By Anna Gabriela A. Mogato
PLDT, Inc. has signed a new contract with American software and services provider Amdocs to improve its IT infrastructure.
In a disclosure to the Stock Exchange on Friday, this six-year agreement will transform PLDT’s operations with the implementation of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, and robotics.
This will also usher in PLDT’s shift to the use of cloud computing, reportedly set to reduce the company’s operational costs.
PLDT President and Chief Executive Officer Manuel V. Pangilinan said that this will likewise improve their “customer experience and engagement.”
“With Amdocs running and automating our IT operations, we will be better equipped to quickly launch innovative products and services to deliver a compelling digital experience to our customers,” he said.
PLDT and Amdocs had previously signed a seven-year agreement to modernize the local telecommunications provider’s IT applications and digital technologies.
Amdocs Chief Marketing Officer Gary Miles said this partnership will greatly benefit PLDT’s innovation efforts as they further modernize customer experience.
“This will help them accelerate innovation to further enhance the superior experience they deliver to their customers, while increasing engagement, loyalty and affinity to their brand,” Mr. Miles said.
PLDT, Inc. is one of the three local units of Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co. Ltd., along with Philex Mining Corp. and Metro Pacific Investments Corp.
Hastings Holdings, Inc. — a unit of PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund subsidiary MediaQuest Holdings, Inc. — maintains interest in BusinessWorld through the Philippine Star Group, which it controls.

By Bloomberg
Traditionally, the only sort of financial system that works at scale is one decided by courts and enforced by threat of violence. Even back in the days of primitive firepower, deposit and lending activities took place in temples consecrated to the ancient gods, to underscore the idea that dishonesty would be punished.
Widespread belief in the threat reduces the need for active enforcement. The IRS relies on a system of voluntary compliance, meaning that individuals are responsible for reporting and calculating their own tax obligations. The IRS doesn’t have time to check everyone’s work, and less than 1 percent of tax returns are audited. Given the odds, one might expect rampant tax fraud. But we don’t see that. Our tax system functions reasonably well — because Americans fear their government.
In fact, Americans are so inordinately obedient that Indian phone scammers have made hundreds of millions of dollars impersonating government officials. Last year, the New York Times profiled an IRS scammer from Mumbai, who gave this charming quote:
“I think they actually are really afraid of their government,” he said. “In India, people are not afraid of police. If anyone wants to come and arrest, they say, ‘Come and arrest.’ It is easy to get out of anything. But in America they are afraid. We just need to tell them, ‘You are messing with the federal government,’ and that is all.”
A system of deterrence works only as long as the threat is credible. The Holy Island of Lindisfarne held substantial unguarded wealth — or guarded only by God, one might say — until the heathen Vikings showed up and ransacked the place.
From the eighth-century English countryside to the modern global financial system, the only security has been the security of threatened violence. No longer.
Now there are public blockchains, designed to support a global financial system without the need for violence or threats. Rules aren’t enforced under duress, but by consensus between computers all over the world. There’s no way to add exceptions or conditions without the approval of every computer in the network.
While the humans behind the computers are still vulnerable to violence, any coercive threat would have to be applied to thousands of independent individuals, many of whom reside in sanctioned countries or ones without extradition treaties.
Oops! Some might consider this a flaw. When it comes to decentralized digital currencies, the U.S. can’t leverage its banking laws to advance foreign policy; participants in sanctioned countries are unlikely to enforce sanctions against themselves.
It’s also a feature. Decentralized jurisdiction has allowed Bitcoin to endure where previous attempts at privately issued digital money were quashed. Bitcoin’s value comes from its resistance to human arbitration.
That’s the theory, anyway. Decentralization is used to keep the network secure against collusion, but that security can be difficult to quantify until it is breached.
Bitcoin has the longest record of resisting intervention, and even its decentralization may be illusory. Last week, a critical software bug was quietly discovered and reported. The Bitcoin software maintainers quickly developed a patch and notified the largest businesses and miners before releasing the information to the public. Within 72 hours, over half the miners had applied the fix.
While it’s reassuring that a potential attack vector was repaired before exploitation, that sort of coordinated effort runs contrary to the idea that Bitcoin is made up of independent unyielding users. “Coordination” is just a socially acceptable form of collusion. And if collusion is possible, then is Bitcoin really immune to meddling?
Concentration of power has been a concern ever since the first Bitcoin mining chip was fabricated. Miners are responsible for arranging transactions into blocks, and majority control of mining power could selectively censor participants or rewrite portions of recent history.
Despite the potential for abuse, it hasn’t happened yet. No one wants to display outsize influence if a network is supposed to be decentralized. In 2014, one mining group became responsible for 51 percent of the total hashing power. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, the group backed off and promised to keep future power below 40 percent.
Confidence in a network’s decentralization is critical to a cryptocurrency’s value. Public blockchains remove the need for mutual trust between participants because everyone independently audits every transaction. In fact, sweeping distrust is necessary to motivate users to perform their own verification. A healthy paranoia is what keeps things running.

By Bloomberg

Drinks infused with marijuana-derived compounds could swell to become a $600 million market in the U.S. within the next four years, outpacing the growth of other categories of retail cannabis products, according to analysts at Canaccord Genuity.

Beverages with CBD or THC ingredients could grow to capture about 20 percent of the U.S. market for edible pot products by 2022, up from 6 percent of edibles sold now, Canaccord’s Bobby Burleson wrote in a note. It’s an opportunity mainstream beer and soda makers are eager to take part in — Corona-parent Constellation Brands Inc. became the largest stakeholder in Canadian pot cultivator Canopy Growth Corp. earlier this year, while Molson Coors Canada formed a joint venture with Hexo Corp. Also, Coca-Cola Co. said it’s exploring the idea.

“Interest has spiked from the beer industry on mounting evidence of a substitution relationship between cannabis and alcohol, while large soda companies increasingly view CBD as a natural fit within their strategically important wellness offerings,” Burleson wrote.

Canaccord sees the demand for beverages featuring CBD, or cannabidiol, the non-psychoactive compound in marijuana, reaching $260 million by 2022, up from the “negligible revenue” the limited number of drinks contributes now, while THC-based drinks could reach $340 million, up from $106 million expected this year.

Yet others are more cautious on the opportunity. Data from Colorado and Oregon show legal recreational marijuana use hasn’t cut into beer consumption, and the use of pot in Colorado has stayed close to the national average, Susquehanna’s Pablo Zuanic wrote Thursday.

By Bloomberg
It may be hard to justify buying a company that nearly tripled over the past 12 months, but then there’s Abiomed Inc.
With annual sales growth seen at more than 25 percent through 2021, the maker of the world’s smallest heart pump has quickened the pulse of investors, analysts and — not surprisingly — its chief executive.
“We’re just getting started,” Michael Minogue, president and CEO, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters earlier this month. Abiomed has spent more than $200 million over the last 10 years developing and improving its Impella devices, he said.
Abiomed’s hot run can be at least partially attributed to the patented technology that provides an almost impenetrable barrier from competitors seeking involvement in the segment. Plus, it has space in the market to grow. The Danvers, Massachusetts-based company estimates it has only reached about a tenth of its addressable market, with more products and patents on the horizon. On top of that, there’s global expansion.
Abiomed’s preparing for a rush. Its recently expanded facilities in Danvers and Aachen, Germany can now produce more than $1 billion in product a year. That compares to fiscal first quarter sales of $180 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The minimally invasive Impella devices can be inserted via a standard catherization procedure and allow patients to maintain their native heart instead of more invasive surgeries that may require a heart transplant. The tiny pump is slightly less than 5 millimeters in diameter compared to other devices that are more than double the size.
Of course, the rally that’s made it one of the Standard & Poor 500 Index’s hottest stocks this year may also give new investors pause. Shares opened higher on Thursday to extend what was an eight session rally, the longest winning streak in four years, before reversing gains.
Not a Bargain
“If there’s one constraint on the company it is the valuation,” Jefferies analyst Raj Denhoy said in a phone interview. “It’s the most expensive stock that we track in medical devices and by a good amount, frankly. But again, it’d be hard to find another company with the characteristics as this company in terms of a sustainable growth story.”

Rapid adoption of Abiomed’s Impella technology, increased appreciation for the company’s competitive moats and pipeline optionality explain the company’s nearly two-year stock surge, according to BNP Paribas portfolio manager Jon Stephenson. And he sees more upside to come.
“A lot of people look at the valuation as mind-boggling, but in Abiomed’s case, the addressable market for the indications in which they’ve already launched are huge,” Stephenson, who helps oversee $450 million in BNP’s World Health Care fund, said by telephone. The company has 321 patents protecting its technology with an additional 338 pending, management noted.
Not to say that Abiomed’s completely protected from rivals. Abbott Laboratories’ HeartMate PHP is a device currently being studied to take on the Impella and its incarnations. That said, early results from a study underwhelmed analysts at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting in San Diego over the weekend.
The updates showed Abiomed “will be without meaningful competition to Impella for several more years at least,” Jefferies’ Denhoy wrote in a note to clients. In the interim, there’s plenty of demand. The company has five approved pumps that qualify for reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and major insurers, CEO Minogue said. The device maker could bring three more products to market over the next few years that could lead to increased adoption.
Current indications conservatively show a market potential of close to 200,000 to 300,000 cases in the U.S., Denhoy said. A successful trial could add “another couple hundred thousand patients,” he said.
The next key catalyst for investors, outside of second-quarter results expected in late October, will be the highly-anticipated presentation of its 50-patient STEMI door-to-unloading safety and feasibility study in November.

By Bloomberg
In this cloudy year for Facebook Inc., it’s crystal clear that the company is smashing the gas pedal all the way down for “stories,” the short photo-and-video diaries that Snapchat pioneered and Facebook’s Instagram copied a couple of years ago.
Stories are everywhere now at Facebook. Instagram and Facebook put people’s stories at the very top of the apps so people can’t help but click on them. On Wednesday, the company opened its doors wide for advertising in the Facebook app’s version of the story format. Messenger and WhatsApp have stories, too. The company is trying hard to persuade businesses to tailor their marketing pitches for stories and spread them across Facebook and Instagram.
But what if Facebook is wrong to make stories a top priority? What if people tire of the format? Or what if they work for Instagram but not the other Facebook properties? Mark Zuckerberg is making a big wager on stories, and if he’s wrong, it won’t be good. Story-formatted ads generate less revenue for Facebook than its more established news feed marketing slots, and executives in part blamed the gap for a predicted slowdown in revenue growth.
Facebook has successfully predicted trends before — most famously when Zuckerberg upended the company’s strategy in his bet that smartphones would be the dominant form of internet activity. He was absolutely correct. He could be right about stories, too, which I find fresh and more authentic than regular social media posts.
But Facebook has bet wrong before, too. A few years ago, Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook’s future was video, and the company pushed live video zealously. Facebook wasn’t the only company betting on live video, either. It was hardly a flop, but live videos haven’t taken over the world, and Facebook stopped avidly urging people to record and broadcast their lives in real time online.
I hear echoes of Facebook’s live video playbook now when the company talks about stories. That should give Facebook watchers a little nervous twinge.
On Wednesday, I attended a press conference during which Facebook executives touted rapid adoption of stories by people using Facebook, Instagram and its other apps and the compelling early results that companies were seeing from ads in story form. It was a strong pitch. Facebook said 300 million users see or make a story on Facebook or Messenger every day.
The company showed the chart below to offer a glimpse at the number of story-formatted posts on all of its apps, compared with the number of conventional social network posts like those in the news feed. (You perhaps will notice that the Y-axis is not labeled, a misleading trick that I like to call the “Amazon chart” for its frequent use by the e-commerce giant. I confirmed, at least, that the Facebook chart is to scale.)
A few caveats to those stats. In Facebook’s world, 300 million people aren’t that many. An average of 1.5 billion people use Facebook or Messenger each day, and given how avidly Facebook is trying to steer people to stories, I find it underwhelming that 20 percent of those daily users see or make a story. Facebook said in July that 400 million people had some interaction with Instagram stories, a more impressive 40 percent or so of Instagram’s daily users.
I will say that the chart showing an apparently large share of stories as a percentage of total pieces of information posted (as opposed to simply viewed) on Facebook’s apps is more compelling.
But popularity can — like the stories themselves — be ephemeral. There have been reports that Snap Inc. has experienced slowing growth or worse for its story format. It’s true that Snapchat is more likely to be used for one-to-one messages with friends rather than the daily diaries of someone’s day on the beach or experience at a sporting event. But Snap’s reported hiccups show the story format isn’t an unquestioned hit everywhere.
And Facebook had similar positive messages about live video a couple of years ago. It stressed the format with advertisers and told them people were far more likely to watch a commercial message live than pre-recorded. It trumpeted booming use of live video by Facebook users. In early 2017, Facebook said one in five videos on Facebook was live. You’ll notice that’s about the same share of Facebook or Messenger users now watching or making stories.
Just because the playbooks are similar doesn’t mean that stories will fall off Facebook’s priorities list the way live video has. But it is a useful warning.