Social Media Scorecard - Thematic Research

Social Media Scorecard - Thematic Research

Summary

The world’s leading social media companies continue to grow at a remarkable rate - Facebook, for example, still boasts double digit growth in monthly active users, despite having passed the 2 billion mark some time ago - and expand into new lines of business, including Internet TV and online dating. However, they face a growing number of challenges, with regulatory bodies taking them to task on issues such as hate speech, fake news, tax avoidance, and data privacy.

The larger and more established firms in this sector should be strong enough, and diversified enough, to continue growing despite these obstacles, but they should not underestimate the threat that regulation poses, not least to their bottom line. Nor should they dismiss the very real concerns about social media’s ability to negatively impact society that are at the root of many of these regulatory initiatives.

Our thematic scoring methodology is designed to identify tomorrow’s leaders rather than today’s incumbents, based on their competitive position in the most important themes impacting their industry.

To do this, we score the top 600 TMT companies against 60 investment themes, creating a database of 36,000 thematic scores - our thematic engine - to help us identify the strongest and weakest players in each sector over the next two years, once all relevant themes have been taken into account.

Scope

- This report is a sector scorecard, which identifies those companies most likely to succeed in a world filled with disruptive threats. Inside, we predict how each theme will evolve and who the leading and lagging companies are.
- It includes a theme map that shows the 60 biggest themes driving growth in the tech, media and telecom sectors.
- It explains how some of the largest listed players in the sector have performed over the last four years.
- It looks at major technology, macro-economic, and regulatory themes impacting social media companies.

Reasons to buy

- Companies who invest in the right themes become success stories; those who miss the big themes end up as failures.
- Corporate executives and investors who want to outperform their competitors need to understand all the themes that impact their sector.
- However, many of these themes are, by definition, outside of the core competencies of company boardrooms because they typically originate from external industries.
- This Social Media Scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the social media industry over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.