“Size and sophistication” of online attacks “has risen dramatically” with the pandemic’s spike in internet traffic, said Akamai CEO Tom Leighton on a Tuesday investor call: “Threat actors” are taking advantage of the “distraction and vulnerabilities created by employees working remotely.” Malware reports to Akamai jumped nearly fivefold in Q2 from the previous quarter, he said. Nearly half the content on a typical website “originates from third parties,” estimated Leighton. “Attackers are embedding malware in this content to steal users’ credit cards and other personal data.” Theft of login credentials “is another growing problem,” he said. “We blocked more than 53 billion credential abuse attempts last quarter, more than four times the number we saw in Q2 of last year.” Demand for the company's media and security services “more than offset” revenue downturns from the travel and hotel industries and other sectors “hit hardest by the pandemic,” said Leighton: Churn “stayed below 1% of annualized revenue.” Chief Financial Officer Ed McGowan estimated Akamai took a $14 million Q2 hit from COVID-19, mainly through “contract restructurings and elevated bad debt reserves.” A 13% revenue gain and 29% profit increase reflected a “continuation of the high traffic levels” on the internet since the onset of the pandemic, said Leighton. Peak traffic exceeded 100 terabits daily, he said. “That’s a lot of traffic.”
Best Buy CEO Corie Barry applauds CTA’s decision canceling CES 2021 as a physical show and moving it all-virtual (see 2007280034), she told CEO Gary Shapiro in a North Virginia Technology Council video chat Wednesday. CTA co-produces NVTC’s webinars and Shapiro sits on its board. “Kudos to you for making such a sizable decision,” Barry told Shapiro when he asked how she reacted to the news. “It was clear the decision prioritized safety above all else.” Barry, a Minnesota native, said some of her “perspectives" on mentoring changed after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis police custody not far from corporate headquarters. “CEOs now more than ever need to be in constant learning mode,” she said. “Your whole career, you look for mentors who are more accomplished than you and can help you get to that next level. My perspective now is I need to surround myself with people who are completely different.” Work from home happened “almost overnight, literally,” said Barry. Telework “started with people being interested in products,” she said. “It’s turning into productivity,” she said. “It’s less about I need a computer, and it’s more about I need a comfortable home office space.” Telework forced Barry to reinstall a landline, she said. “My cell reception is awful, and I have so many calls that I needed something stable.” As work from home grew progressively longer, “you’re not just buying an iPad, you’re trying to figure out how do I create a productive space.” And “work flexibility is going to stick, said Barry. The days are over of “everyone needing to be in the office all the time to get their work done,” she said. Remote learning is “another space where we were forced into change,” said Barry. There are “pockets of places” where school districts “have done an amazing job” transitioning, she said. “But across the U.S., I think you can see a pretty big gap in distant learning capabilities.”
Global TV demand for 2020 is expected to “remain resilient,” said Corning Chief Financial Officer Tony Tripeny on an investor call Tuesday: “In-home entertainment is more important than ever." TV sell-through unit sales increased slightly from the 2019 quarter, he said. Sales were better than in Q1, and “better than the industry anticipated,” he said. “Preliminary retail sell-through data for June and July indicate that demand recovery in China has held and that demand in North America remained robust, while emerging regions remained weak.” The company's display-glass sales declined 11.2% year over year to $753 million, and were about flat with Q1, said the CFO. Q2 display-glass production volume grew by low-single digits from Q1 because Gen 10.5 customers “bought more glass,” he said. The manufacturer long term isn’t “just counting on everybody buying more stuff,” said CEO Wendell Weeks. “We’re putting more Corning into the products people already buy.” Corning’s specialty materials business, which includes Gorilla Glass used in 8 billion devices globally, had a 13.5% sales increase, while the smartphone market declined, said Weeks. Samsung will be the first to use Corning’s “toughest” cover glass yet, Gorilla Glass Victus, on a smartphone “in the near future, he said.
CTA’s decision to scratch CES 2021 as a physical event gives the association five months and nine days to craft an online experience that outdoes that of most virtual trade shows run during the pandemic, officials said. “Moving to an all-digital format for CES is simply the right thing to do,” said CEO Gary Shapiro by video. “Our exhibitors partners and thought leaders will now have the time to plan, to think, to create compelling ways to engage digital audiences from around the world.”
Sony Interactive Entertainment is getting pushback from the Patent and Trademark Office on its June 22 application for a U.S. trademark on “Play has no limits” as a promotional tagline for the PlayStation 5 videogame console scheduled to debut for the holidays. Mattel’s May 2019 application for “Where play has no boundaries” predates Sony’s by more than a year, so PTO could refuse the PS5 tagline if it clears Mattel's for final registration, said the agency. Sony may “present arguments in support of registration by addressing the issue of the potential conflict" between the two applications, it said. Sony has until Jan. 21 to respond. PTO also judged the application flawed because Sony based it on foreign prior art filed in Jamaica, not Japan, Sony's "country of origin." To be granted a U.S. trademark “based on a foreign registration that will issue from the foreign application relied on for priority, the country in which the foreign application was filed must be the applicant’s country of origin,” said the agency. Sony didn’t comment Monday. Sony said June 29 the PS5 is on schedule to launch Q4 despite COVID-19 testing and production-line delays (see report, June 30).
May desktop monitor imports soared from April at a rate nearly quadruple that of laptops and tablets, the connectivity tools most commonly associated with COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates, according to Census Bureau figures we accessed Sunday through the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb. May brought the highest monthly unit imports of monitors in 10 months. The one-month spike in May monitor imports came amid surging demand in videoconferencing adoption. Cisco’s Webex exceeded 500 million meeting participants in April, generating 25 billion meeting minutes, more than triple the volume in February (see 2005140001). U.S. importers sourced 4.16 million monitors from all countries in May, a 45% increase from the 2.86 million shipped here in April, said DataWeb. May laptop and tablet imports increased 11%. Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam also contributed to U.S. monitor supply in May, on a vastly smaller scale than China.
Americans are increasingly worried about returning to offices amid spikes in COVID-19 cases, and most expect more fall outbreaks, IBM’s monthly consumer attitudes survey found. It canvassed 7,000 respondents in July, finding 84% would prefer working from home indefinitely, at least occasionally, up 3 points from June. More than six in 10 say employers need to communicate clearly what they're doing to sanitize, up from 54% in June. And 58% say employers need strict social distancing protocols, up from 49% in June. Telehealth use is rising, with 40% having participated in a virtual medical visit the past month, up 6 points from June. Half the June respondents planned to keep using telehealth after the pandemic, and 60% expressed those intentions in July. Only 19% said they used telehealth sessions before COVID-19.
CTA will move CES 2021 to an all-virtual event on Jan. 6-9 from a physical show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, said the association Tuesday.
Sigma Designs shareholders of record through Aug. 3 will get a final payout of 28 cents a share under a board-approved plan to finish liquidating and dissolving the company. The former Z-Wave owner and once-formidable SoC supplier -- it was the first to announce Dolby Vision support in September 2014 (see 1409040067) -- “has been working to wind down all of its operations and resolve all outstanding creditor claims,” it said Friday. Shareholders approved the liquidation plan more than two years ago, but phasing out Sigma subsidiaries in Europe and Asia “has taken longer than originally anticipated,” it said. The final distribution of $11.4 million will bring to $252 million “the total amount of cash returned to shareholders,” it said.
MaxLinear’s connected home business generated 45% of Q2 revenue that grew 5% sequentially from Q1 to $65.2 million, said CEO Kishore Seendripu on a Thursday evening investor call. The company supplies broadband communications semiconductors. “We are benefiting from the demand for greater bandwidth at home in a transformative work-from-home environment that we believe is an emerging long-term trend,” said Seendripu. MaxLinear expects its $150 million all-cash buy of Intel’s home gateway business, announced April 6, will close this quarter, he said. The acquisition will more than double its total addressable market to $5 billion, he said. “The rapidly expanding work-from-home mandates due to COVID-19 are driving bandwidth upgrades, which will strongly benefit our core connected home business as well as our companion Intel connected home division acquisitions.”