Tenet Fintech Group Inc. (CSE: PKK, OTC Pink: PKKFF)
Commercial Lending in China Ready to Tenet!
Citing the trajectory of iPhone 12 sales, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives raises his Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) price target from $150 to $160 and sets a Street-high bull case of $200.
Ives: “We have not seen a launch uptrend such as this in a number of years for Apple and the only iPhone trajectory similar would be the iPhone 6 in 2014 based on our analysis. Based on lead times on the Apple website as well as our checks, we believe pre-orders tracked more than 2x its predecessor iPhone 11 thus far and is a robust start out of the gates for Cupertino on this flagship supercycle product.”
The analyst says the Street is forecasting 215M iPhone units for FY21, but Ives says his bull case sees the potential to sell over 240M units, topping the record 231M units sold in FY15.
Wedbush estimates that 350M of the 950M iPhones worldwide are in the upgrade window, which could “translate into an unprecedented upgrade cycle for Apple with a major holiday season on the horizon.”
wedbush maintains an Outperform rating on Apple.
The company has a Very Bullish Quant rating at Seeking Alpha. Check out the top tech stocks listed by Quant rating here.
Apple shares are up 0.2% pre-market to $124.65.
AT&T (NYSE:T) has received bids for its DirecTV unit valuing it at more than $15B including debt, The Wall Street Journal reports, as the process moves into the late stages.
That means there could be a deal completed by early in 2021.
AT&T shares are up 3% to a session high.
Among those offering bids over the $15B mark was Michael Klein’s blank-check firm Churchill Capital Corp. IV (CCIV +0.4%), according to the report.
Meanwhile, Apollo Global Management (APO -0.8%), linked to the discussions for some time, has submitted a bid valuing DirecTV under $15B, the WSJ says.
Churchill Capital IV, which raised $2.07B in July, was linked to the DirecTV talks in November with an eye to a deal around $15B.
The price is still a fraction of what AT&T paid for the assets five years ago: about $48.5B, or $67.1B including debt.
The pandemic has accelerated trends that were already starting, and that includes work from home, said PayPal (PYPL -0.3%) President Daniel Schulman said during a fireside chat during the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Service Virtual Conference.
“I think we’re going to be in this remote model for six to nine months,” then moving to a hybrid model after that, he said.
“It won’t go back to the way it was,” he said.
In addition, the pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital payment by “maybe three to five years,” Schulman said.
CEOs of major retailers have told him that the split between in-store and online shopping have flipped in the past year from 70% in-store/30% online or curbside pickup to 30/70 this year. About two-thirds of those retail CEOs expect that behavior will continue, he said.
“You’ve got new demographics online learning how to use digital,” Schulman said.
Jumping on another trend, PayPal’s new crypto service will soon allow users to buy goods and services with crypto. Better yet for PYPL, about half of its customers that use the crypto service open up their PayPal app everyday, Schulman said.
SoftBank could go private through gradual buybacks – Bloomberg
Bloomberg sources say SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBF,OTCPK:SFTBY) head Masayoshi Son could take the company private by buying back enough shares to have the leverage to push out the other remaining investors.
Son wouldn’t buy shares but his ownership stake of 27% would grow as other investors sold their stakes. When Son reaches 66%, he can ask other shareholders to sell.
The “slow-burn” strategy could take more than a year and would require SoftBank to continue its asset sales to fund buybacks.
Early this year, SoftBank reported a record annual operating loss due to write-offs of its WeWork and Uber investments.
The company then launched a $43B asset sale and buyback program.
SoftBank offloaded some of its stakes in Alibaba, T-Mobile, and some shares of the SoftBank Group telecommunications unit. The company sold its chip unit Arm to Nvidia for $40B.
AI software company C3.ai stock opens 138% above its IPO price
The enterprises artificial intelligence software company priced 15.5M Class A common stock at $42/share, above the prior expected price range of $36-$38 per share and original estimated price range of $31-$34.
The underwriters’ overallotment is an additional 2.325M of class A common stock.
C3.ai provides software-as-a-service, or SaaS, applications.
Competitors include AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
The global market for AI/ML-based solutions was valued at $625M in 2016 and is expected to exceed $6.1B by 2022, a forecasted CAGR of 48.7% from 2017 to 2022, according to MarketsAndMarkets.
