Amazon promised “thousands” of discounted items for Cyber Monday “deals weekend” running Saturday-Monday. Prime members get 30 minutes of early access to the “hottest Lightning Deals” on Amazon.com, said the e-commerce leader's Monday preview.
A unanimous FTC agreed to a Republican proposal to delay voting on whether to issue orders to large retailers and consumer-goods suppliers to study anti-competitive effects of supply chain disruptions (see 2111100084). Despite Chair Lina Khan’s desire to “expeditiously” begin research, the commission, which recently lost its Democratic majority, agreed 4-0 Thursday to table the vote until this Wednesday, after a motion from Commissioner Christine Wilson.
Applied Materials had 34% revenue growth to $23 billion in fiscal 2021 ended Oct. 31, and hit the midpoint of its fiscal Q4 earnings guidance “despite larger than expected supply chain constraints,” said CEO Gary Dickerson on a Thursday analysts call. The company supplies semiconductor production equipment to chipmakers and OLED vapor-deposition products and services to Chinese panel makers, and can be a bellwether of health in the semiconductor and display industries.
As demand and prices for IP version 4 addresses rise, cybersecurity threats are also increasing, IPv4 marketplace IPXO said. The price surge likely leads to increased cybercrime as crooks hijack and sell unused addresses in underground markets, said CEO Vincentas Grinius. The answer isn't to adopt IPv6 but to look to a more sustainable form of internet governance such as leasing IPv4 addresses, he said. IPv4 addresses are a problem if they're made available via carrier-grade network address translation (NAT), which uses a single address for multiple subscribers and can hide cybercriminals, said IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid. Key industries use IPv6, he said.
Most of Best Buy’s Black Friday prices kicked in Friday, in a season that retail experts expect to be less promotional due to tight inventories caused by component shortages and shipping and logistical snarls.
Cisco’s revenue growth was “solid” in its fiscal Q1 ended Oct. 30, rising 8% year over year to $12.9 billion, but growth was hindered by the supply constraints that are “affecting our technology peers and nearly every other industry,” said CEO Chuck Robbins on a Wednesday call. “Our product orders were extremely strong and balanced across our markets, but we are constrained in what we can build and ship to our customers.”
Components shortages forced manufacturing shutdowns for Sonos and will continue into 2022, said Chief Financial Officer Brittany Bagley on the company’s Q4 fiscal 2021 earnings call Wednesday for the quarter ending Oct. 2. The company expects holiday quarter revenue to fall below fiscal Q1 a year ago, and due to supply constraints “we won't be running typical promotional environments in Q1,” Bagley said.
Despite consumers’ early holiday shopping start this year, the National Retail Federation expects a year-on-year increase of 2 million shoppers from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, it said Wednesday, though the estimated 158.3 million are below the 165.3 million who shopped in 2019.
In a breakthrough for right-to-repair advocates, Apple said Wednesday its new Self Service Repair program will make genuine Apple parts, tools and manuals available for consumers who are “comfortable” servicing their own devices. Advocates greeted the news with a mixture of glee and trepidation over what they said was a program that at first appearance was rife with limitations and unknowns.
Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman forecast a low-single-digit decrease for the company’s foundational audio revenue in fiscal 2022, citing analysts’ reports indicating “we will not see the level of market growth we saw in the previous year,” due to uncertainties about global supply constraints and consumer spending.