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Tim Cook, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) greets the media with folded hands outside the Apple store at Jio World Drive mall, Mumbai, India, April 18, 2023.

Ashish Vaishnav | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Apple CEO Tim Cook is in India this week. He’s opened two new Apple stores, is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and he’s seeing sights and visiting customers in the country.

The international trip is the strongest sign yet that India has become a huge strategic focus for Apple as supply chains move away from China and its smartphone market is increasingly saturated with iPhone owners.

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India could echo the role China has played in Apple’s business for the last 15 years: A massive market with an expanding middle class to power sales growth, and potentially a home base for the production of millions of Apple devices.

Analysts say that India’s large population and maturing economy is ideally situated for Apple to make inroads by increasing marketing efforts and offering retail in the country. At the same time, India’s government is eager to work closely with Apple to make it possible to manufacture in the country, CNBC reported.

There’s room for Apple to grow on the subcontinent: Apple has less than 5% of the smartphone market share in India, versus about 18% in China, said Angelo Zino, senior analyst at CFRA research. The bulk of smartphone sales in both countries use versions of the Android operating system created by Google.

“As you look at India today, it’s very similar to China 15 or 20 years ago,” Zino said. “It’s really that natural wealth effect over time that’s going to help Apple really penetrate and see significantly higher revenue potential in India.”

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The opportunity could be massive: Apple did $74 billion in sales in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in fiscal 2022. That’s about 18% of Apple’s total revenue during the period.

India is not there yet. It’s reported in a category with other markets called “rest of Asia Pacific,” which reported only $29 billion in sales during the same time period.

Corporate filings in India covered by local media suggest that Apple’s sales in the country were about $4 billion in fiscal 2022, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Apple reported nearly $6 billion in sales in the year ending in March.

Cook has also made the India-China comparison to investors.

“We are, in essence, taking what we learned in China years ago and how we scale to China and bringing that to bear,” Cook said on an earnings call earlier this year.

Nearly all Android

India is the largest market that the iPhone hasn’t fully cracked, meaning it is critical for sales growth.

Cook boasted in February that the company was successfully wooing “switchers” in the country. That’s Apple’s word for previous Android phone owners who have decided to buy their first iPhone. Cook said in February that Apple had its best sales quarter ever for iPhones in India in the quarter ending in December.

A woman poses for a photo near the screen displaying Apple’s tablets inside the store after the launch at Jio World Drive mall, Mumbai, India, April 18, 2023.

Ashish Vaishnav | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Indians who buy iPhones are much more likely to be “switchers” than customers elsewhere because Android dominates the Indian market, led by Samsung and several Chinese brands. Android had over 95% of market share in the country, according to Statcounter.

The main reason is price. Most phones sold in India are priced below even the least-expensive new Apple iPhone. Industry analyst IDC estimated in February that the average selling price of a smartphone in India is $224, which had increased 18% in 2022. Apple’s entry level phone — the iPhone SE — retails for $429 in the U.S.

One way for Apple to address this gap is by allowing customers to pay for their phones in installments, or giving them a discount for trading in an older device. Cook mentioned these strategies when he was asked about India in February.

“There’s been a lot done from financing options and trade-ins to make products more affordable and give people more options to buy,” Cook said.

The two physical Apple stores opening this week and the online Apple store which launched in the country in 2020 are also expected to boost sales.

‘Make in India’

The second part of the strategy is to build Apple products in the country, a massive project that requires not only Apple’s attention, but also efforts from its manufacturing partners and local and national governments.

Nearly all iPhones are currently assembled in China, which has caused some problems over the past five years, starting with trade tensions and possible tariffs during the Trump administration, and extending to more recent supply chain disruptions caused by Covid and China’s Covid policies, which led to sales shortfalls.

India could end up being a big winner as Apple looks for non-Chinese manufacturing options. In January, India’s commerce minister told CNBC that Apple was manufacturing its latest iPhone 14 in the country and had a goal to produce as many as 25% of all iPhones in the country.

Apple’s primary manufacturing partner, Foxconn, which oversees a large portion of the assembly of new iPhones in China, is expanding in India, too, reportedly building a $700 million plant for iPhone parts in Bangalore.

In another parallel to China, the Indian government is eager to embrace Apple and use it as a symbol to attract other high tech firms to the country for manufacturing and development. Over the past 20 years, Chinese governments at multiple levels have worked to make massive factories like Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory — known as “iPhone City” — possible.

Modi wants to discuss Apple’s plans for manufacturing around the country and creating manufacturing jobs, CNBC’s Seema Mody reported. He also wants to know about the challenges Apple has faced in growing its user base in the country.

Not so fast

Tim Cook, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) reacts as a man shows him Apple’s Macintosh outside the Apple store at Jio World Drive mall, Mumbai, India on April 18, 2023.

Ashish Vaishnav | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Apple has had its eyes on an India expansion since at least 2016, when Cook previously met Modi.

At that meeting, Cook told Modi about the potential for manufacturing and retailing Apple goods in the country. Now, six years later, Cook is back in India to open up the company’s first two owned-and-operated retail stores.

Apple was bullish on India back then, too: “India will be the most populous country in the world in 2022,” Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer at the time, saying it had “huge market potential.”

Apple’s long-term strategy in India is best summarized by a quote Cook gave to local media during his 2016 trip to the subcontinent.

“We are putting enormous energy in here, and we are not here for a quarter, or two quarters, or the next quarter, or the next year, or the next year, we are here for a thousand years,” Cook said.

Apple opens first India retail store with Tim Cook on site

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.

Ben Kriemann | Getty Images

Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.

Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.

There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.

Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.

In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.

Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.

CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia’s latest AI chips

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia's latest AI chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, the company’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, have been commercially deployed at CoreWeave, the companies announced on Thursday.

CoreWeave has received shipments of Dell-built shipments based around Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 AI systems, Dell said on Thursday. It’s the first cloud provider to install systems based around Blackwell Ultra.

The Blackwell Ultra is Nvidia’s latest chip, expected to ship in volume during the rest of the year. The systems that CoreWeave is installing are liquid-cooled and include 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs. The systems are assembled and tested in the U.S., Dell said.

CoreWeave shares rose 6% during trading on Thursday, Dell shares were up about 2% and Nvidia rose less than 2%.

The announcement is a milestone for Nvidia.

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AI developers still clamor for the latest Nvidia chips, which have improvements that make them better for training and deploying models.

Nvidia said Blackwell Ultra can produce 50 times more AI content than its predecessor, Blackwell.

Investors closely watch how Nvidia manages the transition when it announces new AI chips to see if there are production issues or delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in May that Blackwell Ultra shipments would start in the current quarter.

It’s also a win for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs to other clouds and AI developers. Although CoreWeave is smaller than the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, its ability to offer Nvidia’s latest chips first give it a way to differentiate itself.

CoreWeave historically has a close relationship with Nvidia, which owns a stake in the cloud provider. CoreWeave went public earlier this year, and the stock price has quadrupled since its IPO.

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IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

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IPO market gets boost from Circle's 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.

NYSE

For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.

Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.

Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.

Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.

It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”

Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.

The IPO market is coming back, but it won't be linear, says Lazard CEO Peter Orszag

For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.

After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.

The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.

‘Backlog of liquidity’

In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.

“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.

Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.

Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.

Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.

“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”

There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.

And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.

The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.

Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.

While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.

Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.

FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.

Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.

But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.

“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.

WATCH: Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

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