Savvy telecom startup Wind is hiring Canadian talent while its rivals cower.

Telecom service provider Wind Mobile slipped into Canada’s wireless scene determined to gain every strategic advantage it could over the country’s telecommunications giants.

Last year — mostly through online social networking sites – Wind spread the word that it was hiring. Within a year, the company had targeted and recruited more than 700 employees.

Many larger firms have been lax in retention programs in the past several years, betting that economic conditions would not result in unwanted employee departures. “We have hired some ninja engineers from the competitors … I know for a fact that we have got some very sharp talent from the incumbents,” said Wind Mobile chief executive officer Ken Campbell. Campbell argues that staffing a brand-new company in a field where top techies and first-rate customer service people are in high demand, becomes a much easier task in a down economy.

Wind offers competitive pay, stimulating work and professional development opportunities. Campbell’s firm has a Toronto waterfront headquarters and is the brand name under which Globalive Wireless Management Corp. is now selling its wireless services in Canada.

“The scope and flexibility we give them as a startup is just so much more interesting than what you would get at a larger company. We just have to, because we are small and we have to be agile,” says Campbell.

Many times during economic downturns, employees begin feeling stifled, under-compensated and unchallenged. It is precisely then that they become much more open to other offers — even with a riskier venture.

If large organizations fail to adequately plan for tightening labour markets, they can lose out on employees with the required skills, which dampens their future growth prospects. Those losses are usually a start-ups gain…

Wind human resources vice-president Christina Sanders, who previously worked at Magna International Inc. and Virgin Mobile Canada, said Wind’s employees come from “all sectors and hail from all parts of the world.” What they have in common, she said, is “the right attitude, flexibility, entrepreneurship and passion,” Ms. Sanders said. “For people who are in telecom, this is a very exciting time.”

You may remember last March that we said that successful entrepreneurs know that strong firms retool their businesses during lulls in business cycles and that many well known firms were born during recessionary times. Most serially successful entrepreneurs use these lulls as opportunities to borrow, invest, and grow their business model. They know that when markets return, their businesses will be the ones much better equipped to take advantage of the return to strong demand.

Some say that small businesses are not presently hiring. But Wind Telecom — and many other small start-up firms operating in stealth mode right now — know better.

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For many in the east, life remains buried under several feet of snow, but florists across the country say that this Valentine’s Day may be one of their best ever.

Mary Reynolds, of Frederic’s Flowers in Bedford, VA, says this holiday is shaping up to be one of the best she’s had in 15 years. “We have Friday, where you can deliver to the businesses or the schools, and then you have Saturday and Sunday also to deliver to the homes,” she said.

Other florists have also reported high order volumes:

Calvin Mitchell, who owns Leo Wood Florist, said his business has been “very, very busy.”

At Haddonfield Floral Company in the Philadelphia suburb of Haddonfield, N.J., owner D.W. Janszky said that online and phone orders have been strong — especially on Wednesday when so many people were snowed in.

And the snow didn’t slow the orders.  Michael Caruso, vice president of Caruso Florist in Washington DC, said he rented four-wheel-drive vehicles to pick up employees and make deliveries.  “We’ve been in business since 1903 and this isn’t the first storm we’ve weathered,” Caruso said, “Our motto is ‘Rain or snow or 6 below, we go.’”

Joan Arthur, owner of Arthur’s Flower Cart, says snow has made deliveries in some VA residential areas difficult, but that “business has been booming. I feel like we’ve been blessed. We are delivering as hard as we can go.”

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“All of our inventory has disappeared faster than concert tickets,” says Jon Hoch, owner of Power Equipment Direct Inc., an online dealer that has seen surging sales. Snow blowers inventory is now such that, “We have this beautiful Web site that in a day or two won’t have anything left to sell.”

For years the cab drivers in DC have taken advantage of snow situations. On Wednesday one traveler heading to Reagan National Airport said a cabbie tried to charge him a “$100 snow fare.”

In Pennsylvania, Jack Frost Big Boulder, Blue Knob, and Camelback ski resorts are all reporting premium skiing conditions. Servicing key markets like Philadelphia, DC and the Poconos — all areas have had record snows — and East coasters are heading for the hills — their wallets in tow.

Michael Cleren of Jack Frost reports, “We are set for record [sales] numbers in the next 10 days.” For most eastern ski resorts business is strong and the snow pack is now in place for healthy March operations and profits.

For grocery stores, these are also profitable times. The snow storms have challenged Wawa, Safeway and Giant retailers to stay open during the inclement weather. Those that can manage to keep their doors open report brisk sales with the public making a run on staples just prior to the storm.

Sal Mattera, Wawa operations chief reports other good news for some Wawa vendors:
the store pays overtime to keep their parking lots plowed and sidewalks clear. During a storm, customers are in a spending mood. If customers can make it to their parking lot, Wawa does everything possible to make sure they make it inside.

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It is a move I am very excited about as it gives the Mint direct control over the refinery’s output, which is typically between 300 to 400 tonnes of gold a year. I’m reminded of the old adage, “He who owns the gold, makes the rules”, but of course the Mint doesn’t own the gold, its clients do.

The substantial physical inventories needed to support this throughput, and the Mint’s own stock, have been backing Depository client metal for many years. All this acquisition will do is change the refinery’s inventory from being listed as a metal receivable in the Mint’s financials to being a directly owned asset. This should increase the comfort factor for many Depository clients even though it doesn’t really change the fact that their holdings have been, and always will be, backed by physical.

I will be interested to see how the Mint’s critics and competitors try to spin this news against us. It does make it hard to argue that a business that refines 300 tonnes of gold a year “doesn’t have any gold”.

Maybe they’ll argue that we had to get the refinery to plug the imagined short position that they think we have. Apart from exposing their woeful ignorance of how our operations and a refinery’s work, the logical conclusion of such a position would be that the supposed short position is now plugged, making the Depository a totally safe facility!

For those not aware, the AGR refinery operations were originally established by the Perth Mint in 1899 when it was founded as the Perth branch of the British Royal Mint. In 1998 the refinery was combined with the refinery operations of Golden West to form the AGR Joint Venture and then subsequently merged with Johnson Matthey’s Melbourne refinery in 2002. So in a way the refinery business is just coming back to its home.

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Their latest earning release also highlighted a 17% year on year growth in revenues — now up to $6.67B per quarter — from $5.7B per quarter during the same period in 2008. Chief executive Eric Schmidt continues to make optimistic assessments of the current state of affairs.

“Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year,” he said. “Our performance in 2009 underscored the strength of our management team, the resilience of our business model and the pace of innovation within our product and engineering teams, which continued unabated throughout the downturn.”

In a sign that consumers are increasingly willing to spend, more Internet users clicked on ads. The number of paid clicks on ads served on Google’s Web sites rose 13% from last year and 9% from the third quarter of 2009.

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The impressive swing in net income was about 10 times greater than the $234 million (4 cents per share) that the firm reported last year on January 15.

We’ve continued to watch in amazement as Intel seemed completely unphased by the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009:

1. January 2009: Intel beats its Q4 2008 estimates amidst negative headlines everywhere else.

2. April 2009: Intel declares, “We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns.” In the first-quarter, the firm’s profit far exceeded analyst views.

3. July 2009: Still swimming upstream, Intel posts its largest quarterly sequential increase in sales since 1988, further boosts its guidance for Q3 in the face of naysayers calling for lackluster Q3 growth.

4. Oct 2009: Cisco joins Intel in declaring that “Recovery Is Gaining Momentum.”

And just prior to yesterday’s Intel announcement you’ll remember that analyst firm IDC declared that in Q4 2009, the U.S. PC “market exploded higher.“

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IDC saw pent-up demand for new computers in a reviving U.S. economy along with year over year comparisons with a much weaker quarter as the recession deepened in late 2008.

“The U.S. market exploded,” said IDC analyst David Daoud

You’ll remember it was Intel that predicted in June last year that 2009 Q4 growth would be anything but lackluster.

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In a research report released last week the firm estimates that telecom service providers will increase their spending by 1.5% to $57.7 billion.

Avian estimates that the largest spenders will be AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) ($17.5 billion), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) ($16.6 billion), Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) ($5 billion), and T-Mobile USA ($3.5 billion).

Avian’s estimates may be conservative. Several weeks ago Dick Lynch, chief technology officer for Verizon said, “It’s no accident that again [in 2009], Verizon’s consumer and business services won major industry awards.” Lynch asserted that those awards were the direct result of network spending in 2009. “The better the network, the better the performance of the applications that ride on them. It’s as simple as that,” he said.

Accordingly, it is likely that communications providers will spend much of their 2010 capital budgets on technologies that increase the efficiency of their high speed wireless networks. In 2010, CTO’s are focused on core fiber capacity and grooming technologies. AT&T’s CTO John Donovan said last week that his firm completed 7.2-Mbit/s wireless upgrades throughout its whole network including doubling the number of cell sites with fiber-optic capacities.

“We expect that the majority of our mobile data traffic will be carried on fiber-based backhaul by the end of 2010,” Donovan said. AT&T will continue to enhance the “world’s largest deployment of 40-Gig backbone technology,” boasted Donovan.

Last week T-mobile had good news boasts of it own. The firm announced the completion of a scheduled upgrade to its entire network — an upgrade which boosts wireless air speeds from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps. Additionally the company promises that speeds in 2010 will peak at blazing wireless rates of 21 Mbps and that spending on a trial in Philadelphia is already underway.

The spending news came just prior to T-Mobile’s announcement introducing the “Nexus One”, a smartphone that will run on T-Mobile’s network. The Nexus One supports these high speed wireless technologies and analysts see its pairing with T-mobile’s high-speed network upgrades as a significant enabler for economic and technological innovation.

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Same-store-sales declines for Lowe’s progressively moderated as Q3 advanced, with October same-store sales only dropping 5.6%, following a 7.9% decline in September and an 8.7% drop in August. For the full quarter, same-store sales fell 7.5%, an improvement over the second-quarter’s 9.5% decline.

The firm sees inventory in better shape than a year ago and also sees signs that consumers are responding to good deals and promotions — underscoring the firm’s optimism.

“We certainly do feel better about how things are trending,” CFO Robert Hull said.

Lowe’s Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Niblock said appliances, flooring and interior paint posted same-store sales increases. A recent consumer survey found that flooring projects as well as kitchen and bath face-lifts are at the top of consumers’ lists of planned home improvement projects.

“The fact that these types of projects are at the top of homeowners’ to-do lists is encouraging,” Niblock said.

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1. In the world of banks, bigger can be better, Charles Calomiris in the Wall Street Journal.
2. A three-way split is the most logical, by John Gapper in the Financial Times.
3. Narrow banking is not the answer to systemic fragility by Charles Goodhart.
4. See the section titled Regulatory and legislative reaction and the foreign exchange market in Lessons for the foreign exchange market from the global financial crisis by Michael Melvin and Mark P. Taylor on voxEU.

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