In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I was joined by my colleague here at Futurum, Olivier Blanchard, for a conversation about chips. We started with a conversation about chips that power mobile devices and took a dive into Olivier’s research on why Honor and Qualcomm’s complete mobile solution makes perfect sense.
We discussed:
- Honor’s move from Huawei;
- Honor’s partnerships with key chipmakers including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Samsung, SK Hynix, Sony, and Qualcomm, and what that likely means;
- The role we expect Qualcomm will play moving forward in both the budget and mid-market tiers of mobile devices;
With chips on our mind, we then segued over to a discussion of news out of Qualcomm’s two-day Automotive Redefined: Technology Showcase 2021 and what we see happening with regard to Qualcomm’s Automotive sector strategy. Olivier walked us through the highlights of Qualcomm’s Automotive Redefined: Technology Showcase 2021 event and the many advancements we’re seeing and will be seeing out of Qualcomm with regard to 4G LTE and 5G building global momentum for connected cars. That was but one tidbit, and this was a comprehensive conversation about the Automotive sector and the exciting things we’re seeing across the board in this industry. If you’re a car person, or if you’re a technology person interested in the Automotive, this is one part of the conversation you won’t want to miss.
Lastly, we tackled the reality of a global chip shortage, what’s causing that, and the impact that shortage is having on the automotive industry. In short, a global pandemic resulted in a surge of consumer desire for smartphones, gaming devices, TVs, and computers, causing chips to largely be gobbled up to serve the consumer sector. The automotive industry was pinched, and their supply chain issues as it related to chip production has become a very big problem. During the course of the last six to 9 months, the semiconductor industry has not been able to scale up as quickly as needed to meet the demand in the automotive sector.
This is a nice end to an interesting conversation about the semiconductor industry and how chips play an outsized role, in everything from mobile devices to the Automotive industry — and a global chip shortage is a very big deal — especially for the automotive supply chain. For a nice read on that, by the way, check out this article from Financial Times: Global Chip Shortage Puts Car Supply Chain Under the Microscope.
Watch the video interview here:
Grab the audio here:
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Related content:
Moving On From Huawei, Honor May Find The Perfect 5G Mobile Platform Partner In Qualcomm
Qualcomm’s Automotive Sector Strategy Shifts Into High Gear This Week With A Bevy Of Announcements
Transcript:
Shelly Kramer: Hello and welcome to this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast. I’m your host Shelly Kramer and I’m joined today by my colleague Olivier Blanchard. And we are going to talk today about lots of exciting things, focusing a little bit on devices and a little bit on the automotive industry and a little bit on chips and what we think might be ahead. Olivier, welcome.
Olivier Blanchard: Well, it’s good to be here.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely. And it’s great that it’s Friday, although this week does seem to me like it’s been, I don’t know, a week of 4,000 Mondays, but anyway, here we go.
Olivier Blanchard: Yep. Welcome to January.
Shelly Kramer: Exactly, exactly. And the only thing worse is going to be February.
Olivier Blanchard: I know, and it’s almost March already, by the way again. I know. That’s fun.
Shelly Kramer: So we are going to jump right in and we’re going to talk a little bit about Honor, which is a smart phone company. This company has moved on from Huawei in the last, I don’t know, six months maybe, that sale happened in about November 2020, when Honor became independent from Huawei. This move for those of you who might not be aware was, I believe, to separate itself from Huawei who has been in trouble with U S over sanctions imposed by the United States government. The news was that Honor was confirming that it had secured partnership agreements with key global chip makers among them AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Samsung, SK Hynix, Sony, and Qualcomm. Olivier wrote a really interesting piece on that and what was most interesting to him, I think, were maybe the tidbits of information that we didn’t see other analysts covering. So with that, Olivier, talk to us a little bit about this.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. So some of the stuff that was interesting is first of all, yeah it was a really smart move for Honor to disengage themselves from Huawei, given a lot of the limitations imposed on Huawei by several governments, particularly the U S government. So now that it’s on its own, it’s no longer under the same restrictions that Huawei still is and it’s more free to do what it’s going to do. And the thing about Honor is that it was essentially a low price or budget focused brands that belonged to the Huawei umbrella and so it has several opportunities now.
First because it’s no longer limited by Huawei ownership, it has managed to secure very quickly, since December, partnership agreements with basically all the major chip makers that it needed to make agreements with so it can really go into full production, do whatever it wants. But there was a time of limbo between the time that it announced, or it started contemplating separating itself from Huawei and now. And so during that time, it still managed to innovate and come out with new devices.
Mainly, what we saw in the last couple of weeks were a brand new phone called the V40 5G which retails somewhere between 500 and 700 bucks. And one of the things that was interesting is that it came out powered with a media site platform, the Dimensity 1000 Plus, which is a 5g platform.
Shelly Kramer: Right.
Olivier Blanchard: And now the 1200, which is the more recent one. And that to me, and to other analysts I noticed, indicated that there’s a good chance that Honor was dipping into a stock file of chips that Huawei may have hogged before or in anticipation of sanctions against it. So, essentially what was happening with Honor is they were doing what they could with the access to chips that they had in their warehouse. And in order to compensate for the fact that this was older chips, they put a crazy good screen on this that you normally wouldn’t find on a phone at that price range. Usually you would find them a phone of like $800 to $1,200. It’s really, really not a 120 Hertz OLED display. So that pointed or hinted to something else. And basically what Honor wants to be as a company now that it’s no longer under the thumb, if you will, of Huawei.
And because when it was working under Huawei, it was a budget brands and now it no longer works with Huawei, Honor has the opportunity to expand and become a smartphone maker like everybody else and compete at every price tier, not just the low and medium, but also high premium. So in thinking about this, it’s competition there realistically in the first couple of years would be companies like, Xiaomi and Oppo, which are not particularly well-known in the West, but they have really good reputations. They use really good materials and really good components and they produce really good phones at various price ranges that are popular with younger consumers.
So in that light, you have Honor that’s trying to come out as its own brand, that’s finally free to do what it wants. That has to prove itself to the market in the next year and we are in essentially year two and a half of 5g deployments. So 5g is a huge factor in the success of a handset maker, like Honor. And so I was thinking about all these different suppliers, all these agreements that it has for a variety of components, needs, use cases and also devices. Honor also comes out with laptops that are fairly decent, so that’s where you’re going to see some of the AMG action happening. But specifically with the handsets, what I noticed is that it used to depend on Media Tek and Media Tek has excellent modems. It has excellent 5g platforms, but the one thing that Media Tek currently doesn’t have with its 5g modems and its 5g mobile platform is a Millimeter Wave compatible solution.
And for those of us who need a refresher, 5g is essentially two things. 5g, you have the Sub-6 GHz bands which are much more similar to 4g LTE bands, just a little bit faster, a little bit higher. And then you also have Millimeter Wave, which is a completely different technology that has a very limited range but is capable of pushing huge, huge amounts of data very fast across a network. And Media Tek modems and platforms currently do not support Millimeter Wave. The platforms that do and the modems that do really well are Qualcomm chipsets. And so in the last year, Qualcomm has expanded its Millimeter Wave capabilities to various modems and various mobile platform to complete chipsets. The SOC is that phones are built on down from its premium tier to its high and medium tiers, and then even lower tiers.
And it just released a mobile platform called a Snapdragon 480 5G that even though it’s a budget focused chipset, is Millimeter Wave capable as opposed to Media Tek’s which isn’t. And so what I’m thinking and what I didn’t really read a lot in the Tech Press in the last a week or two weeks was this notion that Honor and its efforts to position itself against Xiaomi and Oppo and other handset makers probably doesn’t have much of a choice here. If it stays with Media Tek, it will not have enough, or it won’t have a full range of Millimeter Wave capable smartphones. However, if it wants to compete with the big boys, it needs to have it, which means they have to get at least their modems, if not their entire SOCs, the entire both platforms from Qualcomm.
And this is a really good socket potentially for Qualcomm, because Honor plans on shipping somewhere between 60 million on the low ends to a 100 million on the very high end phones just in this year. So, we could see Qualcomm’s decision to incorporate Millimeter Wave capability up and down all of its SOC tiers pay off just with this one customer, Honor basically entering the market the way it is. So it’s just a value add and just a little bit of tech intelligence that I think wasn’t really focused on nearly as much as it should have been.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah. I thought it was really cool and really interesting to see Qualcomm embracing something for everyone at every level and this connection, I think that you’ve made makes perfect sense. So speaking of Qualcomm, I know that Qualcomm kicked off its Automotive Showcase 2021 and I always pay a lot of attention to the automotive industry and I know you covered this for us this week as well. And there was just a slew of announcements out of Qualcomm following this event. We’re seeing the company’s automotive sector strategy shifting, shifting into high gear, we think. And so maybe touch base a little bit on some of those key announcements that came out of the event this week.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. We could dedicate an entire episode of this to these announcements. So Qualcomm came in heavy and hard with announcements this week. So they had an event called the Automotive Showcase 2021, which is interesting because two years ago or a year and a half ago, I was in New York for an analyst event in which Qualcomm was talking about its strategy from now until 2025, essentially.
But it really focused on 2019 to 2023. And I noticed that there were a lot more slides about the automotive industry than about even 5g or anything else. So it was obvious at the time that Qualcomm was starting to focus a lot of its attention on automotive and obviously understanding that it’s a huge deal and a huge opportunity for a chip maker.
And one thing that people don’t realize is that a lot of chips go into vehicles now. The average car being made today has an average of anywhere from 50 to 150 chips in them. So just on volume alone, any chip maker in the world that isn’t really focusing on automotive, whether it’s connectivity, whether it’s infotainment, cockpit, ADAS like driver assistance systems is leaving a lot of money on the table. And so it’s perfectly normal, I think, and expected to see that Qualcomm is doubling its attention on automotive. And this is nothing new. So a lot of people don’t realize that Qualcomm has been working in the automotive space for a while, but they have been from the very beginning for a lot of reasons and they’ve had some really big partnerships. And one of the ones I think that was emphasized a little bit this week was an expansion of Qualcomm’s relationship with GM, General Motors.
And so what GM were already doing in the background, they were working on connectivity applications and cv2X, but now they’re expanding into digital cockpits, next generation telematic systems and ADAS, which stands for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. So essentially what’s happening here is, up until now, their partnership was a little bit of a trial run like, okay, let’s see what we can build together. And now after this proof of concept, now, Qualcomm is developing much more precise and more powerful platforms, especially driven by AI and other adjacent technologies that Qualcomm’s really good at. They’ve adapted their Snapdragon platform and just moved it over and completely specialized it for automotive. And we’re seeing companies like GM essentially buy into this and go, okay. It’s essentially build out the mobile platform, the mobile tech connectivity platform, the mobile ADAS platform and just bring it all together, so Qualcomm managed to secure that partnership. And it also has partnerships at various levels of all these different technologies that go into vehicles with 20, I think of the world’s top 25 automakers already. So that’s really good.
There’s also were a bunch of other announcements, for instance, I think it was Alexa. Qualcomm and Alexa are working together to bring some really cool voice activated interactivity between not just the drivers of the vehicles, but also the people inside of the vehicle. And one thing that Qualcomm has been really good at, that a lot of people also don’t know, is audio, smart microphones, smart speakers. And so one of the really cool things about this, in my opinion, and I think where Qualcomm brings a really good piece of the puzzle that was missing in bringing voice activated assistance to the cars is noise cancellation, intelligent noise analysis, and voice analysis. So that when you have your windows rolled down and you have kids screaming in the backseat, when you have music on speakers, you can still have an intelligence, voice, language, and noise analysis that allows the in vehicle voice assistants to hear the right words, not to miss hear them.
And so you have a UX value add with Qualcomm’s assistance here that Alexa on its own wouldn’t be able to deliver as well. So that’s something that jumped out at me because it’s… And then one more thing before we move on to the next topic is… There’s always one more thing, but I’m actually excited about this, because again, there were a lot of announcements and they were all pretty cool. One of the things that really jumped out at me also was something that Qualcomm probably should talk about for, and it’s Car To Cloud services. To Car Cloud services, because obviously Qualcomm is very strong in wireless is, I think a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to technology innovation and vehicles. So it’s normal for us to think about updating our phones, well, if we’re very lucky once a year, but more on average, every two to three years, we update our phones because we won’t keep up with the latest technologies.
Shelly Kramer: We buy new phones, you mean?
Olivier Blanchard: Yes, we buy new phones. Yes. We don’t necessarily buy new cars every year or every two to three years. A lot of people lease their cars and that’s great, but a lot of people buy their cars and want to keep them for seven, 10, 15 years. And so what do you do with a car that you want to keep for 10, 15 years if the technology in it might become obsolete, or at least might need an update or an upgrade in the next three to five years? And so even my car, everything works great, I’m very happy with the GPS and the connectivity, but it’s a few years behind and I’d love to upgrade the technology inside the car without necessarily having to buy a new car. And so what Qualcomm has done with all these systems is created a wireless way, like an over the airway, updating your existing systems, whether they’re security updates, like with your computer on your phone, OS updates, new functionality, stuff for Alexa for instance, new ADAS technologies.
And so you don’t have to plug it into anything. You don’t have to necessarily go to a dealership and pay for someone to do this while you wait, this is something that can be done over networks and so-
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, just like updating the OS on your phone?
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. So I think it’s a really good selling point for Qualcomm to go to automakers and say, look, we can actually deliver this value add for customers. Because it’s not so much the automaker putting technology in the vehicle, it’s what happens once the buyer, the user, the owner of the car is out there. And I know that if I go into a car dealership today, I look for a car, that’s one of the questions I’m going to ask is what do I do about this technology three years from now.
Shelly Kramer: Right.
Olivier Blanchard: And so Qualcomm is providing a solution, which I think will be very attractive to a lot of automakers. So…
Shelly Kramer: Speaking of what do I do about… A little personal anecdote here, I drive a Mercedes SUV and I bought it at the end of 2019. So it’s just over a year old, but I bought it at the end of December. And many business owners are nodding, yeah, I’ve done that before. I bought it at the end of December. Totally the dashboard on this car is probably one of the main reasons I bought it, because it was just so incredibly gorgeous and big and awesome. And, when I bought it, I talked a little bit with the tech people at the dealership, and they said, “What we’d love for you to do is to drive it for a few weeks, 30 days, whatever, just get comfortable with it. And then we have you come in and we walk you through a lot of the specifics of technology,” because if they do this huge brain dump, right when I buy the car, you forget everything. And so it’s just like learning the nuances and everything. So I’m like, ‘Okay, cool.”
And so my daughter’s getting married in February in Chicago. Our team is scheduled to head to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And, my life is all planned out and getting back to the dealership to go through the tech setup of my car is not very high on my list. And then a global pandemic happens and the whole world stops and the last thing I care about is going to the dealership to learn about how to use my car. And so my car will park itself.
My car has voice assistance technology where I can say, “Hey, Mercedes…” and tell it what I want it to do. I have used none of that technology because I don’t know how to use it and I don’t want to read the manual. I do use some of the easy stuff, but it’s just funny that sometimes you have technology in your car… It’s like, “I know that I’m not alone in that there are many fast keys or different, cool things I could use on my computer or on my phone that I haven’t made time to learn and so, I’m really behind the curve. But someday soon I am going to have an appointment and understand how to use all the functionality in my car. But in all seriousness, once you have a vehicle, and I went from a bigger Alexis SUV that also had a bunch of technology in it.
This car has quite a bit more technology in it, but once you drive a vehicle that’s a connected vehicle that has safety features, that has so many things built into it, it’s really hard. In this particular car, it will stop me if I am backing up and am going to back into something. I mean, it will literally stop the car or if I am driving and it feels like I’m getting too close to the car in front of me, coming up to a stoplight, you can feel the system shutting you down. And it’s really interesting I haven’t had a situation where the car has actually prevented me from having an accident. I haven’t been that close to something, but it is interesting once you’re driving a car and you get used to being surrounded by smart technology, and then you think about the decades that I drove cars that had nothing but power windows, maybe.
So you just think like, it would be very difficult to experience a truly connected car and then go back to driving something that didn’t really have any of those safety features or options or anything like that. But I also think that’s why we’re seeing them across the board in vehicle. It’s not only just luxury vehicles, we’re seeing these in GM vehicles and all different kinds of vehicles and I think that’s truly very quickly becoming our norm.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, yeah, it is. So speaking of that…
Shelly Kramer: Speaking of that, we’re going to talk about the chips that make all this happen, and the fact that there’s a problem
Olivier Blanchard: There is. And by the way, don’t pay any attention to the fact that half the time I’m talking, I look like I have horns and ears because I really need to change my angle. Yeah. So there is, unfortunately, a very severe chip shortage right now. And we’re not talking about Doritos.
Shelly Kramer: We’re not.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. That would be terrible. This is almost as bad. So essentially what’s happened starting at the end of last year, there’s been a global shortage of auto chips specifically. And one of the reasons was obviously, I mean, this was all caused by COVID. So essentially COVID came, the pandemic began the beginning of last year and forced automakers to temporarily shut their factories down, including their showrooms. It wasn’t just the manufacturing, it was also the sales. Car sales dropped, I think overall last year, something like 15% over the previous year.
And then on top of that, you had uncertainty about jobs as the economy was shutting down and everybody was batten the hatches, the economy froze so people were reluctant to necessarily make major purchases like vehicles. And that also, since people were on lockdown with nowhere to go, it isn’t like they needed to buy a new car. So that really slowed things down. And so what happened is semiconductor manufacturers who were starting to make a lot of chips out for vehicles, for reasons that we just explained, started to reassign production capacity to other companies or clients making other devices. So smartphones laptops, a lot of gaming devices were sold last year, extra TVs and chip makers have been slammed making semiconductors for all of those types of devices and shifted from automotive, which had much lower demands to these electronics at a higher demand.
However, in the meantime, or at least since then, interest rates have been so low and the fear as we start to have normal lives again or start looking forward to having normal lives, the fear of going back to public transportation, of crowding into subways and buses and trains, people started buying cars, again, mainly SUV sedans and pickups. And so the return to normal under the words, the demand for vehicles bounced back a lot sooner and a lot faster than everyone anticipated. And the big problem now is that there’s a little bit of friction. The lead times for suppliers to respond to automakers who are adjusting their demand and their orders for these chips is about six to nine months. So that’s the delay that you have to work with. So anywhere from half a year to three-quarters of the year from the time that automakers start reacting to demands until they start getting in the shipments of chips.
And so we’re in that crunch right now, where there’s a lot of demand for vehicles and auto makers need to make vehicles, but they don’t have the chips, or they’re looking at their supply chain and they may have many of the chips now, but they’re going to run out because they’re just going to go through their stock and they move too fast.
Shelly Kramer: Part of the shortage is driven by a pandemic related boom in gaming consoles and laptops and televisions and the consumer devices that have been eating up the chip supply. And I think that from a manufacturing standpoint, that percentage of manufacturing devoted to automotive needed chips compared to consumer goods chips is very, very small. Something like 10% or something like that.
Olivier Blanchard: It’s 12%.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah.
Olivier Blanchard: Exactly. So yeah, the buying power of these other companies is much greater than automotive. So, the chip makers are in a weird spot right now. On the one hand, they have a finite amount of production that they can deal with right now. And, and the thing about the Chinese is they can build production pretty quickly, much more quickly, I think, than we can in the West. So there’s an opportunity for them to react to this and to do this, but in the meantime, have to choose, right? Do we make our customers happy, our big customers, the Apple’s and Samsung’s of the world, or do we still try to focus on this automotive need and start building that market and build that footprint in automotive specific chip making and, do we use this to get as much of that market share as possible? It is important to note, I think, or at least interesting that TSMC, not a Chinese company, well, that’s depending on what side of the aisle you stand on this particular [crosstalk]
Shelly Kramer: Taiwan based.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, It’s Taiwan based. So Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC, if I’m not mistaken accounted for over half. So I think it was like 56 or 57% of all global chip manufacturing revenue in the last quarter of 2020. So that’s the most recent information we have. So that’s one company and there’s a lot of outsourcing that goes on and different things so it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. But what we have essentially is disproportionate amounts of reliance in the market on this one company to be a supplier to all of these different industries and verticals. And so that puts a lot of power on one hand in TSMC hands, but also it limits our ability to be agile sometimes when it comes to adjusting to things like this.
And it’s something that we saw, I think for the first time during the meltdown, well, during the earthquake that created the tsunami, that then crippled a lot of industry production in Japan, a decade ago. The reliance of some of the companies they’re on one or two manufacturers showed how just that one earthquake, that one unexpected events could really slow down automotive production for the same reasons. And we have a similar thing with the pandemic and our reliance on that particular chip maker today that’s making things a little bit more precarious, or at least that’s making it slower for the automotive industry to bounce back.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, it’s interesting. And, not every car maker has been impacted I think. I’m seeing Toyota and Hyundai and VWs, Audi, I think that they have had less problems and some other brands and it really is. It really is a big problem. I know Fiat, Chrysler has struggled and so it really is. It’s an ongoing battle. And I think the industry as a whole is pretty panicked. So it will be interesting to see how the supply chain rights itself in the coming months, for sure.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. Car makers are having to make some tough choices and prioritize which vehicles and which plants, which markets that they want to protect and which ones are secondary. So it’s interesting to see which plants are either planning shutdowns, or are already shut down. I saw that Ford was one of the companies that had stopped, or at least slowed production on a couple of plants already for certain types of vehicles that probably don’t sell as well as others.
Shelly Kramer: Right.
Olivier Blanchard: But I think to give scope to this, we’re looking at potentially a missed target production for the first quarter of 100 000 vehicles overall, which is about 4% of global quarterly output. And also the shortage from a financial standpoint, you could be looking at $14 billion in lost revenue for the automotive industry, just in the first quarter and maybe 60 billion overall in 2021. So it’s massive. It’s not a permanent problem. They’re going to bounce back, but it’s probably going to take most of the year to get back to normal and probably auto production will reach 2019 levels again. So sometime in 2023. So it may take an additional year for us to get back to completely normal.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I’m seeing in a Financial Times piece that inspired this conversation is that they’re saying that, the production of more than 280,000 vehicles has already been put on ice according to Auto Forecast Solutions. And IA just market forecasted that as many as 500,000 vehicles could ultimately be affected worldwide, that’s a big number. But worldwide, we’re not just talking about just the United States or whatever. So it is an impact that will be felt across the world. But, as we mentioned some automakers more than others. And we’re also seeing automakers turning to developing their own relationships with chip makers, which I think is interesting as well. The pandemic has taught us a lot about supply chain and that sometimes operating on a, business as usual this is the way we’ve always done it, mindset can be dangerous. And so sometimes having those relationships of your own and developing your own, we know that China’s working on that. So this will really be interesting to watch for sure.
Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. Essentially I’m the in-house Qualcomm whisperer and we can circle back. And for me, I think, Qualcomm is limited in the same way that all chip makers are because a lot of production is all over the world and so it’s not a typically just primarily American issue. But as we were talking about how companies with the most market power are going to have perhaps a little bit more leverage with the relationships that they have and some of the ways that chip makers are prioritizing production for different types of devices and verticals, I think that Qualcomm again, has an opportunity here. Not that they would want this, nobody wants this, and it’s going to be a crunch for everyone, but Qualcomm might be really well positioned because they have their hands in so many different verticals and they’re pushing so hard for automotive to have some impact on this.
In other words, what I’m saying is that automakers who have invested already in using Qualcomm chipsets and technologies in their vehicles might have an advantage in terms of getting their hands on chips compared to some new ones that may be working with smaller companies with little bit less market power. So we’ll see if I’m right about that, but I haven’t been wrong yet. I don’t think…
Shelly Kramer: About anything ever?
Olivier Blanchard: I have a track record of very few mistakes in the last 37 minutes.
Shelly Kramer: Well, all right. I think that it’s going to wrap up our show. Olivier, as always, it’s a pleasure hanging out with you. And to our audience, thanks for hanging out with us today. And we will definitely be watching. We will be watching what’s happening with devices. We’ll be watching what’s happening in the auto industry. We’ll be watching what Qualcomm’s doing. We’ll be watching what NVIDIA’s doing. We’ll be watching what’s going on with chips, and we’ll be talking more about this, for sure. And with that, have a great rest of the day.
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
