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Read more Amazon expects to incur $4 billion in COVID-related costs next quarter, an estimate that provides a bellwether for other businesses, large and small, trying to stay operational and control expenses amid the pandemic.
The upshot: Amazon is planning for COVID to remain an unwelcome companion through the end of the year with costs higher than the previous quarter.
The company said Thursday in its third-quarter earnings call that it logged $7.5 billion in COVID-related costs since the disease took root earlier this year. Amazon previously said its COVID costs were about $600 million in the first quarter and more than $4 billion in the second. The company’s COVID costs in the third quarter were about $2.5 billion, CFO Brian Olsavsky told an analyst during an earnings call. While Amazon was able to lower its costs in the third quarter due to efficiencies that number is on rise for next quarter.
Olsavsky said the majority of the increase in costs is due to the expansion of its operations. Amazon has hired 100,000 new workers in October.
COVID-19 along with other uncertainties related to the economy, holiday sales and even weather patterns weighed on its guidance for operating income in the fourth quarter. Amazon provided a wide-ranging guidance of between $1 billion and $4.5 billion in operating income in the fourth quarter compared with $3.9 billion in the same period last year. This guidance assumes about $4 billion of costs related to COVID-19.
But what is most telling is that even after providing a lengthy list of possible uncertainties in the fourth quarter, Olsavsky noted that COVID still trumps them all.
“So there’s a whole host of issues that generally come to bear in Q4,” Olsavsky said. “I think the fact that COVID is dwarfing all of those is causing us a lot of uncertainty on our top line range.”
Olsavsky said costs were related to productivity losses caused by changing how it operates as well as expenses related to personal protective equipment and other upfront costs.
“The largest portion of these costs relate to continuing productivity headwinds in our facilities, including process revisions to allow for social distancing and incremental costs to ramp up new facilities, and the large influx of new employees hired to support strong customer demand also includes investments in PPE for employees and enhanced cleaning of our facilities,” Olsavsky said during Thursday’s earnings call.
Amazon said Thursday it also continues to ramp up its in-house COVID-19 testing program with capacity reaching 50,000 tests a day across 650 sites by November.
WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app owned by Facebook, is now delivering roughly 100 billion messages a day, the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the quarterly earnings call Thursday.
For some perspective, users exchanged 100 billion messages on WhatsApp last New Year’s Eve. That is the day when WhatsApp tops its engagement figures, and as many of you may remember, also the time when the service customarily suffered glitches in the past years. (No outage on last New Year’s Eve!)
At this point, WhatsApp is just competing with itself. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016. Apple chief executive Tim Cook said in May that iMessage and FaceTime were seeing record usage, but did not share specific figures. The last time Apple did share the figure, it was far behind WhatsApp’s then usage (podcast). WeChat, which has also amassed over 1 billion users, is behind in daily volume of messages, too.
In early 2014, WhatsApp was being used to exchange about 50 billion texts a day, its then chief executive Jan Koum revealed at an event.
At the time, WhatsApp had fewer than 500 million users. WhatsApp now has more than 2 billion users and at least in India, its largest market by users, its popularity surpasses those of every other smartphone app including the big blue app.
“This year we’ve all relied on messaging more than ever to keep up with our loved ones and get business done,” tweeted Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
Sadly, that’s all the update the company shared on WhatsApp today. Mystery continues for when WhatsApp expects to resume its payments service in Brazil, and when it plans to launch its payments in India, where it began testing the service in 2018. (It has already shared big plans around financial services in India, though.)
“We are proud that WhatsApp is able to deliver roughly 100B messages every day and we’re excited about the road ahead,” said Cathcart.
What does a hologram-obsessed entrepreneur do for a second act after setting up a virtual Ronald Reagan in the Reagan Memorial Library, or beaming Jimmy Kimmel all the way from Hollywood to the Country Music Awards in Nashville?
If that entrepreneur is David Nussbaum, the founder of PORTL Hologram, the next logical step is to build a machine that can bring the joy of hologram-based communication to the masses.
That’s the goal thanks to a new $3 million round that Nussbaum’s company raised from famed venture investor Tim Draper, former Electronic Arts executive Doug Barry and longtime awards-show producer Joe Lewis.
Barry is not only backing the company, he’s also coming on board as its first chief operating officer.
Much of this interest can be traced back to the hologram performance given posthumously by Tupac Shakur back at Coachella about eight years ago.
Nussbaum turned the excitement generated by that event into a business. He bought the patents that powered Tupac’s beyond-the-grave performance, and used the technology to beam Julian Assange out of the Ecuadoran embassy he had been holed up in during his years in London and making dead stars live (and tour) again.
Those visual feats were basically just an updated version of the Pepper’s Ghost technique that stage illusionists and moviemakers have been using since it was invented by John Pepper in the 19th century.
The PORTL is a significant upgrade, according to Nussbaum.
The projector can transmit images any time of the day or night, and using PORTL’s capture studio-in-a-box means that anyone with $60,000 to spend and a white background can beam themselves into any portal anywhere in the world.
The company has sold a hundred devices and already delivered several dozen to shopping malls, airports and movie theater lobbies. “We’ve manufactured and delivered several dozen,” Nussbaum said.
Part of the selling point, beyond just the gimmick of the hologram’s next-level verisimilitude, is its interactivity. Through the studio rig and PORTL hardware, users can hear what people standing around the PORTL are saying and then respond.
For its next trick, PORTL is looking to build a miniaturized version of its system that would be about the size of a desktop computer and could be used to both record and distribute the holograms to anyone with a PORTL device.
“The minis will have all of the features to capture your content and rotoscope you out of our background and have the studio effects that is important in displaying your realistic volumetric like effect and they will beam you to any other device,” Nussbaum said.
To build out the business, the PORTL minis will have more than just communications capabilities, but recorded entertainment as well, Nussbaum said.
“The minis will be bundled with content like Peloton and Mirror bundled with very specific types of content. We are in conversations with a number of extremely well-known content creators where we would bundle a portal but will also have dedicated and exclusive content… [and] bundle that for $39 to $49 per month.”
It’s a vision that Nussbaum admits is far more expansive than his intentions — and the person he has to thank for the more ambitious vision of the business is none other than Draper.
“When I started this I thought it was going to be a novelty company,” he said. “When the pandemic hit he knew we needed to do much more than that.”
Tesla has made good on founder and CEO Elon Musk’s promise to boost the price of its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) software upgrade option, increasing it to $10,000 following the start of the staged rollout of a beta version of the software update last week. This boosts the price of the package $2,000 from its price before today, and it has steadily increased since last May.
The FSD option has been available as an optional add-on to complement Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance technology, even though the features themselves haven’t been available to Tesla owners before the launch of the beta this month. Even still, it’s only in limited beta, but this is the closest Musk and Tesla have come to actually launching something under the FSD moniker — after having teased a fully autonomous mode in production Teslas for years now.
Despite its name, FSD isn’t what most in the industry would define as full, Level 4 or Level 5, autonomy per the standards defined by SAE International and accepted by most working on self-driving. Musk has designed it as vehicles having the ability “to be autonomous but requiring supervision and intervention at times,” whereas Levels 4 and 5 (often considered “true self-driving”) under SAE standards require no driver intervention.
Still, the technology does appear impressive in some ways according to early user feedback — though testing any kind of self-driving software unsupervised via the general public does seem an incredibly risky move. Musk has said that we should see a wide rollout of the FSD tech beyond the beta before year’s end, so he definitely seems confident in its performance.
The price increase might be another sign of his and the company’s confidence. Musk has always maintained that users were getting a discount by handing money over early to Tesla in order to help it develop technology that would come later, so in many ways it makes sense that the price increase comes now. This also obviously helps Tesla boost margins, though it’s already riding high on earnings that beat both revenue and profit expectations from analysts.
Polestar, the electric vehicle brand that was spun out of Volvo Car Group, has issued another recall for its newest electric vehicle.
The company is voluntarily recalling nearly 4,600 vehicles over what has been described as faulty inverters, Reuters reported. Polestar said in a statement that all affected customers will be notified, beginning November 2.
“The recall involves the replacement of faulty inverters on most delivered customer vehicles,” Polestar said in its statement, adding that the inverters transform the stored energy in the battery into the power required by the electric motors.
The required hardware can be done in a single service visit, according to the company. Vehicles in North America were not affected by the recall, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Vehicles in Switzerland were also not affected.
The company also said the vehicles require service for its High Voltage Coolant Heater (HVCH). The HVCH is responsible for both cabin and high voltage battery heating. Faulty parts fitted to early production cars need to be replaced, the company said. The total number of affected vehicles delivered to customers is 3,150.
“As part of the actions required by the recall and service campaign, all vehicles will also be upgraded to be compatible with forthcoming Over-The-Air (OTA) updates,” the company said. “This will allow Polestar to push new software directly to Polestar 2 vehicles when OTA updates are available.”
Polestar, which in 2017 was recast as an electric performance brand aimed at producing exciting and fun-to-drive electric vehicles, started production this spring of its all-electric Polestar 2 vehicle at a plant in China. The production start was a milestone for the company that is jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding of China.
However, the company has faced some early headwinds. Polestar made its last recall on October 2 after several cars had abruptly stopped while driving. “This happened in very, very rare cases,” Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said during an interview at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, which was held in October. Ingenlath said at the time that none of the reported cases happened in the United States, nor were any of the affected vehicles involved in an accident. That issue was fixed with a software update.