Business, Financial & Legal - Page 67

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is rumored to boost its capital expenditure as we head into 2021, with $22 billion ready to go for the year.

This means TSMC will have a 30% growth over 2020 for 2021, which will most likely see the Taiwanese semiconductor leader to stand out from the pack against the likes of Samsung, and others in the fab business. But when it comes to revenue in December 2020, investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates TSMC will make around $4.6 billion (NT$130.5 billion) a new all-time high for the company.

Morgan Stanley notes that this would be the first time that TSMC has breached NT$130 billion for the first time ever, but in the first 11 months of 2020 (January-November) the company breached NT$1.2 trillion ($42 billion or so) which is a hefty 26.4% year-over-year increase. TSMC is expecting even bigger numbers -- NT$1.5 trillion -- in 2021.

Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma hasn't been seen in public in over two months, and he didn't even appear in the final episode of his own talent shot -- Africa's Business Heroes.

Africa's Business Heroes is a talent show that sees entrepreneurs in Africa competing for a chunk of $1.5 million, with Ma part of the judging panel. In the end, the November 2020 episode of Africa's Business Heroes was shot without Ma in presence -- in his place was another Alibaba executive.

The quick takeaway:

CES 2021 is right around the corner, beginning on January 11, 2021 and running for four days through to January 15, 2021.

The new CES 2021 is an all-digital event with organizers Consumer Technology Association (CTA) expecting CES 2022 to be a physical event as they're hoping COVID-19 vaccines will be rolling out and people are vaccinated by then.

There will be 1000 exhibitors at CES 2021 virtually with AMD, LG, NVIDIA, Samsung, and many other still hosting online events. CES 2021 being all-virtual means boat loads of bandwidth will be required, with VentureBeat interviewing CTA CEO Gary Shapiro recently where he said they have "serious bandwidth" available, and will have a media day with 100 hours of programming ready.

Aaaaand Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (HSMC) is done -- they've folded under strain, with the company now insolvent.

Ex-CEO and head of R&D of HSMC, Chiang Shang-yi, told EE Times over a LinkedIn message: "Investors ran short of cash. I got caught by surprise. It's over now, and I'm back home in California". Back in August 2020 you could see the wheels buckling under considerable pressure, where I explained that HSMC was a mess.

But the $20 billion plant just couldn't muster the ability to fire up and begin to take a whimper of a swing at TSMC, with HSMC now under the control of the state assets supervision and administration commission for the Dongxihu district government in Wuhan.

Update: It appears that the emergency response by authorities was a "hoax", with police sources talking to local media confirming it was a hoax.

Ubisoft Montreal is involved in a hostage situation right now, starting at around 1:30 EST -- forcing staffers to flee to the roof for over two hours.

A group of suspects held a large group of Ubisoft Montreal staffers hostage, with Montreal police reporting that there was an "ongoing police situation" and they ask people to "avoid the area". The Montreal Police Department tweeted: "The SPVM is currently validating information and more details will follow".

Disney+ is swinging with the big punches in 2020 which I'm sure is very thankful to the COVID-19 lockdowns worldwide, with a new subscriber milestone reached: 73 million.

The new streaming giant is behind Netflix which, as of April 2020, had 183 million subscribers. Disney CEO Bob Chapek said during the Q4 2020 earnings call: "I'm pleased to report that as of the end of the fourth quarter Disney plus had more than 73 million paid subscribers, far surpassing our expectations in just its first year".

"We're continuing to see positive trends. The growth of Disney plus speaks volumes about the strength of our IP, our unparalleled franchises and amazing content creators, all part of the Disney difference that sets us apart from everyone else. When you look across our full suite of streaming service, we have exceeded 120 million paid subscriptions worldwide".

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd (TSMC) has announced that its board has approved a large investment to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary in Arizona with $3.5 billion in capital.

The new plant will be co-financed between TSMC, the state of Arizona, and the US federal government. TSMC explained in a statement: "Approved an investment to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary in Arizona, United States of America, with a paid-in capital of US$3.5 billion (approximately NT$99.75 billion)".

TSMC announced plans in May 2020 of building a $12 billion new factory in Arizona, which was a positive sign for the USA thanks to President Trump. The Trump administration is trying to get global tech supply chains out of the grips of China, and onto US soil. This is a solid move for TSMC and the United States going forward, as well as the state of Arizona.

Fresh off the closure of its Hanford, California warehouse, Fry's Electronics announced this week the immediate closure of its Campbell, California store. Campbell is located in Santa Clara County, California, and part of Silicon Valley. We first covered the issues Fry's Electronics was having last year.

Over the last three years, we have observed significant gaps in its product stock, and over the two years, entire product lines have been missing for extended periods. Most of the chain's departments have had empty shelves and a lack of consistent stock for products that are carried. One thing we are continuing to hear from employees is that sales, as well as store traffic, have been struggling. Our ongoing visits to the stores in the western region have shown entire isles which used to be well-stocked, completely devoid of any products.

The Campbell store, when open, maintained an Egyptian theme. Like many of Fry's Electronics locations, many of the store's features inside and out were in disrepair over the last six months. It was only earlier this year that Fry's Electronics closed their Palo Alto and Anaheim locations.

Update: MSI has released an official statement, which explains: "A fire accident occurred in MSI Baoan factory in Shenzhen on November 5th afternoon. MSI activated its emergency measures and notified the fire department to deal with it immediately. No injuries were caused and the production line was not damaged. In the future, MSI will continue to strengthen the education and training of personnel. At present, all units are operating normally. Thank you for your concern".

A massive fire has broken out at one of MSI's gigantic plants in Kunshan, China -- with people posting the news to Reddit and Twitter. Check it out:

You can watch a video of the MSI factory fire in China on Reddit here, but it looks pretty serious. This news is just months after MSI CEO Charles Chiang died after falling from a building back in July 2020, and right in the middle of what is most likely MSI's busiest time ever.

AMD has announced it will be acquiring Xilinx in a gigantic deal worth $35 billion, literally on the eve before its huge RDNA 2 reveal event for the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.

The deal sees AMD acquiring Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion, which gives AMD a serious edge against all of its competitors. AMD now has kick ass CPU, GPU, SoCs, and more -- but the acquisition of Xilinx allows the company to expand its claws deeper into its competitors' markets.

Xilinx on the other hand takes its focus and laser beams it into high-performance FPGAs, SoCs for datacenter, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace, and defense markets. You can see from these markets alone why AMD wants to acquire Xilinx -- a very big move going forward.

Netflix's recent Q3'2020 earnings show strong increases in revenues, net income, operating income, and subscriber growth. The company expects this trend to continue and push total subscribers to 200 million.

Netflix just reported its Q3 performance and the results are stellar insofar as earnings. The company raked in $790 million in net income (+18%) on $6.436 billion in net revenues (+20%) in the three-month period ended September 30. Subscriber growth hit 2.2 million paid sign-ons, missing internal projections by 300,000 users. Netflix spent roughly $5.1 billion on marketing, costs of goods and services, tech costs, and other expenses, leaving $1.31 billion in operating income (+34%).

As of Q3, total paid subscribers sit at 195 million. The streaming titan expects this number to jump to 200 million by the holiday season in Q4 2020. APAC was the biggest contributor to Q3 subscriber growth--APAC region sign-ups were up 66% YoY and accounted for nearly half of the total market subscriber growth.

Disney has announced a major reorganization of its media and entertainment divisions, that will have a far increased focus on making content for its streaming and broadcast services.

The company has also outlined that its media businesses, ads, distribution, and Disney+ will be centralized into a single, global Media and Entertainment Distribution organization. The newly-formed Media and Entertainment Distribution will take control of everything, with the focus tightened on streaming.

Newly-minted Disney CEO Bob Chapek explains: "Given the incredible success of Disney+ and our plans to accelerate our direct-to-consumer business, we are strategically positioning our Company to more effectively support our growth strategy and increase shareholder value".

AMD just launched its Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and teased its next-gen RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards -- and now, rumor has it AMD is about to acquire Xilinx.

The news is coming from The Wall Street Journal, which says that its sources saying that AMD is in "advanced talks" to acquire Xilinx. This would be a gigantic deal, and the WSJ says that the deal could be closed as soon as next week. The news comes weeks after GPU competitor to AMD, NVIDIA, acquired ARM for $40 billion.

Cybersecurity magnate and drama magnet John McAfee has been arrested and faces multiple charges of tax evasion from 2014 to 2018.

According to unsealed indictment documents filed in June, McAfee has avoided income tax for at least four years. From 2014 to 2018, McAfee was paid millions for various high-profile endeavors including consulting, on-stage events, promotion of cryptocurrency, and even selling his story for a biopic documentary. McAfee faces 10 total counts: 5 for tax evasion and 5 for failing to file income tax. If convicted, McAfee could face maximum charges of up to five years imprisonment for each count of tax evasion (25 years) and 1 year for each count of knowingly failing to file a tax return (5 years), equaling up to 30 years in prison.

The indictment alleges McAfee avoided taxes by channeling these funds to accounts in other people's names, including both cryptocurrency wallets and bank accounts. McAfee also allegedly hid major million-dollar assets from the IRS including vehicles, yachts, and real estate with mock ownership in others' names.

Nuvia is currently in the process of creatring an ARM-based CPU core and server SoC, codenamed Orion and Phoenix -- and now the company has just secured more funds to make that happen.

In a new Series B funding round, Nuvia raised $240 million in the fresh funding round from Mithril Capital in partnership with Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (who are the founders of Marvell Technology Group), funds and accounted managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC., and Temasek, with additional participation from Atlantic Bridge, Redline Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital.

Back in November 2019, Nuvia held its Series A funding round where it raised $53 million. This new injection of funds will help the new company, that was founded in February 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams with the vision of creating the world's leading server processor.

Amazon has just announced it has 100,000 new positions in order to better position itself for the gigantic increase in online shopping because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new 100,000 positions will be available across the United States and Canada, throughout all of its operations, warehouses, delivery stations, and everything in between. Amazon is offering $15 per hour minimum wage with benefits, and even "up to $1000" in sign-on bonuses in specific cities.

Amazon will be hosting a virtual career day on Wednesday, where it will open up its arms to 33,000 new job openings in both corporate and technology-focused roles. The average pay for a corporate position at Amazon is $150,000 including salary, stock-based compensation and benefits.

NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp (SBG) have announced a definitive agreement where NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited for $40 billion.

The deal will see NVIDIA grow into an even bigger beast, days before the GeForce RTX 3080 launches, where the company explains on its own website that the deal will combine NVIDIA's industry-leading work in AI with Arm's huge ecosystem to create the "premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence, accelerating innovation while expanding into large, high-growth markets".

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA explained: "AI is the most powerful technology force of our time and has launched a new wave of computing. In the years ahead, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet-of-things that is thousands of times larger than today's internet-of-people. Our combination will create a company fabulously positioned for the age of AI".

With millions upon millions of people stuck at home right now, it should come as no surprise that streaming giant Netflix is expected to house over 500 million subscribers by 2030.

According to new projections from RBC analyst Mark Mahaney, who raised his price target by 15% up to $610 a share -- based on his expectations that Netflix will have a massive increase in subscribers in the next 10 years leading up to 2030.

Mahaney explained that Netflix "has achieved a level of sustainable scale, growth, and profitability that isn't currently reflected in its stock price". He added: "We also view Netflix as one of the best derivatives off the strong growth in online video viewing and in internet-connected devices".

NVIDIA acquiring networking giant Mellanox Technologies back in April 2020 for $7 billion, and now has formally renamed the company.

Mellanox Technology is now NVIDIA Networking, where if you visit Mellanox's website you will be directed to NVIDIA. The banner reads: "Mellanox Technologies is now NVIDIA Networking".

NVIDIA only continues to get bigger in the networking space, which is a very important part of the entire HPC cluster of the computing industry. NVIDIA has the dominant GPUs, a world-class networking outfit, and if it acquires ARM then NVIDIA would be collecting one of the last Infinity Stones, really.

Tesla's stock went from $2,213 a share to $457 a share after 5-for-1 stock split, and so many investors want to buy that they're crashing trading sites.

Tesla's new stock split has would-be investors extremely interested in buying the stock. They're so interested that key trading sites like Ameritrade and Robinhood are being overwhelmed. At the time of writing, Robinhood still allows trades, but is experiencing high traffic that is limiting functionality.

Tesla announced the 5-for-1 stock split earlier this month. The split awarded all existing investors a dividend of four extra stock on August 28, and the split took effect today, Monday, August 31. At the time of writing, Tesla stock sits at a stock-split adjusted value of $457 a share and has already jumped 2.86% from its initial split value.