Carlsberg’s results, Beer versus spirituous

During the conference call for Carlsberg’s results, share price was negatively impacted by management comments on margins squeeze related to company inability to pass commodity increases to consumers which contrasts with spirits companies which have been passing healthy prices increases without provoking volumes contractions. If over the past 12 months Carlsberg and Remy Cointreau had similar performance, since 2008, Remy outperformed 3 times Carlsberg.

Siemens Energy results: short term pain, long term gain?

On one hand, Siemens came with disappointing Q1 results related to extra charges in the Gamesa division which had several operational troubles.

On the other hand, orders jumped 50% year on year organically to EUR 12.7 billion driven by a large connection order in Germany and strong demand in the US and the order back log hit a new record high at EUR  99 billion at the end of December confirming that Siemens Energy is well positioned for the energy transition.

Word war between Microsoft and Google on AI

Last year, Microsoft’s CEO Nadella expressed the group’s vast ambitions on artificial intelligence. Nadella clearly targeted Google’s stronghold on the search market. His comments sent Google shares sharply down. Google’s self-made stumbling on its first AI trials did not help. On the week Google lost almost 10%, wiping out $100bn of its market cap. The last time Microsoft aimed at Google was with Bing, its in-house search engine, which eventually peaked with a 2% market share. It is much too early to name the winner. According to the latest trials, AI is clearly not working. Recent headways are creating new problems and challenges. Search results are more “plausible” than with current tools. But a plausible outcome might be highly misleading.