adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Investment

How the market’s biggest companies, from Apple to Tesla and Microsoft, invest their cash

Published

 on

Silicon Valley Bank wasn’t the only U.S. company with a lot of cash to put to work, but corporate America’s bulging balance sheets aren’t likely to cause any of the same kinds of problems. The cash balances of big companies will, though, be in focus again as another earnings season begins.

U.S. companies are sitting on at least $2 trillion of cash, with a quarter of it concentrated in a few top technology companies, according to Moody’s Investor Service. During the depths of the pandemic, a new phenomenon was witnessed in the equities market with investors rushing into names including Apple as if it offered the stock market equivalent of a bond. In the just completed first quarter, even amid all of the volatility that accompanied the banking crisis, Apple posted a 27% return.

It’s not just a tech phenomenon. Other big holders of cash are carmakers like Ford and Tesla, and health-care companies like Pfizer.

For most major companies, the first major point to make it that cash management, for good or ill, has only limited effect on their operations. Taking the bank example, depositors may run if they think an institution is in trouble, as we just saw. Few will likely decline to buy an iPhone, for example, if Apple one day loses money on bonds. There’s no such thing in industrial companies as a run on the bank: If the value of bonds that Tesla owns drops, for example, it won’t be forced to repay customers who have owned a Model X for years, the way banks have had to pay off depositors who want out.

300x250x1

The top five cash holders in Moody’s 2022 survey were Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet.

“You add up the top 10 to 12 tech players, and it’s a trillion dollars in cash,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “But it’s so well managed that you have 2% to 3%, max, in unrealized [losses in value].”

Where to look for limited loss info on income statements

Companies don’t disclose many details about their uses of cash, but what they do disclose is fairly easy to find in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Look for the line on the income statement that discloses “other income,” usually between operating profit or loss and disclosure of the company’s tax bill. Usually, there is a footnote explaining the highlights. But readers seeking a detailed explanation of the portfolio at these companies may leave disappointed.

“The disclosure is really poor for the auto companies regarding the nature of their cash holdings, so there’s not much to go on,” CFRA Research autos analyst Garrett Nelson said. “Companies often keep money in money market funds or similar highly liquid accounts which should generate more interest income as rates rise, but the amount probably won’t be a material contributor to overall earnings for most companies, even those with large cash balances like Tesla or Ford.”

Given the yields on offer, everyone, not just big companies, has been piling into money market funds based on recent data on outflows from bank deposits.

The 2022 results among big companies for managing their cash and investments were all over the mark, for a variety of reasons. Take Amazon’s $16.8 billion 2022 non-cash loss, not related to any bad bond bets but a big investment stake in electric truck maker Rivian.

Ford had a tough 2022 on the “other income” line of its income statement, losing more than $5 billion, according to the company’s annual 10-K filing. Ford, which did not respond to a request for comment, reported a $7.4 billion write down on its own Rivian stake.

But rising interest rates didn’t seem to hurt giant chipmaker Intel, which reported that it made a profit of $1.17 billion on “interest and other” investment income. It also reported a $427 million gain on equity investments — reflecting the successful spinoff of Mobileye. Intel reported $28.3 billion of cash and investments as of Dec. 31.

For some corporations, the big recent moves have been shoring up where the cash on deposit is being held. The latest CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey showed that even as the majority of companies didn’t face a threat from the regional banking crisis, 23% of CFOs surveyed said they had moved some money out of regional banks and into large multinationals in the last month. Still, most (73%) said they are “not at all concerned” about the safety of company deposits.

Big Tech cash and investments

At Amazon, which declined comment but referred CNBC to the correct portion of its 10-K filing, the largest part of its $70 billion cash and securities pile is tied up in money market funds that pay an average interest rate of 4.2%. Nearly $28 billion was sitting at year-end in one of the simplest investment tools on the market, with another $17.5 million invested in corporate bonds. Amazon’s filing shows it owned $7.2 billion in stocks and warrants of other companies, with Rivian securities remaining the largest chunk of Amazon’s $5 billion invested in other public companies.

A few miles away from Amazon in suburban Seattle, Microsoft said its “other income” line was basically break even during the second half of 2022 – the first half of the company’s fiscal year. The world’s largest software company said it lost $6 million in “other income” during the period. The company said its $700 million in interest income nearly matched its $499 million in interest paid and its $184 million in net investment losses, mostly from writing down the value of derivatives. The company had $99.5 billion in cash at Dec. 31.

Apple, long the king of cash-rich U.S. companies, lost $393 million in other income during the December quarter, the first of its fiscal year. The company didn’t recognize investment losses on its $165 billion pile of cash and marketable securities, but said it paid $1 billion in interest and collected $868 million.

Accounting rules require that bond holdings be written down to market value if the company that owns the bonds plans to sell them, according to accounting giant Deloitte. If a company like Amazon or Apple wants to keep bonds it owns, it only needs to write them down to current value if it is likely to be forced to sell the bond before it matures — as was the case for SVB — or if the issuer is likely to fail to repay the bond.

Apple is actually sitting on nearly $13 billion in unrealized losses, mostly on corporate bonds and mortgage securities, according to its most recent filing. But as long as it plans to hold the bonds to maturity, and the bond issuers are solvent enough to repay the debt, Apple and other holders don’t need to charge those losses against their reported earnings, said CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino.

“I don’t want to say it’s not a big deal,” Zino said. “But this is a company that generates $100 billion a year in free cash flow.”

 

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

What is Islamic halal investment and why is it on the rise?

Published

 on

The global Islamic halal economy is set to reach a market value of $7.7 trillion by 2025, more than double the $3.2 trillion it reached in 2015 and significantly higher than the $5.7 trillion it was valued at less than three years ago in 2021, according to industry experts.

A report by the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions revealed last year that the global Islamic funds market has grown by more than 300 percent over the past decade, with nearly $200bn now under management globally.

The statistics depict a rise in both demand for halal – or “sharia compliant” – investments and opportunities.

Investing is permitted under Islam, but certain aspects of investment practice – such as charging or paying interest – are not. This has traditionally meant a lack of opportunities for Muslim savers and investors in the past.

300x250x1

What is halal investment?

Halal is an Arabic term meaning “permitted” and stipulating that:

  • Transactions cannot involve “riba” (interest).
  • Investments must not be made in “haram” (unlawful) assets or commodities such as pork products, alcohol or military equipment, among others.
  • Investments cannot be made based on “gharar”, which has been described as “highly uncertain transactions or transactions that run contrary to the idea of certainty and transparency in business”.

“Halal investment is basically managing your money and finances in line with your faith,” Omar Shaikh, director of Islamic Finance Council UK (UKIFC), told Al Jazeera. “Muslims believe that earning money in a way which is halal is better than earning money (even if that is more) in a way that is harmful to society and against the morals of the religion.”

Umar Munshi, co-founder and managing director of Islamic finance group Ethis, said sharia compliance is key, but institutions and investors looking for ethical investments need to go even further to ensure a business is completely ethical.

“The actions of a business must not have a negative impact on society or the environment,” Munshi told Al Jazeera. “So it’s not only compliant, but refraining from having a negative impact. Investing in a tobacco company, for example, may be sharia compliant, but it’s not good for society.”

How does halal investment work?

One example of halal investment is Islamic business financing, which works using new models of profit-sharing, sharia-compliant insurance and sukuk, an Islamic financial certificate that represents a share of ownership.

Unlike with conventional bonds – a form of IOU that investors can buy in order to receive interest payments – sukuk investors receive partial ownership of a business and then receive profit payments, which are generated over time. These payments are made instead of interest in order to ensure sharia compliancy.

“Islamic finance as a sector is barely 30 years old, with the past 15 years seeing the most development,” Shaikh from UKIFC said. “It takes time to educate and create awareness and as this has happened, more banks have focused on servicing the demand for halal investing. This in turn helps to create more products, which then creates more demand.”

Stock markets used to be the traditional modes of investment for many [Marcin Nowak/Anadolu via Getty Images]

A Goldman Sachs report published in December 2022 estimated that by 2075, five of the world’s 10 largest economies – India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Egypt – will have Muslim populations amounting to more than 850 million people.

As the population rises, so does its demand for financial products. According to the State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2023, published by research group DinarStandard, some $25.9bn was invested into sharia-compliant investments in the financial year 2022-23, marking a 128 percent year-on-year growth.

“In general, it [halal investment] is on the rise. People are a lot more educated and more aware of how their dollar impacts the socioeconomic landscape globally,” said Siddiq Farid, co-founder of SmartCrowd, a real estate investment platform based in Dubai.

“They are a lot more cautious, too, hence leading to more ethical investing, which halal investing is a big component of. It’s on the rise, particularly around the younger generation. The millennials, they are a lot more aware socially. People realise exactly where their money is going and how it’s being used.”

An increase in opportunities for halal investing and their ease of access are also cited as reasons driving the rise in demand.

Israel’s war on Gaza and its impact

More recently, the rise in demand for halal investments has received an additional boost as consumers boycott brands seen as supporting Israel and its war on Gaza.

The war, which has seen more than 32,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza, has “adjusted” the mindset of these investors, Farid said.

“Halal investment has been increasing steadily and it has accelerated further in the past six months, mostly among millennials and people under 40,” he said.

“But in the past, it’s more of these people just looking for something halal. As long as it’s not haram, it’s fine. Now, there’s more awareness of not only halal, but halal aligned with values and faith. All these boycott movements have got people much more aware that something may be halal, but you might not necessarily want to use it, be associated with it or invest in it.”

bds
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has made many people consider where their money goes before they spend or invest it, say experts [Martin Pope/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

How has technology contributed to the rise of halal investing?

FinTech Magazine reported in December last year that while Muslims make up nearly a quarter of the world’s population, barely one percent of financial assets qualify as sharia compliant. This is set to change, say experts, with the arrival of “fintech” – financial technology that can make investing much more accessible for ordinary consumers and individual investors.

“Muslims are generally not as well educated when it comes to investing, and this is partly due to a lack of available options for them as Muslims. Even basic information pertaining to sharia-compliant investments is often not available to most of the Muslim population,” said Ibrahim Khan, co-founder of the online financial platform Islamic Finance Guru, in an interview with FinTech Magazine.

However, the rise of social media has contributed to an increased awareness and significant growth in sharia-compliant finance. In addition, fintech has made halal investment options, which are often much more convenient and easy to use with a smartphone or laptop, more accessible.

Consultancy group McKinsey & Company published research in January this year showing that “revenues in the fintech industry are expected to grow almost three times faster than those in the traditional banking sector between 2023 and 2028”.

“Your phone is often physically the closest thing to you. Fintechs are able to start from this paradigm and build solutions that are efficient and enhance transparency and choice for retail customers. This is where a lot of the action is at. Many banks are now creating fintech-based solutions or acquiring fintech players,” said UKIFC’s Shaikh.

Munshi added the selling point for fintechs is the age of the target audience.

“The younger generation is more open to investing online,” said Munshi, whose company operates an online platform and community for alternative finance and investment opportunities.

The same research by McKinsey & Company showed that the fintech industry raised record capital in the second half of the 2010s. Venture capital funding grew from $19.4bn in 2015 to $33.3bn in 2020, a 17 percent year-over-year increase.

As of July 2023, publicly traded fintech companies had a combined market capitalisation of $550bn, double that of 2019, the research said.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

Published

 on

By


Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

300x250x1

The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

Published

 on

By


Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

300x250x1

Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending