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How E-Tail Startup Jet.com Is Taking On Giant Amazon.com

With a potential $1 billion in 2016 revenue and $803 million in funding, e-tail startup Jet.com has some heft, but it’s still a lightweight compared with e-tail king  Amazon.com ( AMZN ). But that doesn’t faze Jet CEO Marc Lore, who has a strategy, which he laid out for IBD in a phone interview from the company’s Hoboken, N.J., headquarters. It boils down to two big ideas: that e-commerce overall will soar from a $300 billion market to $1 trillion in the next 10 years; and that Amazon can’t possibly take the whole thing. His third point underlying both big ideas is that Jet is targeting shoppers that Amazon is not — those obsessive about saving money. “W e’re going after a different type of customer with a different need,” Lore said. “ We are about saving people money and empowering them to shop in a smarter way. And o ur technology is built to help consumers and retailers pull costs  out of the overall ecosystem. So it is   a more efficient way to buy product.” Jet aims to present shoppers with an experience that more closely matches what they’d find in a store. Every product, for example, has a single view. That’s unlike e-tail giants like Amazon or eBay ( EBAY ), where shoppers are confronted with multiple, competing listings from a number of sellers. Instead Jet.com finds the best price for a given product after searching multiple sellers and displays. So, for example, in a search for Levi’s jeans, a shopper would see a single listing for each style of jeans. The single product view may also help Jet.com avoid the SEO challenges that have plagued eBay , which has a longtime beef with search leader Google. Jet.com Secret Sauce Is ‘Dynamic Pricing’ But the real secret sauce for shoppers is the company’s dynamic pricing. Essentially, customers are rewarded for buying multiple items, which decreases shipping costs and thus decreases customers’ costs. Then, when the customer goes to check out, Jet’s algorithm behind the scenes figures out which sellers are the most efficient in terms of shipping and price, so if one seller is closer but charges more for shipping, you’ll buy from a more distant seller that charges less for shipping and thus results in a lower overall cost for the customer. “Ou r technology is built  more like a real- time trading system than it is an e-commerce site,” Lore said. “A s people shop,  we’re repricing products to reflect the true underlying economics of getting those products to the customer,  based on what products are already in the (checkout)  basket and based on how far away those products are from where the customer lives.” Jet continues to tweak its website. When Lore launched the venture in January 2015, the company used a membership program similar to  Costco ‘s ( COST ) to generate profit. That didn’t last long, and the company changed its business model in October, hiking prices. Though there were reports the change signaled trouble , several analysts interviewed for this report said startups often make strategic changes early on. Amazon’s E-Commerce Empire As shown by its fundraising and number of investors, Jet.com has its believers. Its venture money comes from China e-commerce giant Alibaba ( BABA ), prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms such as General Catalyst Partners, and the venture units of financial powerhouses Goldman Sachs ( GS ) and  Fidelity National Financial ( FNF ), among others. The company is valued near $1 billion, huge for any startup but a blip compared with Amazon’s $286 billion market cap. Amazon has annual revenue topping $100 billion — not including the more than $131 billion in third-party sales — and is catching up to longtime No. 1 retailer  Wal-Mart ( WMT ). Amazon also has a nascent payments business that competes with PayPal ( PYPL ). To facilitate its e-commerce sales, the company has elected to get into the ocean shipping business, which has the potential to generate hundreds of millions in free cash flow . And that’s just the e-tail business. In E-Tail, Go Big Or Go Home Conventional wisdom holds that one strategy to beat Amazon is to pick and choose categories of goods that Amazon is not strong in. One, for example, is fashion — though Amazon recently launched its own line of apparel and a live-streaming TV show . Alibaba-funded e-tail startup ShopRunner is taking aim at Amazon that way. Lore chose another route. In Lore’s view of the e-commerce universe, mass market firms — those competing across a range of product categories — are the only viable firms. That’s because, Lore says, whether a website is selling one category of products or 10, you need to push them “through the same set of pipes.” And thus, he says, it makes more sense to leverage the same set of fixed costs to increase sales. “If you have 10 times as many categories and 10 times the gross marketplace value going through the same set of pipes, you’re going to get a lot more leverage in your fixed expenses, and your expenses as a percentage of revenue is going to be a lot lower,” Lore said. “It makes it really difficult for the specialty guys to compete on price with mass merchants for that reason.” Lore himself has a fair bit of experience with Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. As founder and former CEO of Quidsi, known for its Diapers.com, Lore spent years facing off against Amazon. Ultimately, Bezos killed Diapers.com with a price war — the e-tail giant can afford to lose money for longer than its often smaller competitors — and bought the company from Lore. The CEO stuck around for about three years but ultimately left in 2013 . A little more than a year in, Jet.com remains one of the few e-tail companies in the U.S. that’s openly challenging Amazon’s dominance. With $1 billion in gross merchandise value — a figure often very close to revenue for e-tail firms — and 3.5 million registered shoppers, Lore already has taken Jet on a long flight, with a long runway ahead.

Priceline CEO Resigns After Inappropriate Employee Relationship

Priceline ( PCLN ) CEO Darren Huston resigned Thursday after an internal investigation into an inappropriate relationship with an employee, but shares were down just a fraction in morning trading. The sudden resignation is effective immediately. Huston resigned without severance and forfeited his unvested stock options, Cowen analyst Kevin Kopelman noted in a research report. Kopelman still rates Priceline stock outperform. Chairman Jeffery Boyd was tapped to lead Priceline as the board searches for Huston’s successor. Boyd served as Priceline CEO from 2002 to 2013 and was succeeded by Huston in January 2014 after a lengthy, planned transition. Booking.com President and COO Gillian Tans was named CEO of that key Amsterdam-based Priceline subsidiary. Boyd initially joined Priceline in September 2011, leaving Microsoft ( MSFT ) to take the Booking.com CEO position. Huston’s resignation stemmed from an independent board investigation into a personal relationship with an employee not under his direct supervision, Priceline said in a statement. “The investigation determined that Mr. Huston had acted contrary to the company’s code of conduct and had engaged in activities inconsistent with the board’s expectations for executive conduct,” Priceline said. Huston acknowledged the conduct and expressed regret, the company said. Priceline stock has risen 14% since January 2014, when Huston took the helm. On the stock market today , Priceline stock was trading up fractionally near 1,348. Shares of rival Expedia ( EXPE ) were up 2.5% Thursday morning, ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings report, due out after the close. Priceline is slated to report Q1 earnings before the open on Wednesday and is expected to post $2.12 billion in sales and $9.65 earnings per share minus items, up 15% and 19%, respectively, vs. the year-earlier quarter. Kopelman foresees minimal disruption stemming from Huston’s exit, but he notes that Priceline could have opened itself up to potential litigation. “It is difficult to gauge this risk, given details of Huston’s misconduct were not disclosed,” Kopelman wrote. “However, Priceline has commented to media outlets that the misconduct did not involve the company’s financial reporting or controls.” Indeed, Priceline spokeswoman Leslie Cafferty told IBD via email: “This did not involve issues about the company’s financial statements, accounting or internal controls over financial reporting. This resignation was not related in any way to the company’s operational performance or financial condition.” RBC analyst Mark Mahaney reiterated his outperform rating on Priceline stock. Boyd’s return will provide “continuity, experience and leadership,” he wrote in a report. Tans’ role as Booking.com CEO is also a key positive, he said. Priceline’s fundamentals remain strong, Mahaney said. “These trends constitute one of the most robust growth and profitability profiles across the Internet sector,” he wrote.

Abbott Boosts Cardio Device Business With $25 Billion St. Jude Buy

Two giants in cardiac devices agreed to merge Thursday, as Abbott Laboratories ( ABT ) announced an agreement to acquire  St. Jude Medical ( STJ ) in a deal worth $25 billion. Abbott agreed to pay $46.75 plus 0.8708 Abbott share for every St. Jude share. Based on Abbott’s five-day average share price, the deal valued St. Jude shares at $85 apiece. St. Jude stock was up more than 25% in morning trading on the stock market today , near 78, while Abbott stock was down more than 7%, below 41. Abbott said that the deal will add 21 cents to its EPS next year and 28 cents the following year. It expects to save $500 million in costs from the combination by 2020. Abbott will also assume or refinance St. Jude’s $5.7 billion in debt. The move will greatly enlarge Abbott’s cardiovascular device business, which now represents 19% of its revenue. “St. Jude Medical’s strong positions in heart failure devices, atrial fibrillation and cardiac rhythm management complement Abbott’s leading positions in coronary intervention and transcatheter mitral repair,” said Abbott’s press release. “Together, the company will compete in nearly every area of the cardiovascular market and hold the No. 1 or 2 positions across large and high-growth cardiovascular device markets.” Leerink analyst Danielle Antalffy agreed. St. Jude’s flat-to-negative sales growth over the last few years picked up to 8% in Q1, and she wrote in a research note that it’s set up to continue, while Abbott looked to be growing only in the low single digits. Antalffy also wrote that a competing bid is unlikely. “The most logical buyer beyond Abbott in our view would be Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ ),” Antalffy wrote. “In our meetings with J&J in mid-2015, management emphasized that the company is not interested in what they deemed ‘value’ markets within MedTech, specifically calling out cardiac rhythm management (nearly 30% of St. Jude’s total sales) and drug-eluting stents.” The deal announcement came on a busy day for M&A in medical field. Biotech Medivation ( MDVN ) confirmed that it had received an unsolicited $9.3 billion bid from big pharma Sanofi ( SNY ), while AbbVie ( ABBV ), which used to be Abbott’s biopharma division before it was spun out, agreed to buy another cancer-focused biotech, Stemcentrx, for $5.8 billion.