KPBS anchor Ebone Monet and SDSU marketing lecturer Miro Copic discuss some of the week’s top business stories.
Q: What's the big deal about "Avengers: Endgame"?
A: "Endgame" is projected to become the largest box office opening of any movie in North America and Canada, probably hitting north of $300 million. Infinity War had $250 million in the opening. What's interesting is all of the 21 movies from Marvel collectively have had $2.7 billion dollars of opening box office weekend revenues. This movie is so impressive that Fandango, who's the leading online ticket sales for four movies, is out-selling tickets for "Endgame" 5-to-1 over Infinity War in the same time frame.
Q: An embarrassing week of sorts for Samsung: The release of its new Galaxy phone has been delayed after bad reviews. Could this possibly hurt the brand?
A: I think it will be hard for the brand to be hurt. Samsung has had some embarrassing failures before. They've had phones that have exploded. The fold is an amazing new innovation in the cell phone space. It's a combination cellphone and tablet, and it's a big win for consumers. And in factories for Samsung, they innovate at a far faster rate than all their competitors. So when they announce the Galaxy S10 they announced the fold. People are very excited, but at a cost of $2,000 per unit only early adopters would buy that. So that's why damage would be limited.
What happened with the phone is that, for early testers, it stopped working after a couple of days. There was an interesting screen protector on the screen that's actually meant to stay on. Consumers who took it off got debris in the display and then had issues with the display.
Q: A strong closing this week for the U.S. stock markets. What does that tell us?
A: This is a record week for several of the indexes. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ all hit record highs earlier in the week.
The earnings this quarter have been extraordinarily strong, and the good news is that they're strong on operations, not on tax cuts or financial engineering. So this is really good for U.S. companies. So that's number one. Number two, the Fed has held off on the interest rate increases which makes investors feel much better. Thirdly, there's some greater clarity in terms of the China and U.S. trade negotiations so those are the positives.
Economists are still concerned because they're thinking about recession around the corner. The world economy is still struggling. Countries like Germany, the U.K., Japan, China and Brazil are all in economic trouble. So this kind of the longest bull market in U.S. history to continue.
