Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Motor City v. Silicon Valley
– Updated 03-30-2018 – Business Insider reports that Silicon Valley darling Tesla shares have collapsed almost 6% since January 1 on a string of critical reports about the company’s ability to keep up healthy production levels and meet delivery expectations for its new mass-market Model 3 sedan.
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Back in April, the tech sector was leaping for joy when Tesla’s stock market valuation passed Ford and GM. Rumors abound in Silicon Valley that Tesla is the future of transportation and Elon Musk is the king of cars because they took more orders for cars that did not burn up or crash out of control. In 2016 Tesla delivered only 76,000 vehicles. Ford sold nearly 1 million F-Series trucks in 2016.
Despite the happy dances in Silicon Valley, which fancy itself as the logical successor to Detroit as the capital of American innovation new research says not so fast. The west coast upstarts — Uber, Google (GOOG), and Tesla (TLSA) — still have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to outpacing Michigan manufacturers. The Verge points us to Navigant Research, whose newly released “leaderboard” report ranks autonomous vehicle players not just on their ability to make a car drive itself, but on their ability to bring that car to the mass market.
Navigant Research scored 18 companies working on self-driving technology on 10 different criteria related to strategy, manufacturing, and execution. The report combined all that into an overall score to get a sense of who’s ahead and who’s not. General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) are currently leading the pack, with Daimler and Renault-Nissan close behind. Those four companies make up Navigant’s “leader” category. In other words, when you climb into your first self-driving car in 2021, it will almost certainly be built by one of those four companies.
Most everyone else is in the “contender” category. This includes car companies like BMW, PSA, Hyundai, Toyota, Tesla, and Volkswagen; suppliers like Delphi and ZF; and tech firms like Alphabet’s Waymo. Further down the list, in the “challengers” category, are companies like Honda, nuTonomy, Baidu, and Uber.
Detroit is beating Silicon Valley
Sam Abuelsamid, a senior research analyst at Navigant and one of the authors of the report, told the Verge the reason Detroit beating Silicon Valley so badly in this all-too-crucial race to get autonomous vehicles on the road is because of experience. He says, Silicon Valley, “ …. will have to do deals with someone to get actual vehicles.”
Alphabet’s Waymo, scores top marks for technology but drags in the production strategy and sales, marketing, and distribution buckets. The company plans to work with legacy automakers to put its tech in cars, but has not yet struck any major deals. Mr. Abuelsamid detailed on an email with the Verge that Waymo is in the best position of the contenders.
They have almost every piece of this—except the product strategy … Waymo has what is arguably the best technology right now, although they probably aren’t that far ahead of the leading [original equipment manufacturers] but they will have to do deals with someone to get actual vehicles”
Despite Uber’s high profile, a recent study showed that only 15% of U.S. consumers have tried a ride-hailing app like Uber. Uber also has a safety problem – Uber drivers have been charged with murder and violent crimes against their customers. In the Navigant research, Uber wallows near last place thanks to low grades for distribution, product portfolio, and staying power—and because makes Uber makes neither cars nor money. In fact, its key strength—that it already operates a global fleet of shared vehicles—may not be enough here. “It’s a lot easier for the company that actually has the infrastructure to create vehicles to recreate what Uber’s done, than the other way around,” Mr. Abuelsamid says.
Scale matters in the auto industry.
The Navigant analyst explained scale matters in the auto industry.
All the little [Silicon Valley] startups may have some interesting ideas, but they don’t have the resources to produce something sufficiently robust to be commercially viable. If they have something good to offer, their best bet is an acquisition
The “legacy automakers” have engaged in mergers and acquisitions and early maneuvering in the autonomous vehicle arena as Mr. Abuelsamid stated. The report predicts that big companies will buy little startups to leverage their technology and expertise to round out the much larger-scale enterprise of developing, testing, validating, producing, and distributing self-driving cars.
Wired says Ford and GM both score in the low to mid 80s on the technology front; it’s their old-school skills that float them to first and second place. They’ve each spent more than a century developing, testing, producing, marketing, distributing, and selling cars. Plus, each has made strategic moves to bolster weak points.
GM recently acquired Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle technology maker in a deal valued at more than $1 billion. GM said the acquisition will allow it to “accelerate” its autonomous vehicle development efforts.
Ford has announced an investment of $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, a startup run by Carnegie Mellon roboticists and engineers who really know their artificial intelligence stuff.
Fiat Chrysler has partnered with Alphabet to jointly test autonomous technology in Pacifica minivans, and Alphabet is opening a 53,000 square foot self-driving car development center near Detroit in Novi, MI.
GM has invested $500 million in ride-sharing provider Lyft to beef up its ridesharing service. In the “long-term strategic alliance,” the companies will work on what they call “on-demand autonomous vehicles.” For now, the deal means GM cars will be the “preferred” vehicle used by Lyft drivers who rent their cars in various U.S. cities. Those vehicles will tap into GM’s OnStar service, while GM and Lyft promised “personalized mobility services and experiences,” but did not elaborate.
Ford, meanwhile, recently announced a $75 million investment in LiDAR maker Velodyne, to “quickly mass-produce a more affordable automotive LiDAR sensor” so the company can launch a fleet of self-driving ride-sharing cars by 2021
Ford has also acquired SAIPS, an Israeli machine learning firm to further strengthen its ability in artificial intelligence and computer vision. SAIPS has developed algorithmic solutions in image and video processing, deep learning, signal processing and classification. This expertise will help Ford autonomous vehicles learn and adapt to the surroundings of their environment
Ford announced that it would take part in a $6.6 million seed funding round for Civil Maps to further develop high-resolution 3D mapping capabilities. This provides Ford another way to develop high-resolution 3D maps of autonomous vehicle environments. Ford has also agreed to acquire Chariot, an on-demand shuttle service based in San Francisco.
Mr. Abuelsamid predicts that early on, you probably won’t be buying a self-driving car at a dealership, but rather riding in one that you hail through an app-based service like Uber or Lyft. These vehicles will be part of a fleet owned by a manufacturer, like Ford or GM. Fleet ownership will help manufacturers manage the issues self-driving vehicles are likely to encounter early on, like insurance for the inevitable accidents. Navigant’s Abuelsamid says
With all of that in mind, it’s far easier for a manufacturer to replicate the sort of logistics platform that Uber or Lyft have than it is for those companies to invest in and create the development, manufacturing, and service infrastructure that [original equipment manufacturers] have
Mr. Abuelsamid noted that Tesla ranked pretty far down the “contender” because Elon Musk’s company is “lacking in quality, distribution, financial stability, and their [Autopilot] 2.0 hardware will never be more than limited Level 4-capable (PDF) at best.” In other words, Musk would be advised not to start gloating about his company being valued higher than the OG’s Ford and GM quite yet.
Related articles
- Wall Street has lost its mind when it comes to Ford (F) (businessinsider.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Cars |
Tags: 2017, Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Baidu, Detroit, Elon Musk, F, Ford, GM, Machine learning, Michigan, Motor Ciy, Silicon Valley, Tesla Motors, Uber, Waymo
Whose Time Is It?
What time is it? If you looked at the lower right corner of your Windows PC screen, you know what time it is. That is good enough for most people, but followers of the Bach Seat want to know more. How does Microsoft know that time it is? Microsoft and everybody else uses Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC 7822 standard protocol called Network Time Protocol (NTP).
Network Time Protocol (NTP)
NTP is one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use. NTP was designed by UMich alum David Mills at the University of Delaware. NTP can maintain time to within tens of milliseconds over the public Internet, and better than one-millisecond accuracy on a LAN. Like many other things in the network world, NTP is set up as a hierarchy. At the top of the tree are “Atomic Clocks” (Stratum 0). Corporations, governments, and the military run atomic clocks.
Atomic clocks are high-precision timekeeping devices that use the element cesium, which has a frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hertz. That means it “oscillates” a little over nine billion times a second. Knowing the oscillation frequency and then measuring it in a device creates an incredibly accurate timekeeping mechanism. Atomic clocks generate a very accurate interrupt and timestamp on a connected Stratum 1 computer. Stratum 0 devices are also known as reference clocks. The other stratum levels are:
1 – These are computers attached to stratum 0 devices. Stratum 1 servers are also called “primary time-servers”.
2 – These are computers that synchronize over a network with stratum 1 servers. Stratum 2 computers may also peer with other stratum 2 computers to offer more stable and robust time for all devices in the peer group.
3 computers synchronize with stratum 2 servers. They use the same rules as stratum 2, and can themselves act as servers for stratum 4 computers, and so on.
Once synchronized, with a stratum 1, 2, or 3 server, the client updates the clock about once every 10 minutes, usually requiring only a single message exchange. The NTP process uses User Datagram Protocol port 123. The NTP timestamp message is 64-bits and consists of a 32-bit part for seconds and a 32-bit part for the fractional second. 64-bits gives NTP a time scale of 232 seconds (136 years) and a theoretical resolution of 232 seconds (233 picoseconds). NTP uses an epoch of January 1, 1900, so the first rollover will be on February 7, 2036.
Microsoft Windows Time Service
Microsoft (MSFT) has a mixed history of complying with NTP. All Microsoft Windows versions since Windows 2000 include the Windows Time service (“W32Time”) which was originally implemented to support the Kerberos version 5 authentication protocol. It required time to be within 5 minutes of the correct value to prevent replay attacks. The NTP version in Windows 2000 and XP violates several aspects of the NTP standard. Beginning with Windows Server 2003 and Vista, MSFT’s NTP was reliable to 2 seconds. Windows Server 2016 can now support 1ms time accuracy.
In 2014 a new NTP client, ntimed, was started. As of May 2017, no official release was done yet, but ntimed can synchronize clocks reliably under Debian and FreeBSD, but has not been ported to Windows or Apple (AAPL) macOS.
Accurate time across a network is important for many reasons; discrepancies of even fractions of a second can cause problems. For example:
- Distributed procedures depend on coordinated times to make sure proper sequences are followed.
- Authentication protocols and other security mechanisms depend on consistent timekeeping across the network.
- File-system updates carried out by a number of computers depend on synchronized clock times.
- Network acceleration and network management systems also rely on the accuracy of timestamps to measure performance and troubleshoot problems.
- Each individual blockchain includes a timestamp representing the approximate time the block was created.
NTP vulnerabilities
NTP has known vulnerabilities. The protocol can be exploited and used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for two reasons: First, it will reply to a packet with a spoofed source IP address; second, at least one of its built-in commands will send a long reply to a short request.
More vulnerabilities were recently discovered in NTP. SearchSecurity.com reports that security researcher Magnus Stubman discovered the vulnerability and, instead of going public, took the mature route and privately informed the community of his findings. Mr. Stubman wrote that the vulnerability he discovered could allow unauthenticated users to crash NTPF with a single malformed UDP packet, which will cause a null point dereference. The article explains this means that an attacker could be able to craft a special UDP packet that targets NTP, resulting in an exception bypass that can crash the process. A patch to remediate specific vulnerability — named NTP 4.2.8p9 — was released by the Network Time Foundation Project.
This is a Windows-only vulnerability at this time. The author urges anyone running the NTP daemon on a Windows system to patch it as soon as possible. This particular DoS attack against NTP could incapacitate a time-server and cause havoc in the network. The easiest fix is to apply the NTP patch the article states.
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NTP is important to your network and patching and protecting it should be a priority. The threat to your environment is real. If NTP is not patched, an attacker could take advantage of the chaos created by this vulnerability to hide their tracks since timestamps on files and in logs won’t match.
Way back in the day, when I was a network administrator, I inherited a network where a directory services container was frozen. Seems that time had never been properly set up on the server holding the replica and as time passed, the server time drifted away from network time and at some point, we could not make changes or force a replica update. That meant a late-night call to professional services to kill the locked objects and then apply DSRepair –xkz (I think) and then re-install a R/O replica.
Related articles
- A ‘leap second’ will make 2016 a little longer (businessinsider.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Over Half the World Connected to the Internet
New statistics show that over half of the world’s population is now using the Internet. The 2017 Q2 Global Digital Snapshot Report on social media and digital trends released by Hootsuite, a social media management platform, and We Are Social, a social media agency, found that more than 3.8 billion people around the world now use the internet. This means that global internet penetration is 51%. The report’s author flips the number and points out that people who don’t use the Internet are now in the minority.
How are these people getting online? The report says that the total number of unique mobile users now stands at 4.96 billion. The use of a mobile phone is now ‘normal’ around the world. Almost 66% of the entire global population regularly uses a mobile phone. More and more of these users now own a smartphone too, and the latest data suggest that more than half of the world’s population now uses one of these powerful devices.
2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite
The rapid spread of smartphones has led to significant growth in the number of mobile internet users. The number of people around the world accessing the internet via mobile reached almost 3.4 billion during early April 2017 according to the author.
Additionally, 93% of all internet users now go online via mobile devices (phones or tablets), and with the majority of new internet users now ‘phone first’, mobile’s share is likely to increase even more.
With all of this increased access, We are Social, writes that global social media users total to more than 2.9 billion users. This means that social media users are still increasing at a rate of more than 1 million per day – that’s 14 new users every second.
2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite
The article observes that mobile social media continues to see the fastest growth across all our key data points. In the past 3 months, mobile social media users grew by more than 1.6 million new users every day. The total number of people around the world accessing social media via mobile devices now stands at just under 2.7 billion, representing global penetration of 36%.
Where do all of these mobile social media users go? Of course, they go to Facebook (FB). The research says that Facebook dominates the social media world. The latest data suggests that the world’s favorite social platform adds more than a million new users every day.
2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite
Asia is the center of Facebook’s growth. Much of that growth came from India. With almost 250,000 new users in the country every day, the author speculates there’s a good chance that India will overtake the US to become Facebook’s most active market by July 2017. Bangkok is Facebook’s most active city, with roughly 30 million people in Thailand’s capital using the platform.
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It should be obvious to any marketer that firms need to remake their customer engagement plans and implement real-time interaction with their customers. Simon Kemp, We Are Social said.
“Half of the world’s population is now online, which is a testament to the speed with which digital connectivity is helping to improve people’s lives … Given this latest data, it’s probably time for us to stop referring to social as new media, and integrate it more seamlessly into our day-to-day activities.”
I think Mr. Kemp is too optimistic when he says that “digital connectivity is helping to improve people’s lives.” Followers of the Bach Seat know that too much social media is bad for you.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2017, Asia, Bangkok, Facebook, FB, Hootsuite, India, Internet, Mobile device, Networking, Smartphone, Social media
A Lifetime on Social Media
From the scary stats department – In 2015, time spent on mobile apps exceeded time spent watching TV for U.S. consumers according to TechCrunch. And now influencer marketing agency MediaKix has calculated more scary social media statistics. Social media users will now spend years online during their lifetime.
Growth on many of the top social media platforms continues to rise as each network rolls out new features and functionalities to better compete for users’ daily time. It must be working, not only is the number of people using social media increasing, and the time people are spending each day on social media is increasing. MediaKix says that just Facebook (FB) users are spending an average of 50 minutes each day on the site.
Time on popular social media platforms
In order to see how much the average person will spend on social media throughout their life, MediaKix calculated the time spent across today’s most popular social media platforms. Across today’s most popular social media platforms, people are spending the following daily averages:
- YouTube: 40 minutes
- Facebook: 35 minutes
- Snapchat: 25 minutes
- Instagram: 15 minutes
- Twitter (TWTR): 1 minute
The advertising firm says these social media consumption rates, across a lifetime will total up to:
YouTube: 1 year, 10 months- Facebook: 1 year, 7 months
- Snapchat: 1 year, 2 months
- Instagram: 8 months
- Twitter: 18 days
5 years 4 months on social media
Cumulatively, this adds up for a total of 5 years and 4 months spent on social media across a lifetime. Compare the time spent on social media against more mundane life activities.
- Social Media: 5 years, 4 months
- Eating & Drinking: 3 years, 5 months
- Grooming: 1 year, 10 months
- Socializing: 1 year, 3 months
- Laundry: 6 months
The Santa Monica, CA firm projected the social media figures across an entire lifetime and put the numbers into the infographic below.
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I have argued for a while that the social media fake news issue is a result of the American educational system. They are obsessed with teaching the common core. They don’t teach any analytical skills. Schools need to reinstate current events and media literacy classes.
Quartz cited a survey that found that teens prefer Facebook as a news source (41%). Tweens break between YouTube (41%) and Facebook (37%). By huge margins, girls prefer Facebook for news, and boys, YouTube.
The converging trends of more time spent online, preferring social media as a news source and no education is putting democracy at risk.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Search Engine Journal offers some good suggestions on how to evaluate if a story is real or fake.
What is the Site? most major recognized sources for news journalism are not going to be producing clickbait fake news. Most of the fake news sites go for “shock” value and produce fake stories that are not as recognized. Look into the source itself and see whether it is a website that can be trusted.
Check the Domain – Many fake news stories use similar URLs and domain names to mimic reputable news sources, but rather than using a .com they use .com.co endings
What are the Authors’ Sources? – Good news stories contain links to other reputable reporting by respected organizations. Be wary of sources that cannot substantiate their claims.
Fact Check! – When in doubt, fact-check the information that you read! You can start with a simple search to look into the keywords or the event that is being reported on. You can also use sites like PolitiFact, FactCheck, and Snopes.
Examine the Website Closely – Look at the full spectrum of details on the site. Is there other fake-looking or shocking headlines? What does the overall website look like? How is the user experience? Sometimes doing just a little further digging will make it clear if a news story is fake.
Act! – Once you identify if a story is real or fake, you can make a big difference. Do not share stories on social media that are fake and make them more visible. If you notice a friend or family member share a fake story on a social media outlet, do them a favor and comment or message them showing how you found out it was fake so they don’t repeat the same mistake.
If you come across a fake news article, comment on it stating how you arrived at the conclusion it was fake. If everyone does their part to distinguish fake news stories and make them known, then they won’t be shared as easily.
Category: Social Networking |
Tags: 2017, Common Core, Facebook, FB, GOOG, Google, Infographic, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mobile app, Pinterest, Snapchat, Social media, Twitter, TWTR, YouTube
Can Toshiba Stay in Business?
Updated 01/31/2024 – On 12/20/2023 Toshiba ends its 74-year history as a listed company. Toshiba’s new owner TBJH Inc., delisted the scandal ridden firm as part of the acquisition agreement (PDF). The deal structure is quite complex and involves a web of subsidiaries. Here’s an explanation from Bing:
- TBJH Inc. is an indirect subsidiary of Japan Industrial Partners Inc. (JIP).
- TBJH will be acquired by another JIP subsidiary, an investment fund called TB Investment Limited Partnership (TBLPS), through Brick Lane Partners.
- TBJH Inc. acquired all of Toshiba Corporation’s shares listed on the Tokyo and Nagoya Stock Exchanges.
- The shares of Toshiba Corporation were delisted on Dec. 20, 20232.
- The same amount of money as tender offer price $15 Billion (4,620 JPY per share) is scheduled to be delivered in April.
This structure allowed TBJH to acquire the complete shareholding of Toshiba Corporation and take Toshiba private.
TBLPS is made up of four JIP funds, 17 Japanese businesses, and six Japanese financial institutions. The Related Fund is made up of JIP overseas cooperative funds and overseas funds including those from Japanese institutional investors.
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Updated 06/22/2017 – As predicted below, the NYT reports that the Japanese government formed a coalition including the U.S. venture capital firm Bain Capital to buy Toshiba’s microchip division. Estimates are the Toshiba deal is worth approx. $20 Billion.
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Toshiba is being driven to sell off its crown jewel, its microchip business, to stabilize the international giant. The New York Times reports that the stalwart of Japan’s postwar rise as a global industrial giant warned that it has doubts over whether it could stay in business. In a filing in Japan, Toshiba said it wrote off more than $6 billion connected to Westinghouse Electric’s troubled nuclear reactor projects in the United States, which had created “substantial uncertainty” over its ability to continue as a going concern.
The Toshiba microchip division is the number two global provider of NAND flash memory. NAND flash memory is a type of non-volatile storage technology that does not need power to keep data. Flash memory is electronic (solid-state) non-volatile computer storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed.
Toshiba originally invented flash memory in the early 1980s from EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory). They introduced it to the market in 1984. Called flash memory, after the flash on a camera, the chips have become an essential building block of the modern electronics industry.
The two main types of flash memory are named after the NAND and NOR logic gates. The individual flash memory cells have internal characteristics similar to those of the corresponding gates.
Where EPROMs had to be completely erased before being rewritten, NAND-type flash memory may be written and read in blocks (or pages) that are generally smaller than the entire device. NOR-type flash allows a single machine word (byte) to be written—an erased location—read independently.
The NAND type operates primarily in memory cards, USB flash drives, some solid-state drives, and similar products for general storage and transfer of data. NAND or NOR flash memory is also often used to store configuration data in many digital products, a task previously made possible by EEPROM or battery-powered static RAM. One key disadvantage of flash memory is that it can only endure a relatively small number of write cycles in a specific block.
Makers of flash memory chips
Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) is the biggest maker of flash memory chips, followed by Toshiba, SK Hynix, and U.S.-based Micron Technology (MU). Toshiba manufactures its NAND Flash Memories at its Yokkaichi Operations to maintain quality.
A sale of Toshiba’s chip business, while offering the business a lifeline, would take away its most successful business — and, more broadly, would represent a shift of a major technology away from Japan, depending on the buyer. The Toshiba sale is still in its early stages, and the NYT says as many as 12 companies have approached Toshiba with proposals. Reports are that Toshiba is asking bidders to value its operations at about $17.6 billion (2 trillion yen), and make at least a 50 percent investment.
One of the better-known suitors is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. Foxconn is the assembler of Apple (AAPL) iPhones and is the world’s largest contract electronics maker. Foxconn is based in Taiwan but performs most of its manufacturing in mainland China. According to the article, Foxconn could pay billions to buy the business.
Sources told Japanese public broadcaster NHK the first round of the Toshiba auction drew 10 offers. Toshiba has narrowed the field of bidders for its chip unit to four: U.S. chipmaker Broadcom (AVGO), a private equity firm Silver Lake Partners which reportedly offered $18 billion; SK Hynix; Western Digital (WDC); and Foxconn (2354), reports say Foxconn offered $27 billion.
Apple is considering teaming up with its supplier Foxconn to bid for the Toshiba semiconductor business, Japan’s NHK reported. Apple is considering investing at least several billion dollars to take a stake of more than 20 percent as part of a plan that would have Toshiba keep a partial holding so the business remains under U.S. and Japanese control, NHK reported.
Japanese government may save Toshiba
The authors point out Toshiba’s situation is a remarkable turnabout for Japan, a country that once controlled the majority of microchip markets. In the past Japanese companies have banded together to rescue flailing domestic rivals and not let them fold or be acquired by foreigners.
The article speculates that the Japanese government may cobble together a “team Japan” offer, but the response from potential participants — who would have to explain the spending to shareholders — has been tepid. “It is fundamentally unthinkable that the Industry Ministry would intervene and take some kind of action,” Hiroshige Seko, the industry minister, said at a news conference, further dampening expectations.
Mark Newman, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, argued in a report that Toshiba’s memory business remained valuable enough that selling it amounted to “selling the crown jewels to pay next month’s rent.”
Japanese politicians and industry leaders have voiced concerns over Chinese investors’ buying advanced chip production technology; semiconductors and memory are a major priority of China’s industrial policy. That could hinder any deal with Foxconn, said Mr. Newman, of Sanford C. Bernstein.
The worry is that Foxconn “would build huge fabs in China,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to semiconductor fabrication plants. “The jobs would move to China from Japan, and furthermore China would go after market share at the expense of crushing industry economics, so the U.S., Taiwan, Korea, Japan all get hurt substantially by this arrangement.” Foxconn has been successful in attracting subsidies from the Chinese government to build large-scale production facilities in China.
The article speculates that Foxconn could take the Toshiba technology and manufacture it more cheaply in China. Such a move could drive down pricing for memory, a boon for Apple and low-cost Chinese smartphone makers. But it would also propel China forward in its long push to become internationally competitive in semiconductors. Mr. Newman has warned that competition in NAND chips could heat up next year, creating the possibility of oversupply and putting more pressure on Toshiba’s ability to put in effect next-generation technologies.
Related articles
- Forming Japanese consortium for Toshiba chip unit seen as difficult task (japantimes.co.jp)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2017, AAPL, Apple, BRCM, Broadcom, Business, China, DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Flash memory, Foxconn, Hard disk drive, iPhone, NAND, SK Hynix, Toshiba, WDC, Western Digital