Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Bloomberg Technology 20240714

The chips are off the table. Symantec and broadcom have halted deal talks. Where does that leave them now . First, to our top story. Big tex the big issue on capitol hill this week. Tech the big issue on capitol hill this week. Tuesday and wednesday, they will hear from facebook on libra. Before the testimony steven , mnuchin taking aim at the social network. The Treasury Department has expressed serious concerns that libra could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers. Emily also tuesday, representatives of facebook, google, apple and amazon will defend their companies in front of the house judiciary in a hearing on antitrust. Their goal is to convince lawmakers they do not stifle competition. To discuss, our guest in washington from a nonprofit focused on shaping Public Policy for an open internet. Before that she was at the Anticompetitive Practices Division of the federal trade commission. And we have ben brody. Who covers Technology Influence in the capital. So many areas to keep track of. Libra, antitrust hearings, and a googlespecific hearing. Give us a preview of what we can expect. We are working hard to bring it all to you. One of the things i have been looking at, maybe starting with the googlespecific hearing. This rising chorus there is anticonservative bias by the major social media companies. You saw that in the white house summit last week. I think you will see it, it is the focus of this hearing that will be held by senator ted cruz. You just had a request coming from senator cruz that the ftc look into how these companies are doing content moderation amid concerns of bias. So you have that. And then we will have the antitrust hearing. I expect a lot of talk about the nature of competition. But i also expect a lot of talk about startups, venture capital. Do you start a company just so you can be acquired or because you think it is a great idea that needs to be in the world . That you are going to lead into the future . All those kinds of questions are the ones that i expect to be dueling in different parts of the house tomorrow. Emily meantime, charlotte, you have the fine from the ftc that came down on friday. As far as we know, planning to fine facebook 5 billion in a record privacy settlement. And yet you have got lawmakers like David Cicilline saying it is a slap on the wrist, calling it a Christmas Present coming early. Does the fine matter . It matters but not as much as the behavioral restrictions the ftc places on facebook as part of the settlement. And we have so far not received information about what those restrictions will be. That is what i think could affect facebook going forward. Clearly, the fine is not having a big impact on them. Emily the treasury secretary really taking aim at facebook and libra and the broader crypto industry in general. Take a listen to another portion of his remarks today. This is indeed a National Security issue. The United States has been at the forefront of regulating entities that provide cryptocurrency. We will not allow Digital Assets Service Providers to operate in the shadows and will not tolerate the use of the cryptocurrencies in support of illicit activities. Emily meantime, the cocreator of facebooks cryptocurrency project submitted written testimony he plans to read tomorrow at the hearing. He says, i believe if america does not lead innovation in Digital Currency and payment, others will. If we fail to act, we could see Digital Currency controlled by others whose values are dramatically different. There is a bit of fearmongering here. Do you think this argument will work with lawmakers that if we do not do it, somebody else will . I think on this issue, lawmakers are not going to be swayed. There are some allusions to if we dont do it, china or russia will fill in the space. Occasionally, that will work on the hill. But i think there is a feeling in washington that facebook in particular has not been responsive to concerns. It has not gone and sought what they need to know. Even if they had the meetings, they did not get the kind of regulation and approval they needed and went out with this splashy announcement and did not do the work beforehand. I think there is a lot of concern about the company we are seeing in all of these hearings. When you have that level of concern, you cannot wave it off and say trust us generally in washington. Emily we heard the ceo of facebook give the same argument talking about antitrust more broadly. Saying, china isnt going to break up chinese companies. As someone who used to work at the ftc, how are the agencies going to feel about that argument given the ftc has been assigned oversight of a potential antitrust investigation into facebook should such an investigation happen . I think the antitrust enforcers recognize competition is the best way for these companies to be effective and strong competitors against companies in other countries. We do not do the National Champion thing in the United States. We have competitive markets. The antitrust agencies are tasked with making that happen. Emily what are we expecting in terms of a result from these hearings this week . Lets talk about the house antitrust hearing in particular. How will this move the ball in one direction or another . Great question. This hearing is one in a series. The first one looked at the impact of the big platforms on news. This one is looking at entrepreneurship. I could see others coming down with Small Companies that have complained about some of the Big Companies and how they affect their work and startup culture. When you talk to lawmakers and David Cicilline, the chairman of the committee and say what do you think will come out about this, he says, look, i dont know. It is difficult to know until we know what the problem is what the solution will be. But he has leaned in the direction of saying there is bipartisan concern and maybe we could move some laws forward. Some folks say they may be interested in doing that. You can tweak how mergers are looked at. Or what they cost, to be examined by the ftc. Those sorts of things can change the Competitive Landscape even though they are little. That might be something the committee is looking to do. Emily in what direction is the ball going to go . Some of these are shorterterm sentiment issues. And of course the antitrust investigation by the ftc could take five or 10 years. If such an investigation happened. What do you see happening over the shorterterm versus the longerterm . I think the role of the congressional investigation is really important. Because antitrust can take a long time. And these markets move quickly. What i am looking for from the congressional investigation is building a record for legislation that could happen more quickly than the antitrust investigations and certainly more quickly than future antitrust investigations. Emily after this week, what is next . Then Congress Goes into recess and the 2020 Campaign Starts up. I think that is important to realize. Because a lot of the congressional work goes on hold after this recess. I think that is why youre seeing a flurry of activity right now, because people want to get things into the record. That is not to say they cannot pick them up in the fall and try to advance them, but right now is kind of the moment you have to seize the publics imagination and make your case. If you can get that out, maybe you can advance things in september, october, and november. If you cant, things might die. So when you ask about antitrust, privacy,sial content, anticonservative bias, all these things tech is facing in congress, the question is, which one of them can rise above in the next few weeks . That is what im watching. Emily the president ial campaign will not go on hold. Some candidates have made tech a central part of their platform. Like senator elizabeth warren. Thank you both so much for weighing in. We have full coverage of tuesday and wednesdays congressional tech hearings right here on bloomberg technology. Meantime in europe, france and the u. K. Are also looking at their relationship with big tech. The french have passed a digital tax despite pushback from the United States. Bloomberg opinions alex webb reports from london. On july 11, french lawmakers passed a new Digital Sales tax which will see a levy of 3 imposed on companies with revenue over 750 Million Euros carrying out some Digital Services in france. The huge change is it will be affecting revenue and not profit. The interaction with the customer has been a huge debate, whether the tax should be imposed on Tech Companies where they base, california, or where they have the interaction with users. This is ongoing at the oecd level on how the u. K. Has already put in place a similar process to impose this sort of sales tax. It has caused discontent in the u. S. And germany, where they sell capital goods in the country but might sell Additional Services on top of it which would be subject to such a tax if imposed globally. There are difficulties for the companies. They are concerned there is a lack of clarity in the french tax on what they need to be paying taxes on. Either way, there will be a big tax bill going frances way in the near future. Alex webb in london. Emily thanks. Coming up, this year amazon is celebrating prime day with help from hollywood. They are using star power to generate buzz amid increasing competition from rivals. We will head to seattle for that story next. If you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio, on the bloomberg gap, bloomberg on the radio and on sirius xm. This is bloomberg. Emily amazons fifth annual prime day is underway with more than a million deals on offer to prime members. According to research, shoppers will spend over 5. 8 billion over the 48hour sale, up 11 from last years event which was about half a day shorter. But the shopping extravaganza is battling increasing competition from rivals. Over 250 retailers including target, walmart, and ebay staging their own sales to to compete, emphasizing that their deals dont require a paid membership like amazon. Spencer, what are the highs and lows of the day so far . On the celebrity front, the big thing running into prime is like, what is new. They used prime day to sell gadgets in the past and to promote their acquisition of whole foods. Trying to get more prime members to whole foods. The big thing this year is the celebrity emphasis. A very traditional marketing tactic, but new to amazon where they have people like Mark Wahlberg selling protein power and kobe bryant selling deodorant. That is helping maintain buzz around the big event in its fifth year. The novelty could be fading. Emily amazon opened a celebrity store a year ago. Now they have all of these deals today tied to celebrities. They are starting to offer exclusive products. Lady gaga will offer an exclusive beauty product line only on amazon. How big of a deal is that . There are two things amazon has been trying to push into. Fashion has always been an achilles heel for amazon. They have tried to go into apparel by getting into basics and nonfashion categories. They picked up bigger business than macys doing that. Some of this is to get into the Fashion Accessories business. Apart from that, there starting to realize the millennial crowd, theyre going to start looking at different ways to attract that crowd back to amazon. Celebrity has been a channel that has been added for a while now. Emily what are the trends youre following on this particular prime day . We have a number, at least one Research Firm over 48 hours. , 28 billionsounds like a lot. Slightly more than last year. What is your take . Prime day has typically been the biggest day of the year for amazon, more so than cyber monday or any holiday. This year, they expect that to be the same. One thing which has been counterintuitive we are seeing from amazon is a big push in consumer packaged goods. Representsrime day sales in categories like consumerelectronics, battery packs, tvs, things like that. This year leading into prime day, we saw a 300 increase in traffic and unit sales into consumer packaged goods categories which got into the whole Foods Acquisition like baby food and cereal boxes and things like that. I would imagine people buying more diapers and baby food on prime day is not something you would think of. You would think of them buying echo and alexa devices and tvs and things like that. It has been a big push. We think it is more intensive, from amazon, a big push to capture that 800 billion market of groceries. Emily there was a big Technical Glitch during prime day last year. So far today, i have seen some shoppers complain they could not add stuff to their carts. Have there been hiccups . It looks like a small number here and there. Nothing on the scale of last year. We were monitoring earlier. It seems to have faded. It does seem like whatever problems they had last year they have been able to avoid this year. That is a big deal when you consider competitors like ebay staged a crash sale, basically rubbing amazons face in last years failure and telling customers, when amazon crashes, check out our deals and you wont have problems with our site. Emily what is your take on some of the competitors offerings over these two days . I think it is not giving amazon a run for the money. They are serving amazon by legitimizing prime day. Essentially they say this is a day when we are offering deals. And it is not called a holiday, it is called prime day. Emily they do say you dont need a prime subscription to access it. But already 50 million to 60 million households in the u. S. Have subscriptions. So what is the incrementality they are able to get . Maybe those who are not bigger spenders on ecommerce and things like that. Full to folks who amazon is trying to attract they have already done a great job turning into prime subscribers. Every prime day, there is an agenda for amazon to recruit more prime subscribers. And they are very successful doing that year over year. Emily thank you so much. We will give you the update tomorrow. Coming up netflix is due to , report secondquarter results this week. It has just released a new season of Stranger Things but it is losing the office. And friends. How does it all add up . We will discuss next. And we are Live Streaming on twitter. Be sure to tune into tictoc on twitter. This is bloomberg. Emily netflix is due to report secondquarter results wednesday. Investors are eager to see how new competition is weighing on the company. Apple and disney plan to launch Subscription Services later this year. Nbcer media and universal plan platforms for 2020. The possibility that publishers could withdraw content from netflix without renewing licensing deals. Joining us from stamford, connecticut, to discuss is an Audience Data measurement expert. Always good to have you on the show. What is your take on how the new season of Stranger Things and losing the office nets out . I think that in the near term, for the rest of this calendar year, netflix is going to be fine. I am sometimes negative on netflix, and people call me on it. But it is because i just think the future will be pretty tough for them. They have made some wise decisions in terms of the money they have invested the past few years in terms of original content. And obviously, Stranger Things is an example of that. Obviously theres still previous titles, like orange is the new black that have done well for them. But the problem is it is not just friends. It is original movies from disney. The fox library that disney purchased. It is the new original content from apple. I think they have never had so much competition in terms of known content that they have previously licensed as well as original content that will be pulled off their platform and go to competing platforms. Emily how does netflix fill the void . Is it all about original content . Or can they fill it with original content . One thing netflix has benefited from even with the amount of money theyre spending on original content is the first mover advantage they have had in terms of generating market share. The issue, now theres more connected tv homes in the United States than homes with the cable box. So the economies of scale have changed in that they are no longer differentiated from a lot of the other services. So, i dont see them outspending apple or amazon. So i dont think original content can do it alone. What i have said for some time, i think they should invest money in buying an existing content provider that has a library and a fan base and some following, similarly to how disney bought fox. I think that is much more likely. The other thing that people talk about less but will play a Significant Impact in terms of time spent on netflix is the growth of adsupported streaming Services Like pluto tv, recently acquired by viacom, and others. Im a big believer in 2020 that netflix has to launch some sort of adsupported tier that they can maybe feature the original content library on. Emily interesting. What will you be watching for on wednesday when the Company Reports . A couple of things. I will be looking more at the international number. I think that is an area where they have more wiggle room in terms of the first mover advantage. In those markets, they dont have these huge Global International companies they are , competing against. They are competing against incumbents in local markets. I think that number has to be very good to give them the headwinds that will help fend off competitors coming into the end of the year and into 2020. I dont think the domestic number matters much because the real competition is two quarters away domestically. Emily thank you so much for weighing in. Coming up, will they or wont they . For now, broadcom and symantec wont. Merge, that is. Why they called off their deal talks. Billionaire peter thiel says googles agreement to work closely with china is seemingly treasonous. How this led to calls for the u. S. To probe the tech giant, later in the show. This is bloomberg. Wanna take your xfi to the next level . Now you can with xfi advantage. Giving you enhanced performance and protection. When devices are connected to your homes wifi, theyre protected. Helping keep outsiders from getting inside. And if someone tries, well let you know. So you can stream, surf and game all you want, with confidence you can get coverage where you need it most. Thats xfi advantage. Make your xfi even better. Upgrade today. Call, click or visit a store. Emily this is bloomberg technology. Im emily chang in san francisco. It is the deal that is no more for now. Symantec and broadcom have halted talks on the proposed merger. Discussions hit an impasse after broadcom sought to reduce its offer by more than 1. 50 a share. Shares of symantec plunged by double digits in trading after the deal was called off, but broadcom still finished the day up, perhaps in part thanks to a Financial Times report saying they were still keen to do a deal with symantec. To discuss, we have mike hytha and bloomberg techs nico grant. Who covers enterprise software. Mike, what went wrong . Mike the main thing is the price. Something came up in Due Diligence during the process in talks. They were close to a deal. They were expecting as early as tomorrow and something came up. Broadcom says we want to pay less for it. 1. 50 or so less. Symantec did not like that and said no deal. Talks break down and not clear exactly where it goes from here. Emily the broadcom ceo has been notorious for making big bets, or trying to, but this is the second or third big deal that has fallen apart for broadcom. Is there something wrong with their strategy . Nico he has been thinking about how can i run broadcom similar to a private equity play . He first went after the 500 billion chip market. Bought other companies, cut expenses and created some industry power there. Now he is thinking about how can we expand this beyond chips . So software has been his bet, particularly after the deal with qualcomm failed. And that was over National Security reasons. It was a messy situation, you covered it a lot. But in this case, i think broadcom is being quite savvy in saying to symantec this is really a buyers market in this case. Symantec is a company that has been struggling for a long time. So they want this premium. 28 is the threshold. Whether symantec is worth more or less, for a long time, symantec was trading partly quite poorly because there was an investigation over finances that ended in the company has to restate finances, which is never good. There has also been turmoil in the executive ranks. Emily the ceo left. Greg clark, the former ceo, was trying to mount a competing offer. Where does that stand . Nico it is unclear. Now, the thing symantec wants is more money. It seems a little bit less likely that this competing offer from the former ceo will pass because if a company as big as broadcom is not meeting the threshold, then someone cobbling together financing from different places might also be under pressure, particularly if you take on debt for a deal like that. This is not a company that is growing in terms of revenue and it is also not a company that is profitable, as a lot of other software companies. That is what they wanted, to cut down some expenses and have stable revenue. Emily broadcom still dangling the carrot, saying they are still keen to do a deal. What could bring the two sides back to the table . Mike the one obvious thing is that although there might be some bruised ceo egos involved, there are investors who want their money. Silverlake has representation on the board at symantec, as does starboard. As an activist investor. And thats going to create a real economic incentive that is going to get over some of the more human factors, if you will. And as nico notes, it is a buyers market. And, symantec would not be the First Company that said no, we demand this price and then be willing a little later after some more thought and ask a little less. Emily do we expect, lets say a company like broadcom, very ambitious, to continue to be acquisitive in other areas . Nico it definitely seems like it. The price broadcom would have paid for qualcomm was so huge, it would have vaulted to the top of the list of largest tech acquisitions of all time. So,biggest being dell emc, 60 billion. You know, ca technologies was about 20 billion last year. This would be around 17 billion, perhaps less. So, it definitely seems like hock tan has the power to do something. The question is, with reports that mcafee is looking into may be doing and ipo after being in private hands, whether broadcom sort of bigfoots its way over to talk to mcafee to put more pressure. Emily mcafee has also struggled as a cybersecurity company. What other options does broadcom have . Mike you named one of them, mcafee. Any company pursuing an ipo is almost certainly looking at a dual track process. Why go through the trouble of an ipo if you can sell the company for just as much money . Certainly, broadcom has those options. And as nico notes, if you are selling a company, you got the one car on the lot that you have to find somebody that wants it. If you are buying a car or software company, you can look around a bit. And maybe you decide you actually need a bicycle instead or can take public transit, but you have other options and that is the market broadcom has. They are trying to build up some software, cybersecurity presence more than they have now. There are Different Things they can do, different ways to approach it. Emily you give me a great segue. Thank you so much. Some food delivery stories dominating the tech world today. The latest Bloomberg Intelligence report shows private funding surges has driven the valuation of Online Meal Delivery Companies near 100 billion. That is helping startups, while grubhub is seeing valuations fade. Competition is fierce, all vying for customers. Bloomberg intelligence predicts more consolidation in food delivery by next year. And speaking of bikes, the autonomous robot delivery part of the food Delivery Business, there is one that can use bike lanes. It is a threewheeled vehicle touted as smaller and less extensive than a delivery van. Each unit costs 5,000. It is small enough to qualify under ebike regulations, making it eligible for bike lanes. No word yet on whether it will annoy human bicyclists. Meantime, grocery delivery app instacart is getting skewered by some of its own fullservice shoppers. From washington for all the details, we have Josh Eidelson who has an indepth piece on Bloomberg Businessweek about what the shoppers have been experiencing. Josh, give us some color here about just how difficult it is to be an Instacart Shopper. Josh instacart says it is offering Flexible Work opportunities to independent contractors, but dozens of workers i spoke to say the company has a range of coercive tactics it uses to pressure them to accept work, even tasks that do not look very appealing based on the amount of money offered. For example, they say to get a substantial amount of work, they need to get what they call early access. A chance to sign up ahead of time to be available for certain shifts. But when the app presents them for a job, it has a bright accept button but no decline button. If they dont want a job, they have to wait through four minutes of sonar sounds that people compare to a submarine sonar or a ticking time bomb. They said it freaks out their dogs. It makes people passing by look at them weirdly. It haunts them in their dreams. Four minutes of pinging. One of the things that drives some people working on the app crazy, along with punishments as they see it for rejecting jobs. The risk of losing your ability to preselect shifts that you want if you dont accept enough of the jobs that were offered to you. Hectoring messages that workers say they get via text messages, even phone calls pressuring them particular tasks. Together, that makes people working on the platform say it is not the kind of Flexible Work people were signing up for. Emily four minutes of pinging sounds like a nightmare, but my question on top of it, are these jobs actually worth it . As someone who has shopped on instacart before, my question is always, how much are these workers getting paid . It is really not that expensive to get the groceries delivered. And then i pay for the groceries on top of that. What does the Instacart Shopper make and how was that a valuable proposition . Josh they have weathered a series of controversies about how much they pay people. A recent one we reported on his was instacarts practice that it has since ended, of paying workers less because of money that was promised to that worker by a customer as a tip. That is something workers said amounted to stealing their tips. Instacart says it changed that policy and now guarantees 7 to 10 for the task of gathering and delivering food. Workers say they should be paid more and, in fact, they were paid more before under the old system that instacart used before changes that were made last year. Emily now, the legendary demise of webvan, the Grocery Delivery Company that started at the time of the dotcom bust. We all know about that. This food Delivery Business now is global. It is not just groceries, but restaurants and startups. Companies as small as instacart and as big as amazon and walmart. Is there a model that actually works . The uber eats model, for example . Or is there something that actually makes this a valuable economic proposition for the people doing this work . Josh it is a highly competitive industry, as you said. And one that may look very different in a few years. There is a real existential challenge for these companies which is that they rely on the ability to classify people as independent contractors, and thereby avoid liability and costs in terms of everything from Sexual Harassment protections to Union Organizing to overtime pay. There are limits in the law in terms of how much companies can control the workers in the way the work is done if they claim not to be employers. With californias state Supreme Court tightening the standard on that issue last year and legislators in california now moving to codify that ruling, this is immediate, major challenge for these companies that are already in fierce competition with each other. Emily Josh Eidelson continuing to cover these worker issues for us from d. C. Thank you for your reporting. Coming up, google is facing more antitrust scrutiny as infamous investor peter thiel, calling the company out for no less than treason. What does it mean for the search giant and its youtube unit, next. This is bloomberg. Emily bitcoin was on the move to start the week. The popular cryptocurrency dipped below 10,000 before bouncing back following another weekend selloff that sought some digital tokens plunged by more than 20 . Cryptos are center stage as facebook prepares to testify at multiple congressional hearings and it will be on the docket at the g7 finance ministers meeting as well. Billionaire investor and facebook board member peter thiel is taking aim at google. In a speech sunday at the National Conservatism conference in d. C. , he singled out google for agreeing to work with china, while letting a u. S. Defense Department Contract lapse. He called on the fbi and cia to investigate what he said were seemingly treasonous actions. Meantime, youtube is also coming under scrutiny with several digital video advertisers citing out the company for squeezing out competition. Joining us to discuss is Lizette Chapman and lucas shaw. Not surprising to hear controversial remarks from peter thiel, but this in particular is a new attack. The attack of silicon valley, and google in particular. Lizette it is not unusual for peter thiel to take a controversial and kind of loud stance on a lot of these things. He has called out a lot of things in the past. But, this one, he called google, on this manhattan ai project and asked the fbi and cia to not ask question them gently about whether they are employing chinese nationals and taking a look at the work they are doing. This lays the groundwork for potentially other of thiels business interests like palantir perhaps to assist with a digital dragnet of data mining and see where these connections lead. Emily he talked about how we should talk about googles ai projects as a military weapon. It is so colorful and such an indictment of google. Saying number one, how many foreign Intelligence Companies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for a. I. Number two, does googles Senior Management consider itself to be thoroughly infiltrated by chinese intelligence . Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese Military and not the u. S. Military . Does he have any evidence to put this stuff out there . Lizette that is a good question. I think his focus here, yesterday and moving forward has been on finding out the answers to these things. There has been a Whisper Network for years about different connections of, you know, with foreign governments and how that information is shared. Especially in a more open academic environment that google fosters. But whether there is evidence or not, nothing that he presented yesterday. Emily lucas, youtube under increasing scrutiny as well. Google and youtube facing potential antitrust issues. You have a new piece where you interviewed several of youtubes partners and former employees. What are they saying . Lucas dozens of people, both people who built businesses on top of youtube and ad Tech Companies that compete with youtube all say the company has been anticompetitive and somewhat of a bully over the past 10 years. Youtube is by far the Largest Online video site in the world. Its ad business is as big as the entire u. S. Online advertising business. And it has got there on the backs of these companies. There is not one move that youtube did that really wiped out the competition. Instead, it brought a lot of people onto the site promising them a big audience. Taking both the ad inventory and the programming, and then kind of they put together a model where they made a lot of money and nobody else made much money because the Profit Margins are so slim. That was fine with youtube because of how much it controlled but it did not work for anyone else who was a bit smaller. Emily the doj is the agency that will have oversight over a potential antitrust investigation into google. Meantime the ftc is also probing allegations of certain issues at youtube. Where does that stand . Lucas the ftc, we are expect ing some kind of fine for a privacy violation in terms of kids programming in the next few weeks. I know a few of our colleagues thought it would come by now. We are waiting. Ftc has been busy. They fined facebook last week for a lot of money. The doj process and the House Judiciary Committee is also looking into antitrust claims those i expect to be a lot longer. We are talking a year or two before we hear any kind of result. They are just reaching out to people about interviewing. I have been told by a few different sources that they have been reached out to, but they have not had to go in for any kind of interview. Emily all right, lucas shaw and Lizette Chapman. I want to underscore that peter thiel is a facebook board member and google is a facebook competitor. Thank you. Still ahead, Computer Technology company dell saying it braced for the impact of the u. S. China trade war, but so far, so good. More from dell cfo tom sweet, next. This is bloomberg. Emily the nikkei news says hp and dell plans to move as much as 30 of notebook production away from china and avoid tariffs on u. S. Bound goods. Dell cfo tom sweet declined to comment on the news, he told us the flexibility of the supply chain is helping the company navigate the dynamics. Tom we have a Global Supply chain that has flexibility in it. We have 25 manufacturing facilities across the globe. And we are balancing the needs of our customers with the environment we are in. So i think we have done a nice job of balancing tariff dynamics and will continue to work our way through that. Hopefully, the two governments will come to an appropriate agreement at the right time. Shery what does that mean in terms of adjusting your supply chains . You talked about 25 manufacturing sites, but when will you have to start adjusting prices, or have you started doing so already . Tom well, if you recall it is a great question if you recall, there have been three tariff lists that have come out that we have been able to navigate so far. By far, we have been able to mitigate the impact through shifts in the supply chain, working with our supply base. We have adjusted certain prices on a small minority of products as a result of our inability to mitigate it. While we have done some price adjustments, by and large, we have been able to offset the impact to date. Paul given the rhetoric around the trade war, have you detected any change in sentiment towards American Products and companies such as dell in china . Tom we have certainly been thoughtful about or worried about that, but to date, we have not really seen an impact for our domestic china business. We have quite a large domestic business in china. It is our second largest market. It has shown good growth over the last number of years. And we have been in china for over 20 years at this point. So we are hopeful that the tensions will reside and allow Companies Like ours to continue to work in their respective markets. But to date, no, we have not seen it impact to our local business. Shery you are seeing some impacts just from the cycle itself. You have talked about softness in china server markets. How is dell able to navigate that . Tom it is a great question. Yes, we are coming off an extraordinarily strong fiscal 2019 in terms of Technology Investment and spend. We are in a longterm Technology Investment cycle. Having said that, we have seen some softness in parts of the globe on servers as we have moved into this year. So, our balance and what we are driving right now we built the company to grow under various market circumstances and focusing on taking share and growing revenue, despite what the local circumstances might be. Right now, our focus is lets drive growth where we can get growth. Make sure we are balancing our growth and profitability, delivering the right results for our investors. Emily that was dell cfo tom sweet there. A technical problem is to blame for a scrubbed Moon Mission Launch out of india. A Successful Mission would have made india the first country to land on the south pole of the moon. No word on the technical problem, but the mission was scrapped 56 minutes before launch. The next launch may be months away. As of now only the u. S. , china and russia have managed a soft landing on the moon. Finally, speaking of the moon and moonmen, a Facebook Event is getting lots of attention for its focus on the extraterrestrial. The socalled storm area 51 they cannot stop all of us event is set for september 20. In nevada near area 51, the , secretive military testing based that conspiracy theorists have long suspected was devoted to the study of extraterrestrials. The post appears to be a joke, but nearly one Million People seem to be taking it seriously. Local motels are being bombarded by inquiries for reservations. The air force issued a statement, saying area 51 is an open Training Range for u. S. And we discourage anyone from trying to come into the area. Nevertheless, as you can expect ing out onet is meme this like crazy. That does it for this edition of bloomberg technology. We are livestreaming on twitter. Check us out technology. Follow our global breaking news network, tictoc, on twitter. This is bloomberg. Most of us dont know how much data we use, but we all know were paying too much for it. Enter xfinity mobile. Americas best lte with the most wifi hotspots, combined for the first time. When youre near an xfinity hotspot, youre connected to wifi, saving on data. When youre not, you pay for data by the gig. Use a little, pay a little. Use a lot, just switch to unlimited. Get 400 back when you buy the new lg g8. Call, visit or click today. Manus cap story this morning. Ust may go to beijing for facetoface negotiations if them because go around. Manus we had a price check of salesconomy leader as new figures are released. What it will mean for the fed as they prepare for the first rate cut sent to bethany. Rate cutaid since 2008. Tracy threatening to revive its Nuclear Program back to the status it reached before the 2013 deal was signed