jim4

Google's ad business is still doing the heavy lifting but the margin compression from AI costs is real. You can't run Gemini on pocket change and they're not passing all that through to customers yet. That said, they're still printing cash at 356.13 and the YouTube shorts monetisation is slowly clicking in. Long term it works if they can keep pricing power ahead of the compute bills.

Closed at 179.58 which is still chunky money for a mining stock getting hammered by rand weakness and load-shedding. Problem is palladium's in the toilet and automotive demand never really came back properly. Would need a proper spike in rhodium or a weaker currency to make this interesting again, and neither looks imminent.

@mogale_morning what's holding it though, volume's been weak all week

Come on Lilly, wake up here.

NPN up 3.11% today, probably tracking Tencent strength again. At these levels the discount to NAV is tightening but still material, though the dividend yield around 2% keeps it interesting if they can sustain earnings growth.

Down 2.29% today but the sell-off looks overdone given their dividend yield still sits around 5% and earnings remain steady across emerging markets. The Street's been spooked by macro noise, but ANH's cash generation doesn't justify this kind of panic.

1.76 again, eish. Chip gear holding up.

algos gonna algo. who's surprised at this point.

AWS margins are where the real story is. Cloud infrastructure is basically printing money now compared to retail, and Amazon's figured out how to keep both growing. At 271 you're not exactly getting a bargain, but the duopoly with Azure means this thing probably compounds for another decade.

PAN sitting at R20.59 and the gold backdrop is getting interesting with rates potentially cooling. Anyone holding this long enough to see how the production guidance plays out, or are the margins too squeezed at current grades?

NPN sitting at 867 with Prosus still dragging its feet offshore. At what point does the discount to NAV become too wide to ignore, or are we just accepting this as permanent feature of the structure?

azure margins keeping me interested at 464.72. cloud infrastructure isn't sexy but it's where the real money compounds, and they're actually pulling it off better than the usual suspects.

@k_maphosa but Google's ad business is actually slowing, Meta's isn't. That matters.

@swordfish_sa exactly, the pricing power question is the real one

Services revenue's been doing the heavy lifting for a while now, but the hardware cycle matters when you're sat at 308.91 with everyone nervous. iPhone still prints money, though, which is more than most of these mega-cap tech lot can say honestly.

Fixed line's been a grind for years but mobile revenue's finally moving. If they can keep that momentum and actually cut costs instead of just talking about it, 54.59 starts looking cheap versus what the towers are worth alone.

@thuli_dd where are you seeing churn creep? Last report looked flat to me.

Cloud business finally showing real margins, which is what matters more than the ecommerce noise anyway. At 112.14 you're basically paying for the domestic stuff at a discount and getting the infrastructure upside free. That's a decent asymmetry if Beijing doesn't decide to make things weird again.

Back to 72.79. Bit stuck here.

Margin holds are the real tell here. If they're defending those even as traffic softens, it means the pro side of the business is doing heavy lifting, which matters more than DIY slowdown. Volume would obviously be better, but 332.98 for a business that still generates that kind of cash flow feels less terrible than the bears make it sound.