Didi is a play on the whim of the state. The Coronavirus may lead the Chinese state to give Didi a bit of breathing space while the economy gets back on its feet, but this space could be short-lived. The main issue facing China now is not containment but getting its economy back on its feet without triggering a further...
The hits keep on coming. SoftBank’s biggest problem following on from WeWork is that every one of its investments that go wrong or have problems will receive intense press attention and scrutiny. The reality is that while SoftBank still has some hits to take as a result of overpaying and investing too much, I think the worst is over. The...
Google is making more errors. In addition to issuing refunds and apologising to its users (many of whom feel duped (see here)), Google should also realise that its power in search and Android has not crossed over into games and be nice to developers. There is little doubt that Stadia is an unmitigated disaster and given the current opportunity with...
Waymo has to get back out front. Waymo has raised $2.25bn from outside sources as I think it needs to accelerate its progress as evidence that many of its rivals are hotter on its heels than it anticipated. Waymo is raining $2.25bn from Silverlake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and UAE-based Mubadala. Conspicuously absent from this raise is SoftBank...
I think Cortana will go back to the research lab. Cortana is set to become a productivity-based digital assistant which in reality means that Microsoft is cutting the resources it has allocated to it, paving the way for its demise and a whole-hearted switch over to Amazon Alexa. Cortana is one of the last remnants of Microsoft’s consumer-facing activities that...
Softbank must be under real pressure. In the current environment, the last thing one should do is bring a highly valued, loss-making, sharing economy-based company to IPO, demonstrating that Softbank is under withering pressure to produce some good news. With the spectre of a global infectious pandemic looming, businesses that enable users to share assets are not particularly desirable as...
The field tightens a long way away from commercial offerings. Disengagement data from the California DMV (see here) shows that Waymo has lost its lead in autonomous driving to Baidu explaining why Waymo has criticised this data for the first time. The use of disengagements to measure the quality of an autonomous driving system is deeply flawed but in the...
Toyota comes to its senses (sort of). After its inexplicable investment in Uber’s self-driving unit (see here) at a valuation of $7.25bn and its madcap plan to build an entire city in the shadow of Mount Fuji (see here), it has finally done something that I can find some sense in. Toyota is investing $400m in Pony.ai at a valuation...
Screen durability and price still hold back this enticing segment. Despite the cancellation of MWC, Huawei is going ahead with its device launches as planned with the new Mate Xs at its pinnacle. The Mate Xs is a folding phone that looks much like its predecessor and sadly it suffers from all the same flaws (as do its peers) that...
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. XIII.
Software is not a refuge. Faced with the complete collapse of its smartphone business outside of China, Huawei is trying to develop its own ecosystem but without any users, this is a forlorn hope. Android devices that ship outside of China are almost entirely Google Ecosystem devices carrying services that billions of users like and rely which are front and...