#strategy

AK spewing his typical stuff at the WEF in Davos. For the CEO of an American corporation, he seems real concerned about India's AI sovereignty.

"US AGI Is Overhyped": IBM CEO & India's IT Minister Talk India's AI Sovereignty At Davos 2026 --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqb29BAxTrs

Is India Behind US, China In AI? IT Minister, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna Respond At Davos --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4bARzQmqkU

What a joke, fido has ~91 different flavors of the same thing, what a clown camp! Is the marketing team wagging the investment management team or what holy shxt!

Hmmm, how many asset allocations can we make up....how about our next attempt to saturate the product market with the same thing is the stock allocations all have red prospectuses and the bond has white prospectuses and any cash has blue prospectuses, well will call it the Fidelity Red, White and Blue allocations.
"Bravo you are promoted"

Freedom Index
Freedom Blend
Freedom Fund
Freedom Retirement Index
Fidelity Sustainable Target Date

But Mr. Customer do you want us to do the same thing in a managed account and pay us a separate fee...

dahhhhhhhhh

I am having a hard time understanding some of the layoffs. Is it just targeting highly compensated people, and replacing them with cheaper, less qualified labor? Not quite sure how G plans to pull this one off.

Any info on the ITK workshops going on strategy in P&O

I’ve participated in ESPP for several years, and the lack of a consistent strategy is becoming hard to ignore.

Leadership keeps reacting on short-term measures instead of planning; repeated layoffs every few months erode trust internally and externally.

It’s time for a proactive plan that lasts longer than a calendar quarter. Credibility matters.

Train wreck in every org coming. We struggle to manage operations with current staffing, and no way in he!! will HIH provide % of 1% support to keep lights on, nevermind manage strategy. All those on the 20 to 25% cut list, remember you followed their lead, they created the mess...I hope they bought stock in the mops they will need to clean up the slop on the floors.

How is Financials are gonna be impacted. I heard business was a negative margin business and VZ deciding to double down on a losing business.

Sounds like a winning strategy to me. For competitors I mean

2.5 years/10 Qtrs into Rahuls reign and the company is struggling to grow, thats what they say in meetings and Turnover keeps on shrinking even though the company is highly profitable by squeezing employees pay contracts will eventually run off.

What can be done? Rahul and the team need to take big cuts until they grow, or a new leader needs to be brought in, this can't continue.

What's even the strategy anymore? We keep losing customers and value, but all we hear are excuses. The big transformational plan they promised has been a total failure. Instead of fixing the core issues, they just cut more people and shuffle org charts. It makes you wonder if anyone at the top has a clue how to stop the slide or if they even care.

I’m on board with that, bring in the new blood with innovation and forward thinking. Bring in the visionaries. This includes Jane. She’s old guard, right? The Citi vision needs to be more than ‘wait and see what the other banks are doing, then play catch up’.

Let’s bring in some new blood. How is this a bad thing?

Well for those fortunate enough to keep their jobs, hearing RTO 5 days a week is coming as part of the new strategy going forward. Gone are the Friday through Monday "4 day weekends" many have been enjoying. Covid is long over...time for everyone to get back in the saddle 5 days a week.

The direction couldn’t be clearer anymore: the company is consolidating aggressively into Plano. Everything outside of Plano is being phased out unless you’re considered “critical” and already local. Even employees currently assigned to the Dallas HQ are being told they’ll move to Plano once the new office is ready, which says everything about the strategy.

Notices are starting to hit teams in St. Louis, LA, and other non-Plano locations, with more expected to follow. This isn’t a rumor or a one-off—it’s the plan. If you’re not in Plano, the message is blunt: relocate or prepare to exit. The days of distributed hubs and geographic flexibility are effectively over at AT&T.

Dan, you have taken the pledge, have an obligation, thus to be resilient and NOT RUTHLESS.

Outage, valuable 2026 lesson(s) learnt, difficult as-is, thus formulate a to-be "savvy and realistic" turnaround strategy.

Mission (make it better): Customers first and then employees second!!!

Goal (image is everything): Do not allow the competition to eat and take Verizon's lunch.

Irony (sorrow): Wednesday's Outage, formerly Hans the network SME and also formerly Shank (Shankar) the IT SME, causes and effect??

Lions, led by donkeys… “classic”
https://www.printweek.com/content/news/xerox-s-darren-cassidy-steps-fully-into-new-role

At CES this year, analysts delivered one of the bluntest assessments the PC industry has heard in decades. While Apple and Lenovo are projected to become mega giants by 2030, far larger and more dominant than they are today, HP and Dell face a very different trajectory. Experts described both companies as “too large to pivot quickly, but too dependent on legacy PC economics to compete at the cutting edge.”
The consensus across panels and private briefings was clear. HP and Dell will not disappear, but they will be significantly smaller by the end of the decade. Multiple analysts forecast that each company will be less than half the size they are today by 2030, a direct result of structural disadvantages that intensify between 2026 and 2030.
The forces driving this contraction are the same ones powering Apple and Lenovo’s rise: AI acceleration, unified memory architectures, and a global shortage of advanced DRAM and HBM that favors vertically integrated giants.

HP: The Enterprise Giant Without a Silicon Strategy
By 2030, HP remains a recognizable brand, but primarily because of its enterprise contracts an government relationships, but the printing ecosystem completely collapses. Its consumer PC business, once a global leader, shrinks sharply during the second half of the decade.
Analysts at CES highlighted three core weaknesses:
• No proprietary silicon
HP depends entirely on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA for AI acceleration. As AI PCs shift toward unified memory and custom neural engines, HP cannot differentiate.
• Thin margins in a tightening consumer market
Memory shortages hit HP’s mid‑range systems hardest. With HBM and advanced DRAM diverted to AI servers, HP’s consumer lineup becomes less competitive.
• Slow transition to AI‑native design
HP’s attempts to retrofit AI features into traditional laptops fall short of the performance delivered by vertically integrated competitors.
By 2029 and 2030, HP begins exploring carve‑outs and strategic restructuring to protect its enterprise business but the consumer footprint is gone.

Dell: A Server Powerhouse Dragged Down by Its PC Division
Dell enters the late 2020s with a booming server and data‑center business driven by global AI infrastructure demand. Yet this strength exposes the weakness of its PC division.
CES analysts pointed to several structural challenges:
• PCs lose strategic relevance inside Dell
As AI servers dominate revenue, the PC division becomes a low‑margin legacy business.
• Dependence on third‑party memory and GPUs
When HBM shortages intensify between 2027 and 2029, Dell prioritizes servers, leaving its PC lineup underpowered and overpriced.
• Enterprise buyers shift to AI‑native devices
Corporate customers increasingly choose AI‑accelerated systems from Apple and Lenovo, which offer better on‑device inference and unified memory designs.
By 2030, Dell’s PC business survives only through mergers, joint ventures, or partial divestitures, allowing the company to focus on its profitable AI‑server empire.

The New Hierarchy by 2030
CES analysts agreed on the broad outline of the decade ahead:
• Apple and Lenovo become mega giants, far larger and more dominant than they are today
• HP and Dell shrink to less than half their current size
• Acer and MSI exit the market entirely
• AI PCs replace traditional laptops
• Control of silicon and memory determines survival

Apple business represent 40% of modem business for Qualcomm. Qualcomm fooling its way into the GPU datacenter business is a fantasy. Insider information suggests Qualcomm is offering their solution to a relative unknown Humain for free just to test their solution. In other words Qualcomm is doomed.

No wonder there are so many layoffs! 30000 employees laid off to recover $10B.
Increase the price of Prime!

All tech shares saw a drop today. But SAP's is a small drop in the bucket. Wait for the 29th when the quarterly financial results are out and you'll see how much faith investors actually have at SAP.

Investors are realizing two important things: (i) that SAP is abandoning its core revenue generating businesses for stupid AI features that do not work and no one wants to pay for, and (ii) that SAP has no real strategy to grow the company revenue. They're only focused on saving some operating costs using layoffs and by cutting down on employee salary budgets and benefits. But there is no real plan to make the company more profitable. There are better companies to invest in and that's where shareholders are focusing their wealth.

Also there has been a talk between SAP executives to restart share buybacks. Maybe that's why some of the millionaire executives are dumping their shares.

An on point post from @a9+1keyr10dv.

Phillips 66 presents itself as an integrated downstream energy company—one designed to balance cycles, allocate capital across segments, and deliver more durable returns than simpler peers. On paper, that strategy is sensible. The challenge is that the benefits of integration remain difficult to see in either operating results or market valuation.

Under Mark Lashier, integration is frequently cited as a core advantage. But integration is not defined by asset mix or corporate structure. It is defined by whether complexity earns its keep.

So far, the evidence is mixed at best.

If integration were working as intended, it would show up in at least one of three ways:

1) Meaningfully lower earnings volatility than pure-play refiners

2) Superior capital efficiency driven by portfolio-level optimization

3) Consistently stronger shareholder returns than simpler competitors

Phillips 66 has not reliably delivered any of the three.

Refining continues to dominate quarterly performance and investor sentiment. Volatility in one segment regularly overwhelms stability elsewhere in the portfolio. The diversification benefit that is central to the integration story often feels theoretical rather than observable. When one business sets the tone for the entire enterprise, the portfolio is diversified in name only.

This is not an asset-quality issue. Phillips 66 owns strong positions across refining, midstream, and chemicals. Nor is it an employee issue—teams across the company execute in difficult, cyclical markets. The problem is structural: complexity has not translated into resilience or premium valuation.

Markets tend to be blunt about this. Companies that combine multiple businesses without producing clear cross-segment advantages are typically valued at a discount, not because investors misunderstand them, but because the burden of complexity outweighs the benefits. Phillips 66 continues to be priced like a company where scale and breadth dilute focus rather than amplify it.

Leadership compensation underscores this tension.

Lashier’s most recently disclosed compensation, at approximately $22.6 million, places him near the top of the energy peer group. That level of pay implicitly signals confidence that Phillips 66 is being run at a leadership premium—that integration is working, that capital is being optimally allocated, and that complexity is being actively converted into value.

Shareholder outcomes tell a more restrained story.

Over the past year, Phillips 66 delivered solid but not standout returns—better than the broader energy sector, but trailing several refining-focused peers operating with far simpler portfolios and fewer internal trade-offs. For a company that argues its structure creates advantage, delivering merely “good” performance relative to best-in-class peers raises an uncomfortable question: what is the complexity buying?

There is also a less quantifiable—but critical—dimension of integration: leadership proximity to execution.

Integration is not forged in earnings calls or strategy decks. It is built where trade-offs are resolved—between segments competing for capital, between systems that don’t fully align, and between teams asked to move in sync without shared incentives. Sustained senior leadership presence in those environments matters. When that presence is limited, integration remains conceptual rather than operational.

None of this diminishes the effort of employees. Phillips 66 has capable people doing hard work in volatile conditions. The gap lies between strategy and operating reality.

Until integration demonstrably reduces volatility, improves capital outcomes, or delivers consistently superior returns, it will remain a promise rather than a proven advantage—and markets will continue to treat it accordingly.

I have to give credit where credit is due. T-Mobile leadership made a smart move by getting rid of phone subsidies and acquiring Sprint but the rest of their strategy was very straightforward. They waited until the 5G standard was finalized then deployed it with a standalone 5G core starting with low band so they could maximize coverage. Their 5G customers have all been on the standalone 5G core since 2020!

Contrast this to the unforced errors of Verizon leadership. They started by deploying small islands of coverage using mmWave weighed down by the old 4G core. They added unnecessary complexity to the network then proceeded to let go of a lot of experienced people through multiple rounds of VSPs and layoffs. And now they managed to loose their hard earned reputation as the most reliable network.

T-Mobile leadership didn’t do much that was extraordinary. They just avoided rookie mistakes but they now look like absolute geniuses.

Seems to be happening

Intel has a track record of sinking infinite amount of money.
Is LBT still trying to fix it, or just feed it with more money, this time from Uncle Sam?
Is Intel still on track to be split up?

"Our future is not in the print industry but in semiconductors".

Kind of saying the quiet part out loud there.

I wanted to understand whether the market is actually buying our integration narrative—or whether repeating it is meaningfully changing how investors who trade PSX perceive the company.

To test this, I analyzed daily share price correlations between PSX and a set of peers—MPC, VLO, DINO, and PBF, with XOM and CVX included as examples of truly integrated energy companies—across 5-, 3-, 2-, and 1-year periods.

The results are clear and consistent: PSX trades most like Valero, and that relationship is stable across every time horizon. Only in the most recent one-year period does PSX trade marginally more like MPC, but even then, its correlation with refining peers increased, not decreased. In contrast, correlations with XOM and CVX remain materially lower and largely unchanged over time.

The market is telling us something straightforward: PSX is viewed as a refiner, and that perception is not evolving.

Rather than fighting that reality, we should consider embracing it—making the hard choices required to present PSX as a pure-play refining and marketing company, one that investors can clearly benchmark against peers and value accordingly.

TRP is so behind our peers in so many ways. Those who have spent their careers here often don’t see the issues or aren’t willing to challenge them. It’s time to bring in more new blood at the top levels to turn the ship around. The focus should be on innovation and operational efficiency.

Need new leadership

Hi Folks its that time again, need more excuses for the Analysts, what if say we are expanding AI offices in Venezuela, Greenland, Eye rack, and Canada, or were now run by the blue flag office headquarters. I could reduce the pay raises budget so only the chosen ones get the pay and then use it for more buybacks. Help help this Qtr will be another $5 million in the bank for me amigos.

I know the small format store that last opened was in Miami. Are there plans for any more of these (if known), and are the small format stores doing well?

CHRO: Set the Foundation?

What does success look like?? What is different than today??

Where are we deliberately going—and why does it matter???

Citi feels like a company moving without a clear direction. Decisions seem reactive and disconnected from what teams are dealing with day to day. I keep waiting to see a real long term strategy show up. Open to being proven wrong, but I am not seeing it yet.

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/cisco-csco-unlikely-pursue-axonius-231333205.html?guccounter=1

TD Cowen also noted that names like SentinelOne, Varonis, and Tenable could attract interest from strategic and financial sponsors.

What's the latest on location strategy? They forced hundreds of people to uproot their lives and move to a hub in 2025. Has anyone heard of anyone being let go after they moved? I'm still seeing many people shown as being in non hub locations in workday. Are they scheduled to relocate this year or somehow they got an exception to stay where they are?

Anyone know if BPX assets are in discussion for divestment? Which basins?
I understand layoffs took place last year, but new CEO wants discipline more CAPEX discipline. I think BPX just needs new leadership

Surprised nobody is talking about that here.

For the right price I think we should do exactly that. We need to focus efforts on turning around our core brands: Nike and Jordan. Converse is generating strategic as well as financial drag.

In another distant time it must have been quite a triumph to buy them but that era is long gone. Let’s attach our mask first.

This is published information- these layoffs have been planned for several years. All of the “ we are a people first company “ we care about your career, growth, development” spiel is garbage.

C-Levels and their directs are all full of BS. Stop drinking the kool aid they are serving up, stop cheering for them as the spew this BS. They do not care about you! You are a commodity, “a human tax” that will eventually do away with while lining their pockets.

Details: do your own research

T-Mobile projects that AI initiatives will drive approximately $10 billion in additional Core Adjusted EBITDA by 2027.

At its September 2024 Capital Markets Day, T-Mobile outlined a growth strategy heavily leveraging artificial intelligence and expected financial targets for 2027.

Key points regarding T-Mobile and AI by 2027:
Financial Impact: AI and digital leadership are expected to increase Core Adjusted EBITDA to between $38 billion and $39 billion by 2027, an increase of roughly $10 billion from 2023 levels.

Customer Experience: T-Mobile is collaborating with OpenAI to create an AI-powered customer service platform, called IntentCX, aimed at providing faster and more personalized customer support experiences.
Network Performance: The company has partnered with Nvidia, Ericsson, and Nokia to establish an AI-RAN Innovation Center in Bellevue, Washington, which will use AI to optimize the radio access network for faster speeds and reduced latency.

Revenue & Efficiency: AI is seen as a key driver of significant operating efficiencies and a projected service revenue compound annual growth rate of about 5% through 2027, reaching up to $76 billion.

While AI is central to T-Mobile's growth strategy and financial outlook for 2027, it remains one component of a broader plan that includes network leadership, customer growth, and strategic acquisitions.

So US companies will be "rebuilding" the Venezuela oilfields. Are we going to "Drill baby drill?" Will this save HAL?

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1571996/000157199625000111/dell-20250930.htm

The U.S. Government invested in CPU manufacturing in the US and at CES Intel's only advantage was GPU for gaming and promises of handheld gaming chips, All still relying on TSMC for yield with Intel 18A as a backup.

Wot ?!?
All it took to bounce the stock higher was divest the space companies and programs ? Those fat cash-immobile programs.

Why didn’t they do this sooner ? So much bloodshed with folks we lost since April 2024.

Expect more moves like this every few years as LHX responds to the market and challenges of nimble defense startups and China Dual Use adversaries.

Can we rebrand also as:
“The Trusted Transforming Disruptor”