The first bricks go up. Huawei’s migration of its smartphone business to its home-grown Harmony OS is the first concrete sign that our long-predicted Balkanisation of the Internet has begun and everyone, not just China will be poorer because of it. Calendar Q4 has become geopolitics season with the Department of Commerce updating the rules in October and Huawei releasing...
The reset will start the battle. Amazon has upped its investment in Anthropic which virtually guarantees that when the money runs out, Anthropic will be acquired and become the AI department of Amazon, creating a fully vertically integrated player ready to fight for the AI Ecosystem prize. This is a confirmation of what has been clear for some time and...
Rotten earnings point towards a state in deep depression. Poor results from both Baidu and PDD point directly to the moribund Chinese economy underpinning the view that nothing will improve until the Chinese state lets the private sector off the leash. PDD reported worse than expected results as its rapid market share growth has slowed markedly as rivals react to...
Reasonable multiple prevents a crash. Nvidia reported excellent results as the AI boom remains on track, but it failed to raise guidance which caused some disappointment, but as the valuation remains in the realm of reality, this only triggered a small correction in the share price. FQ3 25 revenues / Adj-EPS were $35.1bn / $0.81 ahead of estimates of $33.2bn...
Low-balled numbers still give good growth. Qualcomm used its 2024 investor day to focus on the areas outside of smartphones where the diversification strategy that was laid out in 2021 is starting to bear fruit. It also gave some targets for its businesses outside of smartphones which, in some cases, look pretty conservative to me and could be handsomely beaten....
Google: A badly thought-through remedy. The US Department of Justice is recommending that Google be forced to sell Chrome as a remedy for its illegal monopolisation of the search market in a move that looks badly thought through and will probably fail on appeal. Google is a company that offers a diverse set of digital services to users and then...
Alibaba remains captive to China’s poor economy. The performance and outlook at Alibaba are a strong indication that in reality, the Chinese economy remains moribund and that a lot more stimulus and a relaxation of state oversight is required for China to begin really growing once again. FQ3 25 revenues / EPS were RMB236.6bn (up 5% YoY) / RMB2.27 broadly...
Inference at the edge remains a no-brainer. Now that LLMs are starting to show the limits of their performance, attention is likely to turn to use cases where RFM research has long argued that the real opportunity is to run inference at the edge of the network as opposed to in the cloud. Delving into the subject more deeply leads...
Apple looks like it has run out of ideas. It looks like growth is becoming a real problem at Apple as it is considering entering segments where its competitors have seen very little success in a sign that Apple is pretty much out of ideas. The correct response in this scenario would be to return all of the excess cash...
Samsung Electronics – Efficient Market
Priced for a Nokia. The case for Samsung Electronics is purely based on recovery in semiconductors because if things stay the way they are, there is little to no upside in the shares. Following Samsung’s second horrendous mistake in 8 years, the shares have given up 36% of their value but as the problem now resides in its core Semiconductor...