The Fed claims its first victim. A combination of aggressive Federal Reserve policy and poor management has led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank causing all sorts of problems for start-up companies and putting much of the start-up and early-stage ecosystem in great peril. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as...
Google needs to calm down and do what it is best at. Microsoft has finally managed to get under Google’s skin and the level of panic that has ensued could see Google rush a product to market that damages the quality and performance of its core services. Google appears to be in full panic mode with Sundar Pichai calling in...
Geopolitics and subsidies in the driving seat. Intel is asking Germany to increase the level of subsidy that it is providing to incentivize leading-edge manufacturing in Germany which indicates both how the current subsidies are not enough and also what dire straits Intel currently is in. Intel is looking for a further €4bn-€5bn in subsidies from the German government in...
Zuckerberg giveth and he taketh away. Meta Platforms is giving to its investors with further job cuts likely but at the same time taking it away by cutting the price of its VR units ensuring that more units ship and higher losses are incurred. It looks very likely that another round of job cuts is coming at Meta Platforms and...
Generative AI has bubble written all over it. The signs are everywhere from ridiculous valuations to outlandish use cases and every man and his dog now wanting to build one, but the technology has no chance of living up to the hype meaning that sooner or later the house of cards will fall. That does not mean that there is...
Subsidising failure is a bad idea. The most recent debate doing the rounds at MWC is the idea that Big Tech should pay some of the cost of rolling out 5G as it stands to disproportionately benefit from it. I find this argument to be absurd because I have long argued that the main reason why Big Tech is so...
Floor report – No smiles here. The buzz on the floor is back but the halls of power seem to be filled with doom and gloom as one presentation after another is bemoaning the difficult situation in which the industry finds itself. The Orange CEO gave a dour presentation about the state of operators in Europe while the DT CEO...
Floor report – China returns Mobile World Congress 2023 is finally pretty much back where we left it in 2019 and, although footfall and exhibitors are still clearly lower than before the pandemic, I think that this is more due to the state of the industry and the economy than MWC itself. The awful traffic, queues for the loos and...
Ericsson – Blowing sentiment Mobile World Congress 2023 is about to start, but Ericsson has gotten things off to a bad start with a further 8,500 layoffs indicating that life remains tough in the world of mobile infrastructure. Ericsson is cutting around 8% of its workforce and is taking aim at service delivery, supply, real estate and IT in what...
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.
USA vs. China – The Netherlands
The Dutch are unlikely to go nearly as far. The Netherlands has said that it is going to place more restrictions on exports to China but I suspect that these will be slow in coming and be far less wide-reaching than the US would like. The Netherlands’ trade minister has written to the Dutch parliament outlining the new restrictions but...