Life gets more real for online finance in China. Changes to the banking rules mean that the nimble online lending sector will become much more capital intensive which will incentivise the lending platforms to be more risk-averse when it comes to making loans. Online lending platforms are now being forced to have much more skin in the lending game by...
This cycle is going to be bigger than normal. The balance between supply and demand in semiconductors has always been tricky to get right, but the pandemic has made the situation a whole lot worse which is what I suspect is at the heart of the current problems. The main reason why semiconductors are cyclical is because the factories that...
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 /...
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...
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.
Facebook – The wizard of OZ
Facebook outplays the Australians in leveraging its network effect. Facebook has scored a big win in arriving at an agreement with the Australian government regarding paying for news from Australian sources with concessions that virtually guarantee that it will be business as usual from here on. Facebook has said that it is satisfied with the changes and guarantees that it...