Communication Services Sector 

“We are well on track to our capital markets targets to take unit deployment costs down 25% on a like-for-like basis, inflation is not affecting us, we have long-term contracts.”

Timotheus Hottges, Deutsche Telekom AG – Chairman of Management Board, CEO & Member of the Data Privacy Advisory Board (February 2022)

“Nobody should like inflation at the levels we’re seeing in the United States right now. That approach or policy that ultimately doesn’t get that contained quickly is not going to be good for anybody, my company or any other company. And our focus right now as a country, our focus from a policy perspective, our focus on everything we should be doing is about getting that genie back in the bottle and dealing with in an aggressive way, it’s not healthy for anything.”

John T. Stankey, AT&T Inc. – CEO, President & Director (January 2022)

Industrials Sector 

“On the right-hand side, watch items have not changed since our last Capital Market Day: traffic recovery pace, obviously; recruitment and wage inflation; supply chain monitoring. And this is going to be, let’s say, the main watch items, I’d like to say: cost inflation; shortage of materials and components.”

Olivier Andries, Safran SA – CEO & Director (February 2022)

“Because when we talk about these inflationary pressures, we may have a supplier taking advantage of these capacity constraints to play the price card. We may just run out of access to a component.”

H. Lawrence Culp, General Electric Company – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“So we expect to be able to continue to leverage that pricing ability as we work through the inflationary challenges that we face in the new year.”

Michael F. Roman, 3M Company – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“And in a situation where inflation is popping up very quickly and to a very high number, that’s quite of a challenge”

Guillaume M.J.D Faury, Airbus SE – CEO & Executive Director (February 2022)

“And today, we believe we are able to secure trucks at a lower cost than the vast majority of the industry, both in an inflationary market on the right, and a deflationary market on the left.”

Lior Ron, Uber Freight LLC – CEO (February 2022)

“However, if we operate in a sustained higher inflation environment, it’s quite possible that the rate of that decline per unit will adjust to be a slightly less steep decline, which then is an effective relative price increase relative to the rate of decline we’ve had in the past..”

Erik Engstrom, RELX PLC – CEO & Executive Director (February 2022)

“As a leader, a technology leader, we are confident to balance cost inflation with pricing actions over time. All in all, this led to another excellent performance across all financial metrics.”

Roland Busch, Siemens Aktiengesellschaft – President, CEO & Member of Management Board (February 2022)

“I think it’s fair to say the single biggest pressure that the law firms face is that wage inflation.”

Stephen John Hasker, Thomson Reuters Corporation – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“The inflation that we’ve experienced in our Americas businesses and our U.S.-based businesses has been significantly higher than what we’ve seen in other markets around the world.”

Craig Arnold, Eaton Corporation plc – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“These swift pricing actions allow us to stay ahead of the inflation curve, driving a 5% increase year-over-year on top line and yielding approximately 50 basis points of margin expansions net of inflation.”

Darius E. Adamczyk, Honeywell International Inc. – Chairman of the Board & CEO (February 2022)

“Yes, it was a challenge in going into Q3 in North America and with the labor market, big volumes, component shortage and all that and also on the inflation of commodities and components and so on.”

Bjorn Klas Otto Rosengren, ABB Ltd – CEO (February 2022)

“As 2022 kicks off, we’re fully focused on recovering inflationary cost increases through our pricing programs and through the aggressive management of our cost structure.”

James C. Fish, Waste Management, Inc. – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“The external environment is challenging due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, labor tightness, upstream supply chain jams and rising inflation.”

Carol B. Tome, United Parcel Service, Inc. – CEO & Director (February 2022)

“As you know, we implemented price increases during 2021. We’re taking further action in 2022 with the intent to offset the impact of underlying inflation.”

D. James Umpleby, Caterpillar Inc. – Chairman of the Board & CEO (January 2022)

“While we expect to drive further efficiencies in 2022, our plan reflects the impact of increased inflation, any number of discrete strategic investment opportunities.”

James M. Foote, CSX Corporation – President, CEO & Director (January 2022)

Consumer Staples Sector 

“We continue to refresh our core portfolio. And while we’ve talked to you about this for several years, it becomes even more important during times of raw material inflation.”

Noel R. Wallace, Colgate-Palmolive Company – Chairman, CEO & President (February 2022)

“So we have inflation now across the board, but we’ve been dealing with inflation for many years in developing markets, and our revenue management toolkit is being very helpful over the years, but it’s almost like we are in a 2.0 version with data that we have in hand now.”

Michel Dimitrios Doukeris, Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV – CEO (February 2022)

“In addition, unprecedented levels of inflation across nearly all components of cost of goods and cost to serve necessitated multiple pricing actions across the industry, most of which lagged inflation in terms of timing in the market..”

Robert J. Gamgort, Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. – Executive Chairman, President & CEO (February 2022)

“So obviously, we’re dealing with a number of unknowns. Where exactly inflation is going? How much pricing we can get away with?”

Ulf Mark Schneider, Nestle S.A. – CEO, Member of Executive Board & Director (February 2022)

“We’re working closely with our suppliers to manage inflation, finding a few places where we can roll back prices, and we’re paying close attention to how we manage our opening price point items.”

C. Douglas McMillon, Walmart Inc. – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“And I think you have to recognize as well that the cost inflation pressures also hitting private label. So I think you’re going to see that too play itself out.”

Laxman Narasimhan, Reckitt Benckiser Group plc – Group CEO & Executive Director (February 2022)

“As we continue to take this quite assertive price increases, as we are saying in the context of very high generic consumer inflation, energy bills, the big question is, indeed, whether disposable incomes will be hit to the point that it will dampen overall consumer spend and beer spend as well.”

Rudolf Gijsbert Servaas van den Brink, Heineken N.V. – Chairman of the Executive Board & CEO (February 2022)

“Price elasticity is still strong in the U.S. There’s a lot of moving parts at the moment in terms of price of gas, employment and inflation and everything. I mean we’ll take it step by step.” 

Jack Marie Henry David Bowles, British American Tobacco p.l.c. – CEO, Member of Management Board & Director (February 2022)

“Further recovery in 2022 will be determined by macro factors, including overall consumer sentiment as well as supply chain challenges; labor shortages; and of course, the inflationary pressures and interest rates.”

James Robert B. Quincey, The Coca-Cola Company – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“2022 has started well. But the biggest challenge we’ll face this year is navigating a further step-up in input cost inflation… Pricing stepped up to its highest level in the decade as we responded to the significant inflation that we’re seeing across commodities and other input costs.”

Alan W. Jope, Unilever PLC – CEO & Executive Director (February 2022)

Health Care Sector 

“We have a formal inflation task force that we’ve established, with multiple different pillars within that and dedicated groups, working on everything from rethinking our logistics chain, and that includes looking at alternative shipping partners in a number of areas.”

Thomas E. Polen, Becton, Dickinson and Company – President, CEO & Chairman (February 2022)

“At this particular point in time, our book of business for 2022 is pretty much accomplished and part of ’23 is accomplished. But we’re building in some flexibility to reflect the inflationary pressures that might exist, and we’ll continue to work through those as we work through our contract portfolio with the different payers.”

Samuel N. Hazen, HCA Healthcare, Inc. – CEO & Director (January 2022)

“Another area, obviously, on the macro side is supply chains and inflation challenges that every company is facing, and obviously, kind of currency headwinds. So I’d say those are all challenges that are facing a lot of medtech companies, companies in health care, and quite frankly, a lot of companies outside of our sector.”

Robert B. Ford, Abbott Laboratories – Chairman of the Board, President & CEO (January 2022)

“We do see inflationary pressure on our own costs. Certainly, hospitals are going to be seeing it in their cost, labor costs and otherwise. And what that implies for us going forward, we’ll work to balance.”

Gary S. Guthart, Intuitive Surgical, Inc. – President, CEO & Director (January 2022)

Materials Sector 

“We had to absorb inflation and minimize the impact. We had, of course, to swallow EUR 2 billion increase in energy costs.”

Benoit Potier, L’Air Liquide S.A. – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“This was required to compensate for significant incremental costs from supply constraints and much high inflation pressure on our raw material and freight costs, discussed by close to 20% in the fourth quarter, nearly double the rate we saw in the third.”

Christophe Beck, Ecolab Inc. – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“However, I do have some concerns on the economic backdrop driven by continued COVID challenge, the impact of supply chain constraints, inflation, energy costs and geopolitical tensions.”

Seifollah Ghasemi, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. – Chairman, President & CEO (February 2022)

“Even with the increase in consolidated sales, we were not able to fully overcome the impacts of raw material and other cost inflation, raw material availability and the Omicron variant in the year.”

John G. Morikis, The Sherwin-Williams Company – Chairman of the Board, President & CEO (January 2022)

Information Technology Sector 

“So I think, as Prashanth said, cost inflation, we’re in the post-Moore’s Law era, cost inflation, I think, is going to be a long-term facet of the economic dynamic of the semiconductor business. So I expect that cost increases will moderate, but there will be inflation, I think, for the medium to long term here.”

Vincent T. Roche, Analog Devices, Inc. – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“So I think that clearly, we have customers who are definitely trying to buy ahead of price increases.”

Charles H. Robbins, Cisco Systems, Inc. – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“So inflation is affecting our business in a different way than it would be the overall CPI. So if you have inflation expecting rent, while that’s generally not running through our rails to a large extent. So that could again be a very different picture. Taking all of that into account, fundamentally, notwithstanding the impact that inflation has that it could be negative on consumers, on businesses and so forth. There is an impact on GDV if it’s moderate inflation that would be showing in our numbers.”

Michael Miebach, Mastercard Incorporated – CEO, President & Director (January 2022)

“Further, we’d say, over time, we think we have a structurally superior margin model for our business where I think everybody is seeing acute inflation and foundry costs and others in the industry where our factory network will give us a lot more opportunities to create a more balanced cost structure that others in the industry will not be able to accomplish.”

Patrick P. Gelsinger, Intel Corporation – CEO & Director (January 2022)

Utilities Sector

“About half of our operating margin is automatically protected from inflation as a result of regulatory frameworks and contracts within the excess prices. And for the remainder, we expect market prices to reflect increase in cost. In addition, our major supply contract for 2022 are already closed with fixed or hedged prices protecting ourselves from any potential duration of price shock in the global supply chains.”

Jose Ignacio Sanchez Galan, Iberdrola, S.A. – Executive Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“In terms of inflation, we are seeing labor inflation as the one thing I would point to.”

Lynn J. Good, Duke Energy Corporation – Chairman, President & CEO (February 2022)

Real Estate Sector 

“There are different types of price increases. We’re actually implementing some baseline, sort of new pricing for new deals because of a broader set of inflationary characteristics and a deep confidence in the value that we deliver to customers. Those I view as more structural. But then in other markets, there are more temporal pricing adjustments associated directly with the utility volatility. And I wouldn’t expect those to be permanent.”

Charles J. Meyers, Equinix, Inc. – President, CEO & Director (February 2022)

“The other thing is that I think if you’re uncertain about the inflation outlook, which is what a lot of the discussion is, is it inflation, is it supply chain, is it short term, is it long term, not a bad thing to own modestly leveraged real estate in an asset class that’s in the equilibrium, actually better than equilibrium, a couple of hundred basis points tighter than equilibrium, when you have replacement costs that give you that buffer. So we have the buffer of the mark-to-market in the 30% range that Tom talked about. But we also have the buffer of replacement costs going up, which Gene talked about. That’s just the future buffer that we haven’t started talking about yet.”

Hamid R. Moghadam, Prologis, Inc. – Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO (January 2022)

“We have escalators built into our contracts internationally. They’re largely driven tying to inflation. Our land, which is our biggest cost, has fixed escalators largely in the United States and again, kind of the same basis internationally. And our payer role is the next largest expense, which is somewhat controllable as well. So I don’t really look at the inflation as being — having a significant impact on our business.”

Thomas A. Bartlett, American Tower Corporation – President, CEO & Director (January 2022)

Energy Sector 

“We are confident EOG’s innovative and technology-driven culture can offset inflationary pressures this year.”

Ezra Y. Yacob, EOG Resources, Inc. – CEO & Director (February 2022)

“So what you’ve seen or what you hear from Joel is that we have very little exposure to inflation in terms of our operating costs.”

Francois Lionel Poirier, TC Energy Corporation – CEO, President & Director (February 2022)

“In procurement with developing long-term supply agreements, like we would have our long-term relationships, like we would have in the oil and gas business. So it’s one of the things that I think we’re working with them on to these frame agreements that we’ve traditionally used in oil and gas, to see if they can develop long-term relationships, Jason, there. So — and some of these megawatts that we’re flipping on at the moment look like they’re not being impacted by inflation prices. They seem to be very attractive.”

Bernard Looney, BP p.l.c. – CEO & Director (February 2022)

“Yes, we see some price inflation as well. Of course, most of the price inflation that is being talked about today is, of course, in cost of living and clearly driven also by energy prices. If you look into our supply chain, though, it’s a slightly different story. I think probably where we see most of the supply chain cost inflation is actually in the renewable space. So wind turbines, significantly up, but also battery costs, we see the raw materials there also being significantly affected by inflation and supply chain. That’s something that we are watching very carefully because, of course, quite often, you bid on projects where you have to take a view on how costs then subsequently will develop as well. And that’s probably the most significant part.”

Ben Van Beurden, Shell plc – CEO & Director (February 2022)

Financials Sector 

“But just to put it into context, it’s hard to predict how inflation will move forward over the next year or 2, but there’s likely to be inflation there.”

Noel P. Quinn, HSBC Holdings plc – Group CEO, Member of the Group Management Board & Executive Director (February 2022)

“And as you know, we have been very clear that we have believed that, particularly in Europe, interest rate policy and QE have been by far wrong because it was trying to drive certain effects that never materialized, higher investments and others. So now it’s really high time that we increase interest rates. We have minus 5% to 6% interest rates in Germany now, which is basically robbery of private people’s money and the forecast from the Central Bank will all wrong, right? So last year, they said there is no inflation, then the inflation would be very short, and then there was what now. People have come to recognize that it’s there… You can have very negative effects on spread widening that are unintended.”

Oliver Bate, Allianz SE – Chairman of the Management Board & CEO (February 2022)

“Rates. You’ve heard some of the rhetoric. We believe that rates will continue to trend above expected loss costs with an inflation buffer in there. We saw in the fourth quarter where there was concern and fear around Property, and Property turned back. And I call out not only to ourselves but to everybody on this call, how we thought there would be deceleration in 2021, but there was a respect in the industry and a reflection in the industry on inflation costs, and the market is reacting rationally to that. And we think that will continue into 2022.”

David Hughes McElroy, American International Group, Inc. – Executive VP & CEO of General Insurance (February 2022)

“We also think that scale matters everywhere in business. And there’s going to be continued consolidation, continued repositioning activity. And the environment that we’re shifting into, given we’re moving into an environment with probably above trend inflation for a period of time, actually is going to force companies to think about their strategic positioning differently, and we’ll benefit from that… Inflation has the risk of being a real headwind to growth.”

David Solomon, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. – Chairman & CEO (February 2022)

“The only incremental color I’d give is, if anything, we’re seeing more interest in real assets with yield. So anything with some inflation protection, so think infrastructure and real estate. As we see inflation expectations go up, we’re finding even more interest in those asset classes.”

Scott C. Nuttall, KKR & Co. Inc. – Co-CEO & Director (February 2022)

“What are the uncertainties? Obviously, on the one hand, it’s the policy era in the sense that you wind up with massive increases in interest rates, which take economies into recession. We’ve not factored that into our outlook. At this point in time, though we think it’s unlikely, even if there are 7 or 8 rate hikes, that would take rates up to about 2% levels, and 2% levels are still manageable. If the Central Banks find that inflation is too sticky, and therefore, rates get back to 3%, 3.5%, 4% level, then that’s another story.”

Piyush Gupta, DBS Group Holdings Ltd – CEO & Executive Director (February 2022)

The post Inflation: Here is What 55 CEOs Said During the Q4 Earnings Season appeared first on Sentieo.

No More Stranded Documents

Do you have…

• 5 years of an expensive industry weekly archived on your laptop?
• Powerpoint presentations from past conferences that you know are full of great data that you just can’t find?
• A decade’s worth of meeting minutes organized by topic?

While we are constantly adding more and more valuable documents to Sentieo (51 million and counting!), we realize that many of your most valuable documents are your own.  With a Box or Dropbox integration you can make these documents a part of your Sentieo workflow.  

Easy to Set Up, Seamless to Use

With a few clicks you can sync your existing Box or Dropbox folder structure with Sentieo, choose which of your existing documents to include, and configure the sync to automatically upload new files.  Tickers and tags can be added on import for easy searching and filtering.  

Once synced your folder structure and documents become a source in Sentieo’s Document Search.  Your documents are searchable using all of our query operators and categories, filterable by your folder structure, and ready to be highlighted and worked with in Notebook. 

For Sentieo users, step by step instructions can be accessed in the Support Center.

Contact us to learn more about putting the power of the Sentieo financial and corporate research platform to work in your organization.

The post Your Valuable Documents, Our Powerful Search appeared first on Sentieo.

Over the last 12 months, we have participated in a variety of roundtable discussions and webinars on the topic of earnings prep for investor relations. These events helped us identify that industry-leading IR teams are constantly reviewing how their peers message topics when drafting their earnings calls. This has become a standard practice, but we are now seeing a new trend emerge. With algorithms on the rise that can pick up on sentiment and tonality, earnings calls are not just judged by what is said, but by how it is delivered. This is forcing IR teams to scrutinize every word their CEO/CFO is going to say to deliver the best messaging and have a successful earnings call.

What is Smart Summary^TM?

Sentieo introduced Smart Summary in 2019 to help financial analysts uncover insights from earnings calls by leveraging natural language processing. Smart Summary is a proprietary machine learning model created by Sentieo that is meant to mimic the analysis of an equity analyst on earnings calls, both classifying language into different buckets (i.e., business drivers, revenue, guidance, ESG) and overlaying sentiment to understand if something is positive, negative, or neutral in nature.

IR teams leverage Sentieo’s Smart Summary to see how the language on earnings calls is interpreted by algorithms designed with a buy-side lens. IR teams are able to easily compare how the same business topics have been discussed over time, and can analyze changes in sentiment at a topical level over time and across different companies/industries.

Since the release of Smart Summary, IR teams have consistently asked: “Can I run Smart Summary’s model on my earnings call draft before we have our call?”

Introducing Smart Summary on Prepared Statements

So much time and effort goes into drafting prepared statements for an earnings call. Given volatility around earnings, it’s always nice to have a final spot-check. Algorithms driven by machine learning can pick up what the naked eye (or multiple sets of eyes) might miss.

With that in mind, we are opening up our Smart Summary model to our clients so they can test how their commentary will be interpreted before they have their earnings call. This will enable teams to test their prepared language on the fly to see:

• How language will be classified: is this a business driver, does this fall under ESG, or does it sound like we are deflecting?
• How sentiment is interpreted: are we using too much negative language when discussing our financials?
• Compare side by side with your previously completed earnings calls: is there an obvious difference between how we are talking about competition and market share now vs. three months ago? Are we accomplishing our goal of changing our narrative around cost reduction and forward looking guidance?

Contact us to learn more about putting Smart Summary for uploaded documents to work in your earnings prep process.

The post Running Sentieo’s Sentiment Model on Uploaded Documents: Benefits for Investor Relations appeared first on Sentieo.

Sentieo’s new update features another expansion of our NLP offerings: trending topics at both the company and sector level. This new addition enables faster surfacing of emerging topics, along with a sentiment overlay. 

Our existing NLP and ML features include:

• Our recently released SEC Filing Section Redlining (see the 4-minute video tutorial here)
• Our Transcript NLP Heatmaps (see us using the heatmaps and spotting the strength in housing early in Q2 2020) and Trending Term identification
• The word clouds in our Transcript NLP Smart Summaries^TM (see them applied to Clorox, Six Flags, and UPS as we tried to make sense during the tumultuous Q1 2020)
• Our one-click ML-based filings table identification, chaining, visualization, and export tool Table Explorer (one of several tutorials on our YouTube channel)

Our newest update focuses on the extraction of the Top 15 trending topics for individual companies and their sectors, with sentiment analysis and “one click” search for more details on the topic for the sector. The features are available across the Sentieo platform, including its own dropdown module, individual company documents page, the transcript Smart Summary, and the (very popular) Dashboards. 

Let’s look at a specific example, home builder PulteGroup (NYSE:PHM) and its peers. We can see the Top 15 topics for the last eight quarters for the company, and the trending topics for the Homebuilding sector in the latest earnings calls. 

Zooming in, we can see that, for example, both PHM and the industry are positive on Closings, while Lumber (an input cost) is a negative for both PHM and its peers. 

Clicking on Closings opens up the transcript snippets, along with a historical mentions timeline on top for the topic, plus sentiment analysis. 

Similarly, clicking on Lumber for PHM, we can see the negative comments that led to the negative sentiment scoring but we can also see that lumber was either positive or neutral in the prior four quarters. 

Clicking on Lumber for the entire Homebuilder sector opens up a search across the sector transcripts for that term, and we can see Lennar (NYSE: LEN) mentioning that lumber costs went up “dramatically” in the latest available quarterly transcript for the industry. 

If a term is trending for a company, users will spot a little fire icon in the query box when they search that company’s transcript. 

The Trending Terms can be accessed across the Sentieo platform to speed up your workflow. The new addition has its own module in the main navigation dropdown menu.

The Trending Terms can also be accessed on an individual company’s main Documents page.

The Smart Summary section of the quarterly transcripts contains the trending terms for that individual company along with the snippets by topic (below, showing PHM’s comments on lumber, with a sentiment overlay, in the latest transcript).

Finally, the Trending Topics are available in our Dashboards as one of the many widgets that our users can use to build Dashboards from scratch, or to customize their pre-built  Dashboards. 

Learn about these new features and more in the Sentieo V4.5 Release Notes, or contact us to set up a free trial. Be sure to subscribe to the Sentieo Blog for more posts on the new release over the next few weeks.

The post Get More Insights: Company & Sector-Level NLP Trending Topics in Sentieo 4.5 appeared first on Sentieo.

ESG investment research is an increasingly popular topic for our clients. Our powerful platform can surface insights, prove trends, extract and visualize data, all in seconds. But don’t take our word for it: check out the work of some of our friends and users, like the non-profit Just Capital. 

With Sentieo, ESG analysts can surface insights faster and in a more comprehensive way than ever before. For example, below we are using a combination search of press releases only, with synonyms/acronyms (GHG picks up CO2 emissions) and a number type search for weight values. 

Every search can be an email alert (instant/daily/weekly): this automates your workflow and helps you monitor more topics as they develop. In the example below, we had a saved search alert for mentions of plastics in Form PX14, a commonly used SEC form by shareholder interest groups regarding ESG proposals. 

Sentieo’s Smart Summary, our Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing transcript analysis, identifies and scores ESG and many subtopics, shortening the analysts’ time to insight. 

Governance-related searches are also a breeze: using our in: proxy shortcut, we can locate relevant information in a second. For example, here we have identified the CEO to median employee pay ratio disclosure for Dunkin’ Brands. 

Sentieo’s Document Search statistics can be combined with other financial and non-financial data sets to paint a fuller picture. Below we have combined the monthly document counts for 10-Ks with Risk Factors that mention “climate change” versus search interest for the topic. (Interactive chart viewer) 

A unified dashboard view lets users monitor documents, financial metrics, saved searches, team highlights, visualizations, and more. 

Built-in collaboration tools like in-document highlighting, note sharing, document uploads, search, and more enable teams to achieve more, in shorter time.

If you would like to get a custom demo of the platform, please get in touch with us. 

The post ESG Research in Sentieo: Surface insights, prove trends, extract and visualize data—all in seconds appeared first on Sentieo.

In the short videos below, we will go over how we went about getting up to speed on the sector across financial metrics, private company data, sell-side research reports, transcripts, and news reports to get the full picture efficiently. 

The most “news-y” item is the UBER/GRUB potential all-stock deal. One number that came out in the media is 2.15 UBER shares for GRUB. We recorded a video on how to get the context for this ratio in seconds when the news first came out. 

Since two of the four big players in the space are private (DoorDash and Postmates), we used our private company data integration to look at funding rounds, total funding, and backers for these two companies. 

We then looked at revenue and EBITDA numbers for the two public players, UBER and GRUB. We used our in-table search to find exactly what we need. We then used our ML-based table identification, chaining, and visualization tool to look at the trends in GRUB’s EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA on a year-over-year basis. 

Since the space is very dynamic with frequent partnership announcements, staying on top of press releases is essential. Here we looked at how to find press releases for both the public and the private players in the 3P space through our press release searches. 

It’s also important to understand the end-market (restaurant) dynamics. Performing an exhaustive search in restaurant transcripts and in restaurant sell-side reports, we then took highlights and screenshots—without leaving the documents. These are saved automatically, and we will combine them later in the full “report.”  

In this video, we used our extensive Equity Data Terminal to look at the restaurant operator (not franchisor) profitability (specifically EBIT margins), along with the consensus expectations. We look at the large Burger King franchisee Carrol’s (NASDAQ: TAST), “best in class” operator Chipotle (NYSE: CMG), and mall traffic-exposed Red Robin (NASDAQ: RRGB). 

There has been a lot of regulatory news around the delivery companies, both at the local and at the federal level. In this video, we cover how to search and take notes in our News and RSS integration in our Document Search.

In this final video, we show you how to combine your research from all these disparate sources into one single full report. We add all the relevant tickers and tags for discoverability, and we share it with one group and one individual. 

If you think that an integrated financial research platform can improve your productivity and collaboration, please get in touch.

The post Third-party “3P” delivery dynamics: how to get up to speed on Uber Eats (NYSE: UBER), GrubHub (NYSE: GRUB), Postmates and DoorDash appeared first on Sentieo.

The Six Flags transcript we’re reviewing today was reported on April 30, 2020. The Smart Summary arrived in my email box just a few minutes after the regular transcript. 

The Smart Summary begins with a word cloud using NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tear sheet. 

We can see the words “crisis” and “Covid” loom large, of course, and we can also see the term “suspension of operations.” More interesting are social distancing (big questions around capacity for restaurants and entertainment venues) along with virtual queuing. We also see liquidity position and revolver: the company has managed this very well. 

The overall sentiment is lower than any time in recent history, as one would expect, so was UPS’s sentiment.

The ML-based Categories Heatmap is also more red than recent quarters across our broad ML classification categories. We can see that the most recent quarter is “redder” than anything before, indicating more negative sentences in each category.

The Top Terms for the most recent quarter are dominated by Covid and the closures, along with a mention of the revolver.

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The first category is Covid: a complete shutdown and an entirely unpredictable situation means the top 5 sentences are all negative. 

In the Business section, we can read about the company’s longer-term initiatives (marked as positive).

In the 8-min video below, we do a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version inside our product. We discuss the full version of the Smart Summary, visualize the business seasonality for both revenues and cash flows (and compare it to Vail Resorts), we discuss the stock price recovery and the successful bond issuance. 

Stay tuned for more highlights next week. To learn even more, register for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7. And, if you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, we’d be happy to schedule a demo. 

The post Six Flags Entertainment (NYSE:SIX) Transcript Smart Summary Highlights: Complete Operations Shutdown But Superb Liquidity Management Ensures Survival appeared first on Sentieo.

The LabCorp transcript we’re reviewing today was reported on April 29, 2020. As you can see below, the Smart Summary email came just a few minutes after the “old way” transcript (don’t worry, we have the full transcript in the Smart Summary too, with our NLP sentiment scoring applied).

The Smart Summary begins with a word cloud using NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tearsheet. 

From the word cloud, we can quickly see that COVID-19 dominated the conversation, as is the case with the vast majority of the transcripts in Q1 2020. Serology is also related to COVID. We can also quickly spot Negative Impact, Adjusted Operating Income, and Drug Development—the company has some headwinds from trial delays. 

Overall sentiment is lower than prior quarters, but not like what we saw with UPS’s decidedly negative sentiment yesterday.

The ML-based Categories Heatmap is also more red than recent quarters across our broad ML classification categories. The increase in Deflection points to increased uncertainty versus the prior baseline. 

The top keywords, along with the top keywords over the last two years, are next in the emailed summary. We can see coronavirus and related terms (PCR and serology) dominate the call, along with “Negative Impact” and “Drug Development”. 

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The first category is Covid. 

In the top five Covid comments, we see the guidance withdrawal repeat (the company withdrew guidance in February) along with the client drug development program postponements. 

Business drivers are a mix of positive (i.e. share gains) and negative statements.

In the 10-min video below, we provide a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version of the Smart Summary in the Sentieo platform, and check some of the data against the Smart Summary of LabCorp’s direct competitor, Quest (DGX).

Stay tuned for more highlights over the next week. You can register for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7. And, if you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, we’d be happy to schedule a demo. 

The post LabCorp (NYSE: LH) Transcript Smart Summary Highlight: Delays in Trials and 50% Volume Drop Counter COVID-19 Testing Capacity Ramp appeared first on Sentieo.

For the next few days, we will review Q1 calls across a variety of industries using our machine learning and natural language call transcript application, Smart Summary^TM. Today we will focus on UPS.

We released the first version of Smart Summary last July to rave reviews. This was followed up by an in-depth expansion of many of the machine learning classifications and improved visuals (word clouds, heat maps, and keyword extraction) in our March 2020 Sentieo 4.1 product release. 

Smart Summary fundamentally changes the way our clients read transcripts. While it’s important to listen to high priority calls live, Smart Summary ensures that you do not miss anything in your high priority list, whether you listen live, or not. Further, with Smart Summary you no longer need to read transcripts from your broader coverage universe chronologically. 

Today we will look at the most recent UPS transcript (Q1 2020 was reported on April 28, 2020). We can see that the Smart Summary email came in shortly after the “old way” transcript (don’t worry, we have the full transcript in the Smart Summary too, with our NLP sentiment scoring applied).

The Smart Summary PDF starts off with the word cloud through NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tearsheet. 

We can see that Covid-related terms are prominently featured, as is Asia (recovering!), recession, and healthcare (big increase in mentions there due to a number of corporate initiatives). We can also see Headwinds and B2C: this immediately alerts us to the product mix headwinds that the company is experiencing (shift to the less profitable B2C). 

The overall sentiment of the call was decidedly negative versus prior quarters. 

We can also see this reflected in the darker color in the ML-based Categories Heatmap. Notice the particularly negative change in the Economic category, as well as the Deflection category, indicating considerable uncertainty. 

The top keywords in the transcript (along with the top keywords in the prior two years) are next: these mirror the word cloud. We can see the mix mentioned above (SMB and B2C), we can see Healthcare, Asia, and of course, Covid.

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The top category is Covid. In the top five Covid comments, we can immediately see the guidance withdrawal and the unfavorable mix shift language.

In the next category, Business, we see a mix of positive and negative in the top five. While ROIC and the initiatives are positive, we see the decline in U.S. operating income and mix shift (again!) as negatives. 

In the video below, we do a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version inside our product.

Stay tuned for more highlights over the next week, and register below for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7.

If you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, please get in touch. 

The post UPS: Negative NLP Sentiment, ML Highlights Unfavorable Mix Amid the Covid Crisis; China Growing in March appeared first on Sentieo.

I’ve been tracking ways that strategy teams use the Sentieo platform to quickly gain insights on a new market, understand the competitive dynamics, and evaluate a partner in order to better quantify strategic opportunities at hand. Here’s one example:

Thematic and Industry-Focused Research

When entering a new market, it is critical to understand who operates in the market and find the most relevant information to generate a market landscape. Sentieo has a database of millions of documents across enterprise-level content sets like earnings call transcripts, broker research, and SEC filings to help surface that information instantly.

In the video below, we show how to search across the entire Sentieo database for 5G to immediately surface companies that operate in the 5G space (telcos, tech companies, etc.), along with the most content-rich documents on 5G from the last 2 years:

This open-ended search can be used for technologies, products, themes, or even macroeconomic events.

In the example below, we search for “coronavirus impact” and narrow down to the semiconductor sector to see which companies are disclosing the immediate impact on their business. Our natural language processing  (NLP) technology is at play here with results ranging from “impact of coronavirus” to “COVID-19 impacts”, picking up every iteration of the topic:

We can then highlight any relevant information and consolidate that saved data into a single research note:

As seen in this last video, Sentieo has a variety of capabilities that allow teams to consolidate research findings and collaborate, helping reduce duplicative research and keep everyone on the same page.

Access more research steps in our new Strategic Project Research Center. You’ll learn how to use Sentieo to research competitive dynamics and individual companies, as well as more advanced research steps from our Head of Research, Nick Mazing: Royalty Rate Negotiations, Material Disclosure Changes, Trend Identification, and more.

The post Research Steps for Evaluating Strategic Projects appeared first on Sentieo.

I recently had a chance to spend some time with Steve Soter of Workiva. Steve works with their Product Marketing team, previously served as the global controller of an e-commerce company as well as a director of SEC reporting, and has some interesting insights on how the Sentieo platform can help SEC Reporting teams:

• Be consistent with peers
• See rules in practice
• Increase collaboration around the story

Here’s what Steve had to say about each of these use cases.

When changes occurred in your market, how did you find peer insights or trends to ensure you stayed consistent with the pack? 

During my time in SEC reporting at an e-commerce company, we saw a significant impact when Google would make a change to their search algorithm. If our performance was impacted by the change (either for good or bad), we certainly wanted to call it out. But before we talked about that publicly, I really wanted to know how, and if, our peers were talking about it. 

You would think that lots of companies would be impacted by a Google algorithm change, but since our efforts to research our peers were all manual, it was surprisingly difficult to do that research. I had the same issue when we started adding Bitcoin disclosures. It was nearly impossible to find anything.

It would have been great to have tools that would have done this (as it happens, we found out a lot of people copied those early disclosures of ours!).

How can teams avoid SEC comment letters? What is often missed that could have been avoided with better tools? 

First, and as we just discussed, you might not want to be an outlier relative to your peer group when it comes to your disclosures. What I mean by that is that if you have 4 peers, and they are all disclosing things one way, and you decide to go a different way, it’s almost certain that the SEC will know you’re an outlier. I think it’s safe to say that the SEC has research tools of their own (maybe they use Sentieo?!?) and they can quickly determine if your disclosures and reporting is different from your peer group.

So, be sure you’re keeping up, or that you’re clear about why those differences in reporting are important.

I’d say the second thing is to be sure you’re complying with the disclosure requirements (obviously), but especially that you’re watching how they evolve in practice over time. For example, the way we first started disclosing revenue under the new standard hasn’t necessarily changed by the rules, but it has certainly evolved in practice. Keeping up with those changes is important.

Whether you use your SEC filings as a means to actively communicate to your stakeholders, or whether you treat it as a compliance exercise, either way, you need to be aware of what’s being said by your peers.

What are some of the challenges you had when trying to share and collaborate around your research across departments?

Unless you’re a department of one person, it’s easy to see the benefits of collaboration. The problem is that the old school way of SEC research through EDGAR likely involved copy/paste into a standalone document that would be shared by email.

I can think of multiple examples where our team was researching our peers’ disclosures, which was difficult enough as it was, but then we would have to manually combine all of our findings and comments into separate desktop documents.

And that was just within our team. Once we involved a broader group such as our legal department, investor relations, and outside counsel, we could end up compiling huge sets of manual data in standalone documents.

It would have been far easier if our team could have collaborated in one place and then shared that out to the broader group. This was also true when it came to researching sensitive topics that you didn’t want floating out there by email or a broader group involved. A collaborative and permissioned workspace could have facilitated a more discrete research process as well.

Want to learn more about how Sentieo can help your SEC Reporting teams mitigate disclosure risk? Watch our Sentieo for SEC Reporting webinar or get in touch.

The post 3 Tips for Mitigating Disclosure Risk: Interview with Steve Soter of Workiva appeared first on Sentieo.

Like the companies we featured in our “work from home” portfolio, Sentieo provides its users the same functionality at home as it does from the office, making it the most comprehensive work from home solution for investment and corporate research.

Or, as one Sentieo client said, “Sentieo is like a finance vertical version of Slack —conversations around research notes and documents. And its search functionality is A+.”

As a cloud-native application, Sentieo is the only research platform that incorporates a purpose-built, comprehensive Research Management System with all of the other tools used by research analysts: document reading/search/alerts, financial and alternative data, data visualizations, and more. 

The RMS is great for saving notes, charts, models, screens, visualizations, and other tidbits from the platform, but the real power comes together when teams can collaborate seamlessly with comments, document additions, version control, full search, and more. All of your team’s IP stays in one place. And then there is the ROI on time from not having to switch all the time between tools with limited functionality and no integrations.

Portfolio managers can view the progress being made on an investment thesis and read select updates coming in from team members working around the world—all in real-time. For compliance and IT professionals, draconian version control, detailed permissioning, and our SOC-2 compliance provide peace of mind with visibility and audibility. We also integrate with a number of popular tools and offer special environments for our large institutional clients. 

But what does it look like?

To begin, any text, table, image or visualization in Sentieo can be highlighted to be saved, labeled (optional), and automatically tagged with a ticker. We also have a web clipper, uploads (manual and automatic), and email forwarding: if you are still using Ctrl+F in your email, it’s time to rethink your process. 

Here we are highlighting text to save for future use. 

Here we are saving a scatterplot for future use

Here we have entered our own assumptions about a stock and its valuation, and are sending this scenario to Notebook. 

Inside the RMS, users can write own Notes and combine with highlights, and build full theses.

This is what a Note with text and combined highlights and tables looks like. Note that all highlights collected link to the original document for easy audit and context. 

And this is what a full-blown thesis with structured fields on top for work product standardization, team comments, attachments, and quarterly updates looks like:

Updates can be shared with individuals, teams, or sent via email to non-users. Our manager-level users love the Research Management dashboards. These dashboards offer instant insights into what the team is working on, with activity (and documents, and financial data, and more) updates in real-time. 

To see how your remote work process can improve dramatically, please sign up for our upcoming webinar! 

The post Sentieo: The Work from Home Tool for Investment and Corporate Research appeared first on Sentieo.