Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: Big Tesla numbers juice EV companies About this episode It's the new year! Yes, welcome to 2022 from the Equity team. We hope that our holiday episodes kept you entertained, and warm. But it's now back to work, so let's get into the news:
Global stocks are generally higher today, while cryptos are mostly flat. In the last week, major cryptocurrencies have lost value.
Twitter banned Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene for "repeated violations of [its] COVID-19 misinformation policy."
India is investigating Apple's payment system for iOS.
Tesla Q4 deliveries came in above expectations, leading to the company's stock surging in pre-market trading. NIO also saw a bump, which means that EV startups are also having a good day.
The Sensetime IPO happened while Equity was on break. Despite raising far less than it had once wanted, the company's Hong Kong IPO is now in the books, and doing well as a trading equity.
And AIMMO raised $12 million in a Series A. The company provides data labeling tooling for enterprise customers building AI models.
Whoo! The year is underway! The great gears of work have once again begun to spin. Let's get it!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, the TechCrunch podcast where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex Wilhelm and it is 2022. Yes, my dear friends, we made it. From my desk this morning, big hugs to you and everyone else along for the ride. You may not be over 2021, you may still not be over 2020, but we are going to forge ahead because the news just does not stop. Don't worry though, I'm here with you. We're going to get through this together. So, we'll start off this morning with a look at the markets. Asian stocks are mixed today with Evergrande making even more headlines. I swear to you, I've been watching the Chinese real estate saga for like 10 years now and it never, ever bores me. Turning our lens to Europe, stocks were largely higher to start the year, so a good first note, if you
0:54 Speaker 00 will. And here in the United States, stocks are set to rip higher when the markets do open, but we've recorded this hours before that happens, so we'll have to kind of wait and see. Still, no major tone shift to start 2022 from where we left off last year. I would say it still feels like a risk-on moment in the equities markets, which is bullish overall if you own equities. I'm curious though what happens to SaaS stocks this year. Don't forget that they closed out 2021, actually down a fraction, and that kind of cut some of the steam behind what felt like an endless rally in the value of software companies. And speaking of endless rallies, major cryptos are largely flat this morning, but if we zoom out to a seven-day view, we can see that in the last week Bitcoin is off about 7%, ETH, Ethereum, whatever you want to call it,
1:37 Speaker 00 off about 6%, while Solana's token is off about 13% over the last week. Welcome to the new year. Kicking off a new full turn around the sun means that we have quite a lot coming up to think about. That means earnings are going to happen, as always, on a quarterly basis, but also it's the end of the year for most companies, which means that we'll also get a lot of annual reports. We're going to have new venture capital data coming in. I'm stoked about that and we have a little bit of a note on that at the end of the show. And I'll just say, as always, COVID, you know, the start to 2021's COVID year was very different than where we are today and definitely very different than where we were in 2020. So, I don't know what's ahead, but let's write a new chapter in that particular book. All right, big tech.
2:19 Speaker 00 All right, to kick off with the big tech set of news, we have four big stories, kind of a wide ranging list of things here, but I'll just say these are the four things that I think are the most important to start your week in case you missed them. Kicking off recently, TechCrunch reports that, quote, "Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, for, quote, 'repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.'" According to the company, "Her official government account remains active." That's a quick paraphrase of our own Devin Coldaway over from TechCrunch. Now, a couple of things. One, Twitter is allowed to police its own platform by American law. They can decide who can post and who can't. That's their free speech right. Deal with it. And lots of folks, users out there, want COVID wackos to get booted from Twitter so they can't keep spreading complete misinformation.
3:05 Speaker 00 But I'll just say that doing so, actually banning Representative Taylor Greene, kind of plays into her hands because now she can fundraise off this and say, ah, you know, big tech, they're out to get me. So there's no good solution. There's just no good way to handle this. There's no way in which you 100% win, I suppose. But keep an eye on the kind of interplay between technology and governments because that's going to be a big story for 2022. Let's move on. Last Friday, as the year was putting a bow atop its own head, quote, "The Indian antitrust watchdog ordered an investigation into Apple's business practices. In particular, the company mandating iPhone app developers use a proprietary payment system in India where the American firm commands less than 2% of the smartphone market." Again, a paraphrase of TechCrunch, this time it was our own Minnie Singh. I'll just say that the early signs here for Apple don't look good.
3:50 Speaker 00 Not going to get into why that's the case, but it's true. And so Apple could be in a little bit of trouble in the Indian market regarding its ability to command a 30% cut of payments. It's just an enormous fee that they charge and they want to defend it and say it's fair, but it does seem that the tide is turning against Apple. How much should you take away from this? Well, I'll just say that India does have a different and I would say more active approach to technology regulation than some other markets. So the news is not a huge surprise, given what we're seeing in, in fact, other countries. But it does mean that Apple's upside in India could be lower than it had once hoped or perhaps anticipated. Grow the market share, take a 30% cut, huzzah. But if you can only grow your market share and not get a 30% cut, well, not quite as good. The general point here is that technology regulation is going to be an enormous story
4:35 Speaker 00 around the world in 2022, especially as we see diverging governance models between democracies and authoritarian states as they relate to their own local or domestic technology industries. Now, you can kind of guess where I would put my money, but still, no matter what you think or what I think, this is going to be a key story to watch. And then this morning, we have Tesla news. According to our friends over at CNBC, Tesla deliveries amounted to 308,600 electric cars in the fourth quarter and full year deliveries amounted to, wow, this is a lot, actually, 936,172 vehicles in 2021. Now CNBC notes the consensus was for 267,000 EVs in the fourth quarter, so Tesla beat expectations by quite a lot. What happened as a result of that? Well, you guessed it.
5:20 Speaker 00 Tesla shares are up 7% in pre-market trading as I record this. I don't know where they are, but you listen to it, but pretty good result for Tesla. Other boats have been lifted by this. Neo's stock is up a couple of points in pre-market trading as well. The company, the Chinese EV, has lost some of its 2020 gains, but remains richly valued, I might say. I'm curious to see what happens to the company's stock, given the tensions between China and the US and kind of where companies can list, but a good day for Tesla is a good day for Neo is a good day for EV startups.
5:52 Speaker 00 And speaking of startups, let's talk about them. Oh, yeah. Things are actually a little bit light this morning, which is funny because I know that by noon today, we're going to have 87,000 pieces of startup news, but this morning, we can breathe a little bit and let's enjoy that. So to start, SenseTime's IPO. Now, if you recall, before we actually left off, we noted that SenseTime's IPO was delayed. This was back in December. The delay came in the wake of the Chinese AI company running afoul of the US government and winding up on a blacklist. So the stock was put on ice and then the IPO happened while we were off. They raised $744 million in a Hong Kong debut, but the company had initially wanted to raise $2 billion, which was not going to happen. So I'm going to say this is overall Good for the Chinese tech industry that the IPO happened.
6:35 Speaker 00 It clears the pipes a bit for 2022 and does show that Hong Kong listings for Chinese companies are viable today. And if my charts are correct, since time has done very well since that first day of trading, though I don't really trust the data source, I'm going to fact check that again, but certainly not a negative debut. And around, I think, to start the week, why not? Let's talk about IMO. I'm at, it's AMO, but with an I after the A. It's also in all caps. This is a startup, you can tell. AMO, yeah, okay, that's how you pronounce that. Anywho, the startup is based in South Korea and it just raised a $12 million Series A, according to our own Kate Park. And Kate writes that the company uses software and humans to label and categorize image, video, sound, text data, if you will.
7:19 Speaker 00 It's built kind of an AI data annotation platform, enabling the data labeling to happen faster for large companies. The company had about $10 million in 2021 revenue, according to our own reporting. So not a bad multiple there, though it does feel a little bit light for an AI-ish company, if you will.
7:37 Speaker 00 And to close things off this morning, a taste of what is to come. Now, I mentioned earlier on that we are expecting to see an enormous amount of data come regarding the global venture capital ecosystems. Well, it is, of course, a new year, so how can people resist? We're going to get charts plenty. But what matters is we've already done a little bit of the work. So Manish has already done up Indian data for TechCrunch, reporting that, quote, "Capital flowing to private Indian startups surged over four times to about $39 billion this year, and nearly three times, the previous best of $14.6 billion in 2019." So essentially, 2021 was a great year and it crushed a prior high, very impressive. And then he closes that paragraph by saying this, "According to data from Insight Platform Traction, which is also filed for an IPO." I was just rolling on the floor about that.
8:20 Speaker 00 Of course, the company that tracks data is also going public, why not? 2022, already off to a good start.
8:28 Speaker 00 It also appears that African startups have had a cracking year. 2021 was really good for African startups. Did they raise as much money as they should have? No, did they raise a lot more? Yes, they did, and that's positive news, and I'll take it. We don't have data yet from the US, EU and Asian markets, we will in the next couple of days. So we'll bring you all the charts from that. But here's a bit of a spoiler, things were good in Q4, I think, it's fair to say. And that means that things were very, very good in 2021 because through Q3, things were hot. So strap in, these are the good times. And that means we're going to have a lot of superlative to chat about in just a couple of days.
9:01 Speaker 00 All right, that is our show. That is the first Equity Monday of the year in the can. Only 51 more to go. We got this, guys. We got it. And we want you to have it with us. So make sure to follow the show on Twitter, where we tweet under the handle @EquityPod. I tweet under the handle @Alex. So if you want heavy metal tweets, that's where to go. We'll talk soon. We're back on Wednesday. Natasha is off this week, but I think otherwise we're fully back to speed. So hugs from us. Let's do it.
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