Bike sharing has descended into a game of chicken. Hellobike is raising $500m into a suicidally difficult market where its main competitors are either flirting with bankruptcy or have been completely swallowed by much larger ecosystems (Mobike). Hellobike is one of the smaller bike-sharing players in the Chinese market but obviously, it thinks that it has a shot at taking...
Pony.ai & Baidu can do what Waymo apparently cannot. While Beijing is keeping the important autonomous driving data close to its chest, what is available suggests that Pony.ai is the company that is best placed globally to offer a solution in more than one country. Baidu is a close second. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economics and Information Technology has...
Whack-a-mole is not good enough. A Chinese demonstration of the inadequacies of Tesla’s autopilot also clearly shows that the current methodology of rushing out software patches after the event is simply not good enough for autonomous vehicles. One only has to look to Boeing and the severity of the issues it is suffering as a result of alleged bugs in...
Samsung margins unlikely to recover from Huawei’s predations. Samsung’s handset margins are unlikely to recover anytime soon thanks to a resurgent Huawei, but as ever in Android, it is Google that will reap the real benefit. I have written a long series (see here) concerning the competitive dynamics between Samsung and Huawei where my opinion has long been that Samsung’s...
Google goes bananas. Google has pioneered a new field of computer science and intelligence research resulting in new systems that can take over when the traditional AI fails. A sudden hike in the price of bananas in the immediate vicinity of Pryor Creek, Oklahoma prompted Radio Free Mobile and NGCodec to send their undercover investigator into Google’s biggest data centre...
A clear warning sign for Lyft & Uber IPOs. When I backed Meituan at its IPO as one of the more sensible listings (see here), I underestimated the lengths to which it is being forced to go to by Alibaba just to stay relevant. There is a clear read-across for investors in US ride-hailing, who I think will be better...
Lyft is giving away an edge by going public. I continue to think that Lyft is shooting itself in the foot by going public, as I continue to think that the company is not ready for the harsh glare of the public market and it is giving away a big edge that it could have had over Uber. Lyft is...
Samsung is looking better than Apple. Samsung has warned that its Q1 2019 performance will miss expectations which is most likely a sign of further weakness to come at one of its biggest customers, Apple. As is usual with Samsung, this was already fairly widely known as the share price has barely moved following the announcement, but the big question...
New services a drop in a big blue ocean of hardware. In the face of stagnating hardware revenues, Apple has brushed up its services portfolio that have almost zero chance of taking up the mantle of growth from the hardware business. The new and updated services include: First, Apple TV and TV+: The new TV app is essentially a further...
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.
Snap Inc. – Facebook dependent.
Snap needs Facebook to slip to mount a comeback. Snap’s 1st developer conference revealed a move into gaming as well as a strategy to prevent the rampant copying of its innovations that have caused it so much trouble. I don’t think that this is going to trigger user numbers to start really growing again but it may enable Snap to...