Hot July tech lifts markets

It’s the last trading day of July and stocks are surging and on track to post their best month since late 2020. That’s quite a bounce back from the tough first half and it has been aided by some upbeat earnings from Big Tech.

It’s nice to end on an optimistic note, because this is also my last #techFT and the newsletter will be taking an extended break over the summer, before hopefully returning later in the year. I wrote the first #techFT from Web Summit in Dublin in November 2015 and am moving on to edit tech and other stories for the FT from Hong Kong.

Thanks for reading over the past six years or so, and if you have any thoughts about the newsletter and what you would like to see in a new iteration, please let us know at [email protected]. In the meantime, please consider signing up with one click for our other tech-related newsletters while we’re away — Monday’s FintechFT and Friday’s Cryptofinance. You can still get daily headlines on the world of tech by clicking to follow the technology topic — and you can set up a daily or weekly email digest featuring tech stories too.

Back to those positive earnings: Amazon shares are trading nearly 12 per cent higher after it beat revenue expectations and offered an upbeat forecast for the remainder of the year, reports Dave Lee,

Amazon reined in costs and said it expected to return to double-digit quarterly revenue growth now that the year-on-year comparisons with the coronavirus pandemic-affected periods in 2020 and 2021 had passed. Strong performance from its Amazon Web Services cloud business and its fast-growing advertising arm were credited for the better than expected revenues, offsetting another year-on-year drop in online store sales.

Apple is 3 per cent higher after the iPhone maker said revenues had risen 2 per cent from a year ago to $83bn, slightly ahead of analysts’ forecasts for $82.8bn, reports Patrick McGee.

It had warned back in April of up to $8bn in setbacks related to supply and production issues for the quarter. But finance chief Luca Maestri told us yesterday those costs ended up being less than $4bn, and things should improve in the current quarter. “In the current environment, if nothing changes, we expect supply constraints to be less than what we saw in June.,” he said.

Of the other big five tech companies reporting this week, Alphabet and Microsoft are extending gains after upbeat reports, while Facebook-parent Meta’s shares are suffering further losses after it warned the deteriorating economic environment was hitting its core ads business.

The Internet of (Five) Things

1. Intel alarms with revenue drop
Intel shares are nearly 9 per cent lower after the chipmaker shocked Wall Street with a slump in revenue in its latest quarter and a slashing of its financial outlook for the rest of the year. Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said the results were “below the standards we have set” and added that a “sudden and rapid decline in economic activity was the largest driver” behind the drop in revenue, but that it also reflected “execution issues”.

2. Congress passes Chips act
The US Congress has passed the $280bn Chips and Science Act, providing $52bn in subsidies for US chip manufacturers and more than $100bn in technology and sciences investments, including the creation of regional innovation hubs and expanding the work of the National Science Foundation. The act aims to make the US more competitive with China,

3. Ma plans to cede control of Ant
Billionaire entrepreneur Jack Ma is planning to give up control of Ant Group, a change that would further delay the Chinese fintech’s plans to launch an initial public offering. Lex explains companies that undergo controlling ownership changes have to wait three years before they are able to list on mainland Chinese markets.

4. Virgin fibre funding
Virgin Media O2 has secured £4.5bn in investment for a fibre-building joint venture with owners Telefónica and Liberty Global as the group seeks to challenge BT and smaller rivals that are rapidly laying ultrafast network infrastructure in the UK. It aims to build a new full-fibre network that will provide connectivity to up to 7mn homes.

5. Signature falls as crypto crashes
Signature Bank, the 30th-largest bank in America by assets, was also one of the best-performing in the country last year, propelled by a decision to court the surging deposits of the cryptocurrency industry. However, as crypto has crashed so too has Signature Bank’s share price, report Dan McCrum and Josh Franklin. In South Korea, regulators are investigating $3.1bn worth of “abnormal” foreign exchange transactions at two of the country’s biggest commercial banks for possible money laundering linked to crypto investments.

Tech tools — Insect tech

This week’s House & Home looks at Pollinator Pathmaker, part of a new wave of apps and gadgets that are sensitising us to insects’ needs and encouraging us to rethink who — and what — our gardens are for. The online tool, hosted on pollinator.art, generates planting schemes that attract diverse pollinating species. Once you have entered your plot size and selected your site’s light exposure and soil type, it will pick from 150 plants to create a unique design, giving you planting instructions to download. Choose “pollinator vision” and you can see your garden through the eyes of an insect, with the software approximating colours it would detect.

Insect tech is getting increasingly sophisticated. Bulgarian company Pollenity already offers Beebot sensors to hobbyist beekeepers, and aims to bring a robotic insect to market soon, after live-testing it this summer. Their RoboBee performs the “waggle dance” of a bee to guide a hive’s swarm to flowers and away from dangers.