Facts not fiction reveal what’s happening

Never let the facts spoil a good story they say, but at dbdata we think the facts are the story. So here’s your weekly dose of numbers from Data News that really reveals what’s going on.  

Is there no stopping Facebook? The social media juggernaut just keeps getting bigger. Latest quarterly numbers show daily active users now average more than 1 billion last quarter. That’s correct 1 billion a day. And most of them access the network on a mobile device. Increased advertising enabled Facebook to beat Wall Street revenue estimates which in turn saw Facebook’s market capitalisation – at over $US300 billion – leap past General Electric! Increasing use of video advertising across all its platforms is a warning to all other media

Why is everyone’s talking about GST? Because it isn’t working that’s why. Well it is working but not well enough. By 2024-25 it will only deliver on 42 per cent of national expenditure where as in 2000 it was 47 per cent. Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson who knocked out the numbers for the Australian Financial Review explained it well: “The GST isn’t keeping pace with the growth of the wider Australian economy because it doesn’t cover the parts of consumer spending which are growing fastest,” he said.The main one of course is health, which is set to continue to grow as the nation ages.The other big omission is financial services, which has always been put in the ‘too hard basket’ because of its complexity. Fresh food is another category that was considered ‘off limits’. As Treasurer Scott Morrison keeps saying, ‘Everything is back on the table.’

Let’s look at some good news from China. Well good for Australian hotel chains that is. Global research firm STR Global reports hotel occupancies rates in Sydney and Melbourne are averaging nearly 88 per cent year-on-year. But its not only China boosting the numbers, total annual visitors have hit a record 7.1 million, according to Tourism Research Australia. So it’s no surprise that average room rates are going up to $232 in Sydney and $202 in Melbourne. By 2025, Australia will receive almost two million Chinese visitors annually, with overall visitor numbers to climb to 10.6 million, the forecasts show.

So what are the tourists spending their lovely foreign currency on? Well it looks like luxury goods. According to the property consultants CBRE, more well-known prestige brands are flocking to Australia and hunting for retail space in Sydney and Melbourne. Names being bandied abut include Italian fashion houses Valentino and Fendi and French powerhouses Brioni, Dior and Chanel. The reason for this, according to CBRE, is that the everywhere else in the rest of the world is being saturated with luxury stand-alone stores, except for Australia.

But perhaps you shouldn’t go shopping on Monday. A survey on absenteeism by Direct Health Solutions of 97 organisations, that employ 220,000 public and private sector employees across Australia, reports that Monday is still the favored day for a ‘sickie’. However the good news is that workers are taking less of them with absenteeism levels dropping to seven-year lows of 8.6 days a year for each worker. Main reason for being absent is ‘carers leave’ , followed by an unexpected sickness, “chucking a sickie”, and mental ill-health.

And lastly some sobering thoughts on takeovers. A report from the boffins down at Credit Suisse says basically Australian companies aren’t very good at them. In a strategy report covering 20-years and various applications of M&A activity here and overseas, they conclude that the deals don’t do much for the acquirers’ share price and, “perhaps the most efficient form of capital allocation for Australia Inc. is to give money back to the shareholder and not to risk the value destruction that comes from spending it.”

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