Alphabet Q4 2023 – Corporate waffle

Google fails to blow its own trumpet. Alphabet reported good results but one tiny miss combined with vague and non-specific answers to easy questions on the conference call gave the market an excuse to take profits on what has been a great run. Q4 revenues-exTAC / EPS of $72.3bn / $1.64 were better than forecasts of $71.0bn / $1.59 but...

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AI Ecosystem – Capital Bloom.

Nvidia can sleep well for now. Competing with Nvidia is currently focused on building better chips but this is ignoring Nvidia’s two key differentiators which mean that for now, no one is going to lay a glove on Nvidia. There is almost unlimited capital for investing in AI startups at the moment and outside of large language models (LLMs), the...

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Digital Automotive – Radio wars

A very American dispute. The issue of AM radio in vehicles sold in the USA has been debated for many years, but electrical vehicles (EVs)bring this issue to a head meaning that the most likely outcome is that AM radio becomes an option rather than standard in electrical vehicles. Although the relevance of radio broadcasting has declined substantially in most...

Intel Q4 2023 – Too risky

A series of unfortunate events. Intel reported good results but guided badly as inventory corrections and market dynamics in several of Intel’s segments added together caused weak guidance which triggered a correction in what has otherwise been a terrific run. Q4 2023 revenues / EPS were $15.41bn / $0.54 ahead of estimates of $15.16bn / $0.54 but things really fell...

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Apple AI – Back of the pack

There is a little activity behind the curtain. It would be foolish to think that Apple is not trying to do something about AI but I suspect that it has done very little to date and it remains very far behind in a race that is not going to be quite as consequential as the cool-aid drinkers would have us...

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Mobileye – No go

Inventory correction is in full swing. Weak numbers from Texas Instruments echo what Mobileye highlighted a few weeks ago underlining that industrial semiconductors are now enduring the same correction that consumer did just one year ago. Texas Instruments reported weak results and declined to say when it thought that the current weakness would be over stating that it had never...

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Electric Vehicles – Silver lining

Slowdown actually helps OEMs.   The realities of electric vehicles are starting to come home as the early adopters now all have an EV while the rest of us are not prepared to pay a premium and still suffer from all of the issues that EVs still present. RFM has concluded that this is good news for the OEMs (see...

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Open AI – The Stranglehold

All about Nvidia Sam Altman is once again capitalising on the intense popularity of generative AI by looking to raise money for a new chip venture which can only be aimed at breaking Nvidia’s current stranglehold on the AI ecosystem. It looks like the discussion revolves around the creation of a fabless chip company that would design the AI chips...

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TSMC – All about AI

50% inventory, 50% AI. TSMC has signalled better times ahead for the semiconductor industry, but I suspect that things will only be really rosy if one is selling chips that enable the current insatiable demand for AI training. TSMC reported better than expected Q4 2023 results and forecast that 2024 would see a return to growth which buoyed the entire...

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Samsung Unpacked – Where’s Bixby?

Lots of Google. Little of Samsung, Samsung‘s new s24 line-up looks exactly like the s23 but the hope is that the new AI features (almost all of which come from Google) will provide all of the incentive to upgrade to a new Galaxy or horror of horrors switch from iPhone. As usual, there are three devices the s24, the s24+...

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