The global smartphone applications processor (AP) market once again defied the COVID-19 pandemic and grew 20% in revenue terms to $5.8 billion in quarter two (Q2) of 2020, according to Strategy Analytics’ Handset Component Technologies (HCT) service report.
The research group says that Qualcomm, HiSilicon, Apple, MediaTek, and Samsung LSI captured the top-five revenue share spots in the global smartphone applications processor (AP) market in the quarter. Qualcomm maintained its lead of the smartphone AP market with a 32% revenue share, followed by HiSilicon with 22% and Apple with 19%.
Strategy Analytics estimates that smartphone AP shipments declined 16 percent year-on-year in Q2 2020, driven by COVID-19-led weakness. However, increased mix of higher-priced 5G APs more than offset this weakness and helped the AP market to register 20 percent year-on-year revenue growth.
Smartphone APs with on-device artificial intelligence (AI) registered strong growth even as the total market declined and accounted
For every two deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S., a third American dies as a result of the pandemic, according to new data publishing Oct. 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, led by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University, shows that deaths between March 1 and Aug. 1 increased 20% compared to previous years — maybe not surprising in a pandemic. But deaths attributed to COVID-19 only accounted for 67% of those deaths.
“Contrary to skeptics who claim that COVID-19 deaths are fake or that the numbers are much smaller than we hear on the news, our research and many other studies on the same subject show quite the opposite,” said lead author Steven Woolf, M.D., director emeritus of VCU’s Center on Society and Health.
The study also contains suggestive evidence that state policies on reopening early in April and May may have fueled the
A winter wave of COVID-19 may be brewing in the U.S., with many states reporting distinct increases in confirmed cases. More economic stimulus may be necessary if the pandemic worsens from here, but Congress remains deadlocked on the issue. Despite all of this, the stock market was surging on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average(DJINDICES:^DJI) up 1.05% at 1:05 p.m. EDT.
Tech giant Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL) was the Dow’s top performer on Monday, rallying hard one day before the company is expected to announce iPhones that feature 5G technology. Shares of Cisco Systems(NASDAQ:CSCO) were also higher despite an analyst downgrade.
Image source: Getty Images.
Apple surges ahead of iPhone event
If 2020 were a normal year, Apple’s latest iPhones would have likely already launched. But supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced Apple to delay the launch by a few weeks. At an event in September,
Charee Mobley, who teaches middle school in Fort Worth, Texas, had just $166 to get herself and her 17-year-old daughter through the last two weeks of August.
But that money disappeared when Ms. Mobley, 37, ran into an issue with Square’s Cash App, an instant payments app that she was using in the coronavirus pandemic to pay her bills and do her banking.
After seeing an errant online shopping charge on her Cash App, Ms. Mobley called what she thought was a help line for it. But the line had been set up by someone who asked her to download some software, which then took control of the app and drained her account.
“I didn’t have gas money and I couldn’t pay my daughter’s senior dues,” Ms. Mobley said. “We basically just had to stick it out until I got paid the following week.”
In wealth management, merger and acquisition activity is peaking – and quickly re-shaping the … [+] composition of the industry’s landscape.
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The third quarter of 2020 will be remembered as one of the most unique periods of merger and acquisition activity in the history of the wealth management industry.
There were a record number of deals in Q3 – 55 transactions in total, according to the latest ECHELON Partners RIA M&A Deal Report – which surpasses the previous high of 53 deals that our research tracked in Q4 2019.
This record period comes directly after just 35 deals took place in Q2. This 57% increase in quarter-over-quarter M&A activity also registers as one of the sharpest increases in the industry’s history, marking a major rebound after the COVID-19-related market declines delayed and prolonged normal deal-making activity, as the figure below illustrates:
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. surged to a record high after the Indian giant announced a share buyback of as much as 160 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) and said technology spending was recovering faster than anticipated.
Asia’s largest software outsourcing provider reported a larger-than-expected 7% fall in net income to 74.7 billion rupees in the September quarter. But Chief Executive Officer Rajesh Gopinathan said IT budgets were bouncing back and growth should accelerate as clients spend on digital services such as cloud migration, security and work tools to trim costs and adjust to a post-pandemic environment.
Like Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., TCS is struggling to serve global financial services giants and corporate clients after a nationwide lockdown forced hundreds of thousands of their employees to work from home. But spending is loosening as
“The quantum internet will enable transformative applications with wide-ranging societal impacts, including physics-based secure communications, ultra-precise long-baseline astronomy, and advances in medical imaging,” said Aliro Quantum CTO Prineha Narang, PhD. “But to build these networks, telecom and government organizations have an immediate need for accurate simulation and emulation tools. Aliro is proud to unveil pioneering research and simulation products, significant milestones on our mission to make quantum technologies accessible with a write-once-run-anywhere cloud platform.”
Aliro will introduce two new quantum simulation products with superior usability and accuracy to help quantum R&D departments significantly reduce the time and budget associated with distributed quantum computing development:
Aliro™ Q.Compute (AQC) is a hardware-independent quantum computing development environment with an intuitive UX, access to a variety of quantum computing backends, and a robust set of optimization schemes. AQC’s noise-expert compiler makes the necessary transformations to quantum circuits, freeing quantum R&D teams of constraint considerations
Global companies spent around $15 billion extra a week on technology during the pandemic’s first wave, Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO survey finds.
Image: Harvey Mudd/KPMG
Global IT leaders spent around $15 billion extra a week on technology to enable safe and secure home working during COVID-19, according to the 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey. This was one of the biggest surges in technology investment in history— with the world’s IT leaders spending an additional 5% more of their IT budget to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, the survey said.
The technology leadership survey of over 4,200 IT leaders analyzed responses from organizations with a combined technology spend of over $250 billion. It also found that despite this huge surge of spending and security and privacy being the top investment during COVID-19, four in 10 IT leaders report that their company has experienced more cyberattacks.
(Bloomberg) — Daisuke Sasaki has seen his cloud-based accounting company’s valuation swell to $3.7 billion despite having yet to show a profit, but he’s not letting that pressure him.
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Shares of Freee K.K. have quadrupled since going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December, along with rising demand for cloud services amid the remote-working trend.
“We don’t have a set timeframe for when the company will swing to profits,” Sasaki, founder and chief executive of Freee, said in an interview on Aug. 17. “Our business is about subscription.”
The Tokyo-based firm’s stock is one of the many technology names that have surged during Covid-19, fueled by investor euphoria over stay-at-home and DIY themes. While the pandemic roiled the outlook for companies around the world, U.S. accounting software giant Intuit Inc. beat recent earnings estimates, helped by better-than-expected growth for its cloud-based service for small businesses.
(Bloomberg) — Daisuke Sasaki has seen his cloud-based accounting company’s valuation swell to $3.7 billion despite having yet to show a profit, but he’s not letting that pressure him.
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Shares of Freee K.K. have quadrupled since going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December, along with rising demand for cloud services amid the remote-working trend.
“We don’t have a set timeframe for when the company will swing to profits,” Sasaki, founder and chief executive of Freee, said in an interview on Aug. 17. “Our business is about subscription.”
The Tokyo-based firm’s stock is one of the many technology names that have surged during Covid-19, fueled by investor euphoria over stay-at-home and DIY themes. While the pandemic roiled the outlook for companies around the world, U.S. accounting software giant Intuit Inc. beat recent earnings estimates, helped by better-than-expected growth for its cloud-based service for small businesses.