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Comprehensive report by 21st Century Business Herald New Productivity Research Institute

Good morning, a new day has begun. What interesting things have happened in the technology industry in the past 24 hours? Let's take a look with 21tech.

【Giant weathervane】

1. Huawei responded to rumors about the profitability of its automotive BU.Due to huge investment in research and development, Huawei's Automotive BU has been in long-term losses. However, it is reported that Huawei's Automotive BU finally achieved profitability in the first half of this year. Its revenue in the first half of the year was nearly 10 billion yuan, exceeding the total revenue of the past two years. On the evening of July 17, Huawei responded: "The company has no response at present. Regarding financial report information, it is recommended to refer to the authoritative information officially announced." In 2022-2023, Huawei's Automotive BU's annual revenue will be 2.1 billion and 4.7 billion yuan respectively. The Automotive BU is the intelligent automotive solutions division officially established by Huawei in 2019. In May 2021, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Consumer BG (now Terminal BG), was appointed as the CEO of the Automotive BU, which has several different business segments including intelligent driving, intelligent networking, intelligent cockpit, intelligent vehicle light, intelligent vehicle control, intelligent electric, and intelligent vehicle cloud. (Securities Times)

2. The shipment volume of Huawei's Pura70 series increased by 125% year-on-year compared with the P60 series.The reporter learned from relevant people within Huawei that as of July 16, the shipment volume of Huawei Pura70 series increased by 125% year-on-year compared with the P60 series. Huawei Pura 70 mobile phone went on sale on April 18 this year, and it has been 3 months since then. The analysis agency TechInsights released a report at the time saying that the shipment volume of Mate 60 Pro series in China within 5 months (August to December 2023) was 6.2 million units, and it is expected that the Pura 70 series will ship more than 10 million units in 2024. (Cailianshe)

3. Lei Jun responded that he "can generate traffic" and called himself a "socially phobic person".On July 17, Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, posted a video on Weibo to answer questions from netizens. "Recently, I have become the subject of many people's research, saying that I can generate traffic and I am very good. In fact, this makes me a little dizzy. For example, I opened the door for the car owner some time ago. This is actually quite simple. I just wanted to thank our car owner. I really didn't expect it to become 'the CEO worth hundreds of billions opened the door for me'. This matter is very popular on the Internet." In addition, Lei Jun also said that he is a bit socially anxious. He was actually called a "conspicuous bag". He said that he was also puzzled and gave an analysis: "I guess, someone like me who likes to toss around so much will inevitably be a little conspicuous."

4. Nvidia and other giants were exposed for illegally using YouTube data to train models.On July 16, local time, it was reported that large technology companies including Apple, Nvidia, Salesforce and Anthrophic were exposed to have used unauthorized data from YouTube, a video site owned by Google, when training AI models. These companies used a data set provided by a third party, the data set size was 5.7GB, and contained 173,500 videos from more than 48,000 channels on Youtube. This violated YouTube's regulations prohibiting the unauthorized scraping of content from the platform. (The Paper)

5. Three months after Musk ordered massive layoffs, Tesla went on a hiring spree.Tesla is hiring nearly 800 new employees, just three months after CEO Elon Musk issued the largest layoff order in the company's history. According to analysis, some new positions have appeared on Tesla's recruitment page in recent weeks, covering a variety of types from artificial intelligence experts to service positions. The increase in recruitment positions coincides with the surge in Tesla's stock price. In the past 14 trading days alone, Tesla's market value has increased by more than $223 billion.

6. The US FTC reportedly asked Amazon to provide details of its transaction with artificial intelligence startup Adept.The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked Amazon to provide more details about its hiring of executives and researchers from artificial intelligence startup Adept, according to people familiar with the matter. The request reflects the FTC's growing concern about how artificial intelligence deals are done and is the result of a broader review of partnerships between big tech companies and well-known artificial intelligence startups. (Cai Lianshe)

7. Ming-Chi Kuo: Sunny Optical has regained iPhone lens orders.Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known analyst at Tianfeng Securities, pointed out that Sunny Optical is expected to become Apple's new CCM (camera module) supplier in 2025, and mass-produce and ship CCMs for the new M5 series MacBook models in Vietnam. Due to production problems in 2023, Sunny Optical lost iPhone lens orders to competitors, causing the supply ratio to drop to an extremely low level. Ming-Chi Kuo's latest survey shows that starting from the second half of this year, iPhone orders will gradually return to Sunny Optical, and its goal is to restore the lens supply ratio of 2023 in 2025. In Apple's optical supply chain, only Sunny Optical can ship CCM and lenses at the same time.

8. AI startup Anthropic launches AI fund.On July 17th local time, Anthropic, an American AI startup, announced that it will cooperate with Menlo Ventures to establish a new $100 million fund "Anthology Fund". According to the press release, $100 million of the Anthology Fund is funded by Menlo, and Anthropic provides technical support. Approved startups can receive an investment of $100,000 and a "credit" worth $25,000 to access Anthropic's most advanced models. Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, said: "Through collaboration, we hope to accelerate the development of breakthrough AI applications. We are particularly interested in companies that use AI to improve productivity in areas such as healthcare, legal services, education, energy, infrastructure and scientific research."

9. Hesai has become the exclusive supplier of the main laser radar for Baidu's new generation of unmanned driving platform.Hesai Technology said that the sixth generation of Baidu Apollo driverless cars will be launched on the market this year. The main laser radar on the sixth generation Baidu Apollo driverless car Yichi 06 is exclusively supplied by Hesai. Each car is equipped with four ultra-high-definition long-range laser radars AT128, with a detection distance of more than 200 meters. This is the first time in China that ADAS semi-solid laser radar solutions have been deployed on Robotaxi on a large scale.

10. China Mobile completed the industry's first end-to-end dual-band 5G-A deterministic network pilot.Recently, China Mobile Research Institute, together with Jiangsu Mobile, Luxshare Precision and Huawei, completed the industry's first end-to-end "dual-band 5G-A deterministic network" pilot in the core link of Luxshare Precision's industrial production. The pilot is based on 2.6GHz+4.9GHz dual-band networking, innovatively designed 5G endogenous dual-transmitter selection, streamlined 5G LAN, UPF dual-machine hot standby and other technologies, and built an end-to-end 5G-A deterministic network comprehensive solution for terminals, wireless, and core networks. It fully verified the low latency, high reliability, and high stability capabilities in scenarios such as macro station antenna filter production and AGV cross-regional operation, achieving "0" packet loss in data transmission, reducing service latency by 44% and jitter by 37.5%.

11. Customer service denied that Meituan Takeout will launch a low-priced "savings version" of its products.On July 17, it was reported that following the "Pin Hao Fan" product, Meituan Waimai launched another low-priced product, the "Saving Edition", which is currently being tested in many cities across the country. In response, Meituan Waimai customer service staff told reporters that the news was untrue and there was no such thing as a "Saving Edition". If it is an internal test, it will be sent point-to-point to individual customers and will not be carried out in multiple cities. The customer service staff stated that Meituan Waimai did promote low-priced products, and "Pin Hao Fan" has been promoted nationwide. The company has also recently upgraded Meituan Waimai red envelopes and other functions, but there is no "Saving Edition". "If there is, we will be notified as soon as possible." (China Securities Journal)

12. WeChat mini games have 500 million monthly active users.At the WeChat Mini Game Developer Conference, the team disclosed that the number of mini game users reached 1 billion, with 500 million monthly active users, and the user usage time continued to grow. In the past year, the platform has served more than 400,000 developers, of which more than 80% are small teams with less than 30 people, and more than 240 games have a quarterly turnover of more than 10 million. Mini game users are online for about one hour a day. Users are diverse, mature, and widely distributed. The age of users is mainly 24-40 years old, female users account for a higher proportion, and users in third-tier cities account for half.

13. China has more than 900 satellites in orbit.According to data released by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, China has more than 900 satellites in orbit, ranking second in the world, serving thousands of industries in the fields of communications, navigation, remote sensing, etc. For example, in the recent Dongting Lake dam breach incident, from plugging to drainage, at all stages of flood control and disaster relief, satellite image information provided important support for disaster relief command decision-making and disaster relief. The optical remote sensing images from the sky to the ground directly and completely showed the whole picture of the disaster area. At present, based on satellite communications, remote sensing, navigation and positioning and other space infrastructure, China's aerospace industry has developed a relatively complete application system. Many domestic navigation map suppliers have switched to Beidou priority positioning, with an average daily usage of more than 600 billion times.

14. Agency: It is estimated that the global AI server output value will reach US$187 billion in 2024.According to a report released by TrendForce, the high demand for high-end AI servers from large CSPs (cloud service providers) and brand customers will not stop in 2024. In addition, the shortage situation has been greatly alleviated after the second quarter of this year as CoWoS original manufacturer TSMC and HBM original manufacturers such as SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron Technology gradually expanded production, which has led to a reduction in the delivery lead time of Nvidia's main solution H100 from the previous 40-50 weeks to less than 16 weeks. TrendForce predicts that the annual growth rate of general server shipments is only 1.9%. The proportion of AI servers in the overall server market shipments is estimated to reach 12.2%, an increase of about 3.4 percentage points from 2023. It is estimated that the output value of AI servers will reach US$187 billion in 2024, with a growth rate of 69%, and the output value will account for 65% of the overall server market.

【The most core news】

1. The United States is considering taking stricter measures to put pressure on Japan and the Netherlands, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded.Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian hosted a regular press conference on the 17th. A reporter asked that the United States is considering taking stricter measures to put pressure on companies in countries such as Japan and the Netherlands to restrict their chip trade with China. What is China's comment on this? Lin Jian said that China has repeatedly expressed its solemn position on the malicious blockade and suppression of China's semiconductor industry by the United States. The United States has politicized, pan-securityized, and instrumentalized economic, trade, and technological issues, and has continuously increased chip export controls on China, coerced other countries, suppressed China's semiconductor industry, seriously undermined international trade rules, and damaged the stability of the global production and supply chain, which is not beneficial to any party. China has always firmly opposed this. Lin Jian said that he hopes that relevant countries can distinguish right from wrong, resolutely resist coercion, jointly maintain a fair and open international economic and trade order, and truly safeguard their own long-term interests.

2. The second phase of the Big Fund established a silicon materials company.According to the data from Qichacha, on July 15, Taiyuan Jinke Silicon Materials Technology Co., Ltd. was established with a registered capital of 5.5 billion yuan, of which the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II Co., Ltd. holds 27.27% of the shares, Taiyuan Jinke Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. holds 50.91% of the shares, and Taiyuan Fenshui Capital Management Co., Ltd. holds 21.82% of the shares. Taiyuan Jinke Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shanghai Xinsheng Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. (Xinsheng Semiconductor), and Xinsheng Semiconductor is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shanghai Silicon Industry. Previously, Shanghai Silicon Industry issued an announcement stating that it plans to invest in the construction of a 300mm silicon wafer capacity upgrade project for integrated circuits, with an estimated total investment of approximately 13.2 billion yuan. The announcement stated that this outbound investment project is divided into two parts: the Taiyuan project and the Shanghai project. Shanghai Silicon Industry intends to invest through its wholly-owned subsidiary Shanghai Xinsheng or its subsidiaries, and the Big Fund Phase II, Taiyuan Fenshui Capital Management Co., Ltd. or its subsidiaries, to jointly invest in the establishment of a holding subsidiary, Taiyuan Jinke Silicon Materials Technology Co., Ltd., to implement the Taiyuan project of upgrading the capacity of 300mm silicon wafers for integrated circuits.

3. Changdian Technology expects the global semiconductor market to return to growth track in 2024.Changdian Technology said on the interactive platform that with the gradual recovery of the communications and consumer markets, driven by hot application areas such as high-performance computing, etc., the global semiconductor market is expected to end its adjustment and return to the growth track in 2024. The recovery of market demand can effectively promote the recovery of the company's factory operations. The development of advanced packaging technology has huge market potential; driven by the high demand for HPC chips, the demand for advanced packaging has increased significantly.

4. Agency: LCD smartphone panel prices will continue to decline in July.According to a report by CINNO Research, a research organization, in the first half of 2024, the cumulative price declines of a-Si/LTPS panels are 5%/6% respectively. In July, the price of LCD smartphone panels will continue to decline, with a-Si panel prices continuing to drop by $0.1 and LTPS panel prices dropping by $0.2; the cumulative increase in rigid AMOLED panels in the first half of the year reached 10%, and the price stabilized in the short term; after a period of continuous price increases, the price of flexible AMOLED panels began to decline slightly, and will drop by $1 in July.

【Technology Financial Report View】

1. ASML's revenue and profit in the second quarter both increased quarter-on-quarter but declined year-on-year.ASML, the lithography machine giant, released its second quarter 2024 financial report, showing that net sales during the period reached 6.2 billion euros, an increase of 18.0% month-on-month and a decrease of 9.6% year-on-year; net profit reached 1.6 billion euros, an increase of 28.92% month-on-month and a decrease of 18.7% year-on-year; gross profit margin was 51.5%, basically the same as the previous year. Christophe Fouquet, President and CEO of ASML, said: "As in the previous quarters, the overall inventory level of the semiconductor industry has continued to improve. At the same time, we see that the utilization rate of lithography equipment is further improving, whether it is logic chip or memory chip customers. Although uncertainties mainly in the macro environment still exist, we expect the semiconductor industry to continue to recover in the second half of the year." He also expects that the semiconductor industry will enter an upward cycle in 2025. "By 2025, our net sales are expected to be 30 billion to 40 billion euros, and by 2030, it will reach 44 billion to 60 billion euros."