Floor report – No smiles here. The buzz on the floor is back but the halls of power seem to be filled with doom and gloom as one presentation after another is bemoaning the difficult situation in which the industry finds itself. The Orange CEO gave a dour presentation about the state of operators in Europe while the DT CEO...
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...
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...
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 3 – Fair nightmare
Subsidising failure is a bad idea. The most recent debate doing the rounds at MWC is the idea that Big Tech should pay some of the cost of rolling out 5G as it stands to disproportionately benefit from it. I find this argument to be absurd because I have long argued that the main reason why Big Tech is so...