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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. We try and bring you one to two business and market insight episode today. Today's discussion is Saks, Amazon, Porsche and more. So here's the story. We're going to go through about eight to 10 or 12 stories today. The first story is Saks and Amazon are breaking up. Amazon invested about 4,75 million dollars in Sachs to help Sachs acquire Neiman's. And I have to tell you, I love Neiman's. It's expensive as heck, but I love it. They did that back in December 2024. This past week, Saks Global filed for bankruptcy. They've had a disaster. Amazon had tried to use and leverage Saks to get more luxury goods selling through Amazon. That's gone very poorly. Amazon says that its equity investment in Sachs is going to be worthless and that Sachs breached its commitment. So that all went poorly. The second story we're following today and I talk about this more in a separate podcast, Porsche sales slid almost 10% last year. It went from 310,000 vehicles a year to 280,000 vehicles a year. Probably the funniest thing about all this is that the most popular and best selling Porsche, now it's not a sports car, but it's the suv, their small suv, the Macan, which you could buy the base model for about 50 to $65,000. I've always been able to the 50s buying the dealer courtesy vehicle with a couple thousand miles on it. I drive it, which is a little embarrassed because it's really a soccer mom car. But more importantly for Porsche is the fact that the 911 is their number two selling car and the Porsche Macan, this one that's driven by middle aged people, is the number one selling car. The founder somewhere must be rolling in their grave. Third, Beyond Meat, we've got a separate episode on this on Wednesday is making a pivot to protein drinks. When you hear a company say they're making a big pivot, it almost always means they're doing extremely poorly currently. And that is the case with beyond meat. They're down 80% over the last 12 months. Fourth, I played with a colleague in a two man golf tournament this weekend. All you need to know is it right for the match. My partner went to go take a lesson. I went to the PGA store. No other data is needed. We did horribly. Golf is a stupid game. Fifth, today, meta platforms. Facebook is down 6% year to date, but don't bet against Mark Zuckerberg. Sixth, Apple is now down 6% year to date, but just saw its sales surge in China. We'll see if that's enough to start lifting Apple back up. Seventh, the Motley fool points to these three stocks as cash machines that you should invest in. It points to Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia. So I thought that was interesting. Eighth, Walmart keeps on kicking. It's up nearly seven and a half percent year to date. Ninth, DraftKings dropped 9% or 8% or so on Thursday. We'll see if it bounces back this week. Finally, couple more quick thoughts. A shout out today to six of my favorite firms and charities. Beckers Healthcare, McGuire Woods Nimble Solutions, Shore Capital Partners, A16Z or Andreessen Horowitz. And finally, National Medical Fellowships, which helps people of color and minorities and people of need pay for and get to medical school. And it's really focused on people that that have needs that are needy to get to medical school to have medical careers. A fantastic organization. Again, those are several of the stories we're following currently. Thank you so much for listening to the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business Podcast. And a special shout out to Chanel Bunger, our producer. Thank you very, very much.
