Topic: Investment
Toshiba Agrees to Sell Memory Group to Bain for $18bn, with Funding from Apple (Sep 28, 2017)
This has been a long-running saga with several false starts in reporting a conclusion of the deal, but Toshiba has now finally announced an agreement on the sale of its memory business to a consortium led by Bain Capital for two trillion yen, or roughly $18 billion. Apple is among several companies providing funding for the deal, and it looks like it’ll end up paying about $1.5 billion for its stake. Ensuring that Toshiba’s memory business remained a going concern and that it secured its share of its output was paramount to Apple given the constraints and competitiveness in the global memory market, which has pushed up costs and prices over recent months while boosting Samsung’s memory business enormously. Given the frustrations Apple has experienced in having to rely on Samsung as a supplier for OLED screens in an equally constrained market, this long-term imperative will have taken on even greater significance lately. There are additional complexities in the deal because Western Digital, which owns several joint ventures with Toshiba, continues to oppose it, but it looks like it should now go ahead.
via Bloomberg
SoftBank Said to be Nearing Uber Investment Deal Blocking Kalanick Return (Sep 27, 2017)
There’s been reporting for months now about SoftBank being interested in taking a stake in Uber, both making a new investment and buying shares from existing stakeholders, but a major sticking point was said to be worries on both sides of the deal about a potential return by Travis Kalanick to a senior leadership role at the company. It appears that those worries are being resolved by a commitment on all sides to keep Kalanick out of those roles as a condition of SoftBank’s investment. Both the potential new funding and that guarantee are good news for Uber, as we’ve seen plenty of evidence recently of the ongoing fallout from Kalanick’s toxic tenure as CEO, not least Uber’s pending London ban. The funding, meanwhile, will be helpful as Uber continues to lose money, though its belt tightening should lower the need to raise many additional rounds before its IPO, especially if that happens as soon as new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi seems to think it should.
via Bloomberg
Baidu Announces v1.5 of its Autonomous Platform and $1.5bn Fund to Invest in Projects (Sep 21, 2017)
Baidu has announced version 1.5 of its Apollo autonomous driving platform with several new features and also announced a $1.5 billion (10 billion yuan) fund to invest in 100 autonomous driving “projects” over the next three years. All the detail in the press release is around the platform, the traction it’s gained, and the new features, which include obstacle perception, planning, cloud simulation, high-definition (HD) maps and
“end-to-end deep learning” capabilities. When the platform first launched, it sounded impressive on paper but in practical terms appeared to be rather piecemeal and unfinished, with many necessary components missing. The new features certainly fill some gaps but don’t supply all the missing pieces, and it’s likely that the platform still isn’t really ready for prime time deployment, especially outside of China where Baidu doesn’t have granular mapping data. The fund, meanwhile, is not detailed at all in Baidu’s release and it’s really not clear whether it will be a venture capital-style fund for investing in companies, or whether it will be more in the nature of grants supplied to companies using Baidu’s technology in some way. Either way, it’s a significant chunk of money in what’s already a very crowded and high-spending field.
via Baidu
Alphabet Spent $1.1 Billion on Autonomous Driving Tech 2009-2015 (Sep 15, 2017)
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★ Alphabet is Considering A Billion-Dollar Investment in Lyft (Sep 15, 2017)
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Magic Leap Raising Money, May Price Device at $1500-2000 Within 6 Months (Sep 13, 2017)
Bloomberg reports that Magic Leap is trying to raise additional funding, which might include an investment from Singapore’s Temasek fund (which was one of two sources of the money that recently bailed out SoundCloud), and would value it at $6 billion. It also says the company hopes to launch its product within six months, that it will cost $1500-2000, and that it will sit somewhere between glasses and today’s VR headsets in format and require the user to also carry a puck to provide processing. Though the funding is certainly interesting, it’s the other details that are far more interesting to me – those suggest a device which will be out of reach for all but a few consumers if it launches at that price, and which may sit awkwardly between other products in the market, not quite glasses-like enough to be wearable all the time. By all accounts, the technology is pretty amazing, though whether Magic Leap can really squeeze it into a production device with these parameters remains to be seen. But it’s another indication that truly wearable AR is many years away and we’re in for another few years of attempts that fall short in various ways.
via Bloomberg
SoftBank is Making Massive and Disruptive Investments Across Tech (Aug 25, 2017)
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Apple Announces $1.4bn Iowa Data Center Project (Aug 24, 2017)
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★ Apple Reportedly Spending $1 Billion on Original Video Content in Next Year (Aug 16, 2017)
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Essential Gets Additional Funding from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Tencent (Aug 9, 2017)
Essential, Android founder Andy Rubin’s fledgling smartphone outfit, has announced additional funding from companies including Tencent and Amazon, but still refuses to say exactly when its smartphone will go on sale, saying only that a date will be announced in a week or so. It’s also announced that Amazon and Best Buy will be the retail partners for launch, while Sprint was announced earlier as the exclusive US carrier partner. If you’ve read any of my previous pieces on Essential, especially the first one, you’ll know how skeptical I am that an effort like this can succeed. The market is so mature at this point and the distribution and other battle lines so clear that breaking in with yet another Android phone will be a real challenge, one further exacerbated by what’s going to be limited distribution on the weakest carrier in the US. The funding is therefore intriguing, because it suggests these backers see something in the phone that I don’t. Importantly, it’s Amazon’s Alexa Fund specifically that’s making that company’s investment, something the Journal piece I’m linking to here doesn’t dig into at all, but which suggests that the phone will major on Alexa integration, something hinted at earlier by Andy Rubin as part of a statement about the phone’s ecumenical approach to voice assistants, but not made explicit. And backing from both Foxconn and Tencent is intriguing in the context of a phone that’s mostly being launched in North America for now. Recent conversations I’ve had suggest Amazon’s smartphone sales business is going very well, but of course many of its sales are of the kind of low-end prepaid handsets people buy outright anyway rather than the higher-end premium hardware Essential will be selling. I continue to be very bearish on Essential, but at least it sounds like we might finally see the hardware hit the market soon.
via WSJ
Google Officially Launches Gradient Ventures, Engineer-Led AI Fund (Jul 11, 2017)
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★ SiriusXM Takes 16% Stake in Pandora, Which Also Sells Ticketfly to Eventbrite (Jun 9, 2017)
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Google Launches an AI Investment Program Separate from GV and CapitalG (May 26, 2017)
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Apple Allocates First Money from US Manufacturing Fund to Corning (May 12, 2017)
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Apple Announces $1 billion US Manufacturing Investment Fund (May 3, 2017)
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GM to More than Triple Cruise Autonomous Tech Employees in California Over 5 Years (Apr 12, 2017)
GM has filed for and received a tax credit in the sum of $8 million from the state of California in return for investing $14 million in office space and related items this year and committing to hire 1163 employees over the next five years for its self-driving tech subsidiary Cruise. Given how the importance of autonomous driving technology will grow in the coming years and the fact that California is the hub of much of the testing, it’s logical that GM would want to increase its base there significantly. However, these 1163 employees represent a more than three-fold increase in its employee base in the state, and the average salary GM is projecting for those employees is $116,000, so my guess is they’ll mostly be skilled engineers.
via Axios (the filing from which I pulled the data above is here)
LG Confirms Interest in its Display Business, Doesn’t Mention Google – Android Authority (Apr 12, 2017)
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Comcast invests in Plume, a Wi-Fi wall plug startup – Axios (Apr 11, 2017)
This is an interesting investment for Comcast, which already has a big focus on WiFi, as evidenced by its Xfinity Mobile launch last week. Its home broadband routers double as WiFi hotspots for other Comcast customers, and it’s been investing in home automation technology too. So investing in Plume, which offers a service-based approach to WiFi, is a logical next step. Smart home systems are increasingly going to require management and control over the WiFi and other networks in the home for quality and security purposes, so going deeper into WiFi technology and management is going to be important for companies like Comcast that want a role there. The other intriguing part of this is that Plume has been working on a model where it would charge a monthly fee for that WiFi management service, something I could see Comcast doing in time either separately or as part of a smart home service. Yet more evidence, though, that the future mainstream version of the smart home is likely to be service-based. (Incidentally, read this smart piece by Stacey Higginbotham for more on Plume)
via Axios
China’s Tencent Buys 5% Stake in Tesla – WSJ (Mar 28, 2017)
Tencent has been one of the most active Chinese investors in the US tech industry, and here’s another investment. It already has stakes in both Uber and Lyft, and although Baidu has been making bigger direct investments in autonomous driving in the US, Tencent’s indirect investments in transportation in the US are growing. This is a nice vote of confidence in Tesla at a time when it’s trying to raise money to fund the Model 3 manufacturing ramp, and it also gives Tencent decent exposure to what has been a nice growth stock so far this year.
via WSJ
Musk Goes Back to Wall Street to Bring the Model 3 to Market – Bloomberg (Mar 15, 2017)
I think it’s safe to say that Tesla’s plans for Model 3 manufacturing represent the biggest test the company and Elon Musk have faced by a long way. The ramp contemplated is so rapid and takes the company so far beyond its historical production rate that it seems almost impossible for it to meet its targets. And yet here it is raising more money to fund what’s going to be a massive capital spend in the first half of the year to prepare for that production run that’s scheduled to begin in July. In the first half of last year, the company spent around half a billion dollars on capex, and it plans to spend $2-2.5 billion in the first half of 2017, which gives some sense of just how big the leap is from anything the company has done in the past. That’s going to cause a massive cash drain, hence the new funding. Musk continues to execute extremely well on his long-term plans eventually, but hitting short-term targets continues to be his big weakness, and it feels like the Model 3 is either going to be the worst example of that flaw or the biggest possible exception to the pattern. I’m betting it’s the former.
via Bloomberg