Apple’s Tim Cook calls India ‘huge opportunity’ after tech meeting at White House with Prime Minister Modi
US President Joe Biden looks on as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during a meeting with senior officials and CEOs of American and Indian companies, in the East Room the White House in Washington, DC, on June 23, 2023.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
The CEOs of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft got a healthy does of facetime with the leader of India this week, who was in the U.S. to meet with President Biden as well as other political and business leaders.
The tech company execs spent over an hour with Prime Minister Narendra Modi inside the White House on Friday, discussing opportunities and challenges in investing in India. Earlier in the week, Modi met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
After the meeting concluded at the White House, Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that India represents a “huge opportunity.” When asked if Apple would continue expanding there, he pointed to the two retail stores the company opened in India earlier this year.
It was the first state visit to the U.S. for Modi, who became prime minister in 2014. Following Friday’s meeting, the White House said Google will be working with the Indian Institute of Science on open sourcing of speech data for artificial intelligence models.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was also in Washington for the event. Two people with knowledge of the matter said Altman and Modi discussed opportunities to collaborate on AI.
Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture capital firm General Catalyst, attended the roundtable. Ahead of the meeting, he shared with CNBC his intentions to find alignment on efforts to streamline technology transfer rules between the U.S. and India, which has overtaken China as the world’s most-populous country. U.S. relations with China have become increasingly strained in the past few years.
We are in a digital cold war with China, and this approach will ultimately foster an atmosphere of increased cooperation,” Taneja said.
Large semiconductor companies like Micron and Applied Materials used Modi’s visit as an opportunity to announce plans to make significant investments India. Micron is aiming to open a facility in Modi’s home state of Gujarat as the broader chip industry looks for ways to diversify its supply chain. Lam Research revealed plans to train 60,000 Indian engineers.
Access to highly skilled labor and outdated labor laws are challenges for American businesses when it comes to staffing up in India.
“U.S. companies in India have had difficulties over time with regulatory uncertainty as well as challenges in relocating or terminating employees,” said Kenneth Juster, former U.S. Ambassador to India. Juster, who’s now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he remains optimistic, adding that India has pledged to ease the process for foreign companies to do business there.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
WATCH: PayPal CEO Alex Chriss on opportunities for consumers and small businesses
Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.
Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
- Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected
Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.
The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.
“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”
In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.
Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.
Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.
As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.
Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.
Asana CEO and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA | AFP | Getty Images
Dustin Moskovitz, the CEO of Asana and one of the original founders of Facebook, is retiring from the software company he started in 2008.
Asana announced Moskovitz’s retirement on Monday as part of the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report, and its board has retained an executive search firm to help choose a new CEO. Moskovitz notified its board “of his intention to transition to the role of Chair when a new CEO begins,” the company said Monday.
“As I reflect on my journey since co-founding Asana nearly 17 years ago, I’m filled with immense gratitude,” Moskovitz said in a statement. “Creating and leading Asana has been more than just building a company — it’s been a profound privilege to work alongside some of the most talented minds in the industry.”
Asana said fourth-quarter sales rose 10% year-over-year to $188.3 million, which was in-line with analyst estimates.
The company said its fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share was breakeven, ahead of analyst estimates of a loss of one cent per share.
Asana said it expects fiscal first-quarter revenue of $184.5 million to $186.5 million, trailing analyst expectations of $191 million.
Asana’s stock price was down more than 25% in after-hours trading Monday.
WATCH: The market declines look more like a reversion to the Fed.
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