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...
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...
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...
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...
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.”...
Apple loses very little with the Vision Pro. It looks like Apple is going to miss its 1m target for the Apple Vision Pro with commentary from suppliers indicating volumes of 200,000 – 400,000 but this is very far from the disaster that it would appear to be. Apple’s main assembler for the Vision Pro (see here) appears to be...
2 hits, one miss Alphabet: AI everywhere Alphabet reported strong results and spent its conference call reminding everyone that it is the best AI company even if it does a poor job of getting that message out to the media and investors. Q1 24 revenues-exTAC / EPS were $67.6bn / $1.89 ahead of estimates of $66.1bn / $1.53. Alphabet also...
Zuck returns to a bad habit. Meta reported reasonable results but Meta’s habitual tendency to spend resurfaced spooking the market which sent the shares down 15% which I can understand as, based on what it launched last week, Meta should be less capital intensive than its peers. Q1 24 revenues / EPS were $36.5bn / $4.71 slightly ahead of estimates...
TikTok: The ball is in China’s court. The chances of a ban on TikTok have increased substantially meaning that Beijing will now have to choose between the global expansion of a national champion and national security. The bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok has passed the Senate and will now go to the office of the President who has...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
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...