Consumer demand for chips and faster mobile communications won't ebb soon, said executives at a major manufacturer of consumer electronics for other companies. "Things will be back to more normal conditions” in January-March 2022, said Jabil CEO Mark Mondello of semiconductor supply-demand balance. “We think this thing will start to show levels of relief” in fiscal Q1, ending late November, “and for sure as we get into calendar '22,” he said. Demand for semiconductors “has never been higher, with the accelerated convergence of technologies and the associated data generation and storage needs,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Dastoor told a call Tuesday for fiscal Q2, ended Feb. 28. “Nearly every part of the economy runs on silicon.” Jabil is seeing what “finally looks to be reasonable plans in terms of the 5G wireless rollout,” said Mondello. “That’s here to stay, not a number of months, but a number of years,” he said. “That’s going to have all kinds of tangents tied to it as well, once the 5G rollout gets underway, in terms of derivatives to other parts of our business.” The technology is speeding the “secular expansion of cloud adoption and infrastructure growth,” he said.
Entertainment trends accelerated by COVID-19 could speed sports viewership declines, just as the industry's nascent focus on e-betting micro-wagering on in-progress professional games requires better technology, LightShed analysts wrote Tuesday (login required). With more competition for attention, “historically resilient sports TV viewership has been hard hit,” even as “most consumers were stuck at home.” So "with viewership fading and linear TV demographics aging up fast, the pace of advertising dollars shifting away from TV toward digital will undoubtedly accelerate," analysts noted. States legalizing sports wagering expands the market by making it easier to bet, especially on mobile devices, analysts said. More engagement with linear sports TV would be positive for ads and boost long-term values of sports rights, even as cord cutting accelerates, they said. But technology isn’t there yet due to latency, said LightShed. It cited a “significant delay” between broadcast TV over MVPDs vs. over-the-top video streaming, “on top of a delay between what is happening on the field and the broadcast feed."
Qualcomm Technologies completed its buy of CPU and tech design company Nuvia for $1.4 billion, said Qualcomm Tuesday. Qualcomm expects to integrate next-generation CPUs “across a wide portfolio of products,” including smartphones, laptops and digital cockpits, plus advanced driver assistance systems, extended reality and infrastructure networking solutions, it said.
Nokia announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services Monday to research and enable cloud radio access network and open RAN technologies. “The collaboration, which will be conducted at Nokia’s facilities, aims to develop innovative proof of concepts to explore and enable Cloud RAN and related technologies,” said a news release: “Nokia is pursuing a strategy of collaborating with AWS to extend the reach of its Cloud RAN technologies in support of 5G deployments and the development of new use cases.” Nokia also announced an agreement with Google Cloud “to develop new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions.” Nokia also reached an agreement with Microsoft “to develop new market-ready 4G and 5G private wireless use cases designed” for business customers. The collaboration combines Nokia’s cloud RAN technologies with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services.
Commercialization of 5G “continues to be strong,” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf told his company's annual meeting Thursday, his last before his June retirement when he will be replaced by President Cristiano Amon. “We're early on” but 2020 “was the year that 5G really started to ramp,” Mollenkopf said. More than 140 operators have launched it in nearly 60 countries, and 270 more operators “are investing, making their plans known to go to 5G,” he said. Qualcomm expects a billion 5G connections in 2023, “two years faster than that same mark in 4G,” he said. Adoption of 5G smartphones remains "strong,” said Mollenkopf. Industry sold 225 million 5G smartphones in 2020, he said. “We expect that to grow to 500 million at the midpoint in 2021 and continue to grow.”
Younger metropolitan men seeking to buy economy vehicles are the “most receptive” to virtual car buying, and 80% of the public overall is "open" to an online vehicle purchase, a 50% increase from pre-pandemic acceptance, reported Acertus Thursday. The automotive analytics firm canvassed 1,000 actual and likely car buyers in December, finding consumers' inability to test drive the biggest hurdle to online adoption.
TVU Networks and China Unicom are developing technology for collection, transmission, distribution and management of 4K and 8K Ultra HD video over 5G millimeter-wave networks, they said Thursday. Increased bandwidth, reduced latency and flexible configuration of the 5G mmWave band can enable capacity and transmission of future applications such as high-resolution video and immersive augmented and virtual reality, they said. China Unicom will be the exclusive mobile service provider at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Microsoft believes Teams can “coalesce” the “critical mass of capabilities” that hybrid workplaces will need much like smartphones obviated the need for consumers to carry separate flip phones, MP3 players and cameras, Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro told a Jeffries virtual investor conference Wednesday. Microsoft sees “such an opportunity” for Teams to become as essential to employees as Outlook and the Microsoft Office suite, he said. “As we think about the first digital revolution of our business,” it was using “PC power” to promote “the digitization of paperwork,” he said. The digital transformation “we're all going through right now” is about the “digitization of space and of time,” he said. “We believe every company is going to need an organizing layer that allows them to transcend the space and time,” by bringing employees together “even when they're not physically together,” he said.
AI has become the most important technology in smartphones, reported Strategy Analytics Wednesday, saying 71% of smartphones sold globally this year will use AI. It's used on smartphones for intelligent power optimization, imaging, virtual assistants and device performance improvement. Benefits include lower latency, better data privacy and lower power consumption, said analyst Ville-Petteri Ukonaho. Camera AI enables object recognition and motion detection, noted analyst Ken Hyers.
Though surveys show U.S. consumers overwhelmingly think it’s important to support small businesses during COVID-19, shoppers are relying on Amazon “more than ever,” reported Convey Tuesday. The delivery experience management company canvassed 1,100 shoppers online, finding 42% say they buy most goods on Amazon, up 83% since the start of the crisis. Nearly half shop frequently at Amazon because they trust their packages will be delivered when promised. Fifty-two percent say Amazon “has a positive impact on the retail industry,” up 14 points. Thirty-six percent say Amazon has a positive impact on the environment.