Good morning!

We have 2 reports for your delectation again today. I shall be covering trading updates from Impellam (LON:IPEL), Communisis (LON:CMS), and Parity (LON:PTY) . Plus any other bits & bobs that look interesting - e.g. big price movers, takeover bids, etc.

Graham will be writing his own report, click here today - covering Xaar (LON:XAR), Sutton Harbour Holding (LON:SUH), and Haynes Publishing.

Tomorrow it will be 1 report only, from Graham, as I'm having the day off.

All our reports appear on the SCVR landing page here. The most recent is highlighted in the large box, but others appear below. So it's worth scrolling down to see if there are 2 reports for the day, although we'll always mention this at the start of each report too.




Internet shares - winner takes all?

Just Eat (LON:JE.) has announced this morning the acquisition of two competitors. In the UK, it has bought its main competitor, Hungry House, for £200-240m. I'm surprised this has not triggered competition regulatory issues. Certainly, from what I've seen, JustEat and Hungry House have been the 2 big takeaway delivery companies in terms of TV advertising. It seems that JustEat has won the war, and is now gobbling up its competitor. This now gives it a very dominant position in the UK - although Deliveroo and UberEats seem to be up & coming.

(UPDATE: a friend has pointed out to me that Deliveroo & UberEats serve a different market - delivering food from restaurants which don't have their own delivery staff. Whereas JustEat is an interface between takeaways & their customers.)


We've seen similar things in many other sectors, where once in a lifetime changes to business models are taking place, driven by the internet and ubiquitous smartphones.

Where sector disruption occurs, with new technology, It seems to me that, all other things being equal, after a while there tends to be one big winner. This might be the first mover. And/or the big winner might be the company which simply out-spends the competition on marketing. It's often the case that the big winner becomes self-reinforcing after a while, as it sucks in liquidity…

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