It’s “absolutely” possible to have a “real” trade negotiation with China, said U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai Wednesday on a Carnegie Endowment webinar. What the U.S. really wants from China is for its economy “to operate like ours, and along the assumptions and the norms that we feel are embodied in organizations like the World Trade Organization,” said Tai. “The Chinese have pursued a model that is different from ours.” Until China “chooses a path to have its economy operate more like ours, I think we see that we need to have more effective tools in ensuring that we can continue to compete,” she said. She said those tools include “a combination” of the Section 301 tariffs that are in place, plus making investments in “American competitiveness,” she said.
The Lists 1 and 2 Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports didn’t terminate on the fourth anniversaries of their imposition dates, July 6 and Aug. 23, after the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative received “numerous requests” from “domestic industries” to keep the duties intact, said an agency notice Friday.
Huawei “has been facing a lot of challenges the past few years,” including a 29% revenue decline in 2021 amid U.S. export sanctions and weakening smartphone demand, William Tian, Huawei Consumer Business Group president-West European region, said in an IFA 2022 keynote interview Saturday. “The past few years have been incredibly hard for everyone,” he said. “But we are still going. We are still innovating.” Said Tian: “We have not given up.”
E-commerce platform Newegg incurred a 26% decline in first-half net sales to $890.5 million because, “as with many in our industry,” its performance “was affected by several factors that were out of our control,” said CEO Anthony Chow Friday. He cited macroeconomic conditions, higher inflation and “a weak sales environment due to changes in customer spending behavior.” Chief Financial Officer Robert Chang said those challenges, plus “the oversupply of inventory from our sellers,” combined to negatively affect first-half net sales and gross margin. Newegg said it expects to launch Black Friday deals “earlier than usual this year,” and plans to offer a Black Friday price protection program “ahead of an early holiday shopping season.” The promotion will reward shoppers “by automatically refunding the price difference if purchased products drop in price,” it said.
Though consumer tech hardware spending “has been reported to be weak, very weak,” infrastructure and enterprise spending, “from our vantage point,” is “very much holding,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan on an earnings call Thursday for fiscal Q3 ended July 31.
Collaborations and partnerships were the hallmark of Friday’s opening IFA 2022 keynote by Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who announced a multiyear agreement with Meta to jointly develop “custom products” leveraging Snapdragon XR chipsets for Meta’s Quest augmented- and virtual-reality platform. Qualcomm has "conviction" that the metaverse will be "the next computing platform, and eventually it's going to be as powerful and as big as the smartphone market," said Amon. Meta's hope "is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on prerecorded video. The “next phase” of Meta’s partnership with Qualcomm involves “a deeper engineering collaboration at a level that’s a first for both of us,” he said. “Unlike mobile phones, building VR brings novel multidimensional challenges in computing, cost and form factor,” said Zuckerberg. “We’re still at the early stages of the metaverse, and this sort of deep technical integration will help VR move towards being a multifunctional computing platform that will transform how we all connect.” Amon also brought Bose CEO Lila Snyder to the stage to discuss a “broadened collaboration” that will see Bose incorporate Qualcomm voice and music chipsets into future wearables, earbuds and other devices. When Amon asked Snyder to name her favorite Bose device, she answered that it's the product Bose plans for a global debut Wednesday, and that she couldn’t talk about it.
“Tumultuous times” loom this year and next for the PC and tablet industries due to worsening inflation, a weakening global economy and “the surge in buying over the past two years,” reported IDC Thursday. It forecast global shipments of “traditional” PCs, including desktops, notebooks and workstations, will decline 12.8% in 2022 to 305.3 million units, and tablet shipments will fall 6.8% to 156.8 million.
Electric vehicle charging network ChargePoint recorded the first $100 million quarter in its 15-year history, as consumers “embrace the transition to EVs at an accelerating rate,” said CEO Pasquale Romano on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q2 ended July 31. ChargePoint’s installed base of network ports grew 70% year over year to about 200,000, of which more than 60,000 are in Europe, he said: “We do not include home chargers for single-family residences in this count, where we also continue to see strong demand.” ChargePoint’s business model “sets us up well to operationalize” the federal EV infrastructure program, said Romano. Moreover, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law Aug. 16, soon after the close of the July quarter, contains additional “stimulus” for EVs and charging infrastructure “across passenger and fleet categories,” he said. ChargePoint estimates its network has fueled more than 4.4 billion “electric miles,” he said. “These drivers have avoided over 178 million cumulative gallons of gasoline and over 800,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.”
HP, like many tech companies, is managing through the “unexpected and very abrupt” downturn in market conditions “with a focus on what we can control,” said CEO Enrique Lores on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q3 ended July 31. Net revenue for the quarter of $14.66 billion was down 11.1% sequentially from Q2 and 4.1% lower year over year.
The competitive environment in cybersecurity “remains favorable” to CrowdStrike, and “we continue to see strong demand even as organizations respond to macroeconomic conditions,” said CEO George Kurtz on an earnings call Tuesday for fiscal Q2 ended July 31. For CrowdStrike, “this primarily manifested in the form of increased levels of required approvals on some deals as companies evaluated investment priorities, which can extend the time it takes to close deals,” said Kurtz. “However, cybersecurity is not a discretionary line item.” CrowdStrike’s quarterly revenue exceeded $500 million for the first time, he said.