Records and insolent? The power and earnings of tech giants.
3-in-1: 3 digital news in 1 minute. On Monday. Episode 239
Discover 3 original digital news, invest one minute and be a better professional!
News 1: Apple cracks 110 billions revenues in a quarter.
Apple with record economics. iPhone sales jumped to $65bn, proves a successful iPhone 12 launch in parallel to the Asian 5G growth. China sales nearly as big as in Europe, another sign of a new 5G world. Services with $3bn more — strategic orientation towards services confirmed. Opinion for B2B: Well, the best, richest company in the world is the best and the richest. This is bound to go on with the growth of 5G accompanying the iPhone12. Just the Mac is so la la adding rumours to a more pragmatic new Mac Pro — no Touch Bar, magnetic plug and even SD cards!
What? No touch bar on my Mac, a pity! What do you think?
News 2: Microsoft softly on a 17% increase
Softly, Microsoft grows by around 15% by quarters. The latest quarter (FY21 Q3) shows +17%. Teams (and Office) draws the growth in enterprises in pandemics time. Good news on the gaming part with very good numbers for the new Xbox and the linked games. Until now Azure cloud was drawing the company, still grows by 22% (but far from the +75% we remember in 2019 and 2020). Opinion for B2B: Microsoft Teams can be named “Brand of 2020” and everyone in larger companies has enjoyed this newcomer. Asking our clients about a positive digital experience in the last 12 months, Teams comes 1st, by far. Even new PC will get a direct key to Teams, like Netflix on some TV remote control.
Teams and Xbox the winning duo (instead of Office and Azure).
News 3: Facebook does very well, thanks.
Facebook also out with Q4, record figures as well. Very simple for analysts: every single metric of Facebook results is a record. October-December has always been good for Facebook. In 2020, records in profit ($11bn for one quarter), in users, in ARPU (average revenue per user), all geographies. US elections helped, yes. But Facebook earns now strategic decisions of 2018, 2019. Opinion for B2B: Remember the Cambridge Analytics scandal and the consequent announcement of a “privacy first” attitude? It has been implemented on Facebook Groups above all, a big winner in 2020. Closed interest groups. Instagram less open and with more DMs (Direct Messages). We can add the relentless investment in excellent teams in AR (Spark) and AI (FAIR). AI that makes the advertising platform the best in the world, loved by online marketers. And advertising spent on Facebook platforms in record.
We’ll see if the clumsy announcement and postponement of data merge Facebook/WhatsApp has an influence on the Jan-March results. Any view?
Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting in main tech geographies, in AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with a professional opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch. Research time: January 2021.
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