Ericsson – Blowing sentiment Mobile World Congress 2023 is about to start, but Ericsson has gotten things off to a bad start with a further 8,500 layoffs indicating that life remains tough in the world of mobile infrastructure. Ericsson is cutting around 8% of its workforce and is taking aim at service delivery, supply, real estate and IT in what...
Lucid Q4 2022 – Cash conservation. Lucid has moved into cash conservation mode as it is clearly concerned about demand and cash burn but ironically, all is likely to remain well for as long as the oil price stays relatively high. Lucid managed to produce 3,493 vehicles in Q4 2022 which beat expectations but the forecast of 10,000 – 14,000...
The machines are not coming. The idea that the world might not be far from “potentially scary” AI is as absurd now as it was when it was first uttered 50 years ago and is more about the creator of the flavour of the month talking up his creation. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI made statements on Twitter...
Microsoft lobotomizes Sydney. Rather than take a risk on challenging Google in search, Microsoft has chosen to lobotomize Sydney effectively reducing it to another version of the already second-rate Bing. Officially Microsoft has placed limits on conversations with Sydney but unofficially, I suspect that a knife has been taken to the AI that will greatly limit its craziness but also...
Subscription is unlikely to do very much for anyone. In response to slower growth and Apple’s depredations upon data collection, the digital ecosystems are experimenting with subscriptions, but RFM research has long indicated that this is not a particularly viable alternative. Meta Platforms is the latest ecosystem that monetizes through advertising to try its hand at subscription with an $11.99...
Sydney behaves like a sociopath and will make a horrible business. Underneath the hype is a growing thread of incidents that point to a singular weakness in AI that no amount of money, data, compute power or humans scrambling to correct behaviour or factual errors is ever going to fix. In short, I continue to believe that deep neural networks...
Three segments. Three stories. Shopify and Cisco reported wildly differing results which combined with economic stimulus sets up 3 divergent themes for the technology sector in 2023. Shopify reported Q4 2022 results that beat expectations but then guided that revenue growth would slow more than expected in Q1 2023. Expectations were that revenues would grow by 20% YoY in Q1...
Airbnb Q4 2022 – Unrivalled. Airbnb reported results that were in line with expectations but the recovery in travel, especially in China, allowed the company to guide ahead of expectations for Q1 2023. Q4 2022 revenues / EPS were $1.9bn / $0.48 compared to forecasts of $1.9bn / $0.27. Q1 2023 revenue is expected to be $1.75bn – $1.82bn ahead...
A schizophrenic OS that no one will want to use The new Indian OS for smartphones doesn’t really know what it wants to be, but I think it will appeal to government entities and enterprises with very little interest coming from consumers who have long since sold their digital souls to Google. BharOS is a new OS based on Android...
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.
MWC 2023 Day 1 – Back in business
Floor report – China returns Mobile World Congress 2023 is finally pretty much back where we left it in 2019 and, although footfall and exhibitors are still clearly lower than before the pandemic, I think that this is more due to the state of the industry and the economy than MWC itself. The awful traffic, queues for the loos and...