Mary Meeker on Web 2.0
Morgan Stanley technology analyst Mary Meeker was among the notable speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit, the annual look at trends in the social technology market, hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. Each year at the conference, Meeker does a rapid-fire 15 minute presentation. This year, she covered nearly 50 slides in her presentation.
After underperforming the S&P 500 in six of the previous seven years, tech stocks have outperformed the S&P by 918 basis points, year-to-date. While much talk has been made of the reemergence of the tech bubble, Meeker pointed out that recent tech stock performance has been supported by positive earnings revisions. At the same time, she noted that the high valuations given private companies in recent transactions would require superior execution to justify the multiples.
Meeker noted that consumers, not the enterprise, were now driving technology.
While enterprises have driven demand for technology for most of history, consumers were now the #1 users of semiconductors, surpassing IT and government.
Among other key trends Meeker indicated were driving the technology market:
- High demand for consumer Internet-enabled services is driving the demand for technology infrastructure by companies like Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, Google, iTunes, PayPal, YouTube, Facebook and others.
- Wireless innovation is accelerating, with 3G handset adoption set to double by 2009
- Storage needs continue to ramp with consumers expecting to both connect and carry mobile devices
- Strong data center growth to support today’s technology products
- Enterprises are starting to emerge from their purchasing funk
Going forward, Meeker expects emerging markets to pace the next wave of technology adoption, led by
Among other interesting tidbits:
- Facebook is now the 7th rated site globally, in terms of minutes spent on the site, behind Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, MySpace and Google.
- Internet-enabled devices are gaining traction - consumer electronics such as Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox Live, Apple’s iPhone and others are leading the charge.
- YouTube has over 206 million unique global visitors, nearly double what it had a year ago.
- Slide, a widget used on social networking pages, has over 5 million active users and 45 million installs.
The technology outlook was not all sunny, though. Meeker suggested that the risk of recession remained a potential challenge and that the risk of subprime woes spreading should not be underestimated.
Her full presentation is available from the Morgan Stanley Global Technology site.
In other news coming out of the Web 2.0
MySpace to open its platform up for developers to fend off Facebook (Reuters)
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg speaks but says little (O’Reilly Radar) while John Battelle tries to get him to commit (Read/Write/Web)
Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz disputes the NY Times article that this is just a repeat of the bubble (via AlacraBlog)
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