Business Insight Zone

These are some interesting items I’ve run into today:

• JetBlue offered mixed results when it announced earnings: profits are up — but not as much as analysts would have liked. The company also said that, given the nasty problems it had with flight cancellations back in February, it would slow its torrid pace of growth. If all goes according to plan, the airline will continue to get bigger, but it will do it in a better, more sustainable way.
• Meanwhile, one of the biggest and oldest airlines around did much better: UAL (parent company of United Airlines) posted its biggest profit in seven years.
• As we discussed last week, AMD is having a rough go of it versus Intel, but it appears to be saving money and doing the right thing with its corporate climate plan.
• When I have questions about the semiconductor business, I head straight for my Hoover’s colleague Jeff Dorsch, who’s been covering it since way back in the day. Right now at Bizmology he has a look at some of the longest-tenured CEOs in the chip business.
• There’s a big difference between offering a neat product and offering a neat product that makes money. Case in point: Netflix. My own family is addicted to the company’s service and uses it heavily — but the video rental outfit continues to see many ups and downs as it competes with rival Blockbuster.
• McDonald’s has been in business more than fifty years. Wanna guess how many quarterly losses it has ever posted? I’ll wait while you consider . . .Okay, the answer is two. The first one came at the end of 2002; the second one came in the just-completed quarter, thanks to costs associated with the company’s sale of 1,600 Latin American branches.

Stay tuned for more — and please do let me know which sorts of stories you’d like me to point out.

Category: Deals, Executives, Media, Technology, Transportation