Bloomberg：科技巨头财报季聚焦AI支出与利润率

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. [music] Welcome to the Daybreak Asia podcast. I'm Doug Krner. Now in the week ahead, three of the biggest and most important tech companies in the world will be reporting earnings. We'll hear from Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. Now, they're all expected to post doubledigit percentage gains when it comes to revenue for the latest quarter. The market, though, is particularly anxious when it comes to their spending on AI and the degree to which those investments are proving to be profitable.

By the way, we'll also get updates from Samsung and SKH Heinix in the semiconductor complex and the stakes on that front are very high as well. For a look at the market action, let's bring in Bloomberg Sunonny Banga. Sunny is a member of the equities research team in Sydney. Thank you for being here. Talk to me about what you believe or what you see the market trying to track when it comes to earnings expectations.

Yeah, thank you for having me on today. The earning season is, you know, has kicked off and we've got um a couple of companies uh this week that are going to be quite important to the direction of that trade. um particularly their commentary around what they're seeing in the frontier labs uh in particular with Enthropic how the trajectory is looking since the uh company and and when I say company I mean Anthropic reported or gave uh clues to its third quarter revenue the market was probably left with more questions and so some of those questions if they can be answered on the earnings calls will be very important for the direction of trade and uh we've also got some of the memory companies also reporting this week, namely SKH Highix and Samsung, where I think the market's not only just looking for the length or direction of the AI trade, but also what's happening on the capital management front.

We got a few reports out this morning. Company has uh later then uh said no decisions been made on special dividend pay uh payout. So, I think that's sort of in the focus for many investors uh for this week. So, in the US on Sunday, we had the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, saying the company has closed a $40 billion debt deal to pay for semiconductors needed to fuel its ambitions in AI. And he went on to say that the company has essentially finalized the offbalance sheet debt raise to pay for these GPUs from Nvidia. when you hear something like that that this is happening off balance sheet does that raise a concern for you the yeah I I think the the phase we've moved into in terms of the AI trade um you know we've we've you know initially started with training then went into inference and now agentic clearly the agenting component this third phase we're in which we've been in all year is the most comput inensive out of all the phases and uh because it's the actual you know useful part of AI it's how we make you know productivity enhancements or companies can now bank revenues but then at the same token uh we have we are having to fund the buildout before the revenues come through a and that's where the financing component of it is becoming more and more tricky and obviously leading to uh the market getting worried about as you rightly point out the offbalance sheet funding component components of this.

But a lot's going to come down to whether these companies can keep accessing these debt markets and capital markets to fund this growth and are the revenues coming. Um, and you know, for the for the point for SpaceX, they can still access debt markets. I think Elon Muslouds might not be able to access them anymore. I mean, he's obviously

talking up his book relative to his competition. Um but that's the that's the problem here we are facing is we're doing such a huge buildout before before the actual revenues come through.

What about margins? Tell me a little bit about how you understand the metric here and what the risk to margin compression may be as we look at results from the most recent quarter here.

So that's that's a good point. the uh cost inflation that we've seen through chip prices moving up or memory prices moving up. It's it's beginning to impact uh many of the hardware supply chain. Um we've got Microsoft coming to report. So we we need to watch carefully what's happening in its high margin PC business. Uh and and then how that sort of transpires to uh some of the hardware stocks and server companies that are that are also operating the space.

Look, the the the inflation is real um in this space and then you know taking that to uh companies like Bloom Energy uh also reported on Friday noticing that margins are coming a little bit more under pressure. It's definitely the the pre you know there is a shortage that is that is causing this and so companies need to work out whether uh they can pass it through uh and and to some extent um you know the more commodity part of the AI supply chain may may face may face tougher and tougher pressure and the hyperscalers will be another test of that you know margin pressure when they come to report.

Sunny, I'm curious to get your take as to what you're seeing unfold in the Chinese equity market on the mainland. Things have really struggled here recently, and I think that the market overall has lost from its peak in May around $3.5 trillion. That seems stunning. What's underlying this pessimism? A sluggish economy and the lack of earnings growth is really underpinning uh the equity market performance. So uh MCI China at the start of the year was tipped to grow earnings about 10 to 12%.

And as the year has unfolded that that earnings those consensus earnings have now been reduced to basically flat growth. Uh so what what's underpinning that is that domestic companies in China are still really struggling. Domestic consumption is is weak. the property market uh particularly in terms of uh home prices uh are still fairly weak and that all that's sort of compounding into a into a negative uh outlook for the for the equity uh piece of the story.

So I I think there was a little bit of enthusiasm in the middle of the year that maybe we're going to have some earnings growth. China was China is a very cheap market on on PE ratios. Um and so now the market's looking back to what the government will do in terms of support and the plenum may not be the may not be the political event but you know maybe after the plenum we we might get clues in terms of stimulus.

Is there a bright spot when you look at the overall Chinese equity space? I mean I know that we're talking about a lot of different uh industries some of which are stateowned but I'm wondering whether or not you're seeing something mildly positive in the midst of all of this. Yeah, I I guess the the economy um and and the focus of the country has shifted towards um the new industrial manufacturing capacity that the that the China wants to build out which is which is namely uh AI uh and particularly AI hardware um because of export controls uh China cannot get access to the leading uh tools from ASML uh the leading Nvidia GPUs uh so that's cru created its own domestic cycle in in those uh parts of the market.

So newly listed uh memory maker CXMT h has been a a very strong uh had a very strong debu on IPO and is benefiting from the tightness in memory supply but also being the lo being its now local national champion on memory chips and that's sort of playing out on other capital equipment stocks in China. So there is a there are pockets inside the economy that or inside the market that are benefiting from what China needs in order to maintain its uh you know AI ambitions particularly relative to to the US.

So when you look at the Chinese large language models, the labs that have created them, [clears throat] do they necessarily have an advantage over American companies because they're more reliant on the open model? the the Chinese labs are uh definitely close followers to the frontier labs in the