Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1352
Big anchors come together, Taobao Live’s counterattack
Another year of “Double Eleven”, Ali, who is playing at home, is more active than the “big promotion” in the middle of the year: Luo Yonghao and Yu Minhong have already opened accounts after signing a contract to make friends and New Oriental’s entry into the Taobao live broadcast room. Last year, Yaowang Network, which sold twice as much as Douyin, is expected to announce its launch on Taobao in the near future.
Make a friend The official announcement on October 20th has already started and accumulated users. Some users saw the “Luo Yonghao” live broadcast room being pushed to the first screen of the Taobao app homepage in the afternoon. A person close to making a friend told Late Finance that the purpose of entering Taobao is to expand traffic channels. In addition to providing traffic support, Taobao can also help make friends with brands that are difficult to reach on Douyin (such as Nike). Making a friend is also discussing the settlement with the WeChat video account and Kuaishou.
We learned that Luo Yonghao and the Make a Friend team have discussed cooperation with Taobao, Douyin and Kuaishou Live in 2020, because “Douyin has the most power” and settled in. Make a friend did not disclose the annual transaction data, but with reference to the data of Caitong Securities and Xinbangchang, the transaction volume last year was about 5 billion yuan.
New Oriental opened a “New Oriental Xuncheng Education Store” on Taobao Live. The company’s founder and chairman Yu Minhong will start the broadcast on October 31. Other goods and anchor candidates are unknown. In September, Dongfang Zhenxuan, the main body of New Oriental Douyin live broadcast, told the media that it was preparing for Taobao live broadcast.
According to the information from Jiuqian Zhongtai’s minutes, Taobao’s live broadcast sales (GMV) last year were about 750 billion yuan. Compared with Douyin and Kuaishou, Taobao temporarily prefers to support self-broadcasting by merchants rather than live broadcasts by KOLs. In the part of the traffic allocated to the live broadcast of Daren, Taobao supports from the most important to the lightest according to the order of head, waist, small and medium anchors, origin or farm product anchors.
Byte e-commerce can be traced back to the assured purchase at the end of 2016. In 2020, e-commerce will be upgraded to a first-level business unit. Last year, the sales of Douyin live broadcast products exceeded 700 billion yuan. On this basis, it is almost a foregone conclusion to achieve high double-digit growth this year.
For example, Tmall merchants are 100% live broadcast, and there are also a large number of Douyin e-commerce brand merchants. Compared with white-label merchants, brands care not only about sales, but also about product promotion. Therefore, when advertising, they look at both conversions and the traffic of the platform itself. Taobao, Tmall and Douyin are naturally their most important opponents. In September, Tmall’s long-term “exclusive” Uniqlo launched on Douyin.
On the eve of last year’s “Double Eleven”, Yang Guang, then vice president of Ali and vice president of Tmall business group, was asked what he thought of the phenomenon of super anchors, saying that this is “a hard-working and fully marketable behavior”, and the platform is very difficult. to intervene. With the year-on-year decline in Taobao and Tmall’s revenue in the second quarter of this year, and it was only a matter of time before some competitors were overtaken, Ali began to fight back. (Gong Fangyi and Chen Jing)
Let go of repurchases, Tesla is getting old
In 2015, Tesla had a revenue of $4 billion, a net loss of $889 million, and a market value of “merely” $30 billion. Analysts asked Musk how high is the company’s market value in 2025?
“About $700 billion.”
In 2020, Musk fulfilled his expectations five years ahead of schedule.
This Thursday (October 20), Musk raised his 2025 market value target on the company’s third-quarter earnings conference call. This time around $4 trillion.
A few years ago, I said on an earnings call that Tesla has the potential to be worth more than Apple. At the time, Apple was the world’s most valuable company, at about $700 billion. I say surpassing Apple requires incredible execution and some luck. We did, and Tesla is over $700 billion. Now, I think we can surpass Apple’s current market cap ($2.3 trillion). I see the potential for Tesla to be worth more than Apple and Aramco combined…the first time I see that potential.
In the past three quarters, Tesla’s revenue was about 21.454 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 56%, which was lower than market expectations. Musk blamed the transportation link and reduced regional demand, and assured analysts that the company had strong demand in the fourth quarter. , the annual delivery volume will also set another record.
Musk, who called Wall Street analysts “idiots” a few years ago, has softened his attitude towards the capital market in recent years, and this time he even let go of buybacks.
We have a broad debate on buybacks at the board level. The board generally agreed that buybacks made sense, but wanted to move forward with the right process. Even with a downturn next year, we could (and have the ability) to buy back $5 billion to $10 billion. Of course, this is all subject to board review and approval. All in all, we’re likely to do some meaningful repo.
The tech industry is highly competitive and cyclical, and most of the time companies need to invest heavily to stay ahead. Therefore, no repurchase, no dividends or even stock splits, continuous additional capital expenditures, and expansion of competitive advantages are the way for Silicon Valley and more “prime” technology companies to return to shareholders.
Amazon uses the money earned from retail to invest in warehousing and logistics, cloud computing, online video, robots or fresh food, each investing at least 10 billion US dollars; Google’s advertising revenue is used to support artificial intelligence, life science, autonomous driving… Hundreds of billions of dollars in capital spending each year, leaving nothing for Wall Street dividend enthusiasts, but bringing the market an average annual double-digit share price growth. This month, TSMC firmly said no when asked if it was considering a buyback:
Cash on hand will be better spent on capital expenditures, resulting in better returns for shareholders.
But when future economic growth no longer requires such massive investments, companies use their profits to please Wall Street. Last year, Meta announced a $50 billion repurchase plan. This year, Amazon announced a stock split and buyback, and Google announced a stock split. Domestic Alibaba is also expanding the scale of repurchase, and JD.com is issuing special dividends…
Now Tesla is also relenting on buybacks, at the 19th anniversary of the company’s founding. (Gong Fangyi)
US semiconductor manufacturers bearish expectations
The world’s second and fourth largest semiconductor equipment companies – ASML (ASML) and Lam Research (Lam Research) announced record financial results on the same day, the former achieved revenue of 5.778 billion euros in the third quarter, while the latter collected 5.1 billion euros The US dollar both exceeded market expectations.
As the world’s leading lithography machine, ASML said its order backlog has exceeded 38 billion US dollars and remains optimistic about completing the 2023 delivery target. But CEO Peter Wen admitted that he expects 5% of undelivered orders to be affected by US export controls. “If you can’t buy other chip manufacturing equipment, why buy a lithography machine?”
Some American equipment manufacturers may be more affected. The new export controls will reduce the company’s revenue by $2 billion to $2.5 billion next year, executives at Fanlin, whose 30 percent of revenue comes from China, said on the conference call. Goldman Sachs estimates that Applied Materials (AMAT), Lam and Kelei (KLA) could lose a combined $6 billion this year, or nearly 10% of its projected sales. (Qiu Hao)
Meta AI voice translation enables Hokkien and English conversations
On October 19th, Zuckerberg posted a video of an AI translation conversation between English and Hokkien on Facebook, showing Meta’s open-sourced first AI voice translation system, which can realize Hokkien and English voice translation.
The mainstream speech translation systems now rely on speech or text transcription, and translate through cross-reference or deep learning. Hokkien has no standard script and cannot be transcribed. Moreover, there are few translators who master English and Hokkien at the same time, and it is relatively difficult to collect models and label training data.
To develop this speech-only translation system, Meta’s AI research team used Mandarin as an intermediate language. English (or Hokkien) speech is first translated into Mandarin text, then translated into Hokkien (or English) and added to the training data. At the same time, a pre-trained speech encoder is used to replace the Hokkien text by encoding, and then the encoded text is paired with English speech and text with similar semantics, and then the English speech is synthesized from the text.
Currently this translation system is still in progress and can only translate one complete sentence at a time. Based on the Hokkien corpus Taiwanese Across Taiwan, the researchers created an open-source translation benchmark dataset of Hokkien-English bidirectional speech-to-speech. (Intern Zeng Xing)
OTHER NEWS
A total of 250 confirmed cases have been reported in Hohhot.
- On October 19, there were 164 new local confirmed cases and 643 asymptomatic infections.
- Beijing added 14 local confirmed cases and 4 asymptomatic infections.
- From 0:00 to 15:00 on the 20th, 9 new cases of local positive infection were added, of which 1 case was added from the social side.
- Beijing requires schools and other densely populated places to establish personnel ledgers and implement dynamic management.
- Shaanxi added 25 local confirmed cases and 50 asymptomatic infections.
- Yunnan added 2 local confirmed cases and 44 asymptomatic infections, mainly in Ruili.
- Guangdong added 26 new local confirmed cases and 58 asymptomatic infections.
- Inner Mongolia newly added local cases “29+53”, of which Hohhot added “9+34”.
- As of 24:00 on October 19, Hohhot had 250 confirmed cases and 1,895 asymptomatic infections.
- Xinjiang reported 6 new local confirmed cases and 121 asymptomatic infections.
Taobao “Double Eleven” can add up to 20 addresses to combine orders.
Recently, Taobao and Tmall have launched the multi-address combined order function. Users can directly add different addresses to different products, and then combine orders to make up for full discounts and large-value coupon discounts, up to 20 addresses can be added. In addition, Tmall has extended the maximum price guarantee period from 15 days to 21 days, and increased the maximum capacity of the shopping cart from 120 to 300.
In the third quarter, the global mobile phone market share continued to decline, and Apple bucked the trend and grew.
According to the Canalys report, the global smartphone market shipments fell for the third consecutive quarter, down 9% year-on-year. The top five manufacturers in terms of shipments in this quarter are the same as in the second quarter. Apple is the only one that has achieved growth, and its market share has risen from 15% to 18%, continuing to rank second in the world.
Uber forms an advertising business to expand its revenue stream.
According to media reports, Uber has formed a global advertising business unit, led by former Amazon advertising chief Mark Grether, which includes displaying promotions on its app, on the top of cars and on the backs of seats. Uber hopes to gain more users to expand its revenue stream, and plans to achieve $1 billion in annual advertising revenue by 2024. In the second quarter of this year, Uber’s advertising revenue was $350 million.
Price hikes are useless, and P&G expects revenue to turn downward in fiscal 2023.
From July to September this year, Procter & Gamble achieved revenue of US$20.612 billion and net profit of US$3.939 billion, a year-on-year increase of 1.35% and a decline of 4.21% respectively. The 9% increase in the average price of products in the quarter failed to offset the impact of the decline in sales. Procter & Gamble executives lowered their revenue growth forecast for the fiscal year ending June 2023 from 0% to 2% to -1% to -3% in the earnings call.
Nestle has increased prices by an average of 7.5% this year, and will continue to increase prices in the future.
Nestlé’s third-quarter revenue increased by 9.8% year-on-year to 23.5 billion Swiss francs (about 169 billion yuan), the same as the second quarter. Greater China revenue was 1.143 billion Swiss francs (about 8.2 billion yuan), down 14.6% month-on-month. The rise in revenue was helped by higher product prices, which have risen by an average of 7.5% this year. CEO Mark Schneider said further price hikes will be made in the future in response to continued increases in energy and labor costs.
“Avatar 2” will be released in North America on December 16.
According to media reports, “Avatar 2: The Way of Water” will premiere in North America on December 16, 2022. “Avatar 2” is 190 minutes long, still directed by James Cameron, and the story takes place five years after the previous storyline. The production cost of the sequel has increased to about $310 million, compared to the $237 million production cost of Avatar 1.
Truss becomes Britain’s most “interim” prime minister.
On October 20, British Prime Minister Truss announced his resignation, becoming the shortest-term British Prime Minister (45 days). Truss has launched a radical tax cut plan, which has caused turbulence in the financial market. The market was once worried that the British pension holding related financial products would go bankrupt. Britain will hold elections for a new prime minister next week, expected to be done in a week’s time. Polls show former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the most vocal.
Strong growth in core businesses such as software, IBM raises full-year guidance
In the third quarter, IBM’s revenue was $14.11 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.5%. The three core businesses of software, consulting and infrastructure all outperformed expectations; operating losses were US$3.21 billion, mainly due to the payment of a one-time pension settlement fee. Company CEO Arvind Krishna said revenue growth is expected to be in the high single digits for the full year.
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