PDD & Baidu – Bargains for the Brave

Rotten earnings point towards a state in deep depression. Poor results from both Baidu and PDD point directly to the moribund Chinese economy underpinning the view that nothing will improve until the Chinese state lets the private sector off the leash. PDD reported worse than expected results as its rapid market share growth has slowed markedly as rivals react to...

Nvidia FQ3 25 – Valuation Support

Reasonable multiple prevents a crash. Nvidia reported excellent results as the AI boom remains on track, but it failed to raise guidance which caused some disappointment, but as the valuation remains in the realm of reality, this only triggered a small correction in the share price. FQ3 25 revenues / Adj-EPS were $35.1bn / $0.81 ahead of estimates of $33.2bn...

Qualcomm – Confident Outing

Low-balled numbers still give good growth. Qualcomm used its 2024 investor day to focus on the areas outside of smartphones where the diversification strategy that was laid out in 2021 is starting to bear fruit. It also gave some targets for its businesses outside of smartphones which, in some cases, look pretty conservative to me and could be handsomely beaten....

Tech Newsround – Google & Xiaomi

Google: A badly thought-through remedy. The US Department of Justice is recommending that Google be forced to sell Chrome as a remedy for its illegal monopolisation of the search market in a move that looks badly thought through and will probably fail on appeal. Google is a company that offers a diverse set of digital services to users and then...

Alibaba FQ3 25 – Unhappy Hostage.

Alibaba remains captive to China’s poor economy. The performance and outlook at Alibaba are a strong indication that in reality, the Chinese economy remains moribund and that a lot more stimulus and a relaxation of state oversight is required for China to begin really growing once again. FQ3 25 revenues / EPS were RMB236.6bn (up 5% YoY) / RMB2.27 broadly...

Artificial Intelligence – Edge Debate.

Inference at the edge remains a no-brainer. Now that LLMs are starting to show the limits of their performance, attention is likely to turn to use cases where RFM research has long argued that the real opportunity is to run inference at the edge of the network as opposed to in the cloud. Delving into the subject more deeply leads...

Apple – Bottom of the Barrel.

Apple looks like it has run out of ideas. It looks like growth is becoming a real problem at Apple as it is considering entering segments where its competitors have seen very little success in a sign that Apple is pretty much out of ideas. The correct response in this scenario would be to return all of the excess cash...

Amazon & AI – A Question of Time

No one is going to dislodge Nvidia yet. Amazon is readying the next version of its in-house AI training and inference chips but until CUDA is no longer the control point of AI training and Amazon iterates much faster, it is going nowhere (except in-house and with Anthropic). Trainium is Amazon’s in house data centre chip that is designed to...

Artificial Intelligence – Scaling Debate

Scaling laws appear to be dying. There are more signs that the “scaling laws” that have underpinned the AI explosion (and all of the hype attached to super-intelligent machines) are coming to an end meaning that the real potential of LLMs is now visible and is falling way short of the craziest of forecasts. It is important to note that...

China & Semis – No Score Draw

China and semiconductors are unlikely to change much. A change of administration is likely to mean that there is more noise and bluster but no real change when it comes to policy towards either China or the subsidisation of the semiconductor industry overall. Semiconductors Despite only a few days having passed, the outgoing administration is now hurrying to complete its...