Google Assistant Leads on General Knowledge

Source Statista

For more on Amazon Alexa and how it is trying to beat Google and Apple in the battle for the smart home, please see my report for STL Partners.

Google Shares New Numbers on App Usage

Source: Statista

Vodafone Suffers Slowdown

Vodafone reported 1.5% year-on-year growth in service revenue on an organic basis for the quarter ending March 31, 2017. That was slower growth than in the preceding four quarters and Vodafone warned that European roaming regulation will curb future growth. The results were weighed down by weak performances in the UK and India, where Vodafone is facing intense competitive pressure and is merging its operations with those of Idea Cellular.

However, Vittorio Colao, Group CEO, sounded a bullish note, saying: "Sustained investment in network quality has provided the platform to offer more generous plans to our mobile customers in Europe, stabilising contract ARPU, and has allowed us to capture strong data growth in our emerging markets operations. We continue to be Europe’s fastest growing broadband provider, seizing the opportunities created by convergence and winning revenue market share, supported also by our Enterprise business which continues to outperform its peers."

For the financial the year to March 31, 2017, Vodafone reported 700 million euros of revenue from the Internet of Things. It also said it used data analytics to deliver 3.1 billion personalised offers in the financial year. Source: Vodafone presentation

China's Consumers Embrace Local Brands

Source: Statista

Facebook Continues to Call Slowdown

Facebook reported a 49% year-on-year increase in revenue to 8 billion US dollars. The social network said that ad revenues in "the rest of the world' region (essentially Latin America and Africa) and Asia-Pacific grew 66% and 60% respectively, while Europe and North America both grew 47%.

Facebook reported that the average price per ad increased 14% and the total number of ad impressions served increased  32%, primarily driven by mobile feed ads. However,  Facebook warned "we continue to expect that our ad revenue growth rates will come down meaningfully over the course of 2017. We expect that ad load will play a less significant factor in driving revenue growth after mid-2017. We also expect desktop ad revenue growth rates to slow in the third quarter  when we begin to lap our efforts to limit the impact of ad blockers."  source: Facebook transcript

Services Become Apple's Growth Engine

Apple forecast its revenues will rise between 3% and 7% year-on-year to between 43.5 billion and 45.5 billion US dollars in the current quarter.  In the quarter ending April 1st, revenues rose 5% to 52.9 billion dollars, fuelled by a 18% increase in services revenue to 7.04 billion dollars.

“Our services business grew 19% year-over-year and App Store revenue was the highest ever, as our installed base continued to grow and transacting customers hit an all-time record,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. source: Apple statement