SHANGHAI — Nreal, a Chinese company making glasses for so-called augmented reality experiences, is looking to go public within five years, its CEO told CNBC.
“We’re thinking this is really a major tech market and really looking forward to what’s going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years. Very exciting – I think its more like ’06, ’07 of the smartphone business,” Chi Xu, CEO of Nreal said.
“We see a lot of good opportunities and, definitely, we’re thinking the market size is going to be massive. And we have this opportunity and we want to take this to the final end.”
He said an initial public offering could come in “less than 5 years.”
The company’s flagship product is a pair of lightweight glasses called Nreal Light, which has been released in a handful of markets including South Korea and Japan. Nreal says its glasses allow users to experience “mixed reality” where digital images are superimposed over the real world.
The Nreal Light connects to a smartphone. One of the immediate uses frees people from being tied to their small smartphone screens.
“Whatever you’re displaying in the cellphone screen in front of you, you put that in front of your face, into a massive screen, and that can be 3D, that can be ultra-high definition,” Xu said.
An attendee tries a pair of Nreal mixed-reality glasses at the MWC Shanghai exhibition in Shanghai, China, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021.
Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nreal’s ambitions pit it against technology giants that see a bright future in augmented reality. Apple CEO Tim Cook has called AR the “next big thing” and the iPhone giant is reportedly working on a headset. Facebook, Microsoft, Google and other technology companies are all investing in AR.
But current headsets on the market are expensive and often bulky. Nreal is hoping its portable nature will appeal to consumers. The price varies by market depending on how it is distributed. For example, in Japan the headset costs around $700. But in South Korea, the device can be purchased through a telecom operator’s plan which subsidizes the headset to around $300.
Business model
Nreal has a platform for developers to create apps for the headset’s operating system called Nebula.
“It’s very similar to what Apple has been doing for smartphone,” Xu said. “We offer a platform where people use that for different kinds of experiences and developers — they can deploy, they can develop different content onto the field.”
Apple not only makes money from sales of its iPhones and other hardware but it also gets revenue from commissions off its App Store.
Nreal has some notable backers. Kuaishou, the short-video platform in China and iQiyi, a video streaming service, are among the company’s investors. Xu said Nreal would be working with both Kuaishou and iQiyi.
“As we mentioned, not only are we going to provide the hardware. We want to bundle different services with the glasses. So take video for example, whether it’s a long video or short video. We’re thinking glasses are a much better terminal to experience the video in,” the CEO said.
“So that’s why we’ll be working with those giants, really working on the new interface.”
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.
