BUSINESS & MARKETS
The Economy as you take a Coffee Break.
The Patience Of A Very Tall Man
Harry Triguboff's first apartment building went up in Tempe, in Sydney's inner south, in the early 1960s. It was small, unglamorous and in a suburb nobody wrote about. He had been a taxi driver and a textile man before that, and he was not a builder by training. What he worked out in Tempe, and then repeated for six decades without materially changing his mind, was that apartment development is not a series of deals. It is a factory, and a...
A Record With The Sound Turned Off
A company made roughly 107 trillion won in three months and its shares went down. That is the entire story in one sentence, and it deserves a moment of silence before anybody rushes in to explain it away. Samsung Electronics guided to a third-quarter operating profit of about 107.4 trillion won, an increase in the order of 783% on the same quarter a year earlier, and in doing so became the first Korean company in history to clear 100 trillion...
Vertigo At The Top Of The Stack
Five days after Samsung posted the largest quarterly operating profit in Korean corporate history, its shares fell about 7% in a single session. SK Hynix fell about 10%. The Kospi, which is substantially a bet on those two companies wearing an index for a hat, dropped 5.5%. Nothing had broken. No fab had burned down, no order had been cancelled, no memory price had fallen. What had happened was that two ideas arrived in the same morning and the...
Six Perfect Quarters And A Shrug
Six consecutive record quarters. Net profit up by close to 70% year on year. And by the closing bell, down about 2%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported its third quarter and beat its own guidance, which it had already raised. The demand driver is the same one powering every interesting line item in global technology right now, which is to say artificial intelligence and the advanced packaging and leading-edge nodes that make it...
The Tower Nobody Has To Climb
Three of the largest companies in American telecommunications lost a meaningful slice of their market value on the same morning, and not one of them had done anything wrong. SpaceX had signed a nationwide spectrum deal to expand Starlink's mobile service, and Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile were marked down together, as a category rather than as competitors. That is the detail worth pausing on. The market did not pick a winner among the...