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This is Bloomberg Tech coming up.
Qualcom gives an upbeat forecast, but it fell short of investor expectations. We'll discuss why with the CEO.
Plus the earnings don't stop their executives from Figma, Robin Hood, Chime and Lift.
They join us after important results.
And all eyes on Tesla as we await the outcome of a shareholder vote on a one trillion dollar pay package for Elon.
Musk and Tesla.
It weighs on the broader market said, let's get to those broader markets on the day, because well, overall, we've got a lot of macro data to be digesting, and that feeds in the angst that we've been seeing in tech stocks. More broadly, we're of by one point on the NASDAK one one hundred.
We're still questioning valuations.
It's interesting that the AI play moves into the macro in terms of jobs data not coming from the federal departments, but it is coming from Challenger Gray and Christmas and they're saying, we've never seen in October as bad as this in twenty years in terms of one hundred and fifty three thousand jobs losses, AI automation being blamed Bitcoin of by one point seven percent.
We got some risk aversion ed.
Yeah.
In the chip sector, we have two very similar stories with two very different reactions. ARM has given us a bullish outlook for the current period, which basically suggests they're making traction.
In AI.
The shares that opened a lot higher, we're now down two percent. Qualcomm again giving a pretty bullish outlook for the current period, traction in traditional markets, diversifying revenue, but that stock is down four percent at the high end of high end of estimates. They didn't quite get there.
Then there's in the media and entertainment space, Warner Brothers Discovery actually missed estimates on revenue in the quarter, but amid plans for a sale or some kind of transaction, that's really all the street really cared about, it is, and.
Let's dig into that street reaction, the stock reaction.
Hannah Miller's here to covering.
All things media, and really almost these numbers vindicated the decision by David Zazov to be separateing out the businesses talk us through it.
Yeah, so this morning we heard David Zaslov really play up the strength of the studio segment. They had some big blockbuster hits this summer with Superman and Weapons.
He wants buyers to.
Look at the movie business, not the street the TV network's.
Business, of course.
Mister Sarsluff was asked about what happens next, and his response was pretty straightforward. We have an active process underway. Are you able to tell us any more, Hannah, about what an active process underway means.
Yeah.
They want to move quick on this, and we're expecting to get more news in December about this deal. You know, the bids have to come in. They have to consider all the interests they're getting from players like Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount. It's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out.
But Hannah, are they the names that we're limited to, or could we see big tech throw it's had in the ring? Who else might be interested in a CNN on one side or more of the studios on the other side.
Yeah.
We're also you know, hearing whispers about Amazon. You know, they could come in as they try to continue building out their prime video streaming service. You know, there are these valuable assets. You know, there is the focus on the movie business HBO, but we have to remember that their CNN, there's a valuable sports portfolio. There are some really nice assets up for grabs here.
Blom Bogs, Hannah Miller, thank you very much. Let's get back to the chip sector. ARM gave a bullish revenue forecast, helped by rising interest in designing chips to run AI data centers. Congenser Barney, senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, writing, operating expenses remain elevated on AI investments and full chip initiatives, but long term share gains and rising royalty content continue to support its outlook. Conngenser Barni joins us now on
mix money. In two ways, it licenses the blueprints the underlying technology for a chip, and then it gets royalty in each unit of that chips that's sold. The story here is about what ARM is offering in the AI accelerator space or in the data center context.
Explain what you saw in the numbers that they gave.
Yeah, the data center strength was really the highlight, as you mentioned ed when you look at the royalty revenues from the data center. Last fiscal year it was about ten percent of royalties. We expect this now to get to almost eighteen to twenty percent, so a two x increase in one year by the end of fiscal twenty six. What's really driving here In the quarter, they signed a
lot of CSS license deals. Basically, they're licensing their IP to a lot of data center customers, whether it's been the merchant customers, the ACIC designers, soft Bank, and even Chinese customers. A lot of these licenses when eventually you get converted into royalty revenues, hence creating a tailwind for layering more and more royalty debsues.
Their share is significantly.
Increasing quarter over quarter and is as we know. And Media is going to launch their service with the Blackwell. The Blackwell service or the CPU in that service are going to be based on the RP. And you look at Amazon ramping its grivet and chip that's based on the RP, Google sexim chip based on the RP. So they're seeing significant share games here, which eventually sets them up to have strong royalty growth in the future from the data center.
Segmentunjin, you mentioned SoftBank course, soft Bank is the main owner of some of it trades on the public markets, big player in just the broader AI space Stargate for example. Did you get enough detail from Rene Has the CEO of arm about their role in Stargate in the big build out?
We did like So if you look at the numbers this quarter, Software brought in somewhere about one hundred and eighty million in royalty revenues, fifty million jump from just last quarter. Also, when we look at revenues by GEO, Japan is becoming now almost fifteen to twenty percent of revenue, which until a few quarters ago Japan was merged into small category other.
So that tells you that.
The amount of revenue both from royalty side and licensing that Softmaen is bringing into this company and going to become a significantly big concentrated.
Customer going forward.
Software has a lot of portfolio companies that acquired Graphcore mper so you can imagine it's a leading indicator of where they would be using arm IP. Also, there's news about Software working with Armed sort of develop their own chips.
Qualcom strong outlook for the current period suggests strengthen Android and efforts to diversify revenue sources doing well. We're sharing your research on the screen. Conjen, very quick, give us your react.
Yeah, it was a good quarter.
But the concern here is that the fear that they would go back to seventy five percent of share at Samsung comes to be coming true.
So that's I think what investors didn't like.
We think that Apple share is higher than what we feared seventy it's close to eighty to eighty five percent, but that goodness got offset by the Samsung share drop.
Conjin Savani, always great research from you and the team.
We appreciate it. Of Blomberg Intelligence shares a quil Com.
We check in on them because they're reported last night. They're training a little bit lower today. But the chip maker actually really delivered an upbeat forecast. They had sales and profits handily topping Wall Street expectations.
But maybe the market got ahead of itself.
Let's talk about it all and the real fundamentals with Christiano Ammon's quill Com CEO. And I'm sure it's really frustrating to start on the start on the stock market reaction, But what do you think investors had done ahead of this?
Have they got over excited.
We're seeing this play out with a few of the chip sector.
Look, it is really hard to predict the market right now, but we're We're incredibly happy about the company. I think we're executing very well our strategy, explaining out perfectly. Everything we said we're going to do, we're actually doing better. And like I could not be more excited about so many things that are going well at Qualcomm right now and the new opportunities we have in the future. I
think the company is very different. We had expanded beyond handsets into a number of different markets.
The results are showing.
And there are very few companies like wealcom that can go from five watts chips for earbuds all the way to now five hundred watts chips for a data center. And I think that's how we think about the opportunity.
We can't wait to get into more on the detail of how you're jumping into the AI accelerator offering, but just going to the smartphone business, which.
Is the bread and butter.
What are you seeing at the moment and particularly what inroads you're making an Android?
Yes, so, you know, I think this is a very interesting and it's you know, every quarter we see this. I know there's a lot of conversation about it, but it's a trend that has happened to qualkom over the past several years. I want everybody to step back and look at what's happening with the hands and marketingneral they hants it. Smartphone is the most important consumer electronic purchase in the world. It's aren't separable device and people want always to get a better device when they buy a
new device. What we see right now is the expansion of the premion teer. So the market Caroline didn't. The units of hands and market is still smaller in an annual basis than used to be before COVID. But what has happened and is driving a lot of growth from Qualkan and Android over the past several years is the premium teer is expending in size. So if you look at a United States market, most devices are premionteer. Most people will buy like an iPhone or Galaxy. That's now
happening everywhere in the world. It's happening in China's happening in India. So we see premionteer expending. That makes you a much richer market for us, and then we see phones becoming more capable, more compute, more AI. That is driving silicon content. That's why Android continues to grow with Snapdragon eight. And I think the upside that we have seen above expectations is really Android expansion for Qualcom.
Christiano, good morning.
It's ed.
What you've tried to do is diversify away from mobile and away from Apple. Right, but there are so many categories now data center, but auto, mixed reality. Which of those is the fastest moving for you?
Right now?
Look right now you probably see in terms of the speed it's automotive. I think we have been growing significantly on an ear of a year basis, and most of our growth, again, like the conversation with Hints, it has nothing to do about the market side. It's just us gaining share those cars becoming really computer on wheels, and we build a digital platform for the core industry, which is the Snapdragon Digital chassis. So when you talk about diversification away from hintst in an Apple, a couple of
things that actually came out in those results. They are incredible and show what we've been saying we're doing it. We just close our fist career the non Apple related growth in the company about eighteen percent, and when you look at segments like automotive, we're actually doing significantly higher than that. And that's also the other segment as well.
The other part of the question is what's moving faster, and we are incredibly optimistic about those new category of mobile devices, which we call personal AI devices, as AI models and agent applications started to appear for consumers. That's materializing with devices that people wear like US glasses for example, really becoming agenta glasses, and we said two billion of revenue by fiscal twenty nine.
We're way ahead of that.
Just looking of how to performing right now, especially with Meta.
This is the first opportunity we've had to speak to you since the Big Data Center News AI two hundred to start, and the question that I've had most often for you from the audience is what is quite different about Qualcom's approach, particularly to inference. You have this AI accelerator family or MPU. How is it different from an nvideo or AMD GPU, a broad coom, Marvel XPU, or this large body of startups that are basically chasing rack scale solutions for AI.
Yes, so I'll start answering the question by saying the following. There's a lot of people that will love Qualcom. There are people they're not gonna like Qualcom. But one thing everybody's probably going to say, don't bet against Qualcom being a technology competent company. I think look just last year with the number one company in America in terms of patent applications and every market that we actually enter, we
developed something very unique from a technology leadership. So now to answer your question, what are we doing, We're actually were very focus on the next phase of data center, the next phase of data center. If you expect all of those projections to materialize and all of those companies investing in data center ANDAI to deliver the profitability the market expects they're going to have to do.
Inference.
Inference is wreactly when you put AI into production at scale. And if you see just some of the conversations you're seeing the market right now about concerns of growth rates. Power is one of the concerns. You need a lot of energy. So we're coming from our DNA of building devices. They're very efficient in power, and we think about what are the architecture that is dedicated for inference, especially for the post GPU. I think architecture, and I think that's
what we're doing. I think we're developing an architecture that is optimized to the highest possible compute density you can put on a data center for a very efficient power and people are interested, and we're.
Just busy executing. I think the other part.
Of the answer, ED is will you why you not think the potcom will have an opportunity to participate? The market is so big we don't have to get a lot. Everything we get is multiple or billions of dollars.
Christiana, you brought up a really interesting if if some of the big numbers that are being bounded about by the big players come to light, three trillion dollars by twenty twenty eight is what Morgan Stanley thinks is going to be needed in data centers.
What if it doesn't, is there.
A risk that we actually innovate because we have to invade because there isn't enough power and suddenly that data center demand just isn't going.
To live up to that expectation.
Now for quockcom for us is oh upside.
So do you think can I just get a take on whether you think that three trillion dollars figure if it is reasonable. Do you have any negative worries, any concerns.
Look, I don't.
I believe that the need for compute is very clear. That's not only also not only on the data centers, everywhere. I think we see that on phones, we see that on cars, we see that on PCs. AI needs a lot more computing power, and I think I believe what that will actually do is create opportunity for innovation, and there'll be competition. Right now, everybody's playing to win, everybody's building data centers to win, and then there's going to be competition. And I think that's what our focus is.
But I don't believe the trend and the need for a computer. You can have an argument about the timing, but the trend is very clear. Here's one way I'll describe it to you, and I'll be very careful.
With my words.
The Internet, when we thought about what the Internet will be back in nineteen ninety nine, is bigger today. It's much d Internet's much bigger today than people thought. So I think on the long run, AI is probably underestimated.
It's going to be bigger.
The question is always going to be about timing, and we're prepared for when there's going to be competition.
Christiano Iman of Qualcom, great to have you back on the show, Thank you very much. Figma delivered an upbeat outlook, projecting stronger than expect to coally revenue and profit, citing strong demand and growing adoption of its new products. I sat down with CEO Dylan Field, who began by explaining the impact to growth from acquiring Weav, a startup focused on generating imagery with AI within a web browser.
Weav is this amazing product where you can bring in a whole sorts of models, you can compose them in a notebase system, which basically means drag and draw visual programming, and from there you can really start to explore what's possible with various models. So for us, it's a bet that the starting prompt is just the starting prompt, it's
not the end. What you need to do is shape these outputs almost like a medium like clay, rather than try to go for the one shot and then the final destination should be what you get through throughout this process. The team itself is incredible. I mean they've managed to really balance simplicity with power so that they're able to achieve an incredible environment for creative exploration and process and workflow building, and really excited to work with them and build this out further.
It brings me back to the customer behavior question. So revenue for the full year will be one point zero four four billion to one point zero four six billion dollars. But I guess it's is this existing customers using more products or is it a custom account growing higher because.
You're offering a wider range of products.
Yeah, I mean definitely both, and also new customers adopting. We are seeing an acceleration all that, and our NDR for example, from one twenty nine to one thirty one percent this quarter, and that's on over ten k err customers. The way that we look at just what's going on overall is people really like the platform aspect of Figma,
and that is something that drives adoption. But also the interoperability between the different products we have is really important and something that we're trying to make all the better.
All the time.
In the quarter gone, net losses were driven by stock based compensation.
Yeah, the one from event related to the IPO in particular.
Related to the IPI particular, but you know, stock based comp is part of this business in the world of technology, but it's also like part of the fabric and culture of the technology industry, particularly now where we have this fixation on AI talent. What is your strategy going to be from this point, Dylan, just less stock comport or you just have to manage it differently.
Well, I think that, first of all, it starts with making sure that you see and everyone sees stock based compensation as a natural expense, and I think that as we build out we will see that number normalize on a nine gap basis. This is a profitable quayer for us, and we continue to invest heavily in the short term in order to drive long term platform growth and capabilities for our customers. I think that every customer wants that, and our investors want that as well.
Dylanfield, Figma CEO with you, Ed. I mean, while Robin Hood also reported earnings yesterday, shares actually falling them this morning. Though the company's crypto earnings they were lower than expected, Meanwhile, operating costs they were higher. Now, Robinhood, CEO of lad Tenev, sat down with us yesterday and discussed the trading platform's plan to expand its offering.
The interesting thing about prediction markets is it rounds out the offering in sort of like complete the time at which Robinhood customers can continue to engage with the platform. For a while, we were offering prominantly US equities, which is very much at US East Coast working hours type of event markets are open, you know, nine to four East Coast hours, and then we've expanded that over time with US introducing twenty four hour market, We've added crypto
and now prediction markets. A lot of the events, particularly in sports, are happening nights and weekends, so robin Hood is becoming increasingly a twenty four seven platform where you can trade and invest in global markets at all.
Times of the day.
And I think our customers do tend to be digitally native and quite savvy. That tends to lean younger, but we also have customers that are, you know, in their seventies and eights.
And as long as you're.
Comfortable doing your finances on a mobile device and you want to be at the frontier of technology, I think it's something that transcends.
Just young people.
Of course, we always want to be relevant to the next generation, but Robinhood I feel like you should be at a disadvantage if you're using any other platform.
That was Robin Hood, CEO of lad Tenev, speaking after the company's earnings call yesterday and now coming up. AI seems to be taking a toll on US jobs. We'll talk about the October labor cuts next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
I'm now for Talking Tech and first time Apple is turning to Google for help overhauling his Story Voice assistant. Now, the iPhone maker is planning to pay about a billion dollars a year for an ultra powerful one point two trillion parameter AI model, according to sources, and the hope is to use the technology as an interim solution until Apple's own models are powerful enough. Plus, AI looks to
be making its mark on the US labor market. Last month saw the most job cuts by US firms for October in two decades.
It's all according to.
Data from Challenge of Gray and Christmas and at the firm point to AI reshaping industries. We're also acknowledging the impact of cost cutting and right sizing post pandemic dead.
Okay, coming up.
Tesla shareholders have voted on the proposed one trillion dollar pay deal for Elon Musk and his future at the company. After the market today, we'll find out the results of that vote.
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I do not believe any company anywhere near this size has ever delivered a compound annual rate of growth for ebit dot which is a bottom line number of forty one percent over ten years. No company has done that. So yes, indeed the incentives are aligned. If he and his team are able to deliver on that number, the stock is going to outperform enormously.
Kathy, if by chance this proposal is rejected, would you consider shedding some of your Tesla position.
So I'm happy that the prediction markets are at ninety to ninety five percent in terms of this is going through, so we don't have to think about that.
Clearly.
If Elon left, we think about it in two ways. One we think robotaxis he has them at the starting gate as of June and now they're rolling out and that AI project is well underway. If he had left five years ago, three years ago, it probably.
Wouldn't be anywhere near where it is.
What we now think though, is in order to capitalize on humanoid robots, which that's a much more difficult project. That yes, Elon's brilliant and the team he has attracted around him are going to be necessary to.
Pull that off.
That was our CEO and testa shareholder Kafe would her firm voting yes on Elon Musk's one trillion dollar compensation package? What about firms that voted no. Kalper's, the largest public pension fund in the US, voted against the pay passage, citing the fact that the deal was far larger than CEO pay packages at comparable companies. Drew Hambley is their
investment director and joins US now. Woods argument there, Drew, which you heard, is that if they continue and achieve the ebit DAR goals that this proposed package is set from us by the board, then the outperformance of the stock will make it in the interest of shareholders.
You don't agree with that.
Why well, thanks, Ed. So you know, we can't predict what the market's going to do, and we're evaluating pay packages. We look at them vis a vis other comparable company. So let's say he does achieve all those goals, but say the market does as well too, Are we really paying for alpha or you know, is that a market beta. When we looked at the last eight years of returns, going back to when the original package was put into place, Tesla was one of our best performers.
It wasn't our best, but it was in our top ten.
And then when we compared you know, the annualized pay of the ninety six million they want to give him in the restricted sack award that vests in two years, and then we looked at medium pay of these other high performers in our portfolio, and that piece of the package alone is seventy three times the median of other high performing companies and CEOs and our portfolio, and we just let that multiple gap was too high.
Drew.
The board is going to argue, they have argued on this program that Tesla is not comparable to other companies. Elon Musk is the only person on the planet who has the skill set. Is what Robin Denholm told us. The real point of tension that you have with others is the concentration of voting power. You said at the time that you cast the vote or confirmed it, that it put too much concentration.
Of power in a single shareholder.
That's exactly the rationale that Elon Musk is proposing investors vote in favor of the package. He wants the voting power in order to achieve the goals that the board have set him. How do you reconcile that going forward?
Well, we look back and at one point he owned twenty five percent of the company and then sort off half of it, and they've achieved gause with him being a twelve or thirteen percent shareholder. So I don't see deluding shareholders by another twelve or thirteen percent and changes the dynamic. He also is a person with a huge stake in this company. I don't see why he would you want to do anything that would damage it. So I don't see why he needs any extra control over
what he already has. I mean, he and the board together on about sixteen percent of the company, and you know, we don't think diluting ourselves by another potentially trillion dollars, you know, changes that dynamic.
I suppose Elon's argument has been there at this inflection point, and it's moving not just from cars and they still want to have what twenty million cars on the roads, but it's going into the era of AI and into humanoid robots.
The army of robots is going to be producing.
Would you want him to have the most say over an army of humanoid robots?
Well, I think he already has tremendous say as the largest shareholder of the company. You know, as a you know, governance person, do we want so much risk in one person? You know, maybe he is the visionary that the board thinks he is, but we don't know what could.
Happen to anybody.
And to have this much risk placed in one person and to dilute ourselves just to one person. There's tens of thousands of people work in a tesla creating value and if it is you know, so key on just one person, key person risk, you know, that's a worry for me as a shareholder.
You are all about stewardship and of the pension fundholders that you report to ultimately, but you've done this job for a long time. Ever, I'm augustanding in other players. If Elon Musk was to walk, would that be in your.
Role of stewardship?
How do you manage to balance that out of what the risk is if indeed he did leave.
Yeah, So we do think of ourselves as long term shareholders and a lot of our portfolio is indexed, and so we plan to hold this company for a long time. So we try not to worry too much about if you know, one person leaves today tomorrow.
We're in it for the long haul.
So if you left tomorrow, would there be a short term hit to the business. Possibly, But if we're going to hold this company for a long time and the board you know, has to replace him and get somebody in, you know, terrific, maybe not as good as Elion, but pretty terrific. We still think we're going to benefit over the long term by holding the stack.
Drew, We got many many questions from our audience for you. One of them is what Caroline just asks, what happens if Elon leaves tomorrow? I think the other one is people would really appreciate an explanation of the criteria by which you cast your vote. So you explained on the comparisons historic patterns. But one way that it was put to me is in the context of CalPERS, is do
you understand the company. Did you look at the mandatory goals set by the board and say, okay, this could be to the benefit of our stakeholders in our pension plan.
Yeah, and we evaluate every pay plan case by case, and so we did look at those things. And what we're trying to do when we're paying a CEO is what part of that return is beta and then where is the actual skill? And so it's hard for us to predict what the bet is going to be ten years from now at the end of this award period. And you know, he might do very well. He might increase it by six times. The market could go up by six times, and that would be you know, how
would he be any better than anybody else? And so to give up that much control and dilute ourselves that much for one person, we think is a risk as well.
There's a risk that he might never achieve these goals. And you've seen that with other similar pay packages echoed. We've seen it an Airbnb. We've seen the other players where they haven't managed to top the goals. Do you think a million robotaxes is achievable in the time frame?
Do you think the FSD is Do you think the cars are.
Well, it's possible that all those things are and I think this time to the competition is greater than when Tesla came to market with their first car. In terms of EVS. You have Google working on robotax as, you have the Chinese working on them. So it's going to be a more competitive marketplace. Certainly they are in a position to be one of the key players in this, but you know, ten years from now we might be talking about, you know, three other companies that dominate robotaxes.
That's hard for us to know today.
True Hammley, it's been great speaking with you. Thank you for your time.
Investment director for Global Public Equity Ever at Kalpers.
Now, let's take a quick look at the broader markets.
Right now, Tesla is actually a key drag on the NAST that one hundred off by one point eight percent. There's also the macro data, the job s data that's got people a little bit worried for the month of October coming from Challenger Green and Christmas. Let's move over though to some individual movers, because earnings have come thick and fast, and boy have they moved the stock door dash actually having a record drop at the moment. This
is after their numbers came through. That really in echoing to uber, they are reinvesting in the business, reinvesting in Deliveru, but that's going to crimp margins and therefore maybe not the growth story that many head antici painted from a margin and profitability perspective.
It's off by fifteen percent.
Snap though it gets a little.
Bit of AI love.
Why because well, they've got to deal with perplexity surging on that four hundred million dollars perplexity aideal and we see it up almost ten percent. Data Dog as well having a pretty phenomenal day up twenty one percent ed. This is as a software company look managed to keep on selling even though we do see it a whole new era of AI cohorts coming for that eat their lunch.
Thus far, they're not eating it.
This is Bloomberg Tech and you're looking at a live shot of the principal room. Check out the Bloomberg Tech podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart this is Bloomberg.
Back to earnings now, Chime.
It's just posted strong member growth, stable revenue per member, and discipline cost execution earnings. They beat expectations, it raised guidance and allow's to share buyback plan. And yet the stop fools, chime. CEO Chris Britt joins us now. And you clearly think your shares are undervalue. That's why you're thinking about to a two hundred million dollar share buyback. Chris, how do you digest this sort of market move now you're a public company.
Well, thanks for having me on, guys. It's great to be with you again. I remember being with you on our IPO day.
Yeah.
Look, we're a recently issued stock.
We've had two quarters now where we've the team's done an amazing job executing. We just announced twenty nine percent revenue growth year over year, twenty one percent growth in our member base. We added four hundred thousand new active members, so and we're approving our profitability program profile at the same time. So we feel like we're executing really, really well. And I think it's incumbent upon us, as a newly minted public company to just continue to educate our investor
base on the enormous opportunity ahead of us. You know, there's about two hundred million Americans that make up tow one hundred thousand dollars a year that are not well served by the incumbents, and so as a newly minted public company, there's always a little bit of volatility in the stock.
But I think it's incumbent on us right.
Now just to continue to execute, and if we do that, I think the share price will take care of itself.
It is a macro picture that perhaps you fight here. We're suddenly worrying about fourth quarter. We're worried about a consumer, particularly perhaps a less affluent consumer. That is really the area you're trying to serve right now. What are you seeing in your customer base.
Well, we actually are serving the seventy percent of America that makes up to one hundred thousand dollars a year, So this is a very large segment of the population.
And if you look at our member base, the fastest growth that we're seeing is in the seventy five to one hundred k earning segment, and I think that's because of some of these new products we just launched, like our chime car our new Chime card, which is a rewards card that gives one point five percent cash back on everyday spend and three point five percent on your saving to account.
But I think it is true that.
There's a bit of a malaise over a lot of consumer stocks that they maybe investors, feel like are going to have a lot of pressure given the tightening of the economy. As it relates to what we're seeing, we see a very healthy consumer. We don't see an uptick in unemployment or unemployment benefits coming to our accounts. We actually are seeing an increase in discretionary spend across our member base, and people are going out there. We're seeing
double digit increases in places like Costco, Amazon. We're seeing people go to restaurants more. We're seeing people use door dash, Uber eats, paying for convenience. So we're not seeing the pressure that I think some companies maybe experiencing out there.
We see a fairly healthy consumer.
Actually, Chris, can you talk about how you're getting new customers to use more than one product?
I think was sting.
Is you letting you clients who might not have a sort of direct deposit set up with you experiment with my pay for example, are you seeing evidence that they then go on to use other things?
Absolutely, we continue to see if you look at our cohorts, and we have this in the supplemental portion of our of our earnings, you can see that as our cohorts age, they continue to not only adopt products at a faster clip early in the relationship, but they also continue to throughout the life cycle and over the course of you know, these are primary recurring direct deposit relationships that we've really honed in and in our business model of being able
to cultivate and that leads to many, many years of recurring revenue and more engagement over time, and as a result of that you see expanding average revenue proactive member.
But yes, it's true.
We're you know, we're doing everything we can also to make our accounts easier to use right out of the gate, and we've seen a lot of success with getting people to fund accounts and then eventually convert to direct deposit.
Later, Chris quickly to finish what's the next new product front tier for chime.
Well, we announced on the call a great development for us, which is that we converted all of our processing onto our own internally built tech stack called Chime Core.
This is a huge unlock not.
Just a significant cost savings advantage for US, but also it will unleash a new era of innovation for US. We announced a number of new features that we're looking to launch over the course of the next year. We
just launched our Chime card that I explained earlier. We're going to launch joint accounts, custodial accounts, investment services, and importantly, we're going to continue to add more tiers so that our more premium members, those that engage with us, the engage with us the most and higher earning consumers get even more when they bank and do their every day payments with Chime, so you should expect to hear more on that front as well.
Chime CEO Chris Britt. Great to have you back on the program. Thank you very much. Now coming up, we're going to speak with Lift cfo Eron Brewer for the company's latest earnings results. Don't want to miss it. This is Bloomberg Tech shares them Lift up about seven percent, on track for their biggest jump since mid September. The company projected an acceleration in bookings this quarter. Easy Investor concerns about the company's global expansion efforts. Here with more
is erin Brewer Lifts CFO. I think what'll be really interesting is, Okay, this current period, the outlook is strong, but what are the underlying behaviors that you're seeing driving that from riders in the different products that they're using.
Absolutely, you know a couple of things.
One of the nice things is this acceleration and the foundation of our performance is multifaceted. Really, So we've got we reported in the third quarter in eighteen percent growth and active riders, and yes, that does incorporate our recent acquisition, but even in North America, we're seeing the strongest active rider growth, hitting all time highs. That's led to gross bookings at all time highs, adjustin libita up twenty nine percent for the quarter, and then a billion dollars in
trailing twelve month free cash flow. We've got our partnerships with the highest penetration rate ever. That's even before we announce the United Airlines deal. We've got, of course, the acquisitions flowing in, and we've got loyalty programs that are differentiated in the industry, and all of this is driving again highest retention rates ever, so your.
Job's difficult, it's great to have you on the program, you know. And when we have a CFO, you have this balance, right investing for growth and then discipline. So in Europe that's been the strategy. Invest M and A in the United States are chasing uber you know, and.
You need to be disciplined.
Then you've very keen to talk about the bottom line performance you personally, how are you managing that right now?
What's the priority?
Absolutely?
You know a couple things that I would say we our market is so large, right, that's what we focus on. The penetration and the opportunity to exist broadly in the market. Three hundred billion personal vehicle trips that exist across the markets we serve. We're not even close to getting, you know, as an industry even let alone lift where we can potentially be. As it relates to investment, you know, it's pretty easy when you're in a growth industry because you've
got lots of opportunities. So you're right, as a CFO, you're thinking about how do you do that in a discipline manner. The great thing is is we're sitting here today in a position with the strength of our free cash flow to be able to do that, to take advantage of opportunities where we can drive shareholder value.
We've also been buying back shares.
We'll complete a five million dollars share we purchase in twenty twenty five, so a nice balance and we see that continuing going forward.
The opportunity many see Aeron at this moment is AV and you've taken interesting partnership routes. So we're also doing things with Buydo and there's a real commitment here to almost own part of the feet of robotaxis. How does that change sort of an asset like model that you've had thus far.
Yeah, you know, one of the things I think that's really interesting to highlight is that Lift today owns cars across multiple cities in the US through our subsidiary Flex Drive. Drivers can come and rent, So we really understand this model.
Of owning assets.
We have assets on our balance sheet today, and of course, as the AV market develops, and we've been very purposeful about the partnerships that we are entering, you know, we're absolutely going to do that in certain cities as we scale, as we learn by do, as you mentioned, is a portion of that we'll be doing a little bit of that in some of our other partnerships. So it's something
again we know how to do. We still see ourselves long term as an asset like company, but as the industry develops, we're going to make some of those investments.
What's interesting is, I think it's by twenty twenty seven you want some of these a these on the road. I mean, it's got a commandment for one hundred thousand car goal by twenty twenty seven.
How realistic all these arein uh, you know, that's you know, I'm not going to comment on necessarily their goals, but we absolutely see if you might, you know, look five seven years down the road, you know, perhaps ten percent of the volume we serve could be served through avs, both the combination of partnerships that we're in and maybe
assets that we own. So it's a huge opportunity. I think the other important thing in that stat though, is you're still going to see huge volumes served by drivers. That's why we're really focused on the hybrid network. That's what's going to make the difference and be economically viable erin very quickly.
What's the timeline to integrate the chauffeuring business into the core Lift app.
Yeah, if at all.
Well, look that it augments what we've been growing in terms of our own business. We have high value modes, premium modes on our platform today. They're up fifty percent year over year in Q three, So this is a great extension to you know, continue to build out that offering as it relates to the way that TBR Global Schiffeering will operate. They've got incredible clients all around the world.
It's an fantastic business. It's not going to be on the app and the near term, but the syn synergies that we see with the fifteen hundred independent fleet operators that they engage with across the globe, We're going to drive some synergies there, and the service capability they bring to our company is incredible.
Aerin Brouh, I joyed to have you on the show. Thank you, c Thank you, Thanks Carolyn, thank you, Ed. Stay well. Meanwhile, that does have.
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