Elon Musk buys and ruins Twitter

[grunge]

Intel - revenue dropped 30% last year :-0

No surprise here, Apple moved there Mac's away from Intel to there own chips. thats gonna be a lot of processors....

 

[Gareth Barry Conlon]

In a year where supply chain issues have been prevalent, it's not a bad result in the end.

Tesla will continue to grow whether some in here like it or not.

The problem with tesla is the company is valued like a tech. But it makes money like an old school manufacturing business. Tech firms get high values as if they get big there is no limit on growth. A car maker can only ever grow so fast as factories take time to build.

Tesla is overvalued as it won't grow quick enough. There is no way it can keep on growing at current rates.

Add to that the fact that Musk is a massive dick and other brands are now just as good if not better and it has a very questionable future.

 

[SSL2]

The problem with tesla is the company is valued like a tech. But it makes money like an old school manufacturing business. Tech firms get high values as if they get big there is no limit on growth. A car maker can only ever grow so fast as factories take time to build.

Tesla is overvalued as it won't grow quick enough. There is no way it can keep on growing at current rates.

Add to that the fact that Musk is a massive dick and other brands are now just as good if not better and it has a very questionable future.

I think their future outlook could be considered a tech company though when you take into account some of the plans Musk has recently talked about. Whether they all happen is another story completely.

 

[JASR]

No surprise here, Apple moved there Mac's away from Intel to there own chips. thats gonna be a lot of processors....

But the M processors started being sold in late 2020, so initial impact on inventory/sales would have been noticed in the 2021 figures?
The change in 2021 to 2022 of Apple Mac's PC market share was from about 8% -> 13%.
So it's a 'hit' on their figures, but no way 30%.

I think the success of AMD has had more of an impact. And IIRC there had been fab issues with the latest family of processors from Intel, and issues with the next step in the continuing reduction of the chip nanometer scale, compared with other chipmakers.

 

[Summerbuzz]

But the M processors started being sold in late 2020, so initial impact on inventory/sales would have been noticed in the 2021 figures?
The change in 2021 to 2022 of Apple Mac's PC market share was from about 8% -> 13%.
So it's a 'hit' on their figures, but no way 30%.

I think the success of AMD has had more of an impact. And IIRC there had been fab issues with the latest family of processors from Intel, and issues with the next step in the continuing reduction of the chip nanometer scale, compared with other chipmakers.

Lot of reasons for Intel's woes.

The desktop CPU market is harsh right now. It boomed during the Ryzen years. But it's hard to argue the people who bought 9 series Intel or 5xxx Ryzens (or later) need a new CPU for gaming. Another slight problem is that DDR5 - which would be essential for most people to consider upgrading adds considerably to the cost of manufacturing the motherboard. I paid £60 for 16GB DDR3 and £45 for an ex-demo B85 when I got my 4790k, £260. The DDR 4 equivalent B660 £100+ - but it's useless because it can't deliver enough power to Raptor Lake. The DDR4 board I'd need is £150. The DDR5 equivalent is £200. Add in 32GB, and even a basic Board/RAM combo, is now as much as the CPU I'd want. £550 total purchase price now vs £350 then. And that's not the end of it for Intel - those I7s sell at half the margin they did five, six years ago.

Also got to note how the ARC GPU range flopped - that cost a lot of money - it's still an important strategy for Intel to have big GPUs available.

There's a lot more to Intel's woes than Desktop, but it is a market where all the players are reporting slowdown. AMD have inventory piled up. At least one of the four big NAND chip (NVME/SSD) manufacturers is likely to run into significant problems. Nvidia's Desktop and AMD's GPU Division are all over the shop, £1000 cards, tiny margins, making it a very niche market right now.

 

[Rammy Blue]

Lot of reasons for Intel's woes.

The desktop CPU market is harsh right now. It boomed during the Ryzen years. But it's hard to argue the people who bought 9 series Intel or 5xxx Ryzens (or later) need a new CPU for gaming. Another slight problem is that DDR5 - which would be essential for most people to consider upgrading adds considerably to the cost of manufacturing the motherboard. I paid £60 for 16GB DDR3 and £45 for an ex-demo B85 when I got my 4790k, £260. The DDR 4 equivalent B660 £100+ - but it's useless because it can't deliver enough power to Raptor Lake. The DDR4 board I'd need is £150. The DDR5 equivalent is £200. Add in 32GB, and even a basic Board/RAM combo, is now as much as the CPU I'd want. £550 total purchase price now vs £350 then. And that's not the end of it for Intel - those I7s sell at half the margin they did five, six years ago.

Also got to note how the ARC GPU range flopped - that cost a lot of money - it's still an important strategy for Intel to have big GPUs available.

There's a lot more to Intel's woes than Desktop, but it is a market where all the players are reporting slowdown. AMD have inventory piled up. At least one of the four big NAND chip (NVME/SSD) manufacturers is likely to run into significant problems. Nvidia's Desktop and AMD's GPU Division are all over the shop, £1000 cards, tiny margins, making it a very niche market right now.

That‘s funny, like a foreign language!

 

[born2bblu]

It’s amazing how many people Musk has been able to con in to being zealot-fanboys willing to defend him to the last as he goes full Fascist, white supremacist, megalomaniac, man-child charlatan.

No matter how many instances of wild mismanagement, idiocy, verified/convicted fraud, malicious and immature behaviour, and gross misconduct across his career and various business ventures, the cult he has groomed ignores it all, largely I think because they desperately want to be him one day and so need to protect his ability to do whatever he wants with little consequence so they can do the same (even though 99% of them will never be wealthy or powerful and Musk sees them all as pawns for his games). He has used them for his own gain and they come back over and over again to ask to be used more.

Thank you for the insight. But I am bit confused, which one are you talking about? ;)

 

[Irwell]

The problem with tesla is the company is valued like a tech. But it makes money like an old school manufacturing business. Tech firms get high values as if they get big there is no limit on growth. A car maker can only ever grow so fast as factories take time to build.

Tesla is overvalued as it won't grow quick enough. There is no way it can keep on growing at current rates.

Add to that the fact that Musk is a massive dick and other brands are now just as good if not better and it has a very questionable future.

You can't really group 'tech' stocks like that to be honest, or at least not when you reach the scale of the companies listed in that post. You might not be doing so, so apologies if not, but many lazily group all the 'tech' companies into one big pot.

There is so much variety in these companies, with completely different business models and product categories, so much so that some like Apple are closer to companies like Tesla than they are to other 'tech' companies. In terms of the companies where there is 'no limit on growth' I guess you mean those that are almost entirely based on their servers? If so then I'm still not sure that it quite scales like you describe.

Look at the investment in a single data centre, which are some of the most heavily secured facilities in the world with many thousands of kilometres of highly optimised cabling between some of the most advanced specialist hardware in the world, plus power and cooling requirements that put small cities in the shade. A decent data centre environment moves into many hundreds of millions to construct and takes many years to design and implement. Less than a high end automotive plant, admittedly, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine trying to layer on top of that all the inter-connectivity required to make multiple of those into high-availability clusters and you end up with a cluster than costs more than even the most expensive automotive plants. Then think of the technology required to create reliable and redundant connections between those clusters across countries and continents to make a truly geo-redundant environment.

Add on top of that the peering negotiations needed with all manner of companies in varying shades of synergy and competition to make your products available to end users. Imagine for example the contract between say Amazon making peering agreements for Amazon Prime Video, trying to peer with BT to allow their customers high reliability access whilst dealing with the conflict of interest around BT being a competitor for Premier League rights. Add third party exchanges and their peering agreements that might conflict with your commercial rights. The whole thing is a huge minefield.

Now add on the fact that these facilities have to perform hardware refreshes on a frequent basis to stay on top of tech trends. Computer technology moves along a lot faster than automotive technology and generally requires complete replacement of the actual hardware installed rather than just upgrading the components you are putting together.

I know there aren't really any of them in that stock list but if you stray away from the ones in the list a little and get into the high tech manufacturing area, and I'm talking about your Samsungs and Foxconns rather than hardware resellers like Apple, then you get equally amazing levels of investment required. They have less of the inter-connectivity concerns, but the cost of building something like a semiconductor fabrication facility is into the tens of billions. Again, it also requires constant hardware refreshes and in this case it usually involves building entirely new fabrication facilities alongside the existing ones every few years.

Throwing up a new car factory is child's play in comparison to the high end of the tech industry once you have a blueprint for your first one.

Scaling from small to medium is pretty easy for a data-oriented tech firm, excluding those that really are resellers of premium consumer products like Apple, I'd absolutely agree that a data-oriented tech startup is easier to grow than most other industries. The reason for this is that the small to medium players piggyback on what the big boys have done now they have turned their expertise into a commodity to help pay for their immense infrastructural and talent costs. The scaling from medium to truly global, though, is an absolutely huge undertaking. Semiconductor fabrication goes a level above this even and is an industry it's almost impossible to get into now.

The fact that a company exists with the knowledge in place to make things happen that very few can actually achieve is what creates the value in the true tech stocks, if it was easy to do then everyone would do it. It's them having proven their capability to scale sufficiently that people trust they can scale further rather than some unwritten rule that once you hit a certain point you can scale indefinitely. There's a reason there are a small handful of these truly global tech firms whereas many countries have truly global car brands.

All that is without taking into account the sheer product diversity in a company like Microsoft compared to the offering from the majority of automotive companies.

That's my rant over, but my take on the dot com bubble back in the day was that it was caused by an over-generalisation of 'tech' stocks and a belief in their ability to just keep growing. You need to understand the specifics of the company you are investing in and many of these tech companies have more significant entries on their balance sheets than automotive ones. The idea that a small 'tech' company needing little infrastructural investment is something that applies at scale is unfair on the people who have made some of these amazing things happen.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

But the M processors started being sold in late 2020, so initial impact on inventory/sales would have been noticed in the 2021 figures?
The change in 2021 to 2022 of Apple Mac's PC market share was from about 8% -> 13%.
So it's a 'hit' on their figures, but no way 30%.

I think the success of AMD has had more of an impact. And IIRC there had been fab issues with the latest family of processors from Intel, and issues with the next step in the continuing reduction of the chip nanometer scale, compared with other chipmakers.

A lot of people bought new computers in the pandemic. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was then a huge drop off in the year after.

 

[FogBlueInSanFran]

It’s working like a charm.