Still a very long way to go. The lead changes once again as Baidu does not feature in this year’s data, but it is now very tight at the top and many players have seen little improvement in the last 12 months leaving us still very far from real commercial deployment. The latest disengagement report from the California Department of...
IPO may end up being the best way forward. The latest revelations with regard to NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm from SoftBank again increases the probability that the acquisition fails, resulting in an IPO outcome which is increasingly looking like the best outcome for everyone except SoftBank. The US has now followed the UK and the EU in increasing its scrutiny...
The ride-sharing market remains in difficulty Uber Q4 2020 – Sheep in FedEx clothes? Uber is fortunate that it has had a delivery business to help it weather the pandemic, but this raises the possibility that it should be compared to FedEx and UPS when it comes to valuation rather than the inflated technology sector. Uber reported in line Q4...
8K pricing seems to be falling off a cliff. If CES and Samsung are anything to go by, the 8K product cycle looks set to be a financial disaster as the lack of a use case seems to be causing the price of the TVs to fall far faster than previous generations. TVs are like any other piece of consumer...
Twitter Q4 2020 – User issues. Twitter reported good Q4 2020 results, but it has run out of road when it comes to user metrics. Q4 2020 revenues / EPS were $1.29bn / $0.27 ahead of consensus of $1.19bn / $0.16. Twitter’s new user measure (monetizable daily users) mDaU were slightly below expectations of 193.5m as there was a small...
A solution that we may never really need. Microsoft Viva is a platform that aims to digitally recreate the work environment down to the chatting around the water cooler which is Microsoft’s answer to the possibility of everyone being stuck at home for a long time to come. Fortunately, I think that the biological evidence of this disease points to...
Intel throws down the gauntlet. Intel has put up a comparison of its latest chip against the M1 that it says tells a very different story but the tests are clearly skewed in Intel’s favour and don’t match real-world testing. However, this is a good sign that Intel intends to slug it out with Apple and remains committed to regaining...
This acquisition is becoming increasingly problematic. NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm is becoming increasingly problematic with in-depth investigations being launched by both the UK and the EU competition authorities and the US looks certain to follow. This combined with the problem in China (see here) could make it so painful to complete this acquisition, that SoftBank ends up returning Arm to...
Amazon Game Studios is suffering from a culture clash. Amazon is having a torrid time trying to make a name in the video game market highlighting how Amazon’s corporate culture can be ruinous for creative industries, meaning that it should probably stick to providing tools for making games (AWS) rather than the games themselves. Amazon’s game division was formed in...
Palantir Q4 2020 – Rollercoaster
Another good company bad stock scenario. In the grand scheme of things, Palantir reported excellent results but because the company trades at 2021 EV/Sales of 32.5x, nothing less than a guarantee of a continuation of blistering growth is enough, meaning that the stock fell 13%. Q4 2020 revenues / EPS were $322.1m / LOSS$0.08 ahead of expectations of $301m /...