Sometimes, Jim Cramer finds companies that shed light on what consumers like to do and where they are really spending their money.
That’s why the “Mad Money” host was so fascinated by Wednesday’s earnings report from Live Nation Entertainment, the Ticketmaster parent that produces live events like music festivals.
“Of course, the stock gave up much of its gain today after Amazon announced it would launch a competing ticket service — they tried to partner with Live Nation but apparently couldn’t agree on who’d keep the data,” Cramer said. “But the truth is that tickets are only one piece of the pie here. Live Nation now owns so many venues and festivals that Amazon will just be another vendor for them.”
In Live Nation’s post-earnings conference call, CEO Michael Rapino elaborated on Live Nation’s sponsors, saying they each pay over $1 million annually “to reach that highly sought-after millennial customer.”
Live Nation also has the perfect cause to entice millennials, Cramer said: live events, particularly music festivals, offer ideal backdrops for posts on the likes of Facebook or Instagram.
“That’s why I think this stock remains one of the best plays on millennials, and any giveback on this Amazon foray may be an excellent opportunity to buy the stock of Live Nation,” Cramer said.
With analysts and strategists concerned that the stock market is overvalued as the Dow plunged 200 points on Thursday, Cramer had to step in and add his voice to the largely bearish mix.
“Every few weeks some old-timer or hot hand comes on air and yells ‘fire’ in the theater,” the “Mad Money” host said. “I get it. Look, these statements about the market being too high roll off the tongue so easily. … The bears sure were right today, right? They could be right again tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean they could be right over the intermediate term, which is the term that I like to think about.”
Cramer said that some fears, like those of the tensions between the United States and North Korea, are legitimate. But the slew of illegitimate worries about stocks being overvalued and on the verge of collapse need to be addressed, he said.
After shares of Planet Fitness neared record highs following the gym franchise’s second-quarter earnings report, CEO Chris Rondeau shared the factors contributing to his company’s growth.
“If you think about our business model and our marketing, it’s a marketing machine,” Rondeau told Cramer on Thursday. “So every incremental member that joins, 9 percent of that dues goes to marketing, fueling the next join.”
Planet Fitness came public in 2015 when it was 7 million members strong. Since then, the low-cost gym chain has grown to 10 million members, thanks in part to its streamlined business model, Rondeau said.
Then, Cramer spoke with Bill Sandbrook, the president and CEO of U.S. Concrete, to hear more about the state of U.S. infrastructure.
“Twenty-six states have raised their gas taxes, 26 states, in order to support infrastructure spend,” Sandbrook told Cramer on Thursday. “It’s a dereliction of duty, what’s going on with the federal government, slow-playing infrastructure investment.”
And as the Trump administration struggles to rally support for the president’s proposed $1 trillion infrastructure project, Sandbrook reminded viewers of the benefits of bringing industrial jobs, like the kinds his company offers, to local economies.
“The people have to live somewhere. They have to work somewhere. They have to shop somewhere. They have to go to a hospital somewhere. They have to have a school for their kids. [There’s] a huge multiplier effect in bringing jobs into a local economy,” Sandbrook said.
Finally, after the longtime CEO of Cypress Semiconductor stepped down last year and launched a proxy fight by remaining its longest shareholder, the company, now led by CEO Hassane El-Khoury, took some time to wrap it up.
Now that the battle is over, however, El-Khoury told Cramer on Thursday that Cypress was taking a refreshed look at its mission.
“First of all is the markets that we are focusing on. That’s automotive, industrial and consumer, and then the technologies that we’re providing in there: programmability, but more importantly, the connectivity,” the CEO said. “But the biggest change, I would tell you, is how we go to market. The days of customers taking multiple chips or just products and putting it together are past. They’re behind us. The future is, how can a semiconductor supplier transform itself to a systems enabler in order to solve higher level problems that add value? That’s where we are.”
And as semiconductors become more of a staple in a range of industries, El-Khoury said Cypress would focus more on implementation rather than manufacturing.
“That’s where a lot of our investment is. It’s no longer in, you know, hardware and technology. It’s a lot of it in the software and system integration side of it, and that’s really fueling the growth that we have,” he told Cramer.
In Cramer’s lightning round, he flew through his take on some callers’ favorite stocks, including:
IAC/InterActive Corp.: “We don’t back trucks up after we’ve had a run to 22,000 and we’ve got ICBM’s pointed at us. What we do is we pick gingerly. I think InterActive had a terrific quarter and I do think you should buy it, but not all at once. Not with this market, not with these little press conferences and not with the fire and the fury.”
TripAdvisor: “That was not a good quarter. No. That was not a good quarter. I mean, Expedia had a good quarter. You might want to do that one, but let it come down. But that was not a good quarter for TripAdvisor.”
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Source: Tech CNBC
Cramer Remix: What the ‘Amazon Effect’ means for Live Nation