Amazon overpays for a jaded asset. Amazon is acquiring MGM Studios to bolster its digital ecosystem but while it has a great name and impressive catalogue, its distinct lack of recent franchises makes me wonder whether Amazon is overpaying in its haste to expand. Amazon is paying $8.45bn to acquire MGM from the creditors who brought it out of bankruptcy...
Peloton should be moving out of hardware. Peloton’s move deeper into hardware will benefit the company in the short term, but as the value in this sector moves into software and the content, hardware manufacturing will rapidly become a liability that will likely crash the company’s valuation. Peloton has announced that it will invest $400m in the construction of a...
No oligarchs please we are Chinese. The withdrawal of Zhang Yiming from the management of ByteDance is all about ensuring that the IPO goes well and that the events that destroyed Ant Group are not repeated. This is another clear indication that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has no real issue with any of these companies but will ensure that...
Tim Cook has a really bad memory. There are a number of items that stretch one’s credibility in the testimony given by senior Apple executives which I think has started to tip the balance of the outcome more in Epic’s favour. Both Tim Cook and Phil Schiller have given testimony in the court case between Epic Games and Apple which...
Google plays catch up on multiple fronts. Google used its keynote to highlight updates to its ecosystem that offer up its version of competing products as well as a few new tweaks of its own. First, LaMDA: which is Google’s answer to Open AI’s GPT-3. In a nutshell, this is a new language model that attempts to make conversation more...
RISC-V gains more momentum. One of the big problems of Arm’s perceived loss of independence by being acquired by NVIDIA is that interest in rivals, once thought to be dead, has been greatly revived. I don’t think that RISC-V has any chance of challenging Arm at the high end without massive Chinese government intervention, but at the low end, Arm...
AT&T & Verizon admit defeat. AT&T and Verizon’s failure to differentiate themselves through media consumption is a stark warning to all telco operators that they need to do something very special in order to avoid being packet pushers. First, it was Verizon that decided that it was unable to make a go of its 3rd rate media assets and sold...
Currencies in name only. While cynics will call Tesla’s recent policy changes regarding Bitcoin a classic pump and dump, I think that they are a clear demonstration that cryptocurrencies are speculative assets and totally unsuitable to be mediums of exchange. The facts of Tesla’s involvement with Bitcoin are not pretty. In early February 2021, Tesla announced that it had bought...
RFM has gone camel racing but will return to active duty on May 17th.
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.
Epic vs. Apple – A right Battle Royale pt. VIII.
The outcome is likely to be somewhere in the middle. The first stage of this battle is over as the judge has retired to consider her decision, but it looks like neither side is going to like the outcome which I think ends up as a net win for Epic until round 2 when Apple appeals the ruling. The problem...