Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Apple’s attempts to appease privacy regulators around the globe have consistently irritated mobile app developers and mobile advertising businesses. This week seems no different, with a new statistic from marketing firm Consumer Acquisition claiming that the phasing out of Apple’s mobile identifier for advertisers (IDFA) – a previously well-established and widely used ad measurement tool – has reduced the advertising revenue of small and medium sized iOS developers by 20%. It is worth wondering whether these dwindling revenues spell out the end of mobile gaming on standalone apps. Considered in isolation, that may seem melodramatic, but when factoring in the new entrants to the market, such as Netflix, it seems near-inevitable. The IDFA essentially allows developers and marketers to identify…
IoT device makers should take more account of antennas at the design stage in order to reduce costs and ensure optimal performance as well as energy efficiency, according to IoT module maker Quectel. As the IoT scales up, the importance of efficient design will become more critical both for ensuring long lasting performance in the field and being competitive on cost as margins become amplified by volume. Quectel has issued a white paper delving deeper into antenna design with recommendations for manufacturers, inevitably with marketing and promotion in mind. The company argues that device makers are better off selecting the same vendor for RF front end, antenna, wireless module and interconnection, in order to reduce complexity. This also avoids buck…
Intel has set 2025 as its target date to catch up with Taiwan’s TSMC and Samsung as the world’s largest chip foundries, as it starts making chips for Qualcomm, with Amazon also lined up. Despite years of cut-throat competition in the mobile market, Intel and Qualcomm will now be strategically tied together as Qualcomm is unveiled as the first publicly announced customer for Intel Foundry Services (IFS), the larger firm’s $20bn bid to build a contract chip manufacturing business to rival Samsung and TSMC. In doing so, it would enhance the USA’s power in the global hi-tech ecosystem and protect US firms from disruptions caused by geopolitics and global crises. And the foundry business is looking commercially attractive. In its…
Samsung is playing the software card in its bid to capitalize on Huawei’s exclusion from many national 5G roll-outs and seize a far larger share of the infrastructure market than it gained in previous cellular generations. The company claims to have taken SDN (software-defined networking) for 5G to a new level with an end-end approach integrating the RAN fully with the backhaul and core, while offering greater levels of automation, resilience and security. It is setting up SDN as the foundation for implementing network slicing, which it regards as the biggest single benefit 5G will bring, underlying many use cases and enabling operators to compete with emerging providers in provision of flexible, differentiated services, as well as in private enterprise…
Europe’s large operators have started to share their second quarter results and the impact of Covid-19, as well as changes in asset ownership, have made them even more of a mixed bag than usual. Telecom Italia (TIM) recorded a quarterly year-on-year revenue increase for the first time since Q3 2018. Revenues were up by 1% to €3.8bn, mainly because of improved service revenues in the key markets of Italy and Brazil, which were up 1.7% to €3.5bn. Though the growth was modest, this was an example of an operator whose figures were heavily hit by Covid-19 in 2020 but has bounced back relatively quickly. Of course, it is easier to demonstrate growth from a base that was depressed by the…
Nokia is making steady, if unspectacular, quarter-by-quarter progress in its turnaround, after the serious 5G setbacks of 2019, that has led to a change of CEO and serious reworking of the business under new chief Pekka Lundmark. The improvements in financial KPIs are certainly affecting Nokia’s market valuation, which has risen by 67% since the start of this calendar year to €30bn (the share price was €5.30 on results day). But Lundmark was characteristically undemonstrative on the analyst call to discuss the Q2 figures, warning of challenges ahead. He said in his statement: “We have executed faster than planned on our strategy in the first half which provides us with a good foundation for the full year. We still however…
The past two weeks have seen the usual rush of financial results announcements from large operators and vendors. It is even harder to draw general conclusions from a quarter of results than usual, with the impact of Covid-19, geopolitics and chip shortages being added to the always unpredictable mixture of factors at the start of a major new generation of deployment, in this case 5G. A few themes can be spotted. One is that traditional network suppliers are rebounding. Both Ericsson and Nokia, despite their challenges, sent out several optimistic signals from their second quarters. Open RAN challengers may start to impact on 5G at a later date, but for now, a new wave of roll-outs primarily delivers a financial…
The Indonesian government quite openly says that it wants to make progress on its nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement, but apparently it can only see an increase from 23% reduction in emissions by 2030 to 29%, which with some potential upside which might reach as high as a 41% reduction. It’s really a case of the government setting its priorities as economic growth first, and selective forgetting about climate change. It will offer the next COP 26 meeting, this meager gruel. It says it will achieve this not by cutting back on coal plants, but by getting people in homes to burn less peat, calculating that peat home fires produce 43.59% of emissions, while the energy markets only…
The recent surge in oil prices has seen Anglo-Dutch oil major Shell post its highest profits since late 2018 for Q2 2021, prompting both a ramped-up dividend and an accelerated share buyback scheme. This era of financial fortune has not, however, translated to the promised shift towards renewable energies, with less than 15% of capital over the next five years set to be allocated to low-carbon technologies. Of Shell’s expected $115 billion spend over the next five years, only $15 billion is earmarked for low-carbon technologies, while the rest will be allocated to oil and gas Capex. Higher oil prices will mean that more value can be extracted from oil majors’ existing businesses. But their transition can only be realized…
UK Perovskite market leader Oxford PV has contacted supplier and shareholder Germany’s Meyer Burger asking to terminate their relationship Meyer Burger. We are left to assume that this is due to a fear that the German solar panel equipment maker has become directly competitive during the last year. When we spoke to a representative of Meyer Burger this week, he expressed surprise that this issue has never come up in any board meeting, as Meyer Burger has a seat on the Oxford PV board. He raised the issue that it may imply some form of change of control in Oxford PV, perhaps pressure from other prominent shareholders. This is perhaps because Meyer Burger is a very different business to the…
Five years ago this week… Verizon threw Yahoo a life jacket, buying the core assets of the firm – search, email, messenger, Flurry and Tumblr – for $4.8 billion. This highly expected acquisition was a quick follow-up to Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of AOL, with both deals giving the US telco giant some serious advertising clout. Despite being surpassed by Google in every way imaginable, at the time, Yahoo still had a billion regularly monthly users and was the fifth most visited website in the US. Unfortunately, the purchase did not cover Yahoo’s 15% stake in Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba, which made up most of the former’s $35.8 billion valuation. This all came to an end just months ago, as…
Swedish media transport vendor Net Insight was being written off several years back, which has spurred the company into reinventing itself over the past 18 months – all while maintaining its famous eye for the most bleeding edge technologies. After selling its video synchronization business Sye to AWS for $37.2 million in late 2019, Net Insight reinvested a tiny fraction of this some three months later by buying Aperi for $1.2 million, a US firm specializing in virtualized software stacks and functions, to beef up its core media transport product portfolio with a larger set of use cases. Well, it hasn’t taken long for Aperi to prove its worth to Net Insight, after picking up a deal worth $0.9 million…
The news of HBO Max’s European beachhead being delayed put a slight dampener on the premature celebrations from the WarnerMedia streaming arm – picking up 2.8 million new domestic HBO Max subscribers in Q2 2021 to total 47 million on home turf. At the close of Q1, Faultline ran the headline ‘Time to tar AT&T with the same brush as Netflix’ – but still we wince as HBO Max is given preferential treatment while Netflix is routinely crucified in the press. With AT&T projecting only between 70 million and 73 million total global subscribers by year end for HBO Max, the company is setting the bar exceptionally low at just 2.5 to 5.5 million per quarter, which on a global…
Apple’s attempts to appease privacy regulators around the globe have consistently irritated mobile app developers and mobile advertising businesses. This week seems no different, with a new stat from marketing firm Consumer Acquisition claiming that the phasing out of Apple’s mobile identifier for advertisers (IDFA) – a previously well-established and widely used ad measurement tool – has reduced the advertising revenue of small and medium sized iOS developers by 20%. It is worth wondering whether these dwindling revenues spell out the end of mobile gaming on standalone apps. Considered in isolation, that may seem melodramatic, but when factoring in the new entrants to the market – cough, Netflix, cough – it seems near-inevitable. For those wanting a quick recap, the…
After recently examining the results of the Moscow State University’s codec competition, which suggested that the MPEG and AOMedia families were being surpassed by some lesser-known codecs, we endeavored to learn more about these upstarts. This week, Faultline spoke with Vadim Asadov, CEO of SIF Codec, to understand the mechanics behind the namesake technology. But before we get our hands dirty, we should note there are currently no customers, which is worrying but not surprising. SIF Codec has partnerships with cloud gaming vendors, and Asadov thinks it has a good chance of securing licenses in that sector in 2022, if not the end of 2021. He admits that SIF Codec does not have a realistic chance of winning significant market…
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is under scrutiny, as viewing audiences across the world discover the extent to which Olympic coverage has been placed behind a pay wall. With the expected slump in viewership this has caused, the IOC may well have done long-term damage to sports participation, and brought the overall market for sports rights down a few pegs. The Olympics are a strange beast. For just a few weeks, all manner of minor sports are put in the spotlight, with consumers tuning in to a plethora of live feeds and highlights packages. The event has an afterglow too, inspiring many to take up sports, and thus helping to create the next generation of athletes that might one day…
Getting your wildly vilified technology standardized by the founding fathers of IP video is an achievement that does more than put you on the map, it writes your name in the history books forever and opens the door to potential riches, transformation, and a lasting legacy. But first must come investment, and V-Nova has secured more funding this week from Neva SGR, one of Italian banking firm Intesa Sanpaolo Group’s investment funds. However, V-Nova’s press release is horribly misleading, luring headlines the world over into a fallacy that V-Nova successfully secured €33 million ($39.2 million), when the truth is that V-Nova closed Neva SGR’s Series C funding where the venture capital firm raised the total round value of €33 million…
Despite AT&T’s best efforts, no one has wanted to take Xandr to the prom. Potential suiters have come and gone for the best part of a year, but it seems no one wants to acquire an ad tech vendor that has been perpetually caught in an identity crisis, juggling display and video advertising capabilities. Rumors this week suggest that Indian ad tech unicorn InMobi is in early stage talks to buy Xandr. The company specializes in mobile display advertising, which suggests that an acquisition might return Xandr to its roots and cast off AT&T’s huge efforts to incorporate video. Common sense would suggest that InMobi is looking to acquire the parts of the business that operate mobile and display ads.…
Ford and Argo AI steer Lyft toward self-driving taxis Ford is working with Uber competitor Lyft and Argo AI to accelerate commercialization of autonomous ride hailing in the US, aiming for first services within six months. The three claim this collaboration brings together all of the parts necessary to create a viable autonomous ride hailing service, including self-driving technology, vehicle fleet and transportation networks. The aim is to deploy Ford self-driving cars, admittedly with safety drivers for now, on the Lyft network, with first passenger rides in Miami later this year. “This collaboration marks the first time all the pieces of the autonomous vehicle puzzle have come together this way, “claimed Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Green. AT&T notches up…
There has been speculation for a couple of years that Vodafone might exit the Indian market following a string of setbacks and intensifying competition from the newest mobile player, Reliance Jio. The latest ruling by the Indian Supreme Court – which has rejected another appeal to reduce the money operators owe the government for ‘adjusted gross revenue’ (AGR) – may be the final straw. The operators have been battling the government over the retrospective fees or tax based on AGR calculations, which add up to over $18bn between the three main players plus Tata Teleservices. The burden will fall most heavily on Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel because they are longer established than Jio – Vodafone is required to pay…