Latest news with #ITspecialist
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
CDW Corporation (CDW): A Bull Case Theory
We came across a bullish thesis on CDW Corporation on Stock Analysis Compilation's Substack. In this article, we will summarize the bulls' thesis on CDW. CDW Corporation's share was trading at $181.37 as of July 23rd. CDW's trailing and forward P/E were 22.47 and 18.94 respectively according to Yahoo Finance. An IT specialist meticulously customizing a software application aiding value-added resellers. CDW is a resilient value-added reseller (VAR) of IT solutions, positioned for steady, recurring growth by consolidating share in the fragmented VAR market, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While IT resellers have pulled back in line with the broader tech sector earlier in the year and concerns persist about cloud computing displacing VARs' higher-margin networking business, disintermediation risk is greater in the enterprise segment. SMBs often lack the resources to vet the wide array of IT products and services, making them heavily reliant on VARs for expertise, product selection, and implementation. Moreover, vendors generally show little interest in building out direct sales capabilities to serve SMBs, reinforcing CDW's critical intermediary role. The company's model is capital-light and generates robust free cash flow, providing resilience through IT's cyclical demand patterns. Over time, CDW has outpaced overall IT spending growth as VARs continue to gain share from direct sales, demonstrating its ability to thrive amid technological transitions that historically raised disintermediation fears—from the shift to digital software, to software-as-a-service, to today's cloud-driven landscape. Looking forward, CDW's position as a trusted partner to SMBs and its disciplined execution support a path of mid- to high-single-digit growth. With the VAR market still highly fragmented, the company's scale, service breadth, and operational efficiency provide a durable competitive advantage, enabling continued market share gains and consistent free cash flow generation, offering investors a compelling combination of stability, growth, and resilience against industry structural shifts. Previously, we covered a bullish thesis on Gartner, Inc. (IT) by Bulls On Parade in March 2025, which highlighted its dominance in tech research, resilient subscription revenues, and disciplined capital allocation. The company's stock price has depreciated about 16.7% since our coverage as near-term headwinds weighed on results. The thesis still stands given Gartner's entrenched model. Stock Analysis Compilation shares a similar view, emphasizing CDW's SMB-focused growth in the fragmented VAR market. CDW Corporation is not on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 44 hedge fund portfolios held CDW at the end of the first quarter which was 46 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of CDW as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock. Disclosure: None.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king
For many Americans, the apartment where 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives might be the stuff of nightmares. Located just outside the capital of Seoul, the building isn't very tall — just 16 stories — by South Korean standards, but the complex consists of 36 separate structures, which are nearly identical except for the building number displayed on their sides. The 2,000-plus units come in the same standardized dimensions found everywhere in the country (Lee lives in a '84C,' which has 84 square meters, or about 900 square feet, of floor space) and offer, in some ways, a ready-made life. The amenities scattered throughout the campus include a rock garden with a fake waterfall, a playground, a gym, an administration office, a senior center and a 'moms cafe.' But this, for the most part, is South Korea's middle-class dream of home ownership — its version of a house with the white picket fence. 'The bigger the apartment complex, the better the surrounding infrastructure, like public transportation, schools, hospitals, grocery stories, parks and so on,' Lee said. 'I like how easy it is to communicate with the neighbors in the complex because there's a well-run online community.' Most in the country would agree: Today, 64% of South Korean households live in such multifamily housing, the majority of them in apartments with five or more stories. Such a reality seems unimaginable in cities like Los Angeles, which has limited or prohibited the construction of dense housing in single-family zones. 'Los Angeles is often seen as an endless tableau of individual houses, each with their own yard and garden,' Max Podemski, an L.A.-based urban planner, wrote in The Times last year. 'Apartment buildings are anathema to the city's ethos.' In recent years, the price of that ethos has become increasingly apparent in the form of a severe housing shortage. In the city of Los Angeles, where nearly 75% of all residential land is zoned for stand-alone single-family homes, rents have been in a seemingly endless ascent, contributing to one of the worst homelessness crises in the country. As a remedy, the state of California has ordered the construction of more than 450,000 new housing units by 2029. The plan will almost certainly require the building of some form of apartment-style housing, but construction has lagged amid fierce resistance. Read more: South Korea celebrates the transformative power of 'Squid Game' Sixty years ago, South Korea stood at a similar crossroads. But the series of urban housing policies it implemented led to the primacy of the apartment, and in doing so, transformed South Korean notions of housing over the course of a single generation. The results of that program have been mixed. But in one important respect, at least, it has been successful: Seoul, which is half the size of the city of L.A., is home to a population of 9.6 million — compared with the estimated 3.3 million people who live here. For Lee, the trade-off is a worthwhile one. In an ideal world, she would have a garage for the sort of garage sales she's admired in American movies. 'But South Korea is a small country,' she said. 'It is necessary to use space as efficiently as possible.' Apartments, in her view, have spared her from the miseries of suburban housing. Restaurants and stores are close by. Easy access to public transportation means she doesn't need a car to get everywhere. 'Maybe it's because of my Korean need to have everything done quickly, but I think it'd be uncomfortable to live somewhere that doesn't have these things within reach at all times,' she said. 'I like to go out at night; I think it would be boring to have all the lights go off at 9 p.m.' *** Apartments first began appearing in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a government response to a housing crisis in the nation's capital — a byproduct of the era's rapid industrialization and subsequent urban population boom. In the 1960s, single-family detached dwellings made up around 95% of homes in the country. But over the following decade, as rural migrants flooded Seoul in search of factory work, doubling the population from 2.4 to 5.5 million, many in this new urban working class found themselves without homes. As a result, many of them settled in shantytowns on the city's outskirts, living in makeshift sheet-metal homes. The authoritarian government at the time, led by a former army general named Park Chung-hee, declared apartments to be the solution and embarked on a building spree that would continue under subsequent administrations. Eased height restrictions and incentives for construction companies helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new apartment units every year. They were pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, soon making them the most desirable form of housing for the middle and upper classes. Known as apateu, which specifically refers to a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex — as distinct from lower stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility. 'Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost every big-name celebrity at the time appeared in apartment commercials,' recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies who has studied the history of South Korean apartments. 'But the biggest reason that apartments proliferated as they did was because they were done at scale, in complexes of five buildings or more.' Read more: First came the heat. Then the lovebugs invaded Essential to the modern apateu are the amenities — such as on-site kindergartens or convenience stores — that allow them to function like miniature towns. This has also turned them into branded commodities and class signifiers, built by construction conglomerates like Samsung, and taking on names like 'castle' or 'palace.' (One of the first such branded apartment complexes was Trump Tower, a luxury development built in Seoul in the late 1990s by a construction firm that licensed the name of Donald Trump.) All of this has made the detached single-family home, for the most part, obsolete. In Seoul, such homes now make up just 10% of the housing stock. Among many younger South Koreans like Lee, they are associated with retirement in the countryside, or, as she puts it: for 'grilling in the garden for your grandkids.' *** This model has not been without problems. There are the usual issues that come with dense housing. In buildings with poor soundproofing, 'inter-floor noise' between units is such a universal scourge that the government runs a noise-related dispute resolution center while discouraging people from angrily confronting their neighbors, a situation that occasionally escalates into headline-making violence. Some apartment buildings have proved to be too much even for a country accustomed to unsentimentally efficient forms of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit complex built by a big-name apartment brand in one of the wealthiest areas of Seoul looks so oppressive that it has become a curiosity, mocked by some as a prison or chicken coop. The sheer number of apartments has prompted criticism of Seoul's skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as 'matchboxes.' And despite the aspirations attached to them, there is also a wariness about a culture where homes are built in such disposable, assembly line-like fashion. Many people here are increasingly questioning how this form of housing, with its nearly identical layouts, has shaped the disposition of contemporary South Korean society, often criticized by its own members as overly homogenized and lockstep. 'I'm concerned that apartments have made South Koreans' lifestyles too similar,' said Maing Pil-soo, an architect and urban planning professor at Seoul National University. 'And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.' Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea's apartment complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the more expansive social bonds that defined traditional society — like those that extended across entire villages — making its inhabitants more individualistic and insular. 'At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that's why they became so popular,' he said. 'But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you're inside your complex and in your home, you don't have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.' Read more: They didn't know they were citizens. Now they are expected to serve in the South Korean military Still, Jung says this uniformity isn't all bad. It is what made them such easily scalable solutions to the housing crisis of decades past. It is also, in some ways, an equalizing force. 'I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,' he said. Though many branded apartment complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary homeowner associations, Jung points out that on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space. Even Seoul's wealthiest neighborhoods feel, to an extent that is hard to see in many American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier often means having a nicer apartment, but an apartment all the same, existing in the same environs as those in a different price range. 'And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like 'chicken coop' to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don't feel like that at all,' Jung said. 'They really are quite comfortable and nice.' *** None of this, however, has been able to stave off Seoul's own present-day housing affordability crisis. The capital has one of the most expensive apartment prices in the world on a price-per-square-meter basis, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and ahead of major U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, according to a report published last month by Deutsche Bank. One especially brutal stretch recently saw apartment prices in Seoul double in four years. Part of the reason for this is that apartments, with their standardized dimensions, have effectively become interchangeable financial commodities: An apartment in Seoul is seen as a much more surefire bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investment and speculation that has driven up home prices. 'Buying an apartment here isn't just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,' said Chae Sang-wook, an independent real estate analyst. 'In South Korea, people invest in apateu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.' Some experts predict that, as the country enters another era of demographic upheaval, the dominance of apartments will someday be no more. If births continue to fall as dramatically as they have done in recent years, South Koreans may no longer need such dense housing. The ongoing rise of single-person households, too, may chip away at a form of housing built to hold four-person nuclear families. But Chae is skeptical that this will happen anytime soon. He points out that South Koreans don't even like to assemble their own furniture, let alone fix their own cars — all downstream effects of ubiquitous apartment living. 'For now, there is no alternative other than this,' he said. 'As a South Korean, you don't have the luxury of choosing.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Virgin Media O2 mobile users' locations exposed for two years in security flaw
The locations of millions of Virgin Media O2 mobile customers were exposed for up to two years until a network security flaw was corrected, it has emerged. Before the fix was implemented on 18 May, anyone with a Virgin Media O2 sim card could use their phone to obtain sensitive information about the network's other customers using a 4G-enabled device, including their location to the nearest mobile mast. The flaw has now been patched and reported to the UK's communications and data protection regulators. Virgin Media O2 said there was no evidence that its network security systems had been externally breached. The locations of customers could be tracked most precisely in urban areas, where mobile masts cover areas as small as 100 square metres. Dan Williams, an IT specialist who discovered the defect, wrote that he was 'extremely disappointed' not to receive a response when he flagged the issue, which was resolved only after he blogged about it two months later, on 17 May. He said there had been no explanation for the delay. He wrote: 'I don't want to be the enemy, I simply want to feel comfortable using my phone.' Williams noticed Virgin Media O2's failure to configure its 4G calling software correctly when he was looking at messaging between his device and the network to work out call quality between himself and another O2 customer. 'I noticed that the responses from the network were extremely long, and upon inspection noticed that extra information from the recipient of the call was sent to the call initiator,' he told the Guardian. This included normally private information, such as the cell ID, which is the current cell tower a caller is connected to; information about sim card, which could be used for a cyber-attack; and the phone model, which can be used to work out how to access it. He believed that it was 'possible this was used in the wild and not reported against' though there was no way to quantify that. If it had been that would be 'quite a large problem', as 'there are situations where this data is extremely, extremely sensitive', for example domestic abuse survivors or government workers, he added. 'I came across it by accident. Someone purposefully trying to find these kinds of vulnerabilities would have probably come across it,' he said. 'There are white papers detailing this exact scenario and warning networks against doing this.' The FT, which first reported Williams's findings, said he had tested the problem with another O2 customer, successfully tracking them to Copenhagen, Denmark. Disabling the 4G calling feature on devices would have prevented them from being tracked, though this is not possible on some handsets, such as iPhones. The issue may have also affected some customers of Giffgaff and Tesco Mobile, which use Virgin Media O2's network. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Alan Woodward, cybersecurity professor at Surrey University, said location data 'could be valuable for scams such as social engineering, or even blackmail' and for phishing attempts referencing a recent location, though they would need other information about the person for this to work. He said this was unlikely to happen for normal people who were not criminal targets, but nevertheless fixing the vulnerability should have been a 'matter of urgency'. A Virgin Media O2 spokesperson said: 'Our engineering teams had been working on and testing a fix for this configuration issue over a number of weeks, and we can confirm this fix was fully implemented on 18 May. 'Our customers do not need to take any action, and we have no evidence of this issue being exploited beyond the two illustrative examples given by a network engineer in his blog which we reported to the ICO [Information Commissioner's Office] and Ofcom. There has been no external compromise of our network security at any time.' An Ofcom spokesperson said it was 'aware that O2 has experienced a network security issue', and is in contact with the provider to establish the scale and cause of the problem. An ICO spokesperson said that after assessing the information provided by Telefonica and remedial steps taken, 'we will not be taking further action at this stage'.
