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...
No one is going to dislodge Nvidia yet. Amazon is readying the next version of its in-house AI training and inference chips but until CUDA is no longer the control point of AI training and Amazon iterates much faster, it is going nowhere (except in-house and with Anthropic). Trainium is Amazon’s in house data centre chip that is designed to...
Scaling laws appear to be dying. There are more signs that the “scaling laws” that have underpinned the AI explosion (and all of the hype attached to super-intelligent machines) are coming to an end meaning that the real potential of LLMs is now visible and is falling way short of the craziest of forecasts. It is important to note that...
China and semiconductors are unlikely to change much. A change of administration is likely to mean that there is more noise and bluster but no real change when it comes to policy towards either China or the subsidisation of the semiconductor industry overall. Semiconductors Despite only a few days having passed, the outgoing administration is now hurrying to complete its...
Qualcomm FQ4 24 – Top Gear. Qualcomm reported good results that beat expectations as a result of a strong performance in automotive, providing the first piece of hard evidence that the diversification strategy is beginning to bear fruit. FQ4 24 revenues / Adj-EPS were $10.2bn / $2.69 nicely ahead of expectations of $9.91bn / $2.56 and there was more good...
Google on the back foot. Open AI has launched a competitor to Google which performs reasonably well in a strong indication that the barriers to entry in the search business are continuing to fall, putting increasing pressure on Google to convince users why they should still use it. SearchGPT is a new service from Open AI that greatly improves its...
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.
Qualcomm – Confident Outing
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....