Some Knowledge Leader companies are born in a moment of disruptive innovation. From the start, they exist under pressure to change their industry or die. Such is the case with Swatch Group, a company scraped together from the remaining ashes of a dying Swiss watch…
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This week, in Bubble-Like Stock Valuations Miss $3.4 Trillion in Hidden Assets, Bloomberg detailed how traditional accounting can make a company’s fundamentals “look a lot worse than they are.” In the article, New York University’s Professor Baruch Lev weighs in. “You get numbers which are…
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Semiconductor and semiconductor capital equipment stocks have been stellar performers lately, a trend we have been a bit slow to recognize. So, I decided to do a deep dive on semis and semiconductor capital equipment stocks to see if there is opportunity left to capture….
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If you don’t know the name Diageo, that’s because Diageo wants it that way. This Knowledge Leader would prefer you to know the names Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Tanqueray and Guinness, the group it calls its “Global Giants,” representing 41% of the firm’s…
Read More“Subscribers Are the New, New Thing in Business” declared The Economist (April 11, 2018). The magazine says that “Subscription models are seen by many investors and executives as the holy grail, because they promise a recurring stream of revenue…. The attractions of subscription businesses are obvious. Firms…
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A common asset possessed by every highly innovative company in the Knowledge Leaders Indexes is a rich store of intangible capital. Such reservoirs of knowledge take the form of trademarks, brands, software, even manufacturing processes, and there is only one way to amass them: over…
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A recent report by The Wall Street Journal identified a new generation of supercomputers as the fuel behind Big Oil’s “digital arms race to find oil and trim costs.” Indeed, make a quick visit to the websites of most of the Supermajors – that’s BP,…
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Baruch Lev is the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at the Stern School of Business, NYU. This article first appeared at the Lev End Of Accounting Blog and is shared here with his permission. Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article that caught my attention: “Next Up: The…
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Later this year, Rio Tinto will seek board approval to spend $2.2B to build the world’s first “intelligent” mine, a network of robots and autonomous vehicles all working together on the site of the earth’s largest iron ore complex in Western Australia. Whether or not…
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In the midst of the worst flu season in a decade, Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi & Co., Ltd. is making headlines for a new drug it says can kill the influenza virus in 24 hours with a single dose. Today, only a handful of treatments…
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