Epic Games builds a war chest for bargain hunting. Epic Games is raising $750m at a mooted $17bn valuation from T Rowe Price and Baillie Gifford, as well as existing investors and I, suspect that the war chest will be used to pick up weakened competitors as the going gets tough in the coming recession. From an operational standpoint, I...
ByteDance is moving from growth into monetisation. ByteDance is showing signs of moving into the next phase of its life cycle which involves tidying up loose ends and moving to really monetise the global engagement that it has generated over the last few years. India has become ByteDance’s No. 2 market with 200m users of TikTok as the nature of...
The future of Grubhub is still bleak. Grubhub has decided to sell itself to Just Eat Takeaway rather than Uber in a move that cited regulatory risk but in reality, will result in a continuation of the bloodbath. In a hurriedly put together deal, Just Eat Takeaway will acquire Grubhub in an all-share deal that values Grubhub at around $75.15...
As with servers, the main issue is legacy software. It looks like Apple is finally about to pull the plug on Intel in its Macintosh computers and switch to Arm which will offer the possibility of unification of iOS and macOS but also raises the problem of all the legacy software that will no longer work. Apple is holding an...
Patent counting is not an indication of reality. The notion that the number of patents that one holds is a refection of one’s contribution to a technology is deeply flawed and in the case of Huawei, most of the evidence points to the contrary. Hence, I don’t think that having a large patent count is going to help alleviate the...
Public transport’s loss is e-bikes’ gain. The aversion to asset sharing is likely to persist for as long as there is no reliable vaccine (evidenced by the sudden spike in demand for e-bikes) meaning that the pressure on the asset sharing industry is not going to change anytime soon. The example of New Zealand shows that it is not...
A study with questionable motivations. I have long argued that the automobile insurance industry must resist the adoption of autonomous driving for as long as it can (see here) and a study from one of its industry bodies seems to be aimed at doing exactly that. Despite protestations to the contrary from the industry, I firmly believe that autonomous driving...
All priced in. Zoom reported very strong Q1 2020 results on all levels as far more customers than expected paid up for the service amid the flood of free users caused by the pandemic. Q1 2020 revenue / EPS were $328m / $0.09 compared to consensus at $203m / $0.01. Customers paying more than $100,000 per year was up 90%...
Quibi looks doomed to fail. The early figures for Quibi are very disappointing which the company is blaming on the pandemic lockdown which I find very surprising as everyone else is finding precisely the opposite. I suspect that the reality is that the video format that Quibi is pushing simply does not work under any circumstances which will result in...
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.
Huawei – Nowhere to run pt XVIII.
“relaxation” is not really a climb-down. The “relaxation” of the US’s stance against Huawei can be taken either as a sign of fear of missing out or as a move to ensure that US companies continue to have a big role to play in the setting of future standards. One thing I am almost certain of is that this “relaxation”...