- Sunday CET
- Posts
- American fight in Europe
Happy Sunday - welcome to the last one this year, hope all of you have a nice holiday time and wish you a great 2025.
Best,
Dragos
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Market talk
🇪🇺 Apple and Meta are fighting in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy.
Meta is said to be abusing efforts by European regulators to require Apple devices to work seamlessly with other devices - if successful, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could read every message and email on someone’s phone, see every call they make and log all of their passwords.
Apple even wrote a paper detailing how this is bad - to counter, Meta notes that it is only asking for the same access Apple’s wearable devices already have.
this looks like a full American corporate warfare going on via an European proxy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - on one hand, Meta uses the EU against Apple, while on the other, don’t forget, Apple’s agenda is to also fight the EU putting pressure to open up to a fair market competition.
Apropos of Apple - the world’s most valuable company is close to reaching an agreement with Indonesia to lift the ban on iPhone 16 sales in the country after securing preliminary approval for a $1 billion investment proposal.
I mentioned it before, this is strategic for Apple, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this involves under the table deals as well, Indonesia is a 280 million people market where corruption is fairly common.
📊 And apropos of Meta - Instagram is estimated to reach $32 billion in ad revenue and is on track to make up half of Meta’s ad revenue in the US. Reminder - Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram back in the day.
Meta has also introduced the track data or pay option across all its media assets in the EU earlier this fall.
💲 Climate tech is officially no longer an investment theme, apparently.
well, climate tech was rather a buzzword to begin with, encompassing multiple industries and business models, which made it difficult to quantify and explain even to people familiar with the lingo. It was a top down panacea, in a VC business that ultimately is working the market in a bottom up way.
those buzzword-as-themes come up once in a while, just like AI, or the likes of mobility or ESG. Saying you are an AI investor today is just moot - btw, remember how quick commerce had become a thing a few years back just because a VC investor was amazed to get groceries in fifteen minutes and thought it’s a macro theme?
jokes aside, climate and clean technology are more complicated than some idealist VCs looking for the next big thing - here’s a layman explanation on why generic alternative energy means are still deeply connected to traditional oil business.
bonus link - coal demand set a record high in 2024.
💲 Trump, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had dinner together this week - apparently Musk was not expected to join initially, but joined anyways. Anybody else has doubts that the 40 billion Twitter price tag is a good entry point for becoming a proxy president of the USA?
on a serious note though, should European tech doers wine and dine with politicians handling European decision making at the top? Probably not the worst idea to stay in touch with people creating actual economic value, and in fairness Ursula seems more open to outside-of-the-bubble feedback post-Draghi report.
but keep in mind that politicians agenda in Europe is heavily lobbied by local oligarchs and century-long family-owned businesses for which tech innovation means upgrading from dial-up to DSL internet. A reason for which the actual legislation is so disconnected to the real growth engines and we’re in the middle of a terrible recession - it’s rather optimised for the said local interests.
more food for thought as a corollary - anybody wondering why Russians are still so powerful and influent in big European capitals, in spite of Russia being at war with Europe for three years already? That’s right, dinero mucho - and we’ve gotten multiple highly visible examples just recently in Germany, Austria, Britain, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and so on. Basically Russians are involved everywhere, and it’s not just by handling the politicians, Europe has been penetrated from the top, from the middle and from the bottom in all sorts of ways, and the guys in charge are seemingly overwhelmed and hopeless to even figure out what hit them.
so given this clusterfuck, how can we expect our top guys to do something meaningful for the marginal startup ecosystem, when they can hardly manage the current state of business in order to stay afloat? The European survival is at the very stake, that is the real talk.
change, as always, will come from within and only bottom up, which is the very definition of value creation of a startup anyways. This lil’ ecosystem, with good and bad - it’s the European Resistance. 😀
💲 My favourite European banker is not messing around - UniCredit has raised its potential stake in Commerzbank to 28% using further derivatives, from a 21% holding previously. Zi Germans are not happy.
📡 The EU announced a €10 billion commitment to a satellite system that will reduce dependence on using services from private companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink.
it will be operational by 2030, when it expects to have 290 satellites, compared to Starlink’s more than 6,000 satellites today.
btw, UK is not part of the project.
🇪🇺 Here’s another way the EU regulating is likely to dramatically impact a market in a negative way by draining liquidity without achieving the EU’s goals - MiCA (Markets in Cryptoassets regime), designed to give regulators greater insight into crypto flows and help prevent crimes like money laundering.
♾️ The relentless advance of American asset managers in Europe, the are we making money or not edition → the Americans are profiting as European investors shift money into low-cost tracking funds and exchange traded funds and unlisted alternatives, including private equity, private credit and infrastructure.
💪 Periodic reminder that we’re running an intel service that’s data-backed and covering what’s important in the European investment ecosystem - who invested in what, why, how much, inside stuff etc. Zero noise and essential reading if you’re a pro in this space, subscribe from here.
Also notable
🫢 Elon Musk, the proxy president of US, called German Chancellor Olaf Scholz an incompetent fool and asked for his resignation in the aftermath of a deadly attack at a Christmas market in Germany a few days ago.
he may be right, and that’s not to say Germany is not a shit show, but Musk is just emotional - bad stuff can happen anywhere, and btw, for example, no European top leader asked for Biden’s resignation when the CEO of an American insurance company was murdered by a woke young man in the middle of Manhattan earlier this month.
in other news, same Musk said he supports the far-right AfD party in Germany and that he would finance also far right Nigel Farage’s populist party in the UK.
crazy times we live in.
🤙 Google sneakily jumped into two super interesting markets these days - via DeepMind's direct entry into AI-powered humanoid robotics and by launching an electronic signatures SAAS product.
🇸🇬 Singapore pegs the salaries of government officials & top civil servants to the money they might earn at the top of the private sector - tres smart.
🇷🇴 UiPath opened an AI hub in London.
🤡 Fake preemptive rounds are just cosplaying Tiger, badly.
🇪🇸 Forbes to open a high-end private members’ club in Madrid as part of a wider effort to diversify revenues at the US media group.
♾️ Apple is reportedly in talks with ByteDance and Tencent to integrate their AI models into iPhones sold in China.
🚘 Waymo plans to test its robotaxis in Tokyo in early 2025, its first international expansion, in partnerships with taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and taxi app GO
🤖 Adidas first AI generated commercial was done with RunwayML and MidJourney.
☎️ OpenAI launched a phone ChatGPT service - that is, people can use their phones to dial 1-800-CHATGPT and talk to the bot for 15 minutes free a month.
OpenAI is actually running a smart marketing campaign as we speak.
🇦🇷 Milei dragged Argentina out of recession - the guy is good, he did a rather long podcast with Lex Friedman a few weeks ago, it’s worth it, you should give it a go.
📺 Speaking of podcasts, here’s another one about the state of marketplace models today.
🇨🇳 For the first time ever, 2-year government bond yields in China seem headed below 1% as a way to fix the private sector debt.
🪖 It’s Sunday, read a little - the Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military power is out. It has a number of interesting things in it - TLDR here.
😱 Gates’ Law - we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.
🎭 Top 100 2024’s leaders in fashion, footwear, music, and art - how many have you heard of? 😀
🐵 Why filmmaker Nenad Cicin-Sain fired his AI screenwriter.
🇬🇧 Mega panic in the UK - there’s a shortage of Guinness at the pubs. End of the world is coming, you read it here first. 🫠
🇺🇸 Dude underreported capital gains after selling $3.7 million in bitcoin and now faces two years of jail time.
🍸 Why our martinis keep getting dirtier.
🎉 The ultimate guide to holding world class dinner parties.
did four dinner parties in London this year, all connecting interesting folks in the VC-backed startups space. People seemed to like them - intend to do some more in the year to come, sign up here if you would like to be considered.
That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!
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