Cashier-less stores are too stupid to make money. Cashier-less shops are not all they are cracked up to be as the emerging bloodbath in China and Amazon’s glacial roll-out clearly indicates. Amazon was first to launch a cashier-less store in 2016 but the fact that it has not taken this concept any further is a clear indication that this experiment...
Component loophole won’t help the smartphone business. US Hardware vendors have found a loophole that will allow them to continue selling silicon-based products to Huawei, but this will not work for software meaning that the outlook for the smartphone business remains dire. The loophole in question is called the di minimis rule which provides an exception for companies on the...
Apple’s response is unlikely to hold water. Apple is just one of a list of larger US tech companies under scrutiny by EU competition authorities, but I think its response to Spotify’s complaint will not hold much water with the EU. The whole dispute revolves around what is referred to as the “App Store Tax” which is the 30% share...
Didi wisely lets in the 3rd parties. Didi’s move to open its platform to 3rd parties indicates that in China, the battle is now all about becoming a transport market place than it is about ride-hailing or becoming a robotaxi operator. Didi Chuxing, which has around 80% of the Chinese ride-hailing market, has opened its platform to 3rd parties such...
Very little substance to this agreement. Renault and Nissan have signed an exclusive deal with Waymo that signals a further fracturing of the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi alliance and when picked apart the deal doesn’t really mean anything. The deal has clearly been worded extremely carefully to give all parties as much wiggle room as possible, meaning that this is not...
Folding phones are now about bragging rights. The launch dates of the Huawei Mate X and the Galaxy Fold have very little to do with demand or market readiness and are really about who can be first with a workable folding screen product. Hidden in the dreadful news (see here) with regard to Huawei’s outlook in smartphones was the news...
Facebook takes a shot at the banking sector. Facebook has launched a digital currency platform that it hopes will succeed thanks to its pervasive network of 2.2bn users into which it can embed its payment system making it much easier to access and use. This is much the same strategy that Apple successfully used with Apple Music where every...
Huawei enters the death spiral. Huawei has warned that its international shipments are already in free-fall which fits with RFM’s recent observations, but I suspect that there could be worse to come as Huawei has entered the death spiral. According to Bloomberg (see here), Huawei is now expecting to see a 40-60m drop in unit shipments this year as...
China likely to be first with a fully digitised vehicle. Alibaba’s partnership with foreign car makers to offer its voice assistant in the vehicles transforms the Chinese market into a two-voice race between Alibaba and Baidu. Alibaba has already released its assistant Tmall Genie for a smart speaker but it has now extended this domain into vehicles with the release...
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.
Electric Vehicles – King in waiting.
It could be a very long wait for electric vehicles. While the German automobile industry has a strong vested interest in the longevity of petrol and diesel engines, it has a point when it claims that electrification is pretty far away. On the sidelines of the BMW NextGen event in Munich, BMW’s head of development stated that in 2025, 80%...