Space startups attracted $5.7 billion in financing in 2019, smashing the $3.5 billion record set in 2018, though it's still a handful of companies attracting the vast bulk of the funding, Bryce Space and Technology said Monday. SpaceX, Blue Origin, OneWeb and Virgin Galactic combined had more than $3.8 billion of that financing, it said. Bryce said 135 space startups received investment in 2019, up 34% from the 2018 previous record. Besides the big four, startup investments totaled $1.8 billion, down slightly from the $1.9 billion in investment excluding those companies the previous year, it said. But 2019 had a big increase in the number of rounds with undisclosed investments -- 38, compared with 15 in 2018 -- pointing to the actual total for the year topping $1.8 billion, it said. Seventy-nine non-U.S. startups got financing in 2019, up from 47 in 2018, while the number of U.S. firms leveled off, with 56 seeing financing, versus 53 in 2018, it said.
AT&T reported mixed results Wednesday for Q4, with growth in wireless and declines elsewhere. There were 229,000 postpaid phone net adds. Entertainment reported 945,000 premium TV-subscriber cancellations, an improvement over a nearly 1.2 million loss the same quarter last year. Communications Workers of America slammed AT&T for cutting almost 38,000 jobs since 2018. “AT&T continues to cut jobs and reduce capital expenditures even as the company announced record operating and free cash flow for 2019 and more than $5 billion in stock buybacks in the past four months,” the union said. The telco didn’t comment. Executives stressed overall economics, on a call with analysts, saying the company cut net debt by $20.3 billion throughout 2019. “We'll continue to invest aggressively and at top-tier levels into our core businesses,” CEO Randall Stephenson said: “We expect to invest $20 billion in 2020. Leading in 5G is critical for AT&T, and we're not slowing down. We're more than 75 percent complete on our FirstNet build.” The company has plenty of spectrum to deploy 5G, said President John Stankey. “Our strong spectrum position gives us a leg up and allows us to execute a different 5G deployment strategy than our competitors,” he said: “We have the low and mid-band spectrum to deploy 5G nationwide. We cover 50 million people today and expect to be nationwide" in Q2. Revenue was $46.8 billion, down from $48 billion a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA declined to $14.4 billion, from $15 billion. The quarter ended Dec. 31. “Wireless subscriber growth improved, though not as a result of improved churn as we expected,” NewStreet’s Jonathan Chaplin told investors: “Pay-TV trends were quite a bit worse than we expected, and the path to stabilization in 2020 appears more tenuous. Everything else was a little worse than we expected too.” MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett said as AT&T sheds costs, it’s up against two clocks. “One clock is counting down to the next recession,” Moffett told investors: “We don’t know when a recession will come, of course, but when it does, AT&T will have to have reduced its leverage to a sustainable level.” The second “is counting down to the obsolescence of at least two of AT&T’s most important businesses,” WarnerMedia and DirecTV, he said. The stock closed down 4 percent Wednesday at $37.05.
Commissioner Mike O’Rielly assured the Washington Auto Show Thursday the FCC doesn’t plan to pick winners and losers in the 5.9 GHz band and will let the market decide. O’Rielly predicted the agency could make a decision on its NPRM this summer. The proposal would allow for both cellular vehicle-to-everything and dedicated short-range communications technologies, he said. “We’re going to see what takes off.”
LAS VEGAS -- The Trump administration unveiled nonbinding guidelines for regulating driverless cars and trucks at CES in Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao's Wednesday keynote. Industry officials told us the department floated the guidelines to such stakeholders Tuesday. The agency calls the guidelines Automated Vehicles 4.0 (AV 4.0). The White House also announced principles Wednesday to govern private sector artificial intelligence development.
U.S. consumers and businesses paid $38 billion in U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods “as a result of the trade war and will continue to take hits as long as talks linger,” emailed Naomi Wilson, Information Technology Industry Council senior policy director-Asia. She responded to President Donald Trump's comments he would perhaps delay a trade deal until after the 2020 presidential campaign. It’s “imperative” that both parties' “political leadership” in Congress “maintain the pressure” on the Trump administration “to reach an agreement that meaningfully addresses unfair trade practices and rolls back harmful tariffs,” said Wilson Tuesday. The White House didn’t comment Wednesday.
Though viewing on mobile devices of “short, snackable” videos under five minutes long is prevalent among two-thirds of U.S. consumers, watching “longer-form content” on smartphones is on the rise, reported Opensignal Wednesday. The mobile analytics firm canvassed 1,000 U.S. consumers and found 39 percent watch TV programs on their smartphones and 38 percent watch movies, it said. Longer-form content viewing on smartphones “increases substantially” for younger audiences, it said. Of consumers who say they watch movies or TV shows on a smartphone, 46 percent said they do so at home on a wireless connection, it said. Though consumers have grown accustomed to watching mobile video on wireless connections, frustrations run high, with 44 percent claiming to have experienced persistent “stuttering” or freezing when streaming content, it said. An additional 30 percent said they often give up trying to watch, it said.
Disney Plus got a reality check Tuesday morning when Twitter lit up with disgruntled customers reporting service fails on the first day of its highly publicized launch. Disney Plus, aggressively affordable at $6.99 per month -- $12.99 in a bundle with ESPN Plus and Hulu -- went live Tuesday. It promises streaming access at launch to nearly 500 films, 7,500 TV episodes and other content.
Some 64.6 million in the U.S. will use an Amazon Fire TV device this year, nearly a third of connected TV users, while Amazon Prime Video adds nearly 9 percent to 96.5 million viewers, projected eMarketer Thursday. Forty percent of Amazon’s U.S. advertising business in 2019 will come from mobile, up from 35 percent last year. Analyst Andrew Lipsman noted margin downside from declining Amazon Web Services growth. Total U.S. e-commerce sales are expected to grow 14 percent this year to $586.92 billion. Amazon’s U.S. e-commerce sales are expected to rise 18 percent to $221.13 billion, for 38 percent of the market and 4 percent of all retail.
State attorneys general challenging T-Mobile buying Sprint seek a hearing on Deutsche Telekom's alleged “improper withholding of thousands of pages of responsive documents in discovery,” said a Monday letter (in Pacer) to Judge Robert Lehrburger at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. After T-Mobile parent DT withheld 38 percent of requested documents as privileged, AGs found “errors and oddities” in the company’s privilege log and raised them with the company, the states said. “The total page count of documents impacted by DT’s improper privilege invocations is currently 6,213.” Order DT to “re-review each entry on any previously issued log, produce any documents improperly withheld, and certify that an experienced attorney admitted to practice in the United States has considered the propriety of its privilege invocations,” the AGs asked. T-Mobile didn’t comment. Trial on the AGs challenge to the merger starts Dec. 9 (see 1909260046).
The U.S. and Japan reached two agreements to “rebalance trade,” said the White House Wednesday. One of the deals “includes robust commitments on digital trade, which will greatly expand commerce across our modern industries,” it said. A second calls for Japan to open its markets to about $7 billion in U.S. agricultural exports, it said. Talks will continue “in the months ahead” toward a “final, comprehensive trade deal,” it said. Tech groups welcomed the digital trade accord. Along with the digital and e-commerce rules in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade, "this agreement with Japan now makes the two strongest trade agreements in U.S. history for digital trade and cross-border data flows," said CTA. "At a time when every company is essentially a tech company, it’s critical to have a new standard for global rules that ensures American innovation can thrive across borders.” Japan is America’s fourth-largest digital trading partner, “and this agreement enshrines key rules of the road from our shared digital framework,” said the Internet Association: “Digital trade benefits businesses of all sizes in every sector, and this agreement will only grow the $38 billion in digital trade between our two countries.” The “first-stage” U.S.-Japan agreement on digital trade is “a positive step toward solidifying international norms that ensure that global markets remain fair, open, and competitive in the modern economy,” said the Information Technology Industry Council. A future comprehensive U.S.-Japan trade agreement "would help to partially fill the void left by the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership," said the Computer & Communications Industry Association.