Global Chatter: Nvidia, Samsung, Cloudflare & More
Edition #1
Welcome to the first edition of Global Chatter — a fortnightly newsletter where we dig through what the world’s biggest companies are saying and bring you the most interesting insights, whether about their businesses, industries, global trends, or the broader economy. We read through major global earnings calls, shareholder letters, investor presentations, and management interviews so you don’t have to.
From Big Tech and semiconductors to global banks, consumer giants, energy majors, and industrial leaders, Global Chatter is our attempt to cut through the noise and surface the conversations that actually matter.
We’re always looking to make Global Chatter more useful and insightful—so if you have ideas on how we can improve or innovate the format further, we’d love to hear them.
In this edition, we have covered 11 companies across 10 diversified industries.
AI Computing
Nvidia
Electronics & Semiconductors
Samsung Electronics
Technology Conglomerate
Alphabet Inc.
Baidu Inc.
E-Commerce
Amazon.com, Inc.
Design & Product Development Platform
Figma Inc.
Consumer Packaged Goods
Unilever PLC
Chemical & Material Conglomerate
Mitsubishi Chemical
Cloud Services & Cybersecurity
Cloudflare, Inc.
Retail
Walmart
Software
Zoom Communications
Nvidia | AI Computing
Nvidia is a technology company that designs high-performance processors, most notably Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Originally built to render video game graphics, these chips are now the global standard for powering artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
Jensen made it clear that NVIDIA’s growth should exceed hyperscaler CapEx growth because the company is now exposed to multiple AI infrastructure categories beyond traditional cloud players. This is a major signal on long-term TAM expansion.
“We should be growing faster than hyperscale CapEx… The first category is hyperscalers… The second category is all of the AI native clouds… enterprise, industrial companies, sovereign AI clouds… hundreds of thousands of companies with smaller installations. That category is going to continue to grow at incredible pace.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Management reiterated its view that AI infrastructure spending is still in the early innings and could expand dramatically over the decade.
“The CapEx is at $1 trillion and it’s growing towards $3 trillion-$4 trillion… If they don’t have the compute, they won’t have the revenues. Compute is revenues. Compute is profit.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen characterized current AI demand as fundamentally different from prior cycles because AI workloads are now directly monetizable.
“This was an extraordinary quarter. Demand has gone parabolic. The reason is simple: agentic AI has arrived. AI can now do productive and valuable work. Tokens are now profitable.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA sees CPUs for agentic AI orchestration as a major new market opportunity beyond GPUs.
“Vera opens a brand-new $200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen outlined how CPUs will play a much larger role in orchestrating AI agents and tool usage.
“The harness runs on CPU, and the tool use runs on CPUs… The world is going to have billions of agents… Every one of those agents are going to spin off sub-agents… All of the orchestration essentially runs on CPUs.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen suggested adoption for Rubin will be broader and faster than Blackwell.
“Every single frontier model company will jump on Vera Rubin from the get-go… Vera Rubin is off to a tremendous start, and it’ll surely be more successful than even Grace Blackwell.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA highlighted Anthropic as a major incremental customer and capacity consumer.
“The amount of capacity that we’re going to bring online for Anthropic this year and next year is going to be quite significant. Very significant.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen indicated that enterprise, sovereign AI, and industrial AI infrastructure may become larger than hyperscaler demand over time.
“Long term… industrial and enterprise… represents some $50 trillion-$80 trillion of the world’s economy… I expect the second category to be larger over time.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA believes robotics and physical AI will become a major incremental growth vector beyond data centers.
“The next wave is physical AI, with billions of autonomous and robotic systems operating in the physical world.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen described a structural change in computing economics that favors NVIDIA’s architecture.
“The economics of cloud computing of the past was $ per core… The economics of AI of the future is tokens per $ or $ per token.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA is expanding CUDA beyond AI models into enterprise software ecosystems.
“We’re accelerating all of the world’s tools so that it runs on CUDA… Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, Adobe… because agents use these tools and they want things to happen quickly.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Physical-world AI deployments require localized compute infrastructure.
“Many industrial companies, there’s no choice but to put the computer where the context is, where the action is… You can’t put that in the cloud.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen framed AI as the first technology wave capable of digitizing industries untouched by traditional IT.
“The rest of the $100 trillion industry that has not been impacted by IT in the last 30 years, it’s about to be impacted by AI.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen argued that AI has transformed compute from a cost center into a direct revenue-generating asset, which structurally changes infrastructure spending behavior.
“SaaS didn’t use to use as much compute, but AI requires a tremendous amount of compute… Compute is revenues. Compute is profit.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA believes AI-native infrastructure providers cannot realistically build their own vertically integrated stacks, strengthening NVIDIA’s moat.
“AI native clouds don’t build chips, don’t design their own chips, they can’t really assemble unrelated parts together into an AI factory… NVIDIA’s architecture is so perfect for them.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Management repeatedly emphasized that NVIDIA is unique because it controls the entire AI stack.
“NVIDIA is quite unique in the sense that we are the only company that builds all of the technology components… in an extreme co-design way, in a complete end-to-end way, in a full stack way.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA expects AI demand to move from a handful of hyperscalers to hundreds of thousands of enterprises globally.
“The rest of the industry represents a couple of 250,000 companies around the world… in the future, it’ll be hundreds of thousands of companies.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Countries increasingly want localized AI infrastructure for regulatory and security reasons.
“Everybody wants to build it in a different way… It could be because of confidential computing. It could be because of national security reasons.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
AI-RAN is emerging as a future infrastructure opportunity extending beyond traditional data centers.
“Every single base station, every single radio network would become an AI-powered radio network.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen described agentic AI as potentially creating a computing explosion larger than the internet era.
“The world is going to have billions of agents… every one of those agents are going to spin off sub-agents.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
While CPUs orchestrate agents, NVIDIA emphasized that the core ‘thinking’ layer still relies on GPUs.
“All of the thinking happens on GPUs.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Jensen suggested industrial and enterprise AI could ultimately dwarf hyperscaler AI economics.
“Industrial and enterprise… represents some $50 trillion-$80 trillion of the world’s economy.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
NVIDIA expects robotics and physical-world automation to accelerate rapidly this decade.
“I’m hoping that within the next 5 years, physical AI and robotics segment is going to grow incredibly fast.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Security and compute isolation are becoming increasingly important for enterprise AI deployments.
“Vera Rubin is the world’s first platform with end-to-end confidential computing.”
— Jensen Huang, President & CEO
Samsung Electronics | Electronics & Semiconductors
Samsung Electronics is a South Korean multinational tech giant and the flagship subsidiary of the Samsung Group, recognized globally for its consumer electronics and semiconductors.
Management attributed the record performance primarily to AI-driven semiconductor demand and stronger mix in high-value products. The scale of profitability improvement was extraordinary, with margins doubling sequentially.
“Total revenue reached a new record high of KRW 134 trillion, up by 43% from the record set one quarter ago. Operating profit also reached a new all-time high of KRW 57 trillion, up 185% QoQ, and the operating margin expanded from 21% in the previous quarter to 43%.”
— Soon-Cheol Park, EVP, Head of Corporate Management Operations, and CFO
Management believes AI infrastructure expansion remains the key structural driver for memory demand and pricing.
“We expect memory price to stay on the current upward trend driven by ongoing expansion in AI infrastructure.”
— Soon-Cheol Park, EVP, Head of Corporate Management Operations, and CFO
The company confirmed that hyperscalers and AI customers are now locking in longer-duration contracts because of tightening supply conditions.
“Major customers are quite confident in future AI and AI-related demand… we have been pursuing multi-year supply agreements… and have already signed finalized contracts with some customers.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
This was one of the strongest signals from the call regarding the intensity of the AI memory cycle and supply tightness.
“Customers who are concerned about supply shortages are actually bringing forward their demand for 2027 already… the supply-demand gap is looking to widen further in 2027 versus this year.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The company acknowledged that available supply is materially below customer demand despite aggressive capacity planning.
“We also have very tight inventory and available supply is far short of customer demand. In fact, our demand fulfillment rate is now at a record low.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Samsung confirmed extremely strong customer demand for next-generation AI memory products.
“The differentiated performance of our HBM4 has led to concentration of demand, and our production-ready capacity is fully booked and sold out.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Samsung is rapidly transitioning toward next-generation HBM products, reflecting accelerating AI infrastructure upgrades.
“HBM4 sales are expected to exceed 50% of total HBM sales from the third quarter onwards and also account for roughly half on a full year basis.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Management believes the spread of agentic AI is accelerating memory demand structurally across servers and storage.
“With the spread of agentic AI, token processing is increasing in volume… and the AI ecosystem is growing even faster than ever.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Management acknowledged an unusual market inversion caused by the rapid spike in commodity DRAM pricing.
“It is true that conventional DRAMs have higher margins versus HBM… this has resulted in inversion of margins between HBM and conventional DRAM.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The company signaled a long-term strategic approach rather than chasing temporary pricing arbitrage.
“If we were to focus our product portfolio on conventional DRAM, looking to achieve short-term performance only, this could potentially pose constraints on the build-out of the underlying AI infrastructure itself.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Supply constraints are being driven by long fab lead times and AI demand growth outpacing industry capacity additions.
“When you consider the lead time involved for new fab expansions, supply growth is expected to remain constrained within the industry for the time being.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The company outlined one of the largest investment programs globally across semiconductors and future technologies.
“The company plans to invest over KRW 110 trillion in facilities and R&D to strengthen our strategic production basis for future.”
— Soon-Cheol Park, EVP, Head of Corporate Management Operations, and CFO
The company framed humanoid robotics as a major future strategic growth area.
“Through the development of humanoid robots… we aim to innovate manufacturing productivity and daily experiences.”
— Soon-Cheol Park, EVP, Head of Corporate Management Operations, and CFO
Samsung Foundry highlighted accelerating customer engagement in advanced AI-related processes.
“We continued to expand our customer base and deepen engagement across high-performance computing applications, sustaining a solid order momentum throughout the quarter.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
Management suggested upcoming leading-edge foundry wins could become visible soon.
“We are in active talks with multiple large-scale AI and HPC customers on 2 nm process projects. Expect to secure more visible results in the near future.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
The company is positioning itself for the next phase of AI infrastructure networking demand.
“We are developing not only silicon photonics components, but also technology for the CPO or co-packaged optics business based on advanced processes and three-D packaging.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
Management believes storage demand is becoming increasingly critical in AI inference architectures.
“NVIDIA proposed an architecture… that extends AI inference data storage beyond HBM to NAND-based storage rather than relying solely on HBM. This will likely lead to rising demand for high performance storage.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Management repeatedly emphasized that the pace of AI ecosystem expansion is exceeding earlier assumptions.
“The spread of agentic AI is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace than initially expected.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
Samsung sees AI demand spilling over from HBM into conventional server infrastructure.
“We expect that the demand for DRAM and SSD for conventional servers will increase more sharply than previously anticipated.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The magnitude of pricing acceleration reflects one of the strongest memory upcycles in recent years.
“Our blended ASP rose by low 90% range QoQ for DRAM, high 80% QoQ for NAND.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
AI-driven server demand is materially transforming the profitability profile of the memory business.
“Our memory business set another all-time high in quarterly performance following the previous quarter.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The company is aggressively advancing the roadmap beyond HBM4.
“We have been accelerating development of next-gen HBM4E products with pin speed of 16 Gbps and bandwidth of 4.0 TB per second.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
AI workloads are broadening demand beyond DRAM and HBM toward high-performance storage.
“This will likely lead to rising demand for high performance storage, such as TLC-based PCIe Gen 6 SSDs.”
— Jaejune Kim, EVP of Memory Business
The company continues to push aggressively into next-generation process leadership.
“The development of the 1.4 nm process is progressing as planned.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
Management provided a concrete commercialization timeline for advanced foundry nodes.
“In the second half, we will start mass production of the second-generation 2 nm process.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
The company is intentionally reducing dependence on mobile markets.
“We are actively pursuing structural transformation by diversifying our application portfolio beyond mobile into AI HPC, automotive, and aerospace sectors.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
AI networking bandwidth requirements are creating new infrastructure opportunities.
“We are seeing growing demand for high bandwidth and low power data transmission, which has led to a rapid rise in demand for silicon photonics.”
— Sukchae Kang, EVP and Head of Sales and Marketing Office for Foundry
Even amid weaker unit shipments, AI-enabled premium devices are supporting value growth.
“The smartphone market is expected to decline in shipments due to rising costs, while revenues are projected to grow driven by expansion of super premium products.”
— Seong Cho, EVP and Head of Strategic Marketing Office for Mobile Experience
Rising memory and component costs are pressuring downstream device margins.
“Cost pressure on key components in Q2 are expected to intensify… a decline in profitability appears inevitable.”
— Seong Cho, EVP and Head of Strategic Marketing Office for Mobile Experience
AI data center expansion is creating a fast-growing adjacent opportunity in thermal management.
“The data center cooling market is projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2024 to $16.6 billion by 2030.”
— Sang-Jik Lee, EVP and Head of Sales Marketing Team of DA
Alphabet Inc. | Technology Conglomerate
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company and the parent organization of Google LLC. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, it was formed in 2015 to restructure Google into a decentralized portfolio of businesses.
This was one of the biggest disclosures of the quarter and signals massive forward demand for AI infrastructure and enterprise AI workloads. Management highlighted that backlog growth was driven by both enterprise AI contracts and TPU hardware agreements.
“Google Cloud’s backlog nearly doubled sequentially, reaching $462 billion at the end of the first quarter. The increase was driven by strong demand for our enterprise AI offerings and the inclusion of TPU hardware sales… The majority of the backlog is related to typical GCP contracts.”
— Anat Ashkenazi, SVP and CFO, Alphabet and Google
Alphabet sharply increased capital expenditure guidance amid unprecedented AI compute demand internally and externally. The company also explicitly guided for another significant increase in 2027 CapEx.
“We are updating our full year 2026 CapEx guidance range to $180 to $190 billion… We are seeing unprecedented internal and external demand for AI compute resources… As a result, we expect our 2027 CapEx to significantly increase compared to 2026.”
— Anat Ashkenazi, SVP and CFO, Alphabet and Google
Sundar explicitly acknowledged ongoing capacity shortages, implying AI demand is materially ahead of supply.
“Obviously, we are compute constrained in the near term. And as an example, our Cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Management confirmed enterprise AI products are now the primary growth driver for Google Cloud, not traditional infrastructure.
“Our Enterprise AI solutions have become our primary growth driver for Cloud for the first time. In Q1, revenue from products built on our gen AI models grew nearly 800% year over year.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Alphabet is now commercializing TPUs beyond Google Cloud, including direct deployments into customer-owned data centers.
“We will begin to deliver TPUs to a select group of customers in their own data centers in a hardware configuration to expand our addressable market opportunity.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Enterprise adoption of Gemini accelerated materially during the quarter, supported by partners and large corporate deployments.
“Gemini Enterprise is seeing tremendous momentum, with 40% growth quarter over quarter in paid monthly active users.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Management emphasized that AI Overviews and AI Mode are expanding overall Search engagement rather than cannibalizing it.
“AI continues to drive Search usage, and queries are at an all time high.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
The company highlighted major inference efficiency gains despite rolling out more advanced AI features into Search.
“Since upgrading AI Overviews and AI Mode to Gemini 3, we have reduced the cost of core AI responses by more than 30%, thanks to continued hardware and engineering breakthroughs.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Sundar described agentic consumer workflows as a major future monetization and engagement layer within Search.
“I think bringing agentic workflows to consumers in a way that it’s easy for them to do, including in the context of Search, I see as a huge opportunity ahead.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Sundar strongly differentiated Google from peers by emphasizing ownership across chips, models, infrastructure, tools, and applications.
“We are unique in the market because of our vertically optimized AI stack… the fact that we own frontier models, own the silicon, really helps us stay ahead of the curve.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Sundar hinted that premium AI-powered Search experiences may increasingly shift toward subscription monetization.
“As we serve more and more valuable use cases, there are going to be use cases where people will want to use the most powerful model, and there may be different ways to accomplish that.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Google believes Gemini is expanding the universe of monetizable Search queries.
“The understanding that we have with Gemini on intent has significantly expanded our ability to deliver Ads on longer, more complex searches that were previously really difficult to monetize.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
AI-native ad products are scaling rapidly across Google’s advertiser base.
“More than 30% of our customers’ Search spend now uses AI enabled campaigns AI Max or Performance Max.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
Management pushed back against fears that AI will shrink Search economics, arguing instead that AI expands use cases and engagement.
“I think the way to think about it is really to think about the expansionary moment we see here for Search.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
Management directly stated that AI features are increasing engagement and repeat usage behavior within Search.
“People love our AI experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews, and they’re coming back to Search more.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
The scale milestone highlights how rapidly AI infrastructure demand is transforming Google Cloud’s business profile.
“Cloud accelerated again this quarter due to strong demand for our AI products and infrastructure. Revenue grew 63%, exceeding $20 billion for the first time.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
AI developer adoption continues to scale rapidly across Google’s ecosystem.
“Our first party models now process more than 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, up from 10 billion last quarter.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Google claims it improved Search performance materially even while integrating compute-intensive AI functionality.
“Even as we have brought new AI features into our results page, we have reduced Search latency by more than 35% over the past five years.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
This marks a major shift away from traditional cloud infrastructure growth drivers.
“Our Enterprise AI solutions have become our primary growth driver for Cloud for the first time.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Existing enterprise customers are scaling AI workloads materially faster than originally forecast.
“Customers outpaced their initial commitments by 45%, accelerating over last quarter.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google
Gemini-powered targeting is materially improving monetization efficiency in Maps.
“In Maps, we are using Gemini to ensure ‘Promoted Pins’ are deeply relevant… This work is improving ads relevance by nearly 10% leading to significant increase in user engagement.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
Google highlighted concrete advertiser performance gains from AI-powered campaigns.
“Hilton EMEA… captured one third more clicks for a fifth of the spend, while simultaneously increasing the average booking value by 55%.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
More conversational and intent-rich queries are expanding monetizable search inventory.
“Etsy saw a 10% search volume uplift, with 15% of those queries being net new to their business.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
Management said the company is redesigning advertising specifically for AI-native search experiences.
“We aren’t just bringing existing ad formats into AI experiences, we are reinventing ads for this new era.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
AI-powered commerce flows are increasingly integrated directly inside Search and Gemini.
“Shoppers can now review product recommendations, compare options and complete streamlined checkout for eligible purchases, directly within AI Mode and Gemini.”
— Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, Google
AI compute demand is heavily shifting spending mix toward server infrastructure.
“Approximately 60% of our investment in technical infrastructure this quarter was in servers.”
— Anat Ashkenazi, SVP and CFO, Alphabet and Google
Baidu Inc. | Technology Conglomerate
Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet services and artificial intelligence. It holds a dominant position in China’s search engine market, and provides a wide variety of other internet services such as Baidu App, Baidu Baike, iQIYI, Baidu Tieba, and ES File Explorer.
Management highlighted that demand is moving beyond model training into large-scale inference and production deployment. This is important because inference demand is structurally larger and stickier than training demand.
“We have seen a remarkable strong enterprise demand for AI infrastructure, both training and inference, with inference showing particularly strong momentum… It tells us that customers have moved beyond training models and are now running AI across more parts of their business and accelerating pace.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
This marks a major business mix transition away from traditional online marketing dependence. Management framed it as a structural inflection point.
“In Q1… our Baidu core AI-powered business… already exceeded 50% of our total revenue for the first time. This is an important milestone reflecting both AI growing contribution and a more diversified revenue base.”
— Haijian He, Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Management clearly stated that AI infrastructure is not just a growth driver but also a margin expansion driver because of higher technical barriers and tight supply.
“GPU Cloud usually carries better margin profiles than a traditional CPU cloud… GPU Cloud is technically more complex, with much higher barriers to entry… demand remains very strong while high-quality supply is relatively tight.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Baidu believes the revenue mix shift toward AI infrastructure and MaaS will durably improve cloud profitability.
“As GPU Cloud takes a larger and larger share of our total cloud infrastructure revenue, we believe the blended margins for our cloud improve structurally, and that’s a durable ongoing trend.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Robin Li reiterated Baidu’s long-standing thesis that AI monetization will accrue primarily at the application layer rather than foundation models themselves.
“We have always believed that models ultimately create value through applications. We have consistently taken an application-driven approach.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Management sees AI-assisted coding becoming a foundational AI capability with broad commercial potential.
“We are enhancing coding capabilities to better support vibe coding, enabling users to build applications through natural language. As coding becomes an increasingly foundational capability in the AI era, this will be a growing area of focus.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Robin Li suggested the AI industry will eventually shift from token pricing toward outcome- and productivity-based monetization models.
“Today, token-based pricing is more common… Over time, AI applications and agents will become more capable of completing real tasks like a human being… In the future, people will pay for agents or applications, and the market for this should be much larger than tokens.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Baidu sees digital humans emerging as a major AI-native application opportunity, especially in commerce.
“In e-commerce live streaming, they are proving increasingly effective at driving engagement and conversion with performance in many cases comparable to or even better than human hosts.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Baidu believes international robotaxi markets may ultimately be significantly more profitable than domestic China operations because of higher pricing environments.
“Apollo Go has already achieved UE breakeven in its largest operational city in China, despite very low fare levels… As we expand globally, the pricing environment becomes much more attractive. We believe our overseas operations have the potential to deliver much stronger profitability.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Baidu emphasized its scale advantage in robotaxis and framed operational experience as a core moat.
“Apollo Go remains a global leader. We’ve completed over 22 million cumulative rides as of April.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Management believes the total addressable market outside China and the U.S. may ultimately exceed the China domestic opportunity.
“The overall international market, outside of U.S. and China, is also bigger than China domestic market.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Baidu believes Chinese AI chips may struggle in frontier training but can compete effectively in inference.
“Domestic chips are still catching up with the most advanced global products in certain frontier training scenarios. Inference is an area where domestic chips can be highly relevant and competitive.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
The company believes industry demand is structurally shifting from training toward inference-heavy workloads.
“We’re seeing a structural shift in AI compute demand from training-heavy to a growing mix of inference.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Baidu emphasized that Kunlun’s advantage is not the chip alone but integration across the AI stack.
“Kunlun is not just a standalone chip product. It’s a critical part of Baidu’s full-stack AI capabilities… We can continuously optimize across the entire stack, improving model efficiency, reducing inference costs.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Baidu is seeing rapidly rising usage across its model-as-a-service platform, reflecting expanding enterprise AI adoption.
“We’re seeing continued growth in token consumption from external customers.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
AI infrastructure demand is no longer limited to internet and technology sectors.
“We keep winning new ones too, including industries that historically won’t have users of AI and cloud computing, like retail and IP-based consumer brands.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Robin Li argued that the AI industry is entering an application-first phase after years dominated by model breakthroughs.
“Over the past three years, the biggest AI moments were driven by model breakthroughs… this year is different. For the first time, it is an agent, an AI application that has captured the world’s attention.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Management framed AI-powered search as one of the biggest long-term monetization opportunities globally.
“Search… is our largest consumer-facing product, and one we have been consistently transforming with AI… enabling search to deliver more intelligent, structured, and genuinely helpful answers at scale.”
— Robin Li, Co-founder & CEO
Management stressed that AI capex is being evaluated through profitability and long-term margin lenses.
“We care a lot about ROI of these investments, and I believe what we are building today will shape our margin structure for the years to come.”
— Haijian He, CFO
Baidu acknowledged that demand growth is still significantly ahead of local chip manufacturing maturity.
“Domestic AI chips still face near-term challenges around capacity and supply chain maturity… demand is growing faster than supply.”
— Dou Shen, EVP in charge of Baidu AI Cloud Group (ACG)
Amazon.com, Inc. | E-commerce, Cloud Computing & AI
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company focused on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it stands as one of the world’s largest and most valuable technology brands
Andy Jassy framed the current AI cycle as a foundational technological shift that will reshape nearly every software application and business workflow. He also reiterated that Amazon plans to invest aggressively for years despite near-term capital intensity.
“We do view this as truly a once in a lifetime opportunity, where every application that we know of is gonna be reinvented. There are so many new applications that none of us have ever imagined or dreamed we could build that are starting to be built and will be built… I expect that we will invest a significant amount of capital over the coming years to pursue that opportunity.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Amazon disclosed one of the largest cloud backlogs globally, with management emphasizing that the pipeline is broad-based rather than concentrated among a few AI labs. The disclosed figure also excludes the recently announced Anthropic agreement.
“The backlog, for Q1 is $364 billion. That does not include the recent deal that we announced with Anthropic for over $100 billion. There’s reasonable breadth in that as well. It’s not just one customer or two customers.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management highlighted that AWS growth has reaccelerated sharply even at a $150 billion annualized revenue run rate, driven by both AI and core cloud demand.
“We’re really pleased with the growth that we’re seeing in AWS right now. You know, 28% year-over-year, fastest growth rate in 15 quarters for us. Haven’t grown at this pace since we were about half the size. Growing 28% on a $150 billion annual run rate basis is not simple to do.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management noted that AI demand is creating second-order growth effects across AWS core infrastructure and compute usage.
“As AI growth is exploding, it turns out that it leads to a lot of core growth as well. You know, all the post-training, all the reinforcement learning, all the agentic actions and tool usage that these agents are using.”
— Brian Olsavsky, Chief Financial Officer
Amazon believes its custom silicon stack provides a structural competitive advantage in AI infrastructure economics.
“Because we have an unusual collection of chips, we have the leading CPU chip in Graviton, and we have the leading price performance, silicon, AI chip in Trainium, it means that we’re really unusually well-positioned for the inflection that we’re seeing and the type of growth that we’re experiencing.”
— Brian Olsavsky, Chief Financial Officer
Andy Jassy confirmed that Amazon may commercialize Trainium infrastructure beyond AWS cloud consumption, potentially opening a new hardware revenue stream.
“I expect over time there’s a good chance we’re gonna sell racks over the next couple years.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Andy described a major architectural shift from stateless chatbots toward persistent AI agents with memory and identity.
“I think the future of using these models is a stateful model, a stateful API… when you’re building agents, you’re building AI applications, you don’t wanna start anew every time you interact with the model.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Amazon’s AI shopping assistant is scaling meaningfully, supporting the company’s broader push into agentic commerce.
“You see the monthly active users up over 115% in Rufus and the engagement up over 400% year-over-year.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes conversational AI shopping experiences may actually expand monetization opportunities rather than reduce ad inventory.
“I actually believe that we’re gonna like this for advertising. I think it’s gonna be good for customers, and it’s gonna be good for our business.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Amazon expects conversational shopping to create more opportunities for product discovery and sponsored recommendations.
“In that process of having multi-turns, there are multiple opportunities to surface relevant products to customers, many of which will be organic and some of which will be sponsored.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management acknowledged severe supply constraints across AI-related infrastructure components.
“The cost of these components, particularly memory, has skyrocketed. We’re just in a stage where there’s just not enough capacity for the amount of demand.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Enterprises struggling to secure infrastructure supply are increasingly moving workloads into AWS.
“One of the interesting things that we see right now… is that it is a further impetus pushing companies who have on-premises infrastructure into the cloud.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Andy described major productivity gains already emerging from agentic coding and AI-assisted software development.
“Normally that would’ve taken 40 or 50 people about 1 year to do, and we took 5 really smart people, AI forward-thinking people building on agentic coding tools, and those 5 people rebuilt it in 65 days.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes AI will fundamentally reshape interfaces, workflows, and interaction models across Amazon’s businesses.
“All of these customer experiences we know are gonna be completely reinvented. They’re gonna have different interfaces, they’re gonna have different ways that people interact with them.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Consumer and enterprise demand for always-on connectivity is becoming a major strategic opportunity.
“Increasingly, we see very large demand for consumers to have direct-to-device.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Management suggested today’s AI shopping assistants still struggle with reliability and personalization.
“The experience just hasn’t gotten great with these third-party horizontal agents yet. They’re not often able to get the pricing right or the product information right.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
The company expects consumers to increasingly prefer AI shopping assistants embedded within trusted retailers.
“If you’re going to a particular retailer that you like to do business with… if they have a great agentic shopping assistant, you’re gonna often start there.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Amazon expects AI-powered advertising tools to broaden the advertiser base.
“I think they’re gonna be a lot more advertisers with the rise of what’s happening in AI.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing engineering labor requirements and timelines.
“That is a very different world of operating, and that’s the world I think we’re heading to over the next few years.”
— Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer
Figma Inc. | Design & Product Development Platform
Figma, Inc.is a San Francisco-based technology company that develops a cloud-based, AI-powered digital design and product development platform. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, it allows teams to collaboratively design, prototype, and build digital products entirely in web browsers.
Teams buying AI add-ons are already generating materially higher ARR, reinforcing the monetization thesis around AI tooling.
“Teams that are purchasing AI credit add-ons on Pro have an average ARR of over 3x more than teams that had not purchased add-ons.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management sees node-based editing and agent workflows as a core future interface paradigm for AI-powered product creation.
“We really believe in the paradigm of node-base editing and the ways that you can create workflows where agents and models are working on the same canvas and you can move between the outputs of the various surfaces.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Customers are increasingly using Make beyond experimentation and into real production workflows.
“We’ve been really impressed by the way that our users have stretched the platform to create everything from tools to prototypes to beautiful website designs to actual ship software.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Figma acknowledged that some initial technical decisions limited scalability and functionality, but claims these issues have now been corrected.
“Some of the early technical decisions that we made did constrain us in ways that are obvious in hindsight… We’ve corrected those. If you haven’t tried Make recently, please try it again. It is already so much better.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes the AI market is entering a new phase where enterprises are increasingly focused on governance and spend efficiency.
“The third chapter seems to be, let’s put some limits on this because this is real spend… customers are looking to have more control.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
The company is building infrastructure to reduce inference costs while maintaining performance.
“That includes things like routing queries across models based on task complexity, leveraging our model-agnostic architecture to optimize across providers and investing in first-party models trained on Figma’s design corpus.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Dylan Field framed AI as a structural tailwind for design platforms because coding itself is becoming easier and more automated.
“As code becomes more commoditized and easier to write, design is clearly the layer above code… We expect this space to continue to heat up and to be the battleground for how software gets built.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management sees some AI-native tools as complementary partners while acknowledging competitive overlap with others.
“Many of them will be tools that we can integrate with and will actually be complementary… Others will be more direct competitors.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
The company believes real-time collaborative editing infrastructure remains difficult to replicate even in the AI era.
“Performant multiplayer canvas… is something that people underestimate how hard it is to get those mechanics right and to really execute with quality on.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Concerns that credit enforcement would sharply reduce usage appear unfounded based on early results.
“As of the end of April… 75% of the org and enterprise users who were previously over their credit limits… continued to consume credits.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Dylan Field believes current developer-centric AI interfaces are temporary and will evolve toward richer visual workflows.
“I don’t think that anyone would tell you that an IDE or a terminal is where people are going to gravitate towards long term… workflows will shift in that direction.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
The company is seeing meaningful traction in bidirectional workflows between code and visual interfaces.
“We’ve been glad to see the usage… from models and code to the canvas… and also on the MCP side… that’s growing tremendously.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Figma is seeing broader deployment and deeper organizational adoption rather than isolated tool usage.
“Customers are going bigger. They’re going broader with Figma than ever before.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Figma reported unusually strong expansion in its paid base, signaling that AI features are materially improving conversion dynamics.
“Our paid customer base grew 54% year-over-year with the long tail of Pro team conversions up over 150% in Q1 compared to the same quarter last year.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
AI is driving not only seat growth but also cross-platform and add-on monetization.
“All the components that helped us orchestrate strength… TAM expansion, seat expansion, product expansion, tier expansion as well as pricing, we’re all kind of kicking into high gear.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Figma is building higher-value enterprise offerings around AI governance and deployment support.
“We’re deepening our investments in stuff like our Governance+ add-on as well as advisory services.”
— Praveer Melwani, Chief Financial Officer
Dylan Field framed the emergence of AI-native design competitors as evidence of the size of the opportunity rather than purely a threat.
“We expect this space to continue to heat up and to be the battleground for how software gets built.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Unlike some ecosystem partners, management explicitly acknowledged Anthropic as a serious long-term competitor.
“Obviously, we can’t dismiss them… They have the ability to train first-party models and couple those with their own products if they choose to.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management repeatedly emphasized convergence across workflows as the company’s strategic direction.
“The ability to bring the best of AI and design and code and freeform direct manipulation together, all in one place, in one platform… will ultimately create flow.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management acknowledged that manual editing still outperforms AI in certain workflows, signaling a hybrid future rather than full automation.
“There are some workflows in Figma Design that are 10 or 100x faster than AI.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
While manual workflows remain strong in some cases, AI is already delivering large productivity gains elsewhere.
“There are some workflows with AI that are way faster than if you’re going to do it manually and really try to do some bulk editing task.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Management sees Assistant as a key future adoption catalyst.
“As we move to a world where Assistant expands in the alpha and ultimately comes out of alpha, more of our customers will be able to get those benefits.”
— Dylan Field, Chief Executive Officer
Unilever PLC | Consumer Packaged Goods
Unilever is a British multinational FMCG company headquartered in London. Formed in 1930, it generates over €50 billion in annual turnover and produces over 400 brands—including Dove, Knorr, Lifebuoy, and Axe—that are used by an estimated 3.7 billion people globally every day.
Management emphasized that the company is maintaining its strategic focus on volume growth even as commodity inflation accelerates sharply. This is important because staples companies historically shift toward price-led growth in inflationary periods.
“We are confident in delivering above 2% volume growth. If you look at the last 9 quarters… our average volume growth has been 2.5%. We had a good start to the year with 2.9% in the first quarter… We expect pricing to accelerate along the year… We expect the H1 our growth to be led by volume. We expect better balance between volume and price in the second half of the year.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
The Middle East crisis and rising oil-linked input costs have significantly worsened the inflation outlook.
“Our expectation for the full year inflation is in the range of about EUR 750 million-EUR 900 million… This will be about EUR 350 million-EUR 500 million higher than our prior expectations when we began the year.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Inflation is concentrated heavily in Home Care and emerging markets, creating both risks and pricing opportunities.
“Fifty percent of the total net inflation for us is coming through in Home Care, and 70% of that is actually focused around the emerging markets.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Management acknowledged that cost inflation can no longer be absorbed entirely through productivity and efficiency.
“Pricing will be needed in selected markets and categories, notably Home Care… It will be calibrated. It will be done in a competitive manner. Our priority will be to really protect the consumer value while also taking care of our financial model.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
The company believes its resilient supply chain could help gain market share as local competitors struggle with shortages.
“We are seeing some shortage in some local players, particularly in India and Southeast Asia, that can support our volumes… resilient supply chain like the one of Unilever can build some competitive advantage to drive more volume.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
India emerged as one of the strongest-performing markets, with strength across categories and channels.
“India accelerated to 7% with 6% volume growth… In powders, we’ve actually hit record shares… in body washes, we have actually gained about 400 basis points of share.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Unilever is structurally reorganizing its India business around newer channels.
“We have put in a new organization to really address our quick commerce and e-commerce and omni-channel capability. That is functioning well.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Strong market share gains and liquids penetration are driving structural growth in Home Care.
“We achieved the highest ever share in laundry powders… We are increasing our position in liquids strongly… We have had double-digit volume growth in Brazil in fabric cleaning, in Vietnam, in Arabia, in Turkey.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management reiterated that EM exposure is a structural advantage versus peers.
“Our strength in emerging markets is definitely a long-term competitive advantage given the exposure they give us to better population growth rate [and] wealth expansion.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes weakness in Wellbeing and Foods is temporary.
“We expect our performance in U.S. accelerating from quarter two onwards.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
The rise of telehealth and GLP-1-linked hair-loss products is increasing CAC in supplements.
“We have seen particularly telehealth platforms in the U.S. significantly investing in the cross-selling of GLP-1 injectables and hair fall products.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management suggested the recent low-inflation environment was temporary and expects the historical pricing model to normalize again.
“In the long run, our combined category and geographical footprint offer around 2% market volume growth and around 2%-3% pricing… situation has changed now… We expect the same to play out in the long run.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes smaller local competitors may struggle with inflation and supply constraints, potentially aiding share gains.
“Classically in a category such as Home Care, this actually works in our favor… a lot of the local players get constrained both from a supply perspective as well as cash.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
The company is assuming significantly elevated oil prices in its planning assumptions.
“Our working assumption for all these costs is really crude at around EUR 100.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Management wants to avoid sharp consumer shocks while still protecting margins.
“There will be frequent price increases, but in small doses… ensuring that we get the right balance of giving value to the consumer while protecting our margin.”
— Srinivas Phatak, CFO
Unilever expects advertising costs to soften if industry-wide inflation intensifies.
“History shows that when there is significant commodity inflation, there tends to be media deflation.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Dove continues to emerge as one of the strongest global consumer brands within staples.
“Dove is now close to a EUR 7 billion brand, and it has delivered more than 6% growth for 14 consecutive quarters.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management highlighted how older brands are being reinvented through digital and creator-led strategies.
“Vaseline… is now building real momentum with younger consumers… delivering more than 100% growth in TikTok Shop in Southeast Asia.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management does not expect Europe to become a major growth contributor in the near future.
“We don’t expect Europe to become a key engine of growth in the future.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
China has stabilized after a prolonged slowdown, especially in foodservice.
“China returned to mid-single digit growth… We are seeing the out-of-home channel in China picking up.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Lean channel inventory suggests current growth is real demand-driven rather than stock-loading.
“Our distributor covers are one of the minimums we have in history.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management pushed back against concerns of artificial demand inflation from channel stocking.
“We have not seen any significant stocking… nothing of material impact at all.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Management admitted leadership depth in North America had lagged peers historically.
“For many, many years, we have been lacking leadership at the top of the organization coming from North America, and this has to change.”
— Fernando Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Mitsubishi Chemical | Chemical & Material Conglomerate
The Mitsubishi Chemical Group is a global Japanese chemical and materials conglomerate headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo. Led by CEO Manabu Chikumoto, the company focuses on high-performance chemicals, advanced materials, healthcare, and industrial gases to achieve sustainable, eco-friendly solutions.
Management described FY26 as a reset year involving aggressive restructuring, impairments, and portfolio exits. The company framed the weak earnings as a deliberate cleanup for future growth.
“These results reflect our strong determination to fully carry out what must be done by FY 2025 for the company’s future growth. As a result, we made decisive structural reforms such as Sustainable Growth, the withdrawal of the coke and carbon materials business, ethylene restructuring in Western Japan, dissolution of overseas MMA joint ventures, and voluntary retirement and the Next-stage Support Program.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
The company acknowledged major execution issues in its Soarnol expansion project in the U.K., forcing a large impairment.
“In our Soarnol business, which is one of the company’s growth drivers, we recorded substantial impairment loss of approximately JPY 30 billion following the review of the plant construction in the U.K.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Management publicly accepted accountability for execution failures and governance lapses.
“We determined that it was necessary to take responsibility for our failure to uphold the three disciplined approaches in business operations… I, as the President and CEO, and Egawa… responsible for the Soarnol business, will take a 20% voluntary reduction in compensation for six months.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Carbon fiber composite parts for robotaxis are becoming a meaningful growth driver.
“We expect profit contributions from the full-scale shipment of carbon fiber composite parts for robotaxis… shipments next year may triple or increase fourfold.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Semiconductor materials and synthetic quartz businesses are emerging as key growth engines.
“We do see a lot of inquiries related to semiconductor business… synthetic quartz, precision cleaning services, and rigid photoresists are expected to see strong growth.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Mitsubishi Chemical is structurally pivoting away from commodity chemicals toward high-value specialty businesses.
“By capturing steady growth in our Specialty Materials businesses, core operating income will increase substantially.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
The company quantified geopolitical downside risks tied to energy and supply chain disruptions.
“If the current situation persists through September, we estimate a downside impact of approximately JPY 18 billion on forecast core operating income for FY 2026.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
More than half the projected geopolitical impact comes from MMA operations.
“MMA derivatives is JPY 10 billion… more than half of the JPY 18 billion impact. Supply chain disruptions in the Middle East are the biggest issue.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Operational restructuring and rationalization became a major earnings support amid weak markets.
“Cost reduction contributed a positive JPY 62.2 billion, with both industrial gases and chemicals accumulating savings across their respective businesses.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
EV-related demand softness continues to pressure some specialty businesses.
“Volume was negatively impacted by lower demand for EV electrolytes, mainly in Europe and U.S.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Petrochemical utilization rates remain weak despite some stabilization.
“Before the war, cracker utilization in Japan was approximately 75%… we were able to continue at around 80% utilization.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Management emphasized advanced materials as the long-term growth platform.
“Composite, semiconductor-related, and gallium nitride are areas where we expect significant increase in volume over the next fiscal year.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
The company linked future carbon composite growth not only to EVs but also to autonomous mobility and robotics.
“In the carbon fiber business, operations will begin in full scale for existing mobility applications, but also business related to robotaxis and a new type of mobility solution.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Beyond robotaxis, management highlighted growing traction in aerospace and drone-related opportunities.
“Drones… we’re getting new inquiries for aviation- and space-related projects, and that is also starting to shape up.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Industrial activity in developed markets remains soft across several end markets.
“Demand in Europe and the U.S. was generally weak… particularly in industrial gases.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Mitsubishi Chemical is centralizing procurement and logistics to structurally reduce costs.
“We’ve been buying from different places; we try to centralize procurement… logistics as well… we’ve been shipping from different places, but we’re trying to consolidate that.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Demand for synthetic quartz and related semiconductor materials is running ahead of current capacity.
“We are currently expecting to sell to the extent we can in our current capacity.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Management is renegotiating customer contracts to reduce lag effects from raw material volatility.
“We’ve been discussing with customers… for some customers we could refer to the previous month so that we can shorten the time lag.”
— Manabu Chikumoto, President & CEO
Operational productivity helped offset inflationary energy costs in the industrial gas business.
“Earnings increased due to cost reductions driven by productivity improvement initiatives across each region.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
The rebound thesis is centered almost entirely on successful scaling of high-value specialty businesses.
“We expect increased sales in businesses positioned as growth drivers, including polyester film for MLCCs, Soarnol, semiconductor-related businesses, and composite parts mainly for robotaxis.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
After two years of restructuring, the company believes the platform for earnings recovery is now in place.
“Having thoroughly completed our structural reforms over the past two years, and with the growth of Specialty Materials, we expect a significant increase in profits.”
— Minoru Kida, CFO
Cloudflare, Inc. | Cloud Services & Cybersecurity
Cloudflare, Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration.
This is one of the most important long-term structural observations from the call, implying a major change in Internet economics.
“Looking at the growth in nonhuman traffic, somewhere in 2027 we think it will surpass human traffic and will not slow down.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Cloudflare is seeing a massive increase in AI-driven requests, which management believes structurally benefits its network architecture.
“Today, we are seeing hundreds of billions of agentic requests per month, growing exponentially… We are setting the rails and the guardrails for that, which is driving our Act One business.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management suggested that Cloudflare’s original focus on APIs and application traffic positioned it perfectly for the AI-agent era.
“We wanted to get in front of the most essential traffic: APIs and applications… In this new world of agentic commerce and agentic transactions, our approach is showing its wisdom and durability.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes the advertising-based Internet business model is breaking and AI agents may require an entirely new payment infrastructure.
“One is microtransactions for requests agents make—fractions of pennies… some percentage of those could carry a micro-payment because they drive infrastructure load.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Unlike hyperscalers, Cloudflare claims it can run AI inference much more efficiently through intelligent routing and utilization optimization.
“Across most hyperscalers, GPU utilization rates are in the single digits. We are steadily getting our GPU utilization to approach our CPU utilization—up in the 70% to 80% range.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
The company is increasingly behaving like an AI orchestration platform rather than just a CDN/security provider.
“AI Gateway allows you to route different requests based on the right model for the right task… If we have a task we can evaluate as relatively simple, we can route it to a model running on our own infrastructure and deliver it at essentially no marginal cost.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
AI coding adoption inside Cloudflare is exploding, but the company claims its infrastructure stack gives it structural cost advantages.
“As usage has gone up—600% in the last quarter—we have seen costs go up, but not nearly as much as some others.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management hinted that internal AI workflow infrastructure could become future commercial products.
“You might see us increasingly take some of the tools we have built internally and make those available to other companies… almost every successful product started as something we needed ourselves.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Cloudflare believes regulatory fragmentation globally strengthens its competitive positioning versus hyperscalers.
“We are uniquely positioned for a world with increasing regulatory—or even practical—requirements around keeping data in particular jurisdictions.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management positioned Cloudflare’s distributed edge network as a unique moat in sovereign AI infrastructure.
“We can do that with a level of granularity no hyperscaler can match.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
As AI agents proliferate, Cloudflare sees rising demand for fine-grained data access controls.
“You want to make sure they only have access to what they should… That will be a bigger tailwind to that space.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Cloudflare added developers at a historically unprecedented rate, reflecting strong AI-native adoption momentum.
“We added 1 million developers to our platform last quarter—almost as many as in all of last year—which is extraordinary.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Cloudflare’s lightweight compute architecture is gaining traction for agentic AI workloads.
“One large AI studio went from essentially zero Dynamic Workers to over 1 million in 15 days running across the platform.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management sees next-generation AI infrastructure requiring lighter and faster execution environments.
“Containers are too slow and heavy to respond to incredibly fast agentic workloads.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Historically free CDN traffic is increasingly monetizing through AI/developer tooling adoption.
“What is fascinating is that a giant pool of free customers turned out to be developers… you are seeing a lot of that free traffic turning into paid traffic.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Agentic workflows could massively increase transaction intensity across the Internet.
“If I look for a digital camera, I might visit five sites; my agent might visit 5,000.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management believes the Internet’s current business model is unsustainable in the AI era and expects major structural change.
“We think the business model of the Internet—historically advertising—is about to change dramatically over the next five years.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management repeatedly emphasized that the company is already internally operating in ways most enterprises have not yet adapted to.
“We have always lived a little bit in the future… I think you are going to see companies across every industry start to realize the gains they can get from these tools.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management contrasted its strategy with traditional CDN peers focused on bandwidth-heavy traffic like streaming.
“Traditional CDNs chased things that drove lots of bandwidth—video streaming, live events… We never saw ourselves that way.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
AI agents generate transactional and API-heavy traffic, which Cloudflare believes is economically superior to commodity bandwidth traffic.
“We wanted to get in front of the most essential traffic: APIs and applications.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management suggested infrastructure efficiency—not raw GPU ownership—will determine future AI economics.
“Watch for when we publish blog posts about how we get more utilization across our fleet of GPUs… that is real IP we are inventing.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
This is a major claim versus hyperscaler economics, implying materially better ROI on AI infrastructure.
“We are steadily getting our GPU utilization to approach our CPU utilization.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
The company explicitly differentiated its economics from cloud infrastructure leasing models.
“The hyperscalers’ business is to buy a server and then lease that server back ideally for five times or more what they paid for it.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Agentic commerce could structurally increase Internet request volumes.
“Agents are not going to watch reruns of the Super Bowl; they will drive transactional traffic to real ecommerce sites.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Cloudflare’s consumption-style enterprise contracts are showing strong renewal behavior.
“We had our highest-ever renewal rate last quarter, and that includes pool-of-funds deals up for renewal.”
— Thomas Seifert, Chief Financial Officer
Cloudflare is becoming infrastructure for AI-content monetization negotiations.
“Media execs tell me they are signing better AI deals because we gave them tools to control who has their content.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Management wants to extend AI monetization beyond large publishers to the ‘long tail’ of the web.
“We want to make sure we make real progress and see the first revenue we can then pass back to the long tail of the Internet to help ensure a healthy ecosystem for content creators.”
— Matthew Prince, Chief Executive Officer
Walmart | Retail | AI & New Profit Streams Drive Growth
Walmart is one of the world’s largest retailers with a growing digital and marketplace presence. Beyond strong sales growth, management highlighted how AI, memberships, and newer businesses are becoming increasingly important drivers of future earnings.
New business areas like advertising and membership fees now make up a significant portion of total profits. These high-margin revenue streams are making the company’s earnings more diverse and sustainable over the long term.
“Alternative profit streams including advertising and membership now account for roughly one-third of operating income.”
— John David Rainey, CFO, Walmart
The services that support third-party sellers and brands had their best quarter yet. The rapid growth of these auxiliary services is fundamentally transforming Walmart into a higher-margin business ecosystem.
“Advertising, marketplace and fulfillment services recorded their strongest quarter.”
— John David Rainey, CFO, Walmart
Their new AI tool is being used by many more people and is leading to significantly larger shopping orders. This tech investment is starting to pay off by making the shopping experience more personalized and efficient.
“Sparky AI weekly active users increased over 100% and users generated 35% higher average order values.”
— John Furner, CEO, Walmart
Wealthier customers are still spending well, but those with lower incomes are starting to cut back on their purchases. This highlights a split in the economy that Walmart is navigating by offering products at multiple price points.
“High-income consumers remain resilient while lower-income consumers show signs of stress.”
— John Furner, CEO, Walmart
Management is cautious that rising energy costs could keep product prices high for the rest of the year. This is a risk for investors to watch as it could impact profit margins and consumer spending.
“Higher fuel prices may lead to higher retail inflation in Q2 and the second half.”
— John David Rainey, CFO, Walmart
Zoom Communications | Software | AI Becoming the New Growth Engine
Zoom Communications is a global communications platform offering video, phone, workplace, and customer engagement solutions. Management highlighted a bigger transition underway as AI moves beyond meetings into workflows, customer experience, and new monetization opportunities across the platform.
Management believes AI is evolving beyond meeting summaries into workflow execution and becoming central to how customers use Zoom. The company is repositioning itself from a communications platform toward a workflow and AI platform.
“Today, when you schedule a Zoom call, you can attach a meeting with a workflow. Meaning during the meeting, we generate My Notes. After the meeting is over, a workflow will automatically take over to get something done for you. Customer really like that vision, focus on the conversation to completion. Without a customer AI Companion, we really cannot transform our business from conversation-centric business to completion-centric.”
— Eric Yuan, CEO, Zoom
Management attributes stronger enterprise growth not to one-time demand but to structural changes including AI monetization, product expansion, and moving upmarket.
“From an enterprise perspective, what we’re seeing is very durable growth. Clearly product diversification, AI monetization, moving up market, moving into new channels, all the things that we’ve said, and working on churn as well. All the things that we’ve said would be durable elements with investors, we’re seeing the fruits of.”
— Michelle Chang, CFO, Zoom
Management highlighted that product strength, AI integration, and combined communications capabilities are helping Zoom win market share.
“Look at our top 10 deals. In eight out of 10 deals, we are replacing some other CCaaS vendors. Look at the entire CCaaS market is pretty big, and we’re replacing almost every one of them. Because of our product, rich feature and innovation, and also the AI, plus our UC and CC combined in a story.”
— Eric Yuan, CEO, Zoom
Management highlighted customer experience as the clearest and strongest AI revenue opportunity in the near term.
“Clearly, the area where we have the most momentum, and you hear that even reflected in our three priority wording, is to scale the clear signal that we have in customer experience.”
— Michelle Chang, CFO, Zoom
Management shared that customers increasingly discuss Zoom in the same AI conversation as infrastructure and platform players.
“For now, in my view, and I talk to so many customers, for now they all view like NVIDIA or the OpenAI and Zoom as AI company.”
— Eric Yuan, CEO, Zoom
That’s it for now! Your feedback will really help shape how Global Chatter evolves. Drop it down in the comments below!
Quotes in this newsletter were curated by Meher, Shahid, Srusti & Kashish.
Disclaimer: We’ve used AI tools in filtering and cleaning up these quotes so there maybe some mistakes. Now, if you are thinking why we are using AI, please remember that we are just a small team of 5 people running everything you see on Zerodha Markets 😬 So, all the good stuff is human and mistakes are AI.
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