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How did technology bosses survive the "cold winter" of 2022?
The economy is in recession, inflation is skyrocketing, Silicon Valley is experiencing a cold winter... In the past 2022, the bosses of major technology companies have become the busiest people. On the one hand, they have to be good people, opening factories, building supply chains, and making large donations to charity all over the world. On the other hand, they have to be evil people. Brother, I am sorry to inform you that you have been laid off.
Hello everyone, this is the investment and research team. In this issue, we have summarized the very busy technology company bosses in the past year. Let’s take a look.
In 2022, Musk will be very busy. Tesla's German factory was completed and put into production, and Musk danced at the scene again; Space To say that Musk is the second busiest technology company boss in the world in 2022, then perhaps no one dares to claim the first place.
Musk has left many topics to the world in the past year, and the most talked about is undoubtedly his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. From sneaking in stock to join Twitter's board of directors, to holding a wash basin and entering Twitter's headquarters, this acquisition war that took half a year finally ended with Musk completing the acquisition after going through many bloody dramas.
But the acquisition brought about not the dust settling, but the passing of a storm. Including the CEO, the five core executives of CTO received their tickets home on the first day that Musk took power. Within one month, Boss Ma killed more than 3/4 of tiwtter employees through random layoffs. In addition to employees getting stabbed, users can’t escape. Blue V has increased prices but the service is not in place. At one time, there were 30 real-name Jesus and 100 Musk shadow clones on twitter. After being ridiculed by observers from all walks of life, Iron Man's character can no longer keep advertisers interested. 75% of core advertisers have suspended cooperation with tiwtter. Although 2022 will be unsatisfactory, Musk's pie is getting bigger and bigger. According to his own future planning ppt, Twitter will follow and WeChat , but this step is by no means simple.
In addition to the Twitter drama, Musk also has a keyword this year: war. Fight with employees. For example, the company has been wrangling with and Tesla employees for several months to get their jobs, and employees fired by Twitter lit up lights on the outer wall of the building to scold them. It got involved in the Russia-Ukraine war and issued a challenge to Putin . It provided 20,000 Starlink terminals for free, allowing Ukraine to have power outages and continuous Internet access, and the military became informatized. In the United States, sometimes they angrily complain about and apple , sometimes they mock , Biden, and for tax hikes, but they still give people the final solution every day, and they are like a world leader.
Although he is so busy, the product launch has not been missed. Tesla released the Optimus Prime robot on AI day, triggering a new wave of humanoid robots. Semi Truck has become the most reliable electric vehicle and may account for half of the large trucks in the United States in the foreseeable future. Although there is no product for the brain-computer interface, it allows monkeys to type with their thoughts, shortening the distance between technology and science fiction. Dramas aside, his business empire has continued to be at the forefront of technology over the past year. After acquiring Twitter, the purge-style layoffs brought his image back to the ground from space, allowing people to see his capitalist side.
announced its name change to Meta in October 2021, and announced layoffs in November 2022. Zuckerberg struggled during this year.
html At the beginning of 2014, Xiaozha was very proud. Oculus had shipped tens of millions of units, and the VR singularity was almost right in front of him. However, the achievements of hardware cannot bring back the decline of software. The metaverse without legs and Xiao Zha with the picture quality of the 1990s have become this year's new hot memes. It spent tens of billions to develop a Horizon World that even developers were too lazy to play. This development failure can almost be regarded as the Atari impact in the field of VR.All in Metaverse, renamed Meta, Xiao Zha’s company’s market value has dropped by nearly two-thirds in the past year. Continuous investment has not yielded the returns it deserves. In the third fiscal quarter financial report released not long ago, the revenue of Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is responsible for developing virtual reality equipment, was nearly halved, with a loss of more than 3.6 billion US dollars.
The continuous losses were the last straw in Zuckerberg's heart. In November 2022, Zuckerberg announced the largest layoffs in the history of Facebook , laying off 11,000 employees around the world in one go. The former Harvard genius is now feeling the cold winter of in the capital market.
Just as Xiao Zha said when the name was changed to Meta, it will take about 10 years for the bet on the Metaverse to see returns. And just one year after changing its name, Meta has experienced a painful decline in revenue and global layoffs. Is there still a chance for Xiao Zha's dream of the metaverse to be realized?
If in the past year, the bosses of smartphone manufacturers have been trying their best to boost market sales, then Cook may not be included. In the past quarter, iPhone was still the best-selling smartphone in the world, and strong market sales also helped Apple withstand the cold winter of the capital market. In the competition with fellow FAANGs, Apple was the only company that did not fall in the past quarter.
As Apple CEO Tim Cook , he has shown his true nature as a "businessman" in 2022. He has made many decisions that "violate the teachings of his ancestors", whether it is to add more advertisements to the software system, or to stick to the bottom line of 30% Apple tax , or to launch new products more quickly that seem to have no upgrades. Under Cook's leadership, almost all topics in the past year have been related to interests, which has helped Apple to withstand the economic downturn to a certain extent.
This year is Cook’s eleventh year as Apple’s CEO. It’s hard to say whether he made Apple or Apple made him during this long period of time. The only thing that is certain is that Cook will continue to appear in the position of Apple CEO until he can find a true successor for Apple.
If you must find a representative figure in this year’s currency circle, SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) must be the only choice. He started to get involved in the cryptocurrency industry in 2017. In just 4 years, he accumulated tens of billions of dollars in crypto assets and was listed on the Forbes Global Rich List. SBF’s fortune history is as fascinating as his iconic afro. In the first half of 2022, SBF was named one of the "Top 100 People of the Year" in 2022 by "Time" magazine, which was unparalleled for a while.
But who would have thought that only a few months later, SBF would fall from the altar. Due to a chain reaction caused by a large number of opaque related transactions between its hedge fund Alameda Research and FTX, FTX suffered a run of more than 6 billion US dollars in just a few days. FTX declared bankruptcy due to its inability to pay these assets. SBF's personal wealth also evaporated from 15 billion US dollars to zero. After the glory, it was nothing but chicken feathers. The ups and downs of
SBF in a few years also reflect the impetuousness of the cryptocurrency field to a certain extent. Compliance issues have always left the cryptocurrency industry in a gray area. Coupled with the opaque management of large amounts of funds, centralized exchanges have once again been pushed to the forefront after the fall of FTX. No one knows whether SBF will make a comeback, but he and his FTX have left a classic business case for Wall Street , just like Lehman Brothers .
In 2022, the 65-year-old Son Masayoshi announced for the second time that he was retiring from SoftBank. Compared with his rapid retirement in 2014, this time, Son’s retirement was a bit embarrassing.
Over the past eight years, the assets of the SoftBank empire led by Masayoshi Son have continued to shrink. In particular, the Vision Fund established under the leadership of Masayoshi Son in 2017 has experienced successive investment failures in the past five years, which ultimately became the trigger for Son to bid farewell to SoftBank.From winning the IPO of Alibaba in 2014 to having a personal debt of US$4.7 billion in 2022, Masayoshi Son may really have to say goodbye to SoftBank, which he founded.
What makes Son even more anxious is Arm. This chip design company that SoftBank once acquired with a wave of Masayoshi Son’s hand for a huge sum of 3.3 trillion yen, or approximately 213.5 billion yuan, has now become a hot potato in Son’s hands. Since Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm was not approved due to regulatory pressure, Son's plan to subsidize SoftBank failed and he had no choice but to seek an independent listing of Arm again.
Just as the times chose Masayoshi Son, now he is experiencing another test that the times have brought to him in the economic downturn cycle. The 65-year-old Son also has a deep understanding of the principle of "profit and loss come from the same source" in the capital market.
Those who also understand the "source of profit and loss" in 2022 should also include Huang Guangyu.
Huang Guangyu, who was released from prison for two years, returned to his management position with his big plan to revive Gome . At this moment, he was full of confidence and even shouted the slogan "Strive to use the next 18 months to restore Gome to its original market position." But within 650 days, the e-commerce transformation plan formulated by Huang Guangyu for Gome did not succeed. New attempts such as "Really Beautiful", "Zhangshangzhe" and "Decorate Home" failed to stir up any splash in the market. The e-commerce track is already too crowded, and it is difficult for investors to be interested in this old style of play.
While Huang Guangyu was transforming Gome, he also made full preparations. Since the end of 2021, Huang Guangyu and his wife have reduced their holdings 13 times so far. The reduction has exceeded more than 7 billion shares, and the cumulative cash out has exceeded 1 billion Hong Kong dollars. The proportion of holdings in has dropped to 33.88%. We must know that as the founders of Gome, Huang Guangyu and Dujuan once accounted for 87.11% of Gome's equity, and now they have reduced their holdings by more than half.
While Huang Guangyu cashed out and left, 90,000 Gome employees were laid off to 46,000, and the rest were furloughed. Faced with those former employees who came to ask for wages without receiving compensation, he and the executives only felt that the other party had no conscience.
Many people say that this era no longer belongs to Huang Guangyu and his Gome. Huang Guangyu was imprisoned for ten years, which caused him to miss the ten years of rapid development of and China Mobile Internet . Where is the next stop? Huang Guangyu may not have thought about it yet, but his Gome is now on the verge of bankruptcy.
Huang Guangyu’s lost ten years made Liu Qiangdong . , JD.com, and have developed rapidly in the past ten years, catching up with , mobile Internet, , and e-commerce. JD.com has also become the "second pole" of China's e-commerce after Taobao. The former "Big Qiangzi" has become the "Brother Dong" today.
After the Mingzhou case was exposed, Liu Qiangdong disappeared from the public eye for four years. It was not until the settlement of the Mingzhou case in 2022 that Liu Qiangdong came to the forefront again. On November 22, Liu Qiangdong issued an internal letter, announcing that the cash salary of all senior managers of JD.com Group would be reduced by 10%-20%. It also improved the benefits of grassroots employees and established a "Housing Security Fund" for all logistics, customer service and other grassroots employees, including all Debon employees. Jingdong will invest tens of billions in the next ten years to provide grassroots employees with interest-free loans for home purchases.
Perhaps no one expected that after Liu Qiangdong ended the Mingzhou case that he had been involved in for four years, he would return to the front desk in this way. After resigning as CEO of JD.com, Liu Qiangdong, who has not relinquished power, has been adjusting JD.com's strategic direction in the past few years, especially the four measures launched this time to guide JD.com to the goal of common prosperity .
As 2022 is about to pass, the crisis brought about by the global economic downturn has made all technology companies feel the chill. Whether it is a wave of layoffs or common prosperity, it will be a symbol left to history by this era, and you and I are in the wave of this era. Okay, that’s all for this issue, see you next time.
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