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Singapore’s tech start-up scene has grown in recent years, and the city-state ranked seventh in the latest Global Innovation Index 2022.

Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Global venture dollars may have dropped in 2022, but Singapore’s government-owned tech investment firm is optimistic about 2023.

“2023 is probably going to be a pretty decent year for venture capital in Singapore,” Hsien-Hui Tong, executive director of investments at SGInnovate, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Wednesday.

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Unlike global markets more generally, the venture capital scene in Singapore is “still very active,” Tong said. That’s because companies in the country tend be at the earlier, nascent stages of development, and “in the seed and Series A stages, there’s still lots of liquidity. There’s lots of capital there,” he added.

Global markets, on the other hand, tend to be at the “more mature” stages of Series B and C, where venture capital has “dried up a little bit.”

A seed funding round — also known as the initial investment — is followed by various rounds, known as Series A, B, C and so on.

Venture funding for the first nine months of 2022 totaled $369 billion, down 25% year on year, according to Crunchbase.

2023 may be a 'decent' year for Singapore venture capital: Government-owned tech organization

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“2022 has been a good year for us, quite unlike some other investment categories. It was a good year for emerging tech startups where a lot of breakthroughs have happened,” Tong said.

For example, Singapore-headquartered biotech company MiRXES launched a “T10 ultra-high throughput sequencing platform” — which it says would help with the early detection of diseases and precision medicine — in Asia-Pacific last month.

And clean-tech company SunGreenH2, which raised $2 million led by SGInnovate in August, is conducting trials of its materials with global electrolyzer manufacturers.

Tong added that Singapore has been “sheltered from a lot of the effects” of global macro economic headwinds. As a result, Singapore has been able to “build up its infrastructure probably a little bit better.”

He also named energy as a sector to watch in 2023 in light of breakthroughs in nuclear fusion and hydrogen.

“Quantum technology is another area where I think there are going to be some significant announcements and breakthroughs,” he added.

There are 'big opportunities' in China's tech sector: VC partner

Correction: This report has been updated to accurately reflect global venture funding for the first nine months of 2022. An earlier version misstated the figure.

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Super Micro’s 44% plunge this week wipes out stock’s gains for the year

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Super Micro's 44% plunge this week wipes out stock's gains for the year

Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7. 

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Super Micro investors continued to rush the exits on Friday, pushing the stock down another 9% and bringing this week’s selloff to 44%, after the data center company lost its second auditor in less than two years.

The company’s shares fell as low as $26.23, wiping out all of the gains for 2024. Shares had peaked at $118.81 in March, at which point they were up more than fourfold for the year. Earlier that month, S&P Dow Jones added the stock to the S&P 500, and Wall Street was rallying around the company’s growth, driven by sales of servers packed with Nvidia’s artificial intelligence processors.

Super Micro’s spectacular collapse since March has wiped out roughly $55 billion in market cap and left the company at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq. On Wednesday, as the stock was in the midst of its second-worst day ever, Super Micro said it will provide a “business update” regarding its latest quarter on Tuesday, which is Election Day in the U.S.

The company’s recent challenges date back to August, when Super Micro said it would not file its annual report on time with the SEC. Noted short seller Hindenburg Research then disclosed a short position in the company and wrote in a report that it identified “fresh evidence of accounting manipulation.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Department of Justice was in the early stages of a probe into the company.

Super Micro disclosed on Wednesday that Ernst & Young had resigned as its accounting firm just 17 months after taking over from Deloitte & Touche. The auditor said it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”

A Super Micro spokesperson told CNBC that the company “disagrees with E&Y’s decision to resign, and we are working diligently to select new auditors.” Super Micro does not expect matters raised by Ernst & Young to “result in any restatements of its quarterly financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, or for prior fiscal years,” the representative said.

Analysts at Argus Research on Thursday downgraded the stock in the intermediate term to a hold, citing the Hindenburg note, reports of the Justice Department investigation and the departure of Super Micro’s accounting firm, which the analysts called a “serious matter.” Argus’ fears go beyond accounting irregularities, with the firm suggesting that the company may be doing business with problematic entities.

“The DoJ’s concerns, in our view, may be mainly about related-party transactions and about SMCI products ending up in the hands of sanctioned Russian companies,” the analysts wrote.

In September, the month after announcing its filing delay, Super Micro said it had received a notification from the Nasdaq indicating that its late status meant the company wasn’t in compliance with the exchange’s listing rules. Super Micro said the Nasdaq’s rules allowed the company 60 days to file its report or submit a plan to regain compliance. Based on that timeframe, the deadline would be mid-November.

Though Super Micro hasn’t filed financials with the SEC since May, the company said in an August earnings presentation that revenue more than doubled for a third straight quarter. Analysts expect that, for the fiscal first quarter ended September, revenue jumped more than 200% to $6.45 billion, according to LSEG. That’s up from $2.1 billion a year earlier and $1.9 billion in the same fiscal quarter of 2023.

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Apple to buy Pixelmator, the iPhone image editing app with AI features

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Apple to buy Pixelmator, the iPhone image editing app with AI features

Peopl walk outside Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple Park campus before Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.

Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images

Apple will buy Pixelmator, the creator of image editing apps for Apple’s iPhone and Mac platforms, Pixelmator announced Friday in a blog post.

Pixelmator, a Lithuanian company, was founded in 2007, and in recent years has been best known for Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro, which compete with Adobe Photoshop. It also makes Photomator, a photo editing app.

Apple has highlighted Pixelmator apps over the years in its keynote product launches. In 2018, Apple named Pixelmator Pro its Mac App of the year, citing the company’s enthusiastic embrace of Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, such as removing distracting objects from photos or making automated color adjustments.

We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance,” Pixelmator said in its blog post.

Apple does not acquire as many large companies as its Silicon Valley rivals. It prefers to make smaller acquisitions of companies with products or people that it can use to create Apple features. Neither Pixelmator nor Apple provided a price for the transaction.

Pixelmator said in its blog post that there “will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time.”

Earlier this week, Apple released the first version of Apple Intelligence, a suite of features that includes photo editing abilities such as Clean Up, which can remove people or objects from photos using AI.

Apple has acquired other popular apps that received accolades at the company’s product launches and awards ceremonies.

In 2020, Apple bought Dark Sky, a weather app that eventually became integrated into Apple’s default weather app. In 2017, it bought Workflow, an automation and macro app that eventually became Shortcuts, the iPhone’s scripting app, as well as the groundwork for a more capable Siri assistant.

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Amazon shares jump 7%, approach record after earnings beat

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Amazon shares jump 7%, approach record after earnings beat

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 8, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon shares jumped 7% on Friday and neared an all-time high after the company reported better-than-expected earnings, driven by growth in its cloud computing and advertising businesses.

The stock is up about 32% for the year and touched $200.50 on Friday. Its highest close was $200, a mark the stock hit twice in July.

Revenue increased 11% in the quarter to $158.9 billion, topping the $157.2 billion estimate of analysts surveyed by LSEG. Earnings of $1.43 topped the average analyst estimate of $1.14.

Sales in the Amazon Web Services cloud business increased 19% to $27.4 billion, coming in just shy of analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount. That was an acceleration from 12% a year ago, but trailed growth at rivals Microsoft and Google, where cloud revenue increased 33% and 35%, respectively. Microsoft’s Azure number includes other cloud services.

Amazon’s capital expenditures surged 81% year over year to $22.62 billion, as the company continues to invest in data centers and equipment such as Nvidia processors to power artificial intelligence products. Amazon has launched several AI products in its cloud and e-commerce businesses, and it is also expected to announce a new version of its Alexa voice assistant powered by generative AI.

“Amazon has integrated AI into what is the most diverse tech footprint of any mega cap, with multi-billion revenue streams in e-commerce, advertising, subscriptions, online video, and cloud,” analysts at Roth MKM wrote in a note after the earnings report. They have a buy rating on the stock.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on the earnings call that the majority of the company’s 2024 capex spending is to support the growing need for technology infrastructure.

CEO Andy Jassy said the company plans to spend about $75 billion on capex in 2024 and that he suspects the company will spend more next year.

“The increased bumps here are really driven by generative AI,” Jassy said on the call. “It is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” he said, noting that shareholders “will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”

Advertising was another bright spot. Sales in the unit expanded 19% to $14.3 billion during the quarter, meeting expectations and outpacing growth in Amazon’s core retail business.

Amazon’s ad growth was about in line with Meta, which saw 18.7% expansion, and faster than growth at Google, which reported a 15% increase in ad revenue. Snap‘s sales also jumped 15% from a year earlier.

Amazon forecast revenue in the current quarter to be between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion, which would represent growth of 7% to 11% year over year. The midpoint of that range, $185 billion, fell short of the average analyst estimate of $186.2 billion, according to LSEG.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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