Month: October 2020

(Bloomberg Opinion) — The story of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s industry dominance steamed ahead unabated Thursday, with record earnings on the back of booming demand for chips used in smartphones and servers. Yet one figure highlights just how much power the company now has as rivals fall by the wayside.Net income climbed 36% to $4.8 billion, higher than even the most bullish of estimates, while the made-to-order chipmaker raised its full-year revenue outlook to growth of more than 30%, in U.S. dollar terms. There’s another figure worth examining. Average price per wafer isn’t a closely followed metric in the foundry …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Oil held gains near $41 a barrel after an industry report pointed to a sharper-than-expected drop in American crude stockpiles.Futures in New York edged lower after gaining 2.1% Wednesday. U.S. inventories fell by 5.42 million barrels last week, the American Petroleum Institute reported, according to people familiar with the data. That would be the biggest weekly drop since August if confirmed by government figures due Thursday. The report also showed declines in gasoline and distillate stockpiles.Crude managed to rise even after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said getting a fiscal stimulus deal before next month’s election would be …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. raised its full-year revenue forecast again after posting a stronger-than-expected 36% increase in profit, buoyed by orders from Apple Inc. ahead of the new iPhones.The world’s largest contract chipmaker now expects 2020 sales to climb more than 30% in dollar terms, compared with a previous forecast of growth of more than 20%. For the current quarter, revenue should be between $12.4 billion and $12.7 billion, while gross margin will be between 51.5% and 53.5%, Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang told analysts.Previously disclosed monthly numbers showed sales climbed to a record NT$356.4 billion ($12.4 billion) …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Miniso Group Holding Ltd., the Chinese budget household and consumer goods retailer, raised $608 million in a U.S. initial public offering priced above a marketed range.The company on Wednesday sold 30.4 million American depositary shares for $20 each after marketing them for $16.50 to $18.50, according to a press release.The company’s backers include Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Each depositary share will represent four ordinary shares.The listing follows 33 others on U.S. exchanges this year by companies based in China and Hong Kong that raised a combined $9.74 billion, …read more […]

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) reported a 36% jump in quarterly net profit, boosted by robust demand for products requiring high-end chips and as Apple Inc readies a new iPhone. July-September net profit for the world’s largest contract chipmaker came in at T$137.3 billion ($4.8 billion), well ahead of the T$124.9 billion average of 19 analyst estimates compiled by Refinitiv. TSMC’s advanced chips are used in high-end smartphones such as Apple’s newly unveiled 5G iPhone 12 as well as in telecommunications technology and artificial intelligence. …read more […]

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The frantic global effort to test people for COVID-19 pushed Roche’s diagnostics division to record revenue, helping the Swiss drugmaker offset declining drug sales and keeping it on track to meet full-year 2020 targets. Sales of diagnostics including tests for the new coronavirus, of which Roche offers several to both detect active and past infections, rose 2% through September to 9.7 billion Swiss francs ($10.6 billion), even when taking into account the Swiss franc’s strength that eroded revenue in the United States and Europe. Roche shares were seen falling 1.9%, according to premarket indicators from Bank Julius Baer. …read more […]

At the end of February we announced the arrival of the first US recession since 2009 and we predicted that the market will decline by at least 20% in (see why hell is coming). We reversed our stance on March 25th after seeing unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus unleashed by the Fed and the Congress. […] …read more […]

How do you pick the next stock to invest in? One way would be to spend days of research browsing through thousands of publicly traded companies. However, an easier way is to look at the stocks that smart money investors are collectively bullish on. Hedge funds and other institutional investors usually invest large amounts of […] …read more […]

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey have plowed through 823 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of June 30th, when the S&P 500 Index was trading around the […] …read more […]

How do you pick the next stock to invest in? One way would be to spend days of research browsing through thousands of publicly traded companies. However, an easier way is to look at the stocks that smart money investors are collectively bullish on. Hedge funds and other institutional investors usually invest large amounts of […] …read more […]

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. We at Insider Monkey have plowed through 823 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F […] …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — Huawei Technologies Co., already getting squeezed out of Europe’s vast market for the next generation of telecom equipment, is under siege in another fast-growing business: cloud computing.U.S. officials have been lobbying European lawmakers and industry leaders to use Western companies — while shunning Huawei — to build data centers and offer infrastructure to handle the growing tide of information.As part of a European tour last week, U.S. Under Secretary Keith Krach met executives including Deutsche Telekom AG CEO Timotheus Hoettges and Meinrad Spenger, the head of Spanish telecom carrier MasMovil, to urge them to ditch Chinese vendors of …read more […]

In what has been a successful year for the semiconductor sector, Micron (MU) can be considered almost an outlier. While the coronavirus has acted as a springboard for many chipmakers, Micron has struggled in the face of lower enterprise demand, reduced IT spending and unfavorable macro conditions, such as the US ban on major customer Huawei.However, over the past week Micron shares have been picking up steam, as the cyclical nature of the chip industry appears to be turning in its favor. Deutsche Bank analyst Sidney Ho certainly thinks so. The latest industry reports lead the analyst to believe the …read more […]

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump and his political allies reacted with fury after Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. on Wednesday restricted a New York Post article linking Joe Biden and his son Hunter to a Ukrainian energy company that figured in the impeachment investigation of Trump.Facebook said it would reduce distribution of the article, seeking to slow the pace of its spread before the social network’s fact-checkers have a chance to evaluate its authenticity.Twitter inserted a warning to people who clicked on the article. The company later said it took action to block links to the story because some of …read more […]