Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Aug 24, 2015 (III)

choi

(5) Lulu Chen with Tian ying, Racing to Stay Ahead of Uber.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... to-defend-home-turf
(“Didi Kuaidi’s president, Jean Liu 柳青 * * * Just behind the company’s co-CEOs on the Didi org[anization] chart, 37-year-old Liu has been a driving figure in its biggest projects of the past year. She grew up the daughter of Lenovo’s founder [柳传志], majored in computer science at Harvard, then spent 12 years managing Asia investments at Goldman Sachs before joining Didi as its chief operating officer last year. She was named president less than two weeks before the merger with Kuaidi was announced”)

Note: summary underneath the title in print: Didi owns China’s online taxi business -- and spends big to keep it.

choi

(7) Lulu Yilun Chen, Alibaba’s $100 Billion Wipeout.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... er-share-price-rout
(“Investor confidence has been shaken, with the company’s market value plunging $100 billion”)

Excerpt in the window of print: 28%  Alibaba's sales growth last quarter, down from an average of 56 percent for the previous 12 quarters

Note: summary underneath the title in print: The e-commerce giant’s market cap has sunk the most in the world

choi

(6) Tim Culpan, Investors Say HTC Ain’t Worth Squat.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... c-ain-t-worth-squat

Quote:

“It [HTC] was briefly No 1 in the US [in 2011] * * * On Aug 10, a further plunge left HTC’s value at $1.5 billion, slightly below the amount of cash it has on hand—meaning investors are saying its brand, facilities, and designs are worthless. ‘Cash is the only asset of value. You can’t really assess any value on the rest of the company,’ says Calvin Huang 黄文堯, an analyst at SinoPac Financial Holdings 永豐金控 [based in Taipei]. ‘HTC’s climb to the top made management too confident, with its ego leading to a string of mistakes in product design, marketing, pricing, and distribution.’

"Richard Ko, an analyst for KGI Securities 凱基證券 [also based in Taipei] * * * estimates, HTC will be out of cash within three years. Says Ko: 'They have to stop the bleeding.'

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Check a, any, dictionary and it will say squat is a slang, a noun meaning “the least amount, anything at all.”  But why?  Lokk deeper, dictionaries will say it is shortened from another slang (noun) “diddly-squat.” Why?

Google with the term (diddly-squat etymology) --without quotation marks -- and Google ITSELF tells you, at the top of the search result: “mid 20th century: probably from slang doodle ‘excrement’ + squat in the sense ‘defecate.’