Walmart U.S. e-commerce sales grew 37% in the quarter ended April 30 from the year-ago period, more than doubling over two years. At Sam’s Club, it gained 47% on curbside pickup, said Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs. Walmart is focused on serving customers better by “diversifying the model,” said CEO Doug McMillon on a quarterly call Tuesday. He cited investments in pickup and delivery, Walmart+ memberships and other factors. Consumer electronics is one of the “pockets where we continue to chase demand,” said CEO Doug McMillon. “We’re monitoring things like delays into ports and other factors in the supply chain.”
Top U.S. cable and wireline ISPs gained 1.02 million net broadband subscribers in Q1 vs. 1.17 million in the year-ago quarter, reported Leichtman Research Group Tuesday. Cable had 73.77 million of 107 million total subscribers, adding 935,000 subs. Telcos had 33.3 million customers, adding 85,000 vs. a net loss of 60,000. Losses among telco non-fiber subs were more than offset by over 400,000 fiber adds, bringing fiber-based telco broadband subs to about 14.6 million. Over the past year, there were about 4.7 million net broadband user adds vs. 2.8 million the prior year, said Principal Bruce Leichtman.
U.S. cloud infrastructure spending rose 29% in Q1 to a record $18.6 billion on “digital transformation” spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, reported Canalys Tuesday: Increases were also fueled by economic recovery and restarting delayed projects. The U.S. had 44% of global spending; China was 15%. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud accounted for 69% of total spending. The relevance of digital services is increasing due to remote working and learning, content streaming, gaming and e-commerce, it said, and enterprise digital transformation is returning “with renewed economic confidence.” There's a proposed $1 billion Technology Modernization Fund (see 2104090041), it noted.
Vizio didn’t take itself public for customary reasons of raising money, but to get the “story” out about plans to “get to the next level” in streaming, Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend told a Needham virtual conference Monday. There's “a nice balance sheet, ample cash, no debt, cash-flow-positive,” he said. It spent the past several years “really investing in a software platform to bring a proprietary operating system to the market” to exploit “the future of consumer video consumption,” he said of SmartCast OS. The streaming opportunity is “getting well defined, and really, really large,” he said. Vizio is “now at scale” with 13.5 million monthly active SmartCast users, he said. “We’re really expanding the offering to consumers in total.” Vizio will add “a lot more” content later this year, he said: “Some pretty big household brand names are coming to the platform pretty soon.”
Growth in U.S. net new broadband subscriptions fell 16% compared with the 2020 quarter when they got a COVID-19 boost, Pivotal Research Group's Jeff Wlodarczak wrote investors Friday. Subs were up modestly from Q1 2019. He expects 2021 net additions down 35% from record 2020 results but about 20% above 2019. Broadband household penetration finished Q1 at 86.8%, up 0.7% sequentially. Cable, with 98% share net new subscribers, saw a 24% drop year on year, up modestly from 2019. Telcos were “treading water” the last three quarters as DSL losses offset fiber-to-the-home gains; telcos added 18,000 in Q1. Some 19 million copper-based telco data subs “are ripe for cable to steal,” he said. Pay-TV results and outlook remain “ugly,” said the analyst, citing “bloodletting” at former DirecTV properties. Pay TV had a 2.1 million subscriber drop vs. 2.4 million in Q1 2020, the worst quarter, and virtual MVPDs lost 1.9 million. Traditional pay TV “remains a dead man walking,” and if players don’t have a credible direct-to-consumer strategy, “they are in trouble,” Wlodarczak noted. PRG is “increasingly excited” about Dish Network’s wireless buildout, noting “what could be a game-changing service with their [Amazon Web Services] relationship a key piece” (see 2104290045).
U.S. Q1 business-to-business tech sales jumped 4% to $24.1 billion, including 3% software revenue growth and 4% in hardware, reported NPD Thursday. As with consumer tech, B2B tech sales trends that began during the onset of the pandemic continued, with strong growth in products “that enable working and learning from home,” it said. USB camera sales revenue increased 320% from Q1 2020 and notebooks were up 51%, said NPD. Though tablet revenue increased 18%, the category slowed from its peak 2020 growth, it said. “As many in the U.S. begin their return to ‘normal' we are starting to see some of the pandemic-related sales momentum shift,” said analyst Mike Crosby. “As businesses and schools begin opening, we are likely to see some growth shift from the hardware that was needed to outfit home offices, back to software for business operations.”
MediaTek’s new Dimensity 900 5G chipset supports Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, 4K video with HDR10+ and a 108-megapixel main camera, said the chipmaker Thursday: The 6-nanometer Dimensity 900, targeted for “high-tier” 5G-enabled smartphones, is embedded with an “HDR-native” image signal processor and a “hardware-accelerated” 4K HDR video recording engine that supports up to four “concurrent cameras.” MediaTek expects the Bluetooth 5.2-compatible chipset will be deployed in 5G smartphones reaching the market starting in 2021's second half.
Logistics delays Vizio is experiencing “in some of the biggest ports of the country” involve “a slowdown in being able to unload vessels and get products processed and out into the distribution hubs,” said Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend on a Q1 call Tuesday, its first as a public company (see report, May 12 issue). The bottlenecks are “particularly” acute at ports in California, where “a lot of our product comes through” from China, he said. “We don’t think it’s that material over the course of a number of months.” Vizio’s 28% year-over-year growth in Q1 smart TV shipments to 1.5 million sets “doesn’t really reflect even what could have been possible if not for those delays,” said Townsend. “There’s demand in the marketplace, and it’s just a matter of getting our products into those stores and onto the shelves.”Logistics delays may create “maybe a little of a shift” in shipment volumes “out of Q1 and into either Q2 or into Q3 if it pushes out that far,” he said. “There’s only so much we can do to control the dynamics of the ports.” Debuting later this year will be an ad-supported VOD offering called “Vizio Features,” said Michael O’Donnell, chief revenue officer for Vizio's Platform+ ad monetization operations. Vizio Features will be a “sponsor-driven content programming opportunity” that gives advertisers more ways “to engage with our consumers inside the SmartCast experience, whether on the home screen or within the actual content,” he said. It will give consumers “access to original or exclusive programming," he said: It's “kind of a low-risk, low-capital-intensive way of providing more value for our advertisers, content partners and ultimately, more stickiness and loyalty.” Vizio will roll "that out over the next few quarters,” said O'Donnell. “Not ready yet to announce the specific partnerships, but we will soon.”
An Amazon Photos services outage that began Tuesday prevented North American accounts from “uploading and viewing photos and videos through our apps,” the company emailed customers Thursday. “Our services are now fully restored. Please be assured that your content is safe and secure.” Amazon didn’t respond to questions about what caused the outage.
The Zigbee Alliance’s rebranding as Connectivity Standards Alliance signals that its approach to connectivity in the IoT space may be more "inclusive,” Parks Associates analyst Patrice Samuels told us. The more expansive term focuses on what Samuels called the “foundation for the success for the smart home”: connectivity. The name change was announced Tuesday (see report, May 12 issue) along with the retitling of Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) to Matter. Years have passed without any protocol achieving dominance in the IoT, Samuels said, and competition among protocols “inhibited industry progress through poor user experiences and consumer hesitance to buy products because of the fear of interoperability issues.” Project CHIP, which launched at the end of 2019, was a step in the right direction, indicating an industry perception that “there is more to be gained from working together on standards than competing,” Samuels said. The move away from the Zigbee name likely means changes to the protocol, too, toward being more open and capable of communicating with other standards, she said. The charter of Project CHIP, now Matter, is to make smart home products easier to produce for manufacturers and developers, said Samuels, noting “the quest for interoperability in home automation is a long one," beginning before the current generation of smart home devices that emerged 8-10 years ago. What makes Matter different is participation by nearly all major smart home players. If the collaboration succeeds in “truly removing the work of interoperability from the consumer’s plate, the vision of the smart home will have taken a meaningful step forward,” she said.