Between Zoom and Tiktok - we have summarized for you some global trends in the field, some of which you may have already forgotten because this year felt like five • 2021, we trust you
Photo: Reuters
There is no doubt that 2020 will be remembered in history as the year of the plague, the year of the corona.
What started with panic and anxiety in the month of March, quickly moved to falls in the markets, continued with the rises of technology stocks, and now we have reached vaccination campaigns already in December.
The event is constantly accompanied by dozens of conspiracies - all of which have had a huge impact on the economy and also on the world of technology, without a doubt one of the big "winners" of the year.
Here's what is probably not forgotten.
Good place in the middle
2020 has closed, hermetically and definitively become "Year of Intermediate Instruments".
The trend, which started a few years ago with OnePlus Android devices, added Shiomi with a host of premium devices at a mid-price and this year - robbery and breakage - even Apple joined the celebration with the iPhone SE 2020 - an upgrade of the iPhone 8 with a modern processor and upgraded camera.
Shiomi started the year with the return of the Pokémon in the F2 Pro version tomorrow for about NIS 2,4000, continued with (too many) devices in its Mi 10 series - all with a price tag of 2,200 plus minus.
Meizu was also present and Realme, a Chinese company, also joined the celebration, but less so
Sold due to its young age - about two years, with not bad devices in relation to their ridiculous price, like the Realme 6 which costs 999 shekels.
Now more than ever, it's not a shame to walk around with a quality Chinese device that costs about half as much as Apple's and Samsung's luxury devices.
Tuk tuk, who's next in line?
Once every few years an app emerges with the back of a serious company, taking the worlds of technology and economy by storm.
When WhatsApp conquered the world and was sold to Facebook in 2014 for $ 19 billion a lot raised an eyebrow and said that Zuckerberg is a sucker and a waste of money.
Recently, the issue has made headlines again, this time from the legal angle regarding Facebook’s accusation of preventing competition by “killing” or buying competing companies;
Today, everyone already knows that the purpose of the acquisition of WhatsApp was more economic interest but the elimination of an existential threat to the Facebook messenger app.
And if the "disappearance" of companies, the collection of Facebook information on WhatsApp, was done at the time through Onavo - an Israeli company that was also acquired and assimilated on Facebook for its exclusive use under the name "Facebook Israel".
This year the most recurring queen of the soul was “Tic Tac” - for the plethora of challenges, Corona jokes and vaccines, Pike News or just people singing to themselves - and not just by Facebook.
In August, it was announced that venture capital firm Sequoia Capital had offered to acquire Tic Tac for about $ 50 billion.
Microsoft's name also made headlines as a potential buyer and even the database company Oracle was there in matters at some point.
The potential sale of Tic Tac becomes even more intriguing as it is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance.
A company that, according to the Trump administration and some members of Congress, could be used as a tool to spy on American citizens and we will return to this later.
Broadcasts to the masses
Until recently, we in Israel were able to enjoy mainly Netflix.
In the past year, Apple TV +, Apple's streaming service, has also become available in Israel.
Prime Video, Amazon's streaming services, has been active in Israel since 2017, but this year the amount of content has increased significantly.
Now, the eyes are on Disney, HULU, HBO and a few other big content providers.
The only question is whether they will arrive in Israel before the vaccine is released for CoVid28 \ 29.
Quite a few areas in the worlds of technology have enjoyed the corona foyer this year, which has left billions of people in their homes, but streaming services seem to have gained the most significant leap forward.
Netflix is still at the top with about 195 million subscribers worldwide with the surprising Disney blowing in the back of its neck.
The media and entertainment conglomerate - under whose umbrella you will find the world of Marvel superheroes, Lucas Film and Star Wars movies, the Pixar animation company, National Geographic and a few other heavy guns - planned to reach 60 million subscribers in 2024 alone .
The Corona fell into their lap like a rain of candy and today, just over a year after the launch of the service, Disney has about 85 million subscribers worldwide (and an expected update of about 205 million subscribers in 2025).
We, as a small country, will probably have to wait quite a while for the service to reach us as well.
Disney is, as mentioned, a monster with a lot of heads and one of its subsidiaries: + ESPN, a provider of streaming sports services, which stands on its own with about 11 million subscribers.
HULU and HBO with its HBO MAX service stand at 39 million and 38 million users respectively.
To sum up, one can understand that Netflix was just the first swallow on the way to the end of the TV era as we once knew it.
And not just series.
Since most cinemas in the world have been closed for almost a year, quite a few movies go directly to the home screen.
"Wonder Woman 1980", which has been available since the beginning of the month in the service of HBO MAX, is a great example of a process that the film world is going through - even after the Corona, there will always be those who prefer to watch a movie lying on the living room sofa than going to the movies.
One last note about Disney as a bridge to the next paragraph - this is a great example of a company that through proper management emerged only strengthened from the corona crisis: in April this year the company's stock crashed after announcing the closure of all its theme parks but recovered very quickly through the distribution of its streaming services.
The one that goes up and the one that goes down
And if we are talking about stocks, 2020 was the year of the "zoom" without any shadow of a doubt.
Looking a little sober towards April, celebrating the Passover Seder with the rest of the family seems like a hallucinatory solution today, but in an age of social alienation and prevention of gatherings - kindergarten parties and parent-teacher meetings, Zum schools seem like a natural thing today.
Not many people, other than high-tech workers and marketing and sales people, were familiar with the software before March of this year.
At the beginning of March, the share price was about $ 110 and in October the price reached a peak of $ 588.
Anyone who believed in the company's product and purchased the stock before the corona gained a 530 percent return in less than a year.
In contrast, the big technology loser of the year is the Chinese Huawei, which wins the dubious title "the main battered of the trade war" between the US and China. Although the "sentence" was given as early as May 2019 when US President Donald Trump signed A presidential decree banning the business relations of American companies with Chinese companies that meet certain criteria (the names of Huawei and other Chinese companies have not been officially listed but the order is aimed at them).
U.S. companies like chipmakers Qualcomm and Intel, and giants Google and Apple are a partial list.
Now try to imagine how an excellent smartphone device it may be, like the Huawei P30 Pro, which we reviewed here last year - would look without Google's operating system or various services like Google Drive, YouTube or the Chrome browser.
Sizzling, green, big money
It seems that high-tech companies have this year become the winning horse of the capital market world.
After the IPOs in 2019 of companies based on technology or information applications, such as Uber, Lyft or the fiasco and the WeWork crash that was not eventually issued, in 2020 almost every IPO became bingo (at least for institutional investors and company owners).
Snowflake, a cloud computing data storage company, was issued in September this year with a target price of $ 120 per share.
The price more than doubled on the first day with 111% return and closed at $ 245 (currently the share price is about $ 330), which set the company’s value at $ 70 billion.
Not bad for a company that was founded in 2014 and raised only a sixth of that amount in early 2020.
Lemonade, an online insurance company founded in 2016, with an IPO target price of $ 29, soared 135% on its first day and closed at $ 65 per share (today the price is about $ 105 per share so those who were in no hurry to sell doubled their investment once again).
Thus, on the first day of the IPO, the company raised an additional $ 320 million that was added to its cash inventory.
See that Good and also DoorDash, a delivery service platform released to the public on December 9, rose 85% on its first day and raised $ 3 billion in capital for the company.
The end-of-year IPO onslaught continued and a day later it was the turn of Airbnb, a digital short-term apartment rental platform that may have suffered the most from the tourism crisis the Corona brought with it.
With a $ 68 IPO target, the stock nearly doubled on the first day of trading, crashing 25% on the second day but since then the stock has stabilized at about $ 160.
There is no doubt that the market expresses great confidence in high-tech and technology companies.
Fewer looking for products, more platforms with the potential for massive growth in the number of users.
When the public is afraid to invest in sustainable products, more people work from home and are less enthusiastic about investing in commercial real estate as in the past, the technology sector and the high-tech industry remain the bubble that (yet) has not been blown.