when money was still easy and big tech, sometimes just low tech, attracted investors, a photo app like Snap was a real stock market hit. It was like before the dot-com bubble burst around the turn of the millennium: you didn’t calculate in anticipation of a super cycle of digital disruption.
Yesterday, after the market closed, Snap’s parent company recovered the forecast for sales and operating profit after just one month. Snap stock plummeted more than 30 percent.
Because CEO Evan Spiegel pointed to the macroeconomic environment deteriorating “more and faster than expected,” Wall Street became “Tremble Street,” the nervous zone. In the field of the recently plucked tech companies, it caught those who, like Snap, depend on online advertising and thus on the economy.
Twitter and Google’s parent company Alphabet lost around four percent. The Facebook group Meta Platforms was hit particularly hard: While the price had already fallen by 40 percent since the beginning of the year, it has now fallen again by eight percent. The problems for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have to do not only with advertising declines – but with a total loss of reputation.
The latest lawsuit by the Attorney General of Washington DC points to the entire inability to deal responsibly with a mass medium that reaches three billion people worldwide. He accuses “The Zuck” of data protection failure because the company Cambridge Analytica had access to millions of Facebook data and thus campaigned precisely for Donald Trump in 2016.
Internally, the mood is down, says our correspondent Stephan Scheuer. There is a hiring freeze, even in the Metaversum future sector “Reality Labs” is being cut. The German Niklas Steenfatt spoke to us, who tracked down dirty, racist, defamatory Facebook content in the “Integrity” section and also ran a channel on Youtube.
That’s why he was targeted by the internal surveillance unit “Employee Investigation”, was interrogated and spied on. Steenfatt resigned and was terminated again by the employer shortly before the end of the working day – without notice.
EU Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager recently appeared in front of students and demanded: “Imagine if all things in this room that were produced outside of Europe were suddenly gone. We’d look like we’d played a game of strip poker.”
In order not to look naked in the fight for raw materials with Russia and China, the EU Commissioner is now calling on Europe to help each other out with countries such as the USA, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Canada.
Instead of the old “off-shoring”, the outsourcing of economic activities somewhere, “friend-shoring” now applies. Incidentally, Vestager believes that we were not “naive” in relation to Russia and its Gazprom capitalism, just “greedy”. Her lesson learned: “We have to pay a safety premium.”
No one is naïve when it comes to China either, but up to now hardly anyone has wanted to be very moral. Unlike in relation to Russia, where there was only the cluster risk of “energy”, we are doubly dependent in relation to China: in sales (e.g. of cars) and in the purchase of raw materials. The shocking photos from the internment camps in the Chinese Uyghur province of Xinjiang, which were disseminated by the media, raise new questions about an old topic.
In the “Xinjiang Police Files” you can see pictures like those from the torture camp: prisoners tied up with bags over their heads, uniformed men holding prisoners in check with assault rifles and wooden clubs and similar bad things. Amnesty sees a “crime against humanity”, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock calls the photos “disturbing and frightening” and called for clarification in the video call with Chinese colleague Wang Yi.
The VW and BASF groups, in turn, declare that they will hold on to their plants in Xinjiang. One examines, but in any case adheres to human rights. On the other hand, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing complains that the situation in Xinjiang is being badmouthed. The society there is stable, the people live in peace.
The SPD is currently the chancellor, but the bottom line is that it is of so little use that it has nothing to do with the current government formations in Kiel and Düsseldorf. It’s going to be the political trend color of the next few years, black and green.
Worse still is that personal details are getting in the way of social democracy. For example in Hesse: Nancy Faeser would be the logical top candidate for the state election campaign in autumn 2023. But since she is Federal Minister of the Interior, you can only talk about it in the same way you talk about monkeypox.
In Frankfurt, on the other hand, the mayor of the scandal, Peter Feldmann, announced that he would read out a short statement with an immediate departure (without further questions). To do this, he returned early from the World Economic Forum in Davos and had his colleague from Offenbach represent him at an appointment.
Conclusion: This is how politicians who have lost all support in their party are resigning. Feldmann recently told football fans of Eintracht Frankfurt on the flight to the European Cup final in Seville that the flight crew had put him “hormonally out of action”.
(Photo: IMAGO/SNA)
Some relief in the social democratic management of difficult issues comes from the former spear bearer Gerhard Schröder. Surprisingly, he announced that “a long time ago” he decided not to be nominated for the supervisory board of the state-owned company Gazprom. Only last week he gave up his seat on the supervisory board of the Russian oil company Rosneft.
The former chancellor, who is constantly losing some of his honorary citizenship or club memberships, has been confronted with increasingly fierce allegations that he puts his friendship with warmonger Vladimir Putin above EU sanctions.
The European Parliament even wanted to put Schröder on the list of sanctions against oligarchs. That should have become superfluous, and the Putin-Schröder camaraderie is also losing its point. The two can no longer use each other, only harm.
Freedom Day is Pay Day for the cruise industry. The Corona and turnover plague is forgotten, holidaymakers dare to return to the ship, analyzes our report. The shipping companies have thrown mask requirements and distance rules overboard, from July most of the pleasure boats with small-town capacity will be fully booked.
In one case you can also book “Best of the Eighties” and sing for days with Markus “I want fun, we step on the gas” against the crises of this time. Everything is so focused on a good mood that the industry association CLIA even expects an increase of twelve percent for 2024 compared to the pre-corona year 2019.
The highly indebted shipping companies urgently need income. Since they scrapped old ships during the pandemic, a now erratic demand meets a tight supply – also a contribution to inflation.
And then there’s Bill McDermott, 60, American with tinted glasses, known to Germans as the long-standing, flamboyant CEO of the software company SAP, when it was still number one in the Dax.
Now he is the boss of the cloud specialist Service Now, still earns extremely well (2021: 165 million dollars) and attacks his slightly weakening ex-employer with old ideas and new joie de vivre. For example, he has a program that analyzes SAP data and makes it more efficient.
Another product helps customers to optimize their core business system – the widely acclaimed start-up Celonis, in which Service Now has invested 100 million dollars, acts as the data supplier. McDermott’s revenue planning is super optimistic and trebles to more than 15 billion dollars by 2026 – greetings to Walldorf too.
A wisdom from François VI applies to this strategy. Duke de La Rochefoucauld: “In the misfortune of our best friends we will always find something that does not displease us.”
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor