The demand for smartphones is falling – the manufacturer Apple is also feeling this.
(Photo: imago/photothek)
Dusseldorf The euphoria is followed by disillusionment: On Thursday, Amazon, Apple and Google announced very weak results in core areas such as the cloud, online ads and smartphones. The courses of the US tech giants fell accordingly in the after-hours trading.
A surprising reversal just one day after a firework display in technology stocks. The meta was the trigger: Facebook’s parent company suddenly gained 80 billion dollars in stock market value after it announced, among other things, the extensive use of AI.
The strong fluctuations should be a warning to investors: Just don’t overestimate the effects of the new hope technology ChatGPT. No question: The new AI language tool from the start-up OpenAI can do a surprising amount, convincing with creative texts or usable software programming. And that is just the beginning. In the long term, AI will revolutionize the economy.
Memories of the dot-com bubble are revived
The emphasis, however, is on the long term. Whether it’s the printing press, electricity or the Internet: all key innovations take time. Their disruptive power is enormous, but in the transition phase they find it difficult to find large and, above all, profitable applications. This will also be the case with artificial intelligence.
Investors behave irrationally when they triple Buzzfeed’s price within days just because the media house wants to create and publish texts with ChatGPT. This brings back memories of the dot-com bubble, when AOL or Stamp.com made such price jumps – because they wanted to change the world with the Internet.
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Even the announcement by Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg that he would use generative AI in “virtually every product” does not justify the euphoria. Well, the share buyback for $40 billion also wowed investors. But Meta’s numbers were terrible: Sales fell 4.5 percent year-on-year and profits fell 55 percent.
iPhones and Macs are less in demand
The situation is similarly bleak for the other tech giants. The slowdown in cloud business is most worrying for the three market leaders, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Online ads are also declining, not to mention iPhone and Mac sales: the decline isn’t just down to delivery issues, as Apple is keen to explain its revenue shortfall.
The global demand for smartphones is falling massively according to new figures from the industry service International Data. Apple is doing better than its peers, but some analysts are expecting a “period of weaker demand,” as Wall Street analyst Krish Sankar von Cowen aptly put it.
No AI euphoria should hide this from investors: after the tech boom in the pandemic, the lull is now coming. Amazon, Apple and Google do not know how long this will last. All three refuse to give an annual outlook.
ChatGPT or other AI applications may seem like magic, but investors shouldn’t stare too wide. On the stock exchange, the magic will lose its effect.
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