I have COVID.
I've been treating COVID patients for several years now, and never got it. Every single other member of my department has had it at least once. I got slacker and slacker with my PPE and hand washing and still nothing. My mask technique slipped and I remained unaffected. I began to think I had a COVID-immunity superpower which was reinforced as the months went by and I remained the sole person to not go down.
It seems I am not in possession of a super power after all.
So, I am sulking in the spare room with the dog for company and cursing my stupidity.
The worst symptoms have worn off now, I have a day or two to kill and so I have decided to procrastinate completing my tax returns until the very last moment, and instead perform a not particularly useful, but mildly entertaining review of some of my Super holdings. Hopefully these will be of some use, albeit quite a different theme to the majority of companies reviewed on Strawman.
This was prompted by the following article which highlighted how certain tech firms have crashed and burned and others are expected to do quite well over recent years. I have a tendency to choose tech related companies, so was of particular interest to me. The only holding in the Lockdown Lunacy Index I hold is Shopify, which in retrospect I should have taken profits on when it was absurdly overvalued last year. Oh well, another lesson learnt.
Sep 1st 2022
How worrying is this return to Earth? To be sure, some of it reflects gloomier prospects for the global economy, racked by inflation, war and rising interest rates. And it is disappointing that two years of digitisation and remote work have not provided clear evidence of a productivity boom. Yet there are reasons still to be techno-optimistic. Much of the early enthusiasm may simply have been focused on the wrong types of firm. Though the pandemic darlings have fizzled, the shift towards ever greater digitisation continues. The true winners are not the flashy consumer-tech firms, but the companies that provide the infrastructure to enable this shift.
Much of the decline of our lockdown index reflects shakier business models. On August 22nd Zoom reported that its year-on-year revenue growth had fallen to 8%, the lowest rate since the company listed in 2019. Three days later Peloton reported a nearly 30% fall in its quarterly sales, compared with a year ago. Subscribers are fleeing Netflix for other viewing platforms, such as Disney+. Robinhood is laying off a quarter of its staff as day traders cool on the markets.
The fading work-from-home boom has affected the demand for hardware, too. Worldwide pc shipments are expected to decline by 10% this year; analysts reckon mobile-phone sales will tumble by 7%. A downturn in spending on video games and a series of crypto implosions have dented the sales of the powerful semiconductors used to mine digital currencies and render computer graphics.
Look beyond the boom and bust of consumer tech, though, and you see the real successes. The market for the infrastructure technology that underpins people’s daily lives, such as cloud computing, cybersecurity and digital payments, is thriving. The cloud-computing industry is expected to grow to almost $500bn this year, up from $243bn in 2019. Amazon’s cloud offering, the largest in the world, is still growing at 33% each year. It accounted for three-quarters of the firm’s operating income over the past 12 months, and is propping up the tech giant’s ailing e-commerce business. Its closest rivals are the cloud services of Microsoft and Google. Their annual sales are growing by 40% and 36%, respectively.
Cloudification has created new demands for cybersecurity, another tech winner. *The combined revenue at the three largest listed cybersecurity firms has almost doubled since the start of the pandemic. Their market capitalisation has tripled, and has come down only a fraction since the start of the year. Digital payments are another bright spot, thanks to lockdowns and social distancing. Three-quarters of iPhone owners use Apple Pay, up from half in 2019, and nine out of ten American retailers now accept it as a payment method. Almost 200m people in India and China have used some form of digital payment for the first time since the onset of covid. A third of adults in sub-Saharan Africa now have a mobile-money account, up from a fifth in 2017.
*my emphasis (see HACK)