Topic: Investment
AT&T Discriminated Against Low-Income Neighborhoods, Study Finds – BuzzFeed (Mar 11, 2017)
Depending on your perspective, this is either the broadband industry’s dirty little secret, or a natural consequence of the investment characteristics of fiber broadband. What’s happening here is that broadband providers like AT&T tend to invest the most in broadband infrastructure in areas where they’re likeliest to see a return on that investment, in other words those areas where takeup is likely to be highest, which in turn are disproportionately going to be more affluent. In the past, some cities have required universal coverage as part of franchise agreements to avoid this kind of redlining, but that has changed in recent years, at least in part because of Google Fiber. Google’s big innovation in deploying fiber was to encourage municipalities to bend over backwards to get the service, which turned the usual model of cities extracting concessions from providers on its head. AT&T then said to the same cities that it was happy to deploy fiber on the same basis if it was offered the same inducements and benefits, thus enabling its rapid deployment of fiber-to-the-home infrastructure in recent years. This FTTN infrastructure predates that model, but we’re going to see a lot more of this redlining in the years to come, and cities only have themselves to blame if they allow companies to operate in this way. Meanwhile, this ability to redline is the single biggest driver of faster broadband deployment in the US today, even if access to that faster broadband remains very uneven.
via BuzzFeed
Samsung Plans U.S. Expansion, Would Shift Manufacturing From Mexico – WSJ (Mar 9, 2017)
This didn’t get a ton of coverage on Wednesday, but it’s one of the first concrete statements we’ve seen from a major tech manufacturer that it is considering building new infrastructure in the US – all other reporting on this topic has either been unconfirmed by the company or has turned out to be something announced earlier. Samsung is fascinating in this context – unlike Apple and Amazon, it was never singled out for criticism during the campaign, and of course Trump himself uses a Samsung smartphone. But the company nevertheless seems keen to curry favor by building capacity in the US.
via WSJ
Google and Intel had the most active corporate VC firms last year – Recode (Feb 22, 2017)
Corporate venture capital in Silicon Valley is always fascinating: these are the things big companies choose to invest in indirectly rather than directly, which often leads to fairly complex relationships between some of these companies (notably Google’s relationship with Uber). My Beyond Devices Podcast co-host Aaron Miller did a great breakdown of this feature of the tech industry a while back – have a listen to this episode if you’re interested. It appears Google and Intel were the biggest investors in 2016, with some really sizable bets made by Google in particular during the year. I wish I could see more details from the report, but CB Insights pulls a bait and switch in which it first asks for just an email address and then follows up with a demand for a phone number and job function, so I’m not downloading it.
via Recode (CB Insights report here)
Alphabet’s Verily Preps for China Entry With Temasek Funds – Bloomberg (Jan 26, 2017)
Verily is one of the most fascinating Other Bets – in some ways, it’s the most completely removed from much of the rest of what Alphabet/Google does, both in terms of its focus and in terms of the business model, which has largely involved partnering with big pharmaceutical firms so far. (We devoted a big chunk of an episode of the Beyond Devices Podcast to Verily a while back, so if you’re interested it’s probably worth a listen – I also wrote a brief summary of my findings here.) Getting outside investment is an interesting way to reduce Alphabet’s exposure to the risks associated with what are rightly called “Bets”, while also potentially allowing these businesses to move faster than they could with Alphabet cash alone, and move into new markets – Temasek is Singaporean, but invests heavily in China. I’m curious to see whether we’ll see this model applied to additional Other Bets, or whether it’s another unique facet of the Verily business which we won’t see repeated elsewhere.
via Bloomberg
Apple Confirms $1 Billion Investment in SoftBank Vision Fund – WSJ (Jan 4, 2017)
This is the second billion-dollar non-acquisition investment Apple has ever made, and both have taken place in the last few months. It’s hard to avoid the sense of a change in strategy here, and an attendant implication about innovation at Apple – that the company recognizes is can’t develop in-house or buy in all the innovation it needs, and will leverage research conducted elsewhere to an increasing extent going forward. Of course, both deals can also be seen as opportunistic with regard to governments, in China (Didi) and the US (SoftBank) as well.
via Apple Confirms $1 Billion Investment in SoftBank Vision Fund – WSJ
US Startup Investments By China’s Internet Giants Slow Down in 2016 – CB Insights (Nov 10, 2016)
This is a great overview of some of the significant investments the four major Chinese Internet companies have made in the US over the past few years. A few things stand out: Tencent has invested significantly more than the others, both in dollar terms and in the number of individual investments; California has received 79% of the total investments made, with most other states only capturing a small number of deals or none at all; investments appear to have peaked in 2016 and dropped in 2015 (though this analysis doesn’t capture the whole of 2016). A lot of the investments are in tiny companies you’ve never heard of, but there are some exceptions: Alibaba and Tencent in Lyft and Snap; Alibaba in ShopRunner, MagicLeap, and Jet.com; Baidu in Uber; and Tencent in Cyanogen. Most of these are small minority investments, but the overall number is significant – the big Chinese companies have been far more able and willing to invest in US properties than vice versa.
via CB Insights