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Aston Villa boss Unai Emery has set his sights on automatic qualification to the last 16 of the Champions League after a 3-2 win at RB Leipzig. Ross Barkley’s 85th-minute goal gave them victory in Germany after goals from John McGinn and Jhon Duran early in each half were cancelled out by Lois Openda and Christoph Baumgartner. That sent them up to third in the new league phase of the competition ahead of Wednesday’s games and with matches against Monaco and Celtic to come, Villa have an excellent chance of finishing in the top eight. Job done... in the end 😅 #RBLAVL #UCL pic.twitter.com/PRD1Hi1Q3A — Aston Villa (@AVFCOfficial) December 10, 2024 That would mean they would avoid a play-off round to make it through to the last 16 and Emery says that is the target. “Today was key. Juventus at home, we were thinking more to win but in the end we accepted the draw because it was important for a point to be more or less in the top 24,” he told Amazon Prime. “Today was a match we were thinking at the beginning was key to be a contender to be in the top eight with the last two matches to be played. “It is going to be difficult and we have to get some more points but we now have the possibility to achieve this option. “We are going to enjoy and try to get top eight but we have to be happy because we are in the top 24 and maybe even the top 16. “We weren’t contenders in the beginning to get there but now we have to accept it.” Leipzig, who are flying high near the top of the Bundesliga, are out after losing all six matches. They did pose a threat to Villa, who inflicted some of their own problems on themselves, notably a rare gaffe from goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez for Openda’s equaliser. But Emery was happy with his side’s performance. “I try to enjoy and always we want to improve and sometimes it is hard but today the team were performing well, playing seriously and I was enjoying it,” he added. “We tried to overcome the mistakes we made and we did. More or less we were playing consistently. One mistake and they score but then we played very well. “Champions League is very difficult and we have to expect that every team playing at home are feeling strong. We played with consistency and domination.”Airbnb ( ABNB 3.06% ) has become so popular that the company's name is often used as a verb when people are looking to travel and book their accommodations. Shares have recently been a disappointment, though, as they are down 2% year to date, as of this writing. Meanwhile, the major market indexes have soared in 2024. With this top travel stock trading at $133 per share, nearly 40% below its all-time high, is buying Airbnb at this level a smart idea? Moat and profits As a two-sided platform with tremendous scale, Airbnb connects millions of hosts and travelers across the globe. The 123 million nights and experiences booked in Q3 serve as clear evidence of the network effects the company enjoys, and this is key to the company's economic moat. This moat is so important because it makes success extremely difficult for new entrants. Someone launching a new competitor to Airbnb would have to bring hosts and travelers onto the platform, but without a large enough base of either user group, this is a tall order. For existing rivals to Airbnb, it's hard to match the depth of offerings. Airbnb currently has 5 million hosts and 8 million active listings in 220 countries. It's the default choice for many hosts and travelers, which creates a positive feedback loop. Airbnb is also consistently profitable. Through the first nine months of this year, Airbnb reported $2.1 billion in operating income, good for a 25% margin. And it generated $1.1 billion in free cash flow (FCF) in Q3, capital that management has used to repurchase outstanding shares. Airbnb's risks Airbnb registered impressive growth during the post-pandemic travel boom. In 2021 and 2022, it posted 77% and 40% revenue growth, respectively. Consumer demand for travel was clearly strong. However, those monster gains are now a thing of the past. After recording an 18% sales increase last year, Airbnb saw the top line expand by just 12% through the first nine months of 2024. The company's performance is stabilizing, so investors expecting the high double-digit growth of years past should temper their expectations. As is often the case with disruptive and innovative businesses that upend entire industries, which is precisely what Airbnb did to the travel sector, there's always uncertainty around the regulatory landscape that investors need to be mindful of. In this instance, Airbnb's presence in some markets has led some local residents and businesses to push for new rules around short-term rentals. The fact that Airbnb operates in so many markets, coupled with the fact that no single city represents more than 2% of overall revenue, adds diversification to the business that protects it from downside. However, it may only take a few major cities or countries to adopt laws that limit short-term rentals to kick off a domino effect. Shares are trading 39% off their peak from Feb. 2021. Don't let that fool you, though. The stock still sells at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 33. This is expensive given FCF is only projected to increase at a 6% annualized pace between 2024 and 2026. Weigh the two sides There are valid bull and bear arguments when it comes to Airbnb stock . The bulls will call out the company's powerful network effects, as well as its ability to generate lots of cash. On the other hand, bears will point to slower growth, regulatory risk, and an expensive valuation. I side with the bears, so I'm keeping the stock on my watch list for now, waiting for a more compelling valuation before making a decision.
When Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected President of Sri Lanka in September, and his National People’s Power [NPP] alliance swept the general elections on November 14, most international news headlines stamped the winners as ‘Marxist’. The tag was hardly positive or even neutral with its connotations of wild-eyed radicalism. The insinuation was that Sri Lanka’s ongoing programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would derail, and economic stability and recovery would be disrupted. President Dissanayake, through his November 21 policy statement to the new Parliament, that he will take forward the IMF framework and the aligned debt treatment plans — finalised by his predecessor — tried to allay these fears. President Dissanayake, through his November 21 policy statement to the new Parliament, that the IMF framework and the aligned debt treatment plans with bilateral and private creditors — finalised by his predecessor — will go ahead, tried to allay these fears. So where does this ‘Marxist label’ on Sri Lanka’s new government come from? The NPP is an eclectic social coalition of some 21 groups, including political parties, youth and women’s organisations, trade unions and civil society networks. But one political party forms its political, if not ideological, core — the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front). In fact, it was JVP leader Mr. Dissanayake who created the NPP in 2019 to widen the party’s appeal beyond its traditional cadre base and boost its chances at the polls. His political enterprise, which has now secured a massive victory, has turned a new page in post-colonial Sri Lanka, where politics has been dominated by just two parties and their offshoots, and the five elite families controlling them. The JVP’s office in Battaramulla, a suburb about 10 km east of Colombo, is located close to parliament, although the party has rarely been close to power in the six decades of its existence. Three large black-and-white portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin adorn the white wall of the main meeting room. Party cadre, regardless of position or prominence, make and serve tea to their guests. Above the reception desk at the entrance is a photograph of the party’s founder and charismatic leader Rohana Wijeweera, an infallible icon for its cadre. His mane, cap, and beard suggest Che Guevara-inspired self-styling. Wijeweera began what became the JVP in 1965, exactly three decades after Ceylon’s left movement birthed the country’s oldest party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), consequent to serial fractures within the Left. The LSSP split during the Second World War, leading to the formation of a pro-Moscow Communist Party. The cracks within the CP in the 1960s, triggered by the Sino-Soviet dispute, and internal tensions over the parliamentary road to socialism would, in turn, lead to the formation of the JVP, as a revolutionary party with Marxist-Leninist orientation. ‘Five classes’ Attracted to Maoism in his student days in the Soviet Union, Wijeweera joined the Communist Party (Peking wing – CP) of Sri Lanka in 1964, and became a youth leader. He challenged the party’s leadership, on their interpretation of class politics and revolution, and was subsequently expelled in 1965. His independent faction morphed into the JVP. Wijeweera and his comrades held political lessons for rural Sinhala youth, called the “Five Classes” that analysed Sri Lanka’s social and political order; Indian hegemony; the reformist left and coalition politics; and the parliamentary road to socialism. As part of preparation to achieving their objective of seizing state power, they trained in the use of shotguns and put together explosive devices. The story of the JVP’s rise in the late 1960s and fall in the next two decades unravels in the backdrop of two major changes in Sri Lanka — President J.R. Jayewardene’s open economic reform in 1977 and the beginning of a full-blown civil war after the 1983, state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom that he falsely attributed to Left parties, including the JVP. The JVP’s first insurrection in 1971 came out of frustration that the left-wing Sirimavo Bandaranaike-led government was not doing enough to meet the aspirations of educated but unemployed young people, and in changing the social, economic and political order inherited from the British. The discourse was anti-imperialist and socialist. The insurgents attacked dozens of police stations, to capture weapons and ammunition. The second insurrection, from 1987 to 1989, roughly coincided with the party’s embrace of Sinhala-nationalism; its fierce opposition to Tamil self-determination; and to the signing of the India-brokered 1987 Accord aimed at ending the war, with boots-on-the-ground in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). To Tamils in the far north of the island, the JVP appeared as Sinhala chauvinist instead of progressive, although the party never directly engaged in anti-Tamil violence. In both insurrections, where the JVP took up arms against the state, its representatives, supporters, and dissidents from the Left [in the second insurrection], the state’s counter-insurgency response was many times more lethal, resulting in the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of Sinhala youth. Wijeweera himself was executed while in state custody in 1989. Somawansa Amarasinghe, the only politburo member to survive the repression of the 1980s, escaped to India and subsequently to Europe. After a few years of underground existence, the surviving cadre resurrected the party, even as the country was increasingly preoccupied with massive human rights violations in the south and the raging war in the north-east. The JVP tentatively contested in the 1994 general election through another party, winning one seat. Within the next few years, the JVP warmed up to the political mainstream, winning more seats in parliament between 2000 and 2004, and four Cabinet-level ministerial portfolios in 2004–05, in a short-lived coalition with the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga government. Two splits The new course of the JVP is defined by two consequential splits, linked to the party’s proximity to Mahinda Rajapaksa who began dominating the political scene from the early 2000s. They were also fuelled by internal differences on the dilution of leftism for “patriotism” (Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism), versus emphasis on Wijeweera’s socialist ideology and the party distancing itself from Mr. Rajapaksa and his pro-war stance. Since the breakdown of the 2001-03 ceasefire, the JVP unambiguously backed Mr. Rajapaksa’s hawkishness in delivering a political solution to the Tamil question, and the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with scant regard to Tamil lives. The JVP’s differences with Rajapaksa were more to do with their unease over ‘family-rule’ and his socio-economic policies rather than his militaristic response. However, its parliamentary group leader and reactionary politician Wimal Weerawansa disagreed, and broke away with a quarter of its legislators, forming the Jathika Nidahas Peramuna or National Freedom Front in 2008, that until recently firmly planted itself in the Rajapaksa camp. Four years later a Marxist faction within the residual JVP also split from it, criticising the party’s unconditional support to the Rajapaksa regime on the handling of the war, and its complete surrender to electoral politics. This group led by Kumar Gunaratnam formed the Frontline Socialist Party in 2012, the chief critic of the JVP today, from the left. In 2014, Mr. Dissanayake was named leader of a party that had to stabilise itself, after shedding both its racist right-wing and its dissenting left-wing. The splits allowed the JVP to refashion itself, blurring its past profiles, and making a reputation for itself inside and outside parliament, as a bold critic of corruption and nepotism, and as an upholder of the rule of law and liberal democratic norms. The party, till date, is wary of clearly defining its position on the unresolved ethnic question. It also evades the language of class politics. In an interview to The Hindu in December 2023, Mr. Dissanayake said: “Labels have always given wrong perceptions. Left politics is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. Some people demonise this. That is why we say we are focussed more on working for the majority of our people, rather than on labels.” Published - November 24, 2024 04:00 am IST Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Sri Lanka / national elections / The Hindu Profiles / The Hindu Explains