Weekly Market Links - 16-22 Aug 2021
Amazon overtakes Walmart, the Metaverse of workplaces begins, Apple and Google scale down healthcare products.
Apple
Apple Podcasts seem to be buggy. Podcasters have complained of syncing issues, and additional manual work assumed to be taken care of in other podcasting platforms.
For each service a podcaster uses, they may need to upload once for each time, preventing lean operations.
Analytics, a bread-and-butter of marketing, was not readily available through Apple Podcasts.
Apple needs to step up its podcasting platform user experience, or lose traction quickly to other players such as Spotify.
HealthHabit, an app Apple employees use to track fitness goals and talk to clinicians, is slated to be shut down. It seems to be facing challenges in monetization, even if healthcare is a $3.8T industry.
Alphabet / Google
Google’s search will start incorporating a new AI model for virtual research assistant use cases.
Instead of searching for important information manually and asking questions all over the place, imagine this new AI can help you find what you’re looking for on the first try.
With more people using such an advanced search, opportunities for raising prices for hyper contextualized search for consumer or enterprise may become a thing.
Google’s Pixel will not come with a charger. Well, that’s another reason to spend - more margin expansion is expected from Google’s hardware segment.
Similar to Apple’s healthcare plans, it seems Google is also winding down their healthcare, whereby staff will be allocated to different parts of the company.
Amazon
Amazon has overtaken Walmart in sales, totalling $610B from June 2020 to 2021. At Walmart, it was $566B.
It is yet to be seen whether Walmart can reach a critical point of e-commerce efficiency to the level of Amazon’s.
Until then, Amazon has a winning strategy and will continue to increase their market share online.
Recently winning the JEDI contract from Microsoft, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins aims to wrest a NASA contract away from SpaceX.
This ordered NASA to halt work on the lunar lander contract awarded to SpaceX until a resolution is reached.
Alibaba / Ant
All cylinders are still firing in the Chinese Giant. Alibaba opens an NFT auction platform, selling digital assets such as a Star Wars illustration. Will this gain traction in China and overseas?
Microsoft
Get ready for Microsoft products prices to be raised by 20%.
Affected products include Microsoft 365 software such as Teams and Outlook. Consumer and education versions stay the same - it is the business plans which will get involved.
The price hike will be effected within six months. We’ll likely see boosted revenues for Microsoft next year and possibly some disgruntled companies (who continue to subscribe).
Oculus Quest has released a beta version of VR meeting rooms. Called Horizon Workrooms, you can see your colleague’s in-game avatars and work in the same virtual “room”.
You can even write notes, share links, chat, with syncing to Outlook and Google Calendar!
Facebook’s foray into providing a hardware platform provides compelling use cases and revenue opportunities in the long term, and an ecosystem for content, or content within content (think in-game items).
That's not all! Facebook is preparing to launch their digital wallet. Called Novi, it has secured licences or regulatory approvals in “nearly every” US state.
Novi will have a P2P transfers service that works domestically and internationally.
Despite the super-competitive landscape, Facebook’s user base (~3.5B users worldwide) can offer a substantial entry into payments.
Novi can piggyback the WhatsApp and Messenger ecosystem to conduct payments, just like WhatsApp Pay in India.
A previous project called Diem was slated to use the digital wallet Novi, but had concerns from regulators on monetary stability and laundering. Diem was scaled down to focus on a single stablecoin backed by the US dollar.
It was again blocked due to a high probability that stablecoins are not backed by what they say they are.
Coinbase has already revealed this, and another case by the SEC is pending for Tether.
NVDA
The ARM acquisition is likely to take more than 18 months due to regulatory roadblocks across the world.
Semicon opposition (ahem, Qualcomm) have also voiced their disapproval of the deal.
The NVDA-ARM offer consists of cash and stock. It has risen 41% to be valued at 54.3B, with a portion of payments tied to the performance of ARM’s business after completion.
Softbank, the owner of ARM, may opt for a stock market listing if the deal takes too long. If this happens, the deal value may increase again, and we’ll have to see if NVDA will match the new price.
Industries
Metaverse
SK Telecom will launch its virtual meeting platform in 80 markets by the end of this year. This is in their bid to boost the adoption of its 5G network service, which will become a very competitive landscape for most telcos.
Facebook has also beta-launched their VR workplace via the Oculus Quest 2 hardware.