Michaels vs Alphabet Inc.
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North America's largest arts and crafts retail chain with 1,250+ stores; Apollo-owned with Jo-Ann bankruptcy creating expansion opportunity competing with Hobby Lobby.
About
Michaels is North America's largest specialty arts and crafts retail chain, operating over 1,250 company-owned stores in the US and Canada offering a vast selection of art supplies, custom picture framing, scrapbooking and paper crafts, yarn and needle arts, seasonal craft supplies, and home décor. Founded in 1973 in Irving, Texas, Michaels went private in a $6.1 billion leveraged buyout led by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone in 2006, then went public again in 2014, and was taken private again in 2021 by Apollo Global Management for approximately $5 billion.\n\nMichaels' product range spans over 45,000 SKUs in major categories: art supplies (paints, canvases, drawing materials), custom framing (in-store custom frame shop), floral (artificial flowers, wreaths), yarn and needle arts (extensive yarn selection, knitting supplies), seasonal (Halloween, Christmas craft supplies), and general crafts. The Michaels brand has added private label brands (Artist's Loft, Recollections for scrapbooking) that generate higher margins than national brands. In-store classes and workshops turn the store into a community space that drives engagement and repeat visits beyond purchases.\n\nIn 2025, Michaels competes with Hobby Lobby, Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores (which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024, creating market share opportunity), and Michael's own Amazon storefronts for arts and crafts retail. Jo-Ann's bankruptcy and potential store closures represent a significant competitive opportunity for Michaels to gain share in the fabric and needle arts segments. The crafting market benefited from COVID-era growth as homebound consumers took up crafts, and the category has maintained elevated participation. Michaels' 2025 strategy focuses on capturing Jo-Ann customer migration, growing the Michaels Pro segment (artists, educators, craft businesses), expanding digital and e-commerce capabilities, and deepening the community/workshop programming that differentiates physical craft retail.
Mountain View AI and digital advertising conglomerate (NASDAQ: GOOGL) $350B FY2024 revenue (+15%); Google Search 90%+ share, Google Cloud $43.2B (+30%), Gemini AI, DOJ monopoly ruling 2024.
About
Alphabet Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based technology conglomerate — publicly traded on the NASDAQ (NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG) as an S&P 500 Information Technology component — operating as the holding company for Google (Search, YouTube, Google Ads, Gmail, Google Cloud, Android, Chrome, Maps, Play Store, Workspace), and Other Bets (Waymo autonomous vehicles, DeepMind AI research, Verily life sciences, Wing drone delivery, Google Fiber) through approximately 183,000 full-time employees. In fiscal year 2024, Alphabet reported revenues of $350 billion (+15% year-over-year), with Google Services (Search, YouTube, Google Play, subscriptions) generating $307 billion, Google Cloud generating $43.2 billion (+30%), and Other Bets $2.0 billion, while generating $100 billion in net income — reflecting Alphabet's position as one of the highest-profit companies in history, funded by Google Search's advertising monopoly (processing 8.5+ billion searches daily, commanding 90%+ global search market share). CEO Sundar Pichai has prioritized Alphabet's AI-first transformation: the 2024 launch of Gemini Ultra 1.0, Gemini 1.5 Pro (1 million token context window — largest at launch), and Gemini 2.0 Flash positioned Google as a competitive AI frontier model lab alongside OpenAI, following the ChatGPT disruption that temporarily threatened Google's search advertising dominance in 2023. Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform (enterprise AI model deployment with Gemini, Llama, and third-party models) and Google Distributed Cloud (air-gapped government cloud) compete directly with Microsoft Azure AI and AWS SageMaker for enterprise AI workload contracts. Waymo's commercial robotaxi operations in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles (Waymo One — fully driverless rides, generating revenue and operational data) represent Alphabet's highest-upside long-duration investment.
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