Jan 22

1. #economics The US-China trade deal presents a paradox for the market (Kristina Hooper)

I updated this topic on Jan 17. Kristina Hooper provided a quite insightful picture of this first deal. First, she believed that this action is inconsequential, yet extremely important. It is inconsequential as US still leaves most of its exclusive tariffs in Chinese goods (only tariffs in $120B out of $500B were reduced) and the deal only tackled low-hanging fruits such as trade imbalance, but not other serious issues. Meanwhile, the deal has a “psychological” effect on companies: the tension is bottoming out, then they will feel economics policy is getting more certain, then they will spend more, esp on capex. Secondly, Kristina pointed out that it’s hard for China to commit to this deal based on their historical purchase of US goods, as well as new agreements with countries like Brazil.  She called this “some flies in the ointment”. Thirdly, the trade war between US and EU is poised to be on the horizon. Trade war with EU brings less damage to US than with China, but it still leads to negative psychological effects on companies: make them tamp down capex spending

2. #tech Coworking and flexible office space are scaling back after years of breakneck growth (PitchBook)

After WeWork with its ill-fated IPO, many smaller players are laying off their employees to curb operating cost. The new players of this “plummeting” club is Knotel with nearly one third of employees stopped working with the company. The leader from Knotel stated that the decision is to align the supply and demand for these leasing businesses in big cities. This trend makes me wonder why some coworking start-ups in Vietnam like UpGen still remain healthy?

3. #tech The future of Apple (BI Intelligence)

They are the two peripheral segments: “Service” and “Wearables, Home and Accessories (WHA)”. The bread and butter – IPhone is going down due to the saturated smartphone market, longer life-cycle, reducing exported revenue because of the trade world,…. While IPhone remains the biggest pie of Apple revenue as it is the cynosure of a consumer’s connected ecosystem experience, Service and WHA will rise to curb its decreasing revenue. Regards to service, Apple is focusing on Appstore with the change from one-time purchase to subscription service, which is a more reliable and predictable revenue generator. Moreover, the company states that it is also investing in developing AR apps (a very lucrative pie in the future). About WHA, Apple is expanding the range of health-offering in its Apple Watch as it is the main driving force of purchase