ZZ25049 Raspberry PI - Financial Results V01 250925

 

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RASPBERRY PI

Market cap £803 million

Half-year revenue $135m

Raspberry Pi expects to sell more of its own semiconductors than its famous little computers for the first time this year. Designed in the UK and manufactured in Taiwan, these “microcontrollers” do not make as much money per unit as the company’s computers, but their mix of high performance and low price has turned them into a hit.

In its latest interim results, Raspberry Pi revealed that it had shipped 4.5 million chips in the first half of this year, more than double the year before. Eben Upton, the cofounder, said: “We are quite enjoying being a semiconductor business!”

Perhaps there could be a future opportunity with Arm, the giant semiconductor designer and a fellow Cambridge company, which holds 6 per cent of the equity? This striking sales inflection point reflects the size and diversity of the firm’s offering and customer base. To some this shows a lack of focus, but others feel it demonstrates versatility.

In a note published immediately after its numbers, Jefferies, the brokerage, called it “unique among single-board computer suppliers in its expertise across semiconductors and software in addition to hardware design”, arguing this “broad strength” would help to increase profitability and market share.

It has not been an easy ride since the company floated last June. The share price has fallen 7 per cent after an impressive rally since its IPO last year, a sign that investors sometimes struggle to know what to make of it.

Some criticise the 25 per cent profit margin as too small and wonder if it can live up to the hype. Sentiment has also been hit by nerves around any potential fallout from President Trump’s sweeping global tariffs. The shares currently trade at 35 times forecast earnings, a discount to a multiple of 42 in May.

The business is best known for making credit card-sized, low-cost computers originally designed for teaching coding, but now used for everything from DIY electronics to robotics. Almost a third are sold to hobbyists but the bulk are used by industry and this is the direction of travel for the business, which is growing its reseller pipeline.

A significant share of sales now depend on a small number of big customers. One major component distributor provided 24 per cent of revenue, $32.4 million, in the first half of 2025; a contract manufacturer accounted for another 4 per cent.

The firm has finally shrugged off uneven demand from customers and Covid disruption to supply chains. It is set to meet full-year expectations.

For the six months to the end of June, overall sales were down by 6 per cent to £135.5 million, due to weaker royalties and component sales, against the backdrop of an extremely strong period last year. But unit sales were up 9 per cent from the second half.

It saw a 43 per cent drop in pre-tax profit in the first half, to £6.2 million from £10.8 million, partly because of costs related to the company’s staff equity scheme. It seems to have resolved its longstanding inventory issue, where customers had built up stock, so paused new orders while working through it.

The company has seen a return of demand from China, buoyed by, Upton said, enterprising engineers who are “less conservative” than their western peers.

With exports, the company claims to have dodged any tariff impact, partly because its computers are built in Mid-Glamorgan and incur 10 per cent tariffs, lower than some peers.

Upton also sees this as a huge advantage at a time when tensions with China are increasing.

But while geopolitics grab the headlines, the real issue is the cost of memory chips, which in some cases have risen about 120 per cent in the past two years. The company has stockpiled enough to cover this year and is working on back-up supply options for next year, but it has not ruled out future price rises.

Looking ahead, there are more product launches scheduled this year including a new AI add-on that can run chatbots. Strikingly, Raspberry Pi might be the only tech company in the world not touting the magic powers of AI. It was only mentioned on one of its results slides.

This does not mean it is ignored. Upton, a former Cambridge don, shrugs that “of course” its products are used for AI, but remarks: “AI is just adding things up.”

ADVICE Hold 
WHY Semiconductor growth could spur a fresh rally

ZZ25048 Tom Matano designer of MX5 dies. V01 230925

 

Auto Drive

23 September 2025

Tom Matano, the Japanese-born designer who made the Mazda MX-5 Miata a reality, passed away on September 20, 2025, in San Francisco at the age of 76. News of his death first surfaced on social media before the Miata Reunion—an event he had long supported—confirmed it with the hospital.

Matano’s career stretched across continents and marques, with spells at General Motors, Holden, BMW and ultimately Mazda. In 1983, he was put in charge of Mazda’s first U.S. design studio, where he shepherded the Miata from concept sketch to production car and also oversaw the third-generation RX-7. His work cemented Mazda’s reputation as a builder of proper sports cars throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

But Matano’s legacy went well beyond boardrooms and clay models. He became deeply woven into the Miata community itself, a familiar face at owner meets and track days, often signing cars with his trademark message: “Always Inspired.” He kept close ties with enthusiasts, supporting racers and attending reunions long after leaving Mazda.

 

In 2002, Matano stepped away from the company and took up a post at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University as executive director of the School of Industrial Design, where he trained a new wave of designers until his retirement earlier this year.

Born in Nagasaki in 1947 as Tsutomo “Tom” Matano, he earned an engineering degree at Seikei University in Tokyo in 1969, before moving to the U.S. the following year to study at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. After graduation he joined General Motors, working first at Oldsmobile and later at Holden in Australia. From there he headed to Germany, contributing to the early design work that led to the E36 BMW 3 Series.

Reflecting on that period, he once said: “At BMW, you end up spending decades working on one model,” noting that he wanted broader horizons. After just a year in Munich he returned to California to become chief designer at Mazda’s Irvine studio. It was around this time that journalist-turned-planner Bob Hall was pitching Mazda on the idea of a lightweight roadster inspired by classics like the Lotus Elan and Alfa Spider. Backed by rotary guru-turned-president Kenichi Yamamoto, the idea gained traction.

 

Mazda staged an international design competition for the car, and in 1986 Matano sketched out a roadmap to guide it across multiple generations. “I wrote the three-generation story, as if somebody 20 years later bought A Collector’s Guide to [the] Miata,” he explained. His vision ensured the car would endure rather than be treated as a one-off.

The RX-7 followed a similar process. Wu-Huang Chin penned the winning design, but Matano shaped the philosophy behind it. “My personal wish or goal was to make it a timeless design,” he said.

His success with both cars saw him rise through Mazda’s ranks, overseeing R&D in North America and later all of the brand’s global design studios. He was also a fixture at major events like Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, where he served as a guest judge.

 

Even after moving on, Matano stayed close to Mazda projects, collaborating on stories about the RX-7 and the 1996 Miata M Coupe concept. He remained approachable and present in the Miata scene, with owners often recalling how he always made time for a chat.

At home, his garage reflected his passions: an FD RX-7 and a 1996 Miata “M” Edition, both driven regularly around the Bay Area. More than a million Miatas on the road, the still-gorgeous FD RX-7, generations of students he mentored, and the countless enthusiasts he touched—those remain the measure of Tom Matano’s influence.

ZZ25047 Hargreaves Lansdown and the Shawbrook challenger bank V01 220925

  Hargreaves enters the cash savings market

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George Nixon - Senior Money Reporter

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Britain’s largest investment platform is offering its own savings accounts for the first time in a challenge to the big high street banks.

Hargreaves Lansdown is launching an easy-access cash Isa today in partnership with the challenger bank Shawbrook, paying 3.45 per cent. While the interest rate is variable, it said it would never pay less than 0.65 percentage points lower than the Bank of England base rate, now 4 per cent.

Customer deposits will be held by Shawbrook, meaning up to £85,000 in any savings accounts with the bank will be protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, but Hargreaves sets the rate.

Mark Hicks from Hargreaves Lansdown said: “A significant amount of savings sits in low-interest or zero-interest accounts with high street banks, while the highest rates in the savings market are often dominated by challenger banks and smaller new entrants who attract clients in with high rates or bonus rates which very quickly drop after the first six to 12 months.”

While the firm, which held £157.3 billion in assets from 1.9 million customers at the end of September last year, according to its latest results, is bestknown as Britain’s biggest fund supermarket, cash savings are an increasingly key part of its business.

Customers held about £12.7 billion in cash in their investment accounts, and another £11.4 billion on the firm’s cash savings platform, Active Savings, which allows savers with large amounts of money to open several accounts with different banks in one place.

Cash was the firm’s biggest money maker last year, with net interest earned on cash held in customers’ investment accounts bringing £260.7 billion in revenue in the year to June 2024. Its net interest margin, the difference between what it paid customers and earned itself, was 2.1 per cent.

In December 2023 the City regulator the Financial Conduct Authority wrote to 42 platforms and pension companies asking how much of the interest they earned from managing customer cash balances they kept to themselves.

Hicks denied the push into savings accounts was due to the FCA’s inquiry.

“It gives us the opportunity to go after the regular saver market and also ensures we can provide consistency to savers who don’t want to switch around all the time into the highest rates.”

ZZ25046 Quality Furniture - Cotswold Company V01 220925

 

The company sells premium furniture, with sofas costing thousands of pounds, which it says offers customers an alternative to “soulless, low-quality” products

The shift away from “throwaway” furniture towards longer-lasting products continues to benefit the Cotswold Company, which has bucked the volatility that has rocked much of the homewares sector since the pandemic.

While rivals such as Made.com collapsed after lockdown-driven demand faded, and retailers from John Lewis to Marks & Spencer have been reshaping their strategies in the category, the Cotswold Company has reported another period of strong trading.

The Cotswold Company, which was founded in 1996 in Bourton-on-the- Water, Gloucestershire, reported a 30 per cent increase in sales to £56.9 million in the six months to the end of August, with new showroom openings and a stronger digital offer helping it “materially outperform” the wider market. Barclays data showed the home and furniture sector rose by only 5.2 per cent over the same period.

Ralph Tucker, who became chief executive shortly before the pandemic, said the business had “seen an increasing number of customers look for alternatives to soulless, low-quality furniture”.

He once described the company as the opposite of fast-fashion retailers like Boohoo, “where you buy something and get rid of it in five minutes”.

The company sells solid wood furniture, upholstery and home accessories positioned at the premium end of the market. Dining tables typically start at around £700, with sofas running into the thousands, aimed squarely at more affluent households seeking durability and classic design over disposable, mass-market alternatives.

As part of efforts to underline its focus on quality, the company this month named Will Kirk, the BBC Repair Shop furniture restorer, as its “quality expert”. He has emphasised furniture “built to last”.

The business, backed by the private equity firm True Capital, now has 13 showrooms and two outlet stores in the UK, alongside partnerships with Next and John Lewis. New openings in Knutsford in Cheshire, and Harpenden in Hertfordshire, are trading “well above expectations”, according to the company, with two more due by the end of the year.

Active customers rose 21 per cent year-on-year to more than a quarter of a million. Upholstery orders increased 82 per cent and accessories sales were up 38 per cent, the group said.

The company has also launched its first artificial intelligence tool for customers, which uses data to improve on-site search results and boost visibility on search platforms.

ZZ25045 TikToc Investor Group. V01 220925

 Trump names investor group in TikTok deal

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Times Business Reporter

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Lachlan Murdoch, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell were named by President Trump as three business leaders involved in a proposal to keep TikTok operating in the United States.

The president said the US and China had made progress on a deal requiring TikTok’s American assets to be transferred to American owners from China’s ByteDance.

Lachlan Murdoch’s father, Rupert Murdoch, may also be involved in the deal, Trump told Fox News. Lachlan Murdoch is chair of News Corp, which owns The Times and the Wall Street Journal, and executive chair of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch is chairman emeritus of News Corp. Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle Corporation, the software and cloud computing group, while Dell is the chief executive of Dell Technologies, the computer hardware and software group.

Trump said the group were prominent people and “American patriots”, and added: “I think they’re going to do a really good job.”

The Biden administration passed legislation requiring the US arm of TikTok to be divested on the grounds that data on 170 million American users could be accessed by Beijing. Enforcement of that law has been delayed pending a deal. A White House official said on Saturday that ByteDance would be allowed to nominate one of seven directors of the demerged US operation as part of an agreement with Beijing.

ZZ25044 Fintech business Cleo using AI to float. V01 220925

 

Barney Hussey-Yeo of Cleo says he probably will not list in London, which languishes while Klarna has lit up New York, though IPOs from the likes of Beauty Tech are mooted

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Cleo, a London-based artificial intelligence-powered fintech business, is considering a flotation.

Yet if the London Stock Exchange, City regulators and the government hope that Cleo’s plans could provide a much-needed boost for the nation’s beleaguered public markets, the company’s founder has some bad news.

Barney Hussey-Yeo, who set the company up in 2016 and has built it to a valuation of more than $1 billion, says the LSE is simply “not fit for purpose for a tech company”.

Cleo provides an AI financial assistant.

It has 350 staff and makes all its revenues in the United States but is planning to open for customers in the UK next year. The company is understood to have spoken to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, the investment banks, about a potential initial public offering.

When it comes to a listing, it is most likely to follow counterparts such as Arm, the chip designer, and, more recently, Wise in looking to the US. “For this generation of companies, unless something drastic happens,” Hussey- Yeo says, “all of our tech champions are going to be on Nasdaq and increasingly US-owned and operated.”

Hussey-Yeo, who grew up in Sheffield, is dismayed by the situation he describes. He has been lobbying the government to make much more ambitious reforms to market rules and the tax regime to tackle it.

“As a British-founded business, you would hope we would list here, scale here, hire British staff, have the British public invest. It’s a real travesty that the fastest-growing and the best companies [are leaving]. If you’re successful as a British company you become an American company.”

This is a crunch moment for the City of London. A string of public companies, including Wise, the money transfer business, have decided to move their main listing from London to New York in recent years and a dearth of new companies joining the British exchange since the last flotations boom in 2021 has raised fears about the health of the UK stock market.

The privately-owned financial services group Revolut, which is the crown jewel of Britain’s fintech industry, valued at $75 billion, has also hinted it is more likely to go public in the US rather than the UK, while Monzo, the London-based online bank, has debated whether to list in New York or in its home market of the UK when it eventually pursues a flotation.

“There’s no way Revolut lists here, there’s no way Cleo lists here, even Monzo, which has a UK customer base and a great UK brand, probably won’t list here,” says Hussey-Yeo.

This is despite the government and the Financial Conduct Authority, spurred on by the LSE, pushing through a string of rule changes in recent years, including the biggest reform to the listings regime for decades in July 2024, to boost the appeal of the London market and encourage more companies to list.

Hussey-Yeo says it’s not enough. “If you look at listing rules, it’s still way more prohibitive than the US. We need to be competing with, and out-competing, the US [on this] and we’re actually behind them. And then we have these self-inflicted wounds like stamp duty [on shares]. It makes no sense to reduce liquidity with stamp duty.”

He adds that a recent City agreement dubbed the Mansion House Accord, in which British pension providers pledged to invest more in private UK businesses and venture capital and ultimately boost British flotation candidates, is “too weak and coming too late”.

“It’s not being pushed aggressively enough by the chancellor. You have to have ten [times] the ambition of that. It has to come before the next election.”

So far, the listing rules changes have failed to stoke a revival. By this month, there had been 12 IPOs in London this year that raised a combined £199 million, the lowest for the period since at least 2000, according to data compiled by the LSE.

With flotation activity in other markets around the world picking up again after the usual summer lull, pressure is mounting on London to put an end to its dry spell and show it can still attract blockbuster flotations.

In New York the autumn window for deals opened with a bang this month with the $20 billion debut of Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later business.

On Friday SMG Swiss Marketplace Group pulled off Europe’s biggest IPO so far this year after it listed its shares in Zurich in a deal that valued the company at 4.5 billion Swiss francs (£4.2 billion).

Verisure, the Swedish maker of home alarm systems, has announced plans to raise about $3.7 billion from a flotation in Stockholm.

If Britain could follow suit with a string of well-received listings over the coming months, it would do much to dispel fears that the London market cannot compete with its rivals in New York and Europe.

One leading lawyer who works on share sales in London said it was “unquestionably” getting busier and that his firm was “in the execution phase of a number of transactions, which is very different from even six months ago”.

These are deals that are likely to come to the UK market next spring, so there is a risk events conspire against them.

“In the past few years, when we approach an IPO window there always seems to be something that happens to derail it,” the lawyer said, ranging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 to the market shock caused by President Trump’s tariffs in April. “So I’m approaching all of this with a healthy dose of scepticism.”

Even so, there are tentative signs of life in the London market.

Beauty Tech, a Cheshire-based maker of cosmetics devices, confirmed this month that it would attempt a UK listing in a share sale that, if successful, would effectively open the autumn IPO window for London. Any deal is likely to be modest in size, however, with a rumoured target of about £350 million.

A bigger IPO could come from Shawbrook, a specialist lender that is understood to be in the advanced stages of preparing for a London flotation.

A listing of the bank, which is owned by the private equity firms Pollen Street and BC Partners, could put a £2 billion price tag on the group. A flotation has been on the cards for years but Shawbrook’s planning has intensified in recent months after it appointed an army of investment bankers to work on a share sale.

Another possible candidate is Ebury, the payments business backed by Santander.

The company had been readying for a London IPO in the spring until turmoil in the global markets forced it to put its plans on hold. There are rumours it might revive the initiative and, like Shawbrook, a valuation of about £2 billion has been mooted.

The pipeline for next year is growing, too, although none of these deals is a certainty. Visma, a Norwegian supplier of tax and accounting software that is owned by British private equity firm Hg, is eyeing a flotation and its preferred listing venue is London.

This would be a coup for Britain, which is often shunned by big tech companies looking to list, and would be a blockbuster deal: Visma was valued at €19 billion during a funding round two years ago. The company has not yet decided definitively on London, however, and Amsterdam is being considered as an alternative.

Similarly, the British payments group SumUp is understood to be in the early stages of planning a $15 billion IPO next year and is considering listing in London or New York.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” one top equity markets banker said.

Even Hussey-Yeo has not quite given up on London. Changes such as a further revamp to listing rules to attract founding entrepreneurs, stamp duty relief for tech companies, capital gains incentives for entrepreneurs and a government mandate for pension funds to invest in venture capital could turn things around, he says.

“If you gave something [to] founders to build here, list here, stay here that would have a massive effect on where they decided to list,” he says.

“This budget could be really positive. If I was going to change things, I would really focus on public markets. The chancellor has this moment to do something really positive to get the LSE working.

ZZ25043 Nvidia AI Investments in UK V01 200825

 

The Wayve driving technology negotiating the streets of London

 The most valuable company in the world is in discussions over an investment of $500 million in a British selfdriving car company as part of a catalogue of funding pledges announced to accompany President Trump’s state visit.

Nvidia announced the talks with Wayve at an event in London as it set aside £2 billion to fund British start-ups including Revolut, the online finance business, and Synthesia, an AI video company.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, promised the investments in front of an audience of technology entrepreneurs and investors on Thursday and predicted that the first trillion-dollar company in the UK would be an AI business.

Nvidia is already an investor in Wayve after participating in a $1.1 billion funding round alongside Microsoft last year, which was the largest known investment into a European AI company at the time.

Wayve, which is headquartered in King’s Cross, north London, is creating technology that will help vehicles to understand the environment around them and navigate obstacles without a human driver.

The group is also backed by Soft- Bank, Uber and Eclipse Ventures.

Wayve is also working with Uber to deploy self-driving vehicles across its ride-hailing network.

Alex Kendall, co-founder and chief executive of Wayve, said the support from Nvidia “underscores confidence” in the group’s approach to AI “and its potential to transform the future of mobility”. Kendall co-founded the business in 2017 after completing a PhD in deep learning, computer vision and robots at Cambridge University.

Wayve’s technology allows cars to work out how pedestrians are likely to move, to predict whether they may cross into a road, based on their body language.

The business does not manufacture cars, but produces an AI system that learns from data that allow cars to learn to drive themselves.

Nvidia announced this week that it would invest £500 million in Nscale, an AI infrastructure start-up, which Huang said “could be a national champion for the UK”.

Nscale develops data centres and delivers cloud services and it has signed a contract to build the biggest “UK sovereign”

AI data centre in Loughton, Essex.

The UK has secured £150 billion in inward investment from US firms as part of Trump’s state visit.

Sir Keir Starmer said: “Today we put tech out there as a special feature of the special relationship.

Thank you so much, Jensen, for your confidence in what we are doing.

ZZ25042 Future of Books V01 190925

 Why books are the new disruptor

You can learn by reading them and also leverage expertise through writing them.

Jane Hamilton reports

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, famously reads 50 books a year, while the investor Warren Buffett claims to digest 500 pages every day to build up his formidable financial knowledge.

With most business now conducted online, burying your head in a book may seem counterintuitive, but the challenging economic landscape means business books are booming.

Industry experts are looking to print as the new disruptor, commanding attention and deep learning over digital “doomscrolling”.

“What is clear is that books are selling well and business people are still writing books that help us learn, upskill, lead and grow in awareness,” Jacq Burns, founder of the London Writers’ Clubs and head judge at the Business Book Awards, said.

While less than 5 per cent of business books published annually achieve significant financial success, mid-tier titles can still generate £10,000 to £100,000 a year for authors.

Perhaps more significantly, writing an acclaimed business title can help amplify your authority and open doors to opportunities including consultancy, public speaking and training.

“The value of a business book isn’t in sales, it’s in how it helps you attract opportunities,” Ella Davidson explains. As the founder of the Book Publicist, a specialist non-fiction PR agency, Davidson has helped promote thousands of authors over a 20-year period.

So what is selling in the world of business books this year? Here is the expert advice from the 2025 Business Book Award winners.

Graham Allcott, author of Kind
Lean into your kindness, it gets results. Kindness drives empathy and creates the trust that speeds up innovation and productivity. But kindness and being nice are very different. Nice is about telling people what they want to hear, but kind is about telling people what they need to hear. Kindness means delivering the hard truths that great work needs.

Emily Austen, author of Smarter 
Multi-tasking is a myth. Switching between tasks drains focus and slows you down. Choose mono-tasking: one priority to be completed before moving on. Also, cut performative work. Lengthy slide decks and late-night Slack messages may look impressive but often achieve little.

Terence Mauri, author of The Upside of Disruption 
Have a “no” strategy. Data isn’t the new oil. Attention is the new oil. Overcommitment erodes attention and doubles the risk of low-contribution shallow work versus high-contribution deep work.

David and Chris Sinkinson, authors of Startup Different
Your product or service isn’t the core function of your business. The core function of all companies is to sell their product or service. Everything else must come second.

Tony Lewis, author of Brand Momentum You don’t need to be that different; you simply need more energy. While many brands focus on what makes them unique or different, the best brands focus on evoking emotions.

ZZ25041 Oracle V01 190925

 

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ORACLE CORP

Employees
160,000

Registered 
customers 5m

Oracle Corp is the technology giant that until last week everyone rather forgot about. The Texas-based computer software company, while a Goliath, laboured in the shadow of even bigger and more talked-about beasts like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and others.

That changed when the company outlined spectacular Septemberquarter numbers which demonstrated how far it had come and how far it may yet go in the battle of the so-called “hyperscalers”, the providers of data centres on which the AI revolution depends.

Oracle shares surged by as much as 43 per cent on the day and the company founder Larry Ellison was briefly declared to be the richest person on earth, thanks to his 41 per cent stake. (Elon Musk has since reclaimed the crown).

Oracle, founded in 1977, is older than many of its tech rivals and was for years seen as duller. It began life as a provider of packaged computer software to businesses and still operates in that area as well as in hardware. Revenues have built steadily over the years.

Its sudden appeal today lies in its extraordinary success in bagging orders from the AI princes: companies like OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Musk’s xAI. They need the data-centre capacity to store and crunch information and Oracle is happy to provide it.

The company reported an astonishing $455 billion in what it calls “remaining performance obligations” or RPOs, a proxy for expected future revenue, which was up 359 per cent on a year and more than double what Wall Street analysts had been pencilling in.

Safra Catz, chief executive, went on to say she expected to bag much more business shortly and that the RPO figure would exceed $500 billion over the next few months. That kind of reliable “sticky” income gushing in years into the future is what investors love.

Revenue from its hyperscaler partners Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google grew by a breathtaking 1,500 per cent in the quarter. There could be more to come after Ellison pledged to lift data centres from the current 34 to 71.

Oracle is on a roll and now weighs in at more than $850 billion, which is two thirds of a Tesla. For investors, there is plenty that may yet lead to disappointment, however.

The first is its spicy valuation. The shares now trade on 44.6 times expected profits for the year to May 2026. That drops to a p/e multiple of about 30 times by 2028 if all goes well, but at these stratospheric levels Oracle remains vulnerable.

One big unknown is the competitive response of the other hyperscalers, who are customers but also rivals. Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet have more experience and clout and could respond aggressively if they see their turf threatened.

Cloud infrastructure is fashionable now but it is comparatively lowmargin and highly capital-intensive, not generally the features of a sector that produces sustainably supernormal profits. Oracle’s offering has some features that distinguish it from the competition but the jury is out on how this market develops.

Another potential worry is the cost of building out the planned network of data centres. While many countries are rolling out the red carpet just now, the cost in fancy chips, in energy and water and in regulatory goodwill is uncertain.

One final concern is key-man risk. This is still a company completely dominated by Ellison, 81, who is both executive chairman and chief technology officer. It is his energy and drive that have of course propelled the group to its success so far, but this maverick quality and determination to win at all costs can be a two-edged sword. Outside shareholders have been allegedly disadvantaged in the past, as when he sold $900 million of Oracle stock before a profit warning in 2000 which sent the share price tumbling. He later settled accusations of insider dealing by paying $100 million to charity.

His fanatical belief in the profound power of AI is, for now, paying off in spades. “AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity and everything that’s come before,” he said earlier this year.

But the frenzy of excitement in, and dollars committed to, AI will eventually subside.

ADVICE Avoid

WHY Strong company with sticky customers but vulnerable to a sell-off when the AI frenzy subsides