USA vs. China – The Grind

Pressure is making life very hard for Chinese semiconductors. SMIC reported difficult results as the cash machine that is supposed to be lagging edge is not delivering meaning that the losses that are being incurred at its most advanced, but uneconomic fabs are increasingly being felt in its financial performance. Q1 24 revenue / net income was $1.75bn / $71.8m...

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Automotive Ecosystems – GM’s Big Bet.

Good, but it needs to be better. A large proportion of the automotive industry thinks that GM has taken leave of its senses by ditching CarPlay in its electric vehicles but the initial feedback is much better than expected although it needs to be a lot better before GM will be able to rid itself of Apple’s shackles. It was...

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Arm FQ4 24 – Volatile Visibility.

The story will remain v9 for some time. Arm reported good results where it made good on its FY24 forecasts, but the shares fell as the guidance for the coming year was not quite up to expectations meaning that the shares will now remain a push and pull between what multiple should be paid for AI and its relatively consistent...

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Apple – Feeling the squeeze.

Apple ups its cadence as competition heats up. Apple appears to be taking a leaf out of Nvidia’s book in launching a new chip just 6 months after it launched the last one in order to remain two generations ahead of Qualcomm even though it does not seem to be competing directly with it. Apple also updated its ageing iPad...

Autonomous Driving – Brains not brawn

End-to-end machine learning is not the answer. SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft are pouring $1bn into a system that relies entirely on machine learning to drive vehicles in the hope that if the model is big enough and trained with enough data magically, the answer will pop out at the end. I suspect that when it comes to the problem of...

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Lidar – Last Man Standing

The only thing that matters is cash. The weakening of EV demand and the failure of the industry to produce autonomy has slowed demand for automotive Lidar putting a lot of players in existential trouble with Luminar being the latest victim. When a company announces a large restructuring, strategy shift and headcount reduction a few days before its results, it...

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Apple & Peloton – Opposites

Fat middle age versus fighting for survival. Apple FQ2 24: Bounces off the bottom. Apple reported reasonable results and predicted a better FQ3 as the stabilisation in the smartphone market and continued growth in the services business are arresting the revenue decline. Apple also sprinkled its commentary with as much AI as possible promising that it would share “some very...

Qualcomm FQ2 24 – Steady Sailing.

Stable quarter and guidance raised. A steady quarter devoid of fireworks but where the fundamentals are beginning to come together creates a foundation for more upside as new segments such as PCs and automotive gain traction. Qualcomm reported good results and raised guidance as the core smartphone chip business continues to recover and the new business areas get themselves ready...

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Amazon Q1 24 – Picks and shovels.

All roads lead to Nvidia. Amazon reported good results that were led by AWS as appending on AI has reignited growth, but capex is growing to support these massive models and the main beneficiary remains Nvidia. Q1 24 revenues / EPS were $143.3bn / $0.98 ahead of estimates of $142.7bn / $0.84 and guidance for the coming quarter was broadly...

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Automotive Ecosystems – Play Suspended

Mercedes bails on Apple CarPlay 2.0. Mercedes Benz has confirmed that it has no plans to support the next generation of CarPlay as it has realised that letting Apple take over the infotainment domain will destroy its ability to monetise digital services in the vehicle. Ola Källenius was very clear on the Decoder podcast answering “the short answer is no.”...

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