Tech Review: 1) Tencent & WeChat's Pony Ma, 2) Browser Market Share

Tech Review (TR 2018-08-04)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech investing news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Tencent & WeChat's Pony Ma, 2) Browser Market Share--Where's Amazon Silk? 3) Investing: The Week: Apple at $1T, Investing Notes: a. Disrupted, b. $FB Record Loss, c. U.S. at 3% Growth Next 4-5 Years? 4) ICYMI Tech News.

1) China’s Tencent & WeChat Billionaire

Pony Ma is one of the richest people in the world. He created Tencent (domain: tencent.com), China's tech colossus, one of the ten largest companies in the world and developer of the WeChat app (domain: wechat.com), China's ubiquitous multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app. But few signs in his early years suggest that he would become such a success. Bloomberg.com video above first published 11 Jul 2018.

Tencent Holdings Ltd   HKG: 0700

Tencent's $143 Billion Rout Is World's Biggest as Tech Sinks--Bloomberg.com July 30, 2018--Tencent's stock has dropped 25% from its January peak, erasing $143B in value, as global investors became wary of big tech's potential growth.

2) Browser Market Share Worldwide (all devices) June 2018--Where's Amazon Silk?

• Chrome 58.94% (Google)
• Safari 13.7% (Apple)
• UC Browser 7.46% (Alibaba)
• Firefox 5.17% (Mozilla Foundation, Mountain View, California)
• Opera 3.5% (Chinese consortium)
• IE 3.12% (Microsoft)

Editor's note: The dominant market leader is definitely Google's Chrome browser, and #2 Safari offers real competition only on Apple devices (Apple's 'walled garden'). But watch Opera's future market share growth on cheap smartphones, particularly in China, India, and Brazil. Also watch if Amazon's Silk browser expands beyond Amazon devices. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), could be just a few steps away from a broad array of new products and services, including a competitive search engine to Google and Microsoft's Bing, built on its core ecommerce platform, its AWS technology (aws.amazon.com), its Twitch (twitch.tv) subsidiary, and its expanding Amazon Advertising Platform--advertising.amazon.com/amazon-advertising-platform.

source: Statista.com

source: Statista.com

3) Investing

The Week: NASDAQ Composite +0.9% | S&P 500 Index +0.8% | DJIA +0.1%

Apple $AAPL Jul 27-Aug 2, 2018

Apple $AAPL on Thursday, August 2, 2018, became the first $1Trillion market cap company.

Wall Street's Charging Bull

Investing Notes:

a. Disrupted: "the staid taxi industry slept through the arrival of smartphones – and what an app-based system could do. While there are now apps for taxi services, it’s too little too late"--WolfStreet.com.

b. Facebook's Big Single Day Market Cap Loss in Context:

source: Statista.com

c. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he sees at least 3 percent growth for next 4-5 years--reuters.com.

4) ICYMI Tech News:

• Q2 2018 Results of note this past week: Apple $AAPL & Tesla $TSLA. 

• 342M smartphones were shipped worldwide in Q2 2018, down 1.8% YoY from 348.2M, with Huawei passing Apple to ship the second-most smartphones--IDC.com.

• Chinese smartphone market declined 7% YoY in Q2 2018, fourth consecutive quarter of annual decline; Huawei's marketshare grew from 20% to 26%--counterpointresearch.com.

• Amazon has 70% of the U.S. home speaker market, followed by Google with 24% and Apple only 6%. The number of smart speaker devices in use in the U.S.? 50 million--CNET.com.

• 5G: Nokia & T-Mobile US agree to $3.5B 5G network hardware deal--reuters.com.

• "Logistics is hard"--Walmart stumbles with its 'last mile' package delivery plan--reuters.com.

• Cryptocurrency: California college student who allegedly was a member of OGUSERS, allegedly stole over $5M in cryptocurrency by "SIM swapping" (hijacking cellphone numbers)--motherboard.vice.com.
• Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic--Paul Krugman in the New York Times | NYTimes.com.

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

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