Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella arrives to court in San Francisco on June 28, 2023. Microsoft and Activision Blizzard CEOs are expected to testify to persuade a federal judge in California to reject the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to block their $69 billion deal.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday that he would like to eliminate exclusive arrangements between video games and popular gaming consoles.
Larger gaming rivals Nintendo and Sony often release exclusive titles on their devices as a way to lure customers in a competitive market. Microsoft employs the strategy as well for its Xbox, though Nadella said his company is a “low share player in the console market.”
Regarding exclusive deals, Nadella said “I have no love for that world.”
Nadella spoke at a hearing in federal court in San Francisco, as the Federal Trade Commission seeks judicial support to prevent Microsoft from closing its $68.7 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard. The FTC is worried that the tie-up could allow Microsoft to withhold popular games in Activision’s library from other consoles or degrade service for those games elsewhere.
Microsoft has said it wants to add Activision games to its Game Pass subscription service. To quell regulator concerns, Microsoft has offered 10-year agreements to make Activision’s popular Call of Duty titles available for Sony and Nintendo consoles.
Sony hasn’t accepted Microsoft’s offer and is opposed to its acquisition of Activision.
“I believe that this transaction is bad for competition,” Jim Ryan, head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in a video deposition that was played in court on Tuesday.
Nadella’s view on consoles reflects his broader approach to technology platforms. Since becoming CEO in 2014, he’s changed the culture at a company long known for proprietary closed systems, attempting to ensure that its software can work well on multiple devices, not just its own hardware.
Microsoft has brought its Office productivity applications to Apple’s iPad and its SQL Server database software to Linux. In earlier years, Microsoft prioritized Windows, but today the operating system is no longer the crucial source of revenue that it was. In the fiscal third quarter, Microsoft said Windows represented just over 10% of revenue, down from about 25% in 2011.
A Microsoft spokesperson said Nadella’s comments on Wednesday “made it abundantly clear that Microsoft will honor its commitments to its partners and the gaming community to bring more games to more players.”
Nadella also acknowledges that, when it comes to gaming, Microsoft has challenges. Microsoft’s cloud service, which is available in Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions, is “just not good enough” as a substitute for current platforms, he said.
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is skeptical of multi-game subscription services in general. He said in court on Wednesday that his company has experimented with them, including working with Nvidia’s GeForce Now while it was in a testing phase.
Kotick, whose company is based in Santa Monica, California, said he still wants to get the deal done with Microsoft even if he holds a differing opinion on subscriptions and whether they present a big opportunity.
“Maybe part of it is being in Los Angeles and having watched the big media companies move their content to these subscription streaming services, and the business results have suffered,” Kotick said.
Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley will decide if the FTC will receive a preliminary injunction that would stop Microsoft from closing the deal. Meanwhile, in the U.K., the Competition and Markets Authority moved to block the transaction in April.
“My board’s view is if the preliminary injunction is granted, they don’t see how the deal can continue,” Kotick said.
A sign with the Toyota logo in Surrey, England on August, 2023
Peter Dazeley | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Toyota Motor on Wednesday raised the operating profit forecast for its financial year ending in March, while flagging a 1.45 trillion yen hit from U.S. tariffs.
The company, which revised its operating profit outlook to 3.4 trillion yen from 3.2 trillion yen forecast earlier, missed profit estimates for the quarter ended September.
“Despite the impact of U.S. tariffs, strong demand supported by the competitiveness of our products has led to increased sales volumes mainly in Japan and North America and has expanded value chain profits,” Toyota said in its earnings report.
Here are Toyota’s September quarter results compared with mean estimates from LSEG:
Revenue: 12.38 trillion yen (about $81 billion) vs. 12.18 trillion yen
Operating profit: 834 billion yen vs. 863.1 billion yen
The world’s largest carmaker by sales volume reported a nearly 28% quarterly drop in profit, year on year, while revenue increased over 8%. Net income reached 972.9 billion yen, up
Toyota released 6-month results — from April to September — and the quarterly numbers have been calculated by CNBC, based on company statement and LSEG data.
The decline in the September quarter’s operating profit represents the second straight drop since the U.S. introduced “reciprocal” tariffs in April. Tokyo in July clinched a trade deal with Washington, bringing down tariffs on its exports to the U.S. to 15% from the 25% initially proposed by President Donald Trump. The 15% duties took effect on Aug. 7.
The company flagged that tariffs remain the largest drag on Toyota’s profit in the U.S., while factors such exchange rate fluctuations and increased expenses hit earnings in Japan, .
A Toyota executive said in the earnings call that the company was “assessing challenges” and “making preparations” for a plan to ship made-in-U.S. vehicles to customers in Japan, as to align with a new investment framework between Tokyo and Washington.
They added that the plan may not be “economically rational,” but could make certain products more available to Japanese customers.
Tariffs bite
The impacts of U.S. tariffs have been sharply felt across Japan’s auto industry, with Japanese shipments of automobiles to the U.S. dropping 24.2% in September, though this was slightly less compared to the 28.4% drop in August.
While Toyota has extensive North American production, about one-fifth of its U.S. sales still depend on Japanese imports and tariff costs on those imports are being absorbed rather than passed through, according to Liz Lee, associate director at Counterpoint Research.
“We’re expecting profitability to remain under pressure in [the current quarter] as tariff and currency headwinds persist, with gradual improvement likely from the [March quarter] onwards,” Lee told CNBC in a statement.
“Profitability should recover modestly next fiscal year if trade costs stabilize and the yen weakens, though rising EV competition will continue to cap upside potential,” she added.
Toyota has increasingly been leaning into electrified vehicles, which accounted for 46.9% of Toyota and Lexus vehicle sales in the first half of its fiscal year. These sales were primarily driven by hybrid electric vehicles in regions such as North America and China.
However, Toyota’s limited lineup of fully electric battery-powered vehicles could leave it more exposed to competition from Chinese EV players in Europe and Southeast Asia, Lee said.
Despite decreasing profits, Toyota has continued to show strong global demand. The company recently reported that vehicle sales, including its luxury brand Lexus, reached 5.3 million in the nine months to September, a 4.7% increase from a year earlier. In it’s earnings report, the company said it would continue to focus on increasing sales volume and cutting costs.
Nvidia will help train and mentor emerging deep tech startups in India as a founding member of a $2 billion investment alliance, deepening its presence in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.
The U.S. chipmaker has joined the India Deep Tech Alliance (IDTA) — a group of private equity and venture capital investors pledging $2 billion for deep tech investments — as a founding member. Deep tech startups are an umbrella term for emerging companies in semiconductors, space, AI, biotech, robotics, and energy.
The world’s most valuable company will offer technical talks and training through its Nvidia Deep Learning Institute to emerging startups in India.
Nvidia wants to “provide guidance on AI systems, developer enablement, and responsible deployment, and to collaborate with policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs,” Vishal Dhupar, Nvidia’s managing director of South Asia, said.
Nvidia did not disclose any financial investment, timeline, or training targets, and did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
“Nvidia’s depth of expertise in AI systems, software, and ecosystem-building will benefit our network of investors and entrepreneurs,” said Sriram Viswanathan, founding executive council member of the IDTA.
He told CNBC that the pace of innovation is accelerating in India and there could be a “significant number of Indian deep tech companies of global repute” in the next five years.
The Indian government is also actively encouraging research and innovation in the deep tech space through major initiatives, including over 100 billion rupees ($1.1 billion USD) under its AI Mission and a separate 1 trillion rupees ($11.2 billion) Research, Development and Innovation Scheme Fund targeting deep tech companies.
On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the country will host the AI Impact Summit in February next year.
The event is likely to see the participation of heads of state and top policymakers, along with business leaders such as Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of NVIDIA, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
Nvidia’s commitment in India coincides with rising global interest in India’s AI market, where OpenAI counts the country as its second-largest user base. U.S. rivals are also deepening ties: Google recently pledged $15 billion to build an AI hub in the southern city of Visakhapatnam.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer suggested Wall Street is too fixated the on large valuations of certain tech and speculative stocks, chalking up Tuesday’s market-wide decline in part to Palantir‘s nearly 8% loss despite strong earnings results.
“The larger issue is that we’re at the moment where money managers, when asked if the market’s too expensive, immediately think of the high-flying speculative stocks or those in the high-growth artificial intelligence column, and so they warn you away from the entire asset class,” he said. “These guys don’t think of the other 334 stocks in the S&P 500 that sell for less than 23 times earnings — those aren’t outrageous.”
Declines in Palantir and other artificial intelligence companies helped bring stocks down on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 losing 1.17%,the Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 0.53% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sinking 2.04%. Palantir managed to beat the estimates and offer solid guidance, citing growth in the artificial intelligence business. But investors worried broadly about the huge valuations of tech giants that have been leading the market to new heights.
Investors who saw Palantir as their “north star” were alarmed by its big pullback after a great quarter, according to Cramer. The fears triggered “a raft of selling” as these investors questioned the market as a whole, he continued.
Palantir can be a tough stock to classify, Cramer suggested, saying it straddles two different market segments — one centered around tech and artificial intelligence, and another focused on speculative stocks. He noted that the data-driven software company is very lucrative and fast growing, and it “defies easy description.” He listed off a number of its business arms — including its work as a defense contractor and as a consultant for companies looking to modernize and improve profitability.
To Cramer, it’s reasonable to consider that there’s nothing wrong with Palantir, and it just needs “to cool off in order to grow into its market capitalization.”
“Sure, there are indeed some stocks that are visibly overvalued, and when you pull them apart, many of these valuations can be justified, some can’t,” he said. “I think the Magnificent Seven can be justified on the pace of the growth that’s ahead of them. Same, ultimately, with Palantir.”