bed Bath & Beyond. Decrease in unemployment rate is also one of the major causes. Better job scenario is letting money spend more money on luxury and it is allowing them to spend higher. Hence, the market of the company has grown through its 1000 mainline stores.

Hence in a nutshell, the company is the sole dominator which has again proved to be one of the best out there despite of going through a bad patch for a short span of time.

Actavis Will Acquire Botox Firm Allergan

Allergan Inc. is an American based global pharmaceutical company which develops and manufactures products on ophthalmic pharmaceuticals, dermatology, neuroscience, urology and cosmetics. Founded in 1948, it has been one of the popular companies in the pharmaceutical industry which has affected the markets by its performance. The company is most famous for developing the Botox drug which many pharmaceutical giants are chasing in recent times. Valeant Pharmaceuticals was on the verge to sign Allergan despite that Allergan was not in favor tosell its Botox drug, but Actavis rescued Allergan with a $66 billion offer.

Botox developer Allergan recently accepted a block buster offer of $66 billion from Actavis which ended a hostile pursuit by activist investor William Ackman and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. for over seven months.

According to Reuters, Actavis PLC., offered $219 per share in cash and stock to Allergan which amounted to billions more than what Valeant Pharmaceuticals was prepared to pay. William Ackman denied commenting anything when Actavis came to sign Allergan with a block buster bid. Moreover, Valeant itself said that it would walk away from its Allergan campaign shortly after the deal was announced.

Reuters reported that “The deal marks a surprise win for Allergan, which had fought the Valeant-Pershing alliance in court and among shareholders in one of the healthcare sector's most complex takeover efforts.” This deal saw an increase in the shares of Allergan by 5.3 percent as they closed at $209.20 when the news came out. Actavis share prices also rose up by 1.7 percent in the market.

Allergan said that the offer by Valeant Pharmaceuticals was of $54 billion which might have hurt the investments of shareholders and investors given that the Canadian drug maker's history of cutting research and development spending at companies it acquires. Hence, the Actavis deal will benefit both parties as two companies will integrate their operations and ensure some of Allergan's promising experimental eye treatments for macular degeneration and glaucoma remain in the pipeline

The unlikely partnership of Twitter and IBM

Twitter is going through a rough phase in recent times and the company is trying hard to keep up with the market pace and come back strong. Hence, the company is trying its best to come up with new strategies that help in boosting their business mechanism. Therefore, in order to achieve its objective, Twitter hasplanned to collaborate with IBM to assist them in making better decisions for their business by analyzing the data collected by the company of tweets on a worldwide scale.

This is a very unlikely partnership between Twitter and IBM. According to B2C, they believe that this deal will revolutionize business intelligence. But “they seem like an unlikely pair, the team could end up being quite natural, as IBM’s vast processing power and far-reaching and extensive business and enterprise connections are a perfect complement to Twitters huge stores of data, the huge majority of which are sitting in data centers across the country, more or less unanalyzed.”

However despite of being a very unlikely pair in the market which signed a collaboration deal out of the blue to improve business intelligence, it is believed that together these companies will benefit small businesses and executives in growth companies as their services will turn out to be critically important and crucial.

The impact of the announcements that have been made can be extremely outrageous as well can restructure the existing paradigms. Chris Moody who is an executive at Twitter was extremely content with how this deal has progressed and with sheer enthusiasm claimed that the future of this application is "nearly limitless". He also made predictions that in the years to come “Every significant business decision will have Twitter input.”

According to the deal between both parties, IBM will gain full and unrestricted real time access to all public tweets, as well as and archives of past public tweets. For example, through the analysis of Twitter scientists will be able to learn more about different information in detail such as how widely earthquakes are felt. The term “real time access” means that data and information from Twitter has been used for these purposes before, they were all based on analysis of historic tweets, not real-time data. Hence it will help more to provide information on big radar.

Google and Netflix are not the same anymore

Netflix has been one of the leading and largest Internet streaming providers of movies and TV shows for a very long time now. It has captivated the market and has been a dominant force which has put the jeopardy of pay TV cable in trouble. However for pay TV cable, after facing a very tough and one sided competition from Netflix, there is another entry which started to take over the market as soon as it was launched in the past days. Netflix’s rivals are increasing in the past days as Amazon Prime and Hulu are bolstering their position in the market.

Moreover, the new entrant in the market, Shomi, which is a Canadian based company, is also imposing great threats on pay TV cable as well as internet streaming services. Hence it is reported that Google, Amazon, and Netflix are 3 percent, 20 percent, and 5 percent down respectively. It is very well known that these companies were known as the powerhouses in their markets.

According to CNBC, Google used to be an island all by itself with no competition. And even though it still continues to dominate, it's left with the pressure to be profitable. Analysts believe that Google must be working and start milking the virgin territory of what it owns for instance, YouTube.

Analysts also believe that Netflix was once a dominant force in all non-networking programming market but it has lost its charm due to tough competition. It is not that these companies are not performing well in the market but tough competition has pressurized them which is affecting the performance of the company over the period of time.