Elon Musk continues to ride high

While many industries saw a downturn, the world of tech went ahead full steam. Most tech leaders continued to innovate and grow their companies.

Elon Musk: This maverick billionaire seems to be having one good year after another and has his hands in many pies. In 2020 Smart Car manufacturer Tesla became the most valuable automobile company in the world after overtaking Toyota. Then it went ahead and breached the half-trillion dollar mark in terms of market capitalization. It made it to four quarters of profits in a row for the first time ever. With that it became ready to enter the prestigious S&P 500. In a survey it registered the highest “Overall customer satisfaction of any car manufacturer”.

Musk’s SpaceX made a landmark when it sent astronauts to the ISS (International Space Station), thereby becoming the first ever private space company to do so. The Starlink satellites launched also neared the 1000 mark in 2020 as they began beta testing for users for this low-Earth orbit satellite Internet service. Starlink is revolutionary and when completed, there will be more of its satellites than all other satellites put together, launched by every government in the world. The Boring Company finished the tunnel for the Hyperloop under the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Musk announced that SolarCity was now giving the cheapest solar power in the US.

Mukesh Ambani: If you look at the largest companies in the world, then it's the trifecta of energy, retail and tech. While they are already an energy giant, Ambani’s Reliance increased their footprint this year after looking to buy out Future Group’s Big Bazaar, Brand Factory and Foodhall. Amazon opposed this and took the Future Group to court, but you can bet on Reliance in the long-term. The biggest takeaway of 2020 was that with Jio, Reliance is now looking to be a major global tech player.

A look at some of the dozen plus investors that got a bite of the Reliance-Jio pie… Google, which dominates search and video (via YouTube), the mobile OS space (Android) etc; Facebook, the No. 1 tech company in the world in terms of users (add WhatsApp and Instagram to the mix); Silver Lake that has invested in companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Dell, Skype etc; KKR that has invested in ByteDance (TikTok) & Epic Games along with Mubadala Investment Company, that owns GlobalFoundries, the world’s second largest semiconductor foundry company.

When you look at the list of companies that Reliance has invested in or taken over, that list is equally diverse: Netmeds (online pharmacy), Triller (social video), Eros International-Balaji Telefilms (OTT space), Embibe (EdTech), Radisys (telecom), NowFloats (SaaS), Asteria Aerospace (drones), Saavn (music streaming), Fynd (ecommerce), Grab (a logistics startup), Haptik (AI), Reverie (regional language tech), Tesseract (AR/VR) and cable players Datacom, Hathway and Den.

It is for this reason that Reliance became the first Indian company with a market capitalization of $150 billion. Reliance debuted directly at the No. 2 position in the PwC global Future Brand index in the recent 2020 list ahead of the likes of Samsung and Microsoft (Apple was No. 1). The Reliance Chairman announced at the last AGM that Jio was in a position to implement 5G within a year of getting the contract. That is big because 5G will not just power mobiles, but entire Smart Cities with all their components: Smart Homes, Smart Cars, Smart Factories, Smart Utilities etc. So the future also belongs to 5G players and Mukesh ensured that 2020 cemented that.

Jeff Bezos: Thanks to Covid-19, ecommerce saw huge growth in the US and worldwide and early in the year and Bezos’ Amazon crossed a marcap of $1 trillion. Amazon got into the online pharmacy market, launched the Luxury Store mobile app and relaunched Prime Gaming, a video service. Amazon has its own logistics network with their own planes and transport vehicles and they are also getting into the driverless market big time. Another growth area of 2020 was the cloud and that’s where Amazon Web Services is going strong.

While Amazon Alexa is doing well, they also came out with many Amazon Ring (which started as a video doorbell that could alert the police) products including an indoor one with a home drone and one for the car. In the Cloud-Data world of tomorrow, Bezos is posed to dominate much more than say companies like Apple. Like Musk, Bezos has space ambitions. His Blue Origin was part of the Artemis team that got the half-a-billion dollar plus contract that will come out with an “integrated human landing system” for the next round of Moon landings. Related to that, they had a successful New Shepard 3 rocket launch.

Eric Yuan: Video collaboration had been around in the 2000s, but it was only Yuan’s Zoom, launched in 2011, that took it to the next level. But even he had to wait till the Covid crisis to truly showcase his great new product. This was the first real tech success story of 2020. Interestingly Zoom had become profitable and come out with an IPO in 2019 itself. At that time it was at $36 a share which became $70 in January and subsequently crossed $500 later in the year.

Zoom became a verb and everyone wanted to be on the platform. A lot of first time and home users learnt all about video collaboration only through Zoom. Depending on which geography and time period you took, it even recorded growth in the thousands of percentages. It did the job admirably in the first few months, soon other collaboration players caught up, bandwidth providers had to up their game and that led to the WFH revolution that helped companies continue working throughout the lockdown.

Chinese Misses: Zhang Yiming formed ByteDance in 2012, but it is more known for its TikTok, which saw a phenomenal rise in the last few years. It was poised to become the first ever non-American brand to garner one billion active users when it was targeted by both the Indian and American governments. While Facebook got 2.5 billion users, its products WhatsApp and Instagram are in the 1-billion-club. Now the fate of rising superstar TikTok is uncertain.

Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei way back in 1987 and it really took off in the 2010s. It was poised to be the backbone of the global 5G network and that would have taken it to the next level. However security issues and US President Donald Trump’s Clean Network initiatives forced America and its allies to dump Huawei one by one. You can imagine the potential of Huawei that despite all of this, it still came in at No. 2 in global mobile shipments in the last quarter and is going full steam ahead with China’s 5G.

Jack Ma’s Alibaba is into ecommerce, cloud and AI, all industries of the future. When he came out with the IPO of their FinTech Ant Group, it got a whopping $3 trillion worth of bids from individual investors. But he fell foul of the Chinese government and had to be withdrawn. Meanwhile Xiaomi displaced Apple for the No. 3 spot in terms of global shipments and Tech China must be itching to take on Tech America and regain the trust of the world.