Dolphin Research

0717 | Dolphin Focus: Daily News Recap | Dolphin Research 🐬 Macro/Industry 1: APAC equities weakened across the board by midday, marking the worst showing in months as heavy selling in AI and semis triggered outflows. Japan and Taiwan led declines, with TSM's results falling short of lofty expectations and dragging the broader chip supply chain lower.

The following is Dolphin Research's Trans of $Netflix(NFLX.US) FY26 Q2 earnings call. For our post-earnings take, see 'Netflix: From internet darling to matron?'

I. Core recap

$Netflix(NFLX.US) Q2 results were underwhelming despite the bar not being high. Near-term softness largely reflects a late-cycle content slate and backlash from price hikes in core markets, and it keeps some investors wary of mid-to-long-term bear cases.

1) Revenue growth kept slowing: Q2 revenue was $12.6bn, up 13% YoY (+12% ex-FX), broadly in line with guidance, but the decelerating trend further erodes confidence in the outlook. There were no price actions in Q2...

Below is Dolphin Research's Trans of TSMC FY26 Q2 (fiscal Q2 2026) earnings call. For the earnings analysis, see 'No blowout, just so-so: Can TSMC still carry the AI narrative?'

TSM reported Q2 2026 results on Jul 16, 2026 (Beijing time) during U.S. pre-market hours. The quarter covered the period ended Jun 2026.

1) Revenue: $40.2bn, up 12% QoQ, near the high end of guidance ($39–40.2bn). Growth was led by AI silicon, with most core customers' AI chips migrating to 3nm (N3). On a 12-inch equivalent basis, wafer shipments were 4,336k...

Below is Dolphin Research's recap of ASML's FY26 Q2 earnings call. For our earnings analysis, please see 'ASML: AI panic everywhere, is the shovel trade running hot?'.

ASML released Q2 2026 results ahead of the U.S. open on Jul 15 (Beijing time). The quarter ended Jun 2026, with key points below: 1) Revenue & GPM.

a) Revenue was €9.3bn (+21% YoY), beating consensus (€8.9bn). Growth was driven by lithography system pull-ins from TSMC and Korean customers, and higher services revenue.

b) GPM was 54%. This was clearly above prior guidance (51–52%)...

0715 | Dolphin Focus: 🐬 Stock 1, $TENCENT(00700.HK) rolled out Hy3 1-bit and 4-bit quantized builds. The original 295B model carried ~600GB of weights; the 1-bit build compresses this to 85.5GiB, allowing local runs on a single 96GB pro inference card.

The 4-bit variant delivers accuracy close to the full model. It is designed for enterprise offline inference.

Previously, large MoE models typically relied on multi-GPU clusters. The new quantization sharply lowers the hardware bar for smaller developers, strengthening Tencent’s on-device and private deployment capabilities...

In Dolphin Research's earlier piece 'AMZN's AI Misfire: Can It Mount a Comeback?', we examined AWS's AI buildout from several angles.

Jul 13 | Dolphin Research Watchlist: 🐬 Macro/Industry. US–Iran tensions continued to escalate, with multiple US airstrikes on Iranian coastal military sites.

After $Meta Platforms(META.US) began weighing compute leasing, it stoked worries that the compute supply chain may be peaking. While the market debated whether this was a stopgap or a long-term strategy, Meta answered with three concrete moves: it is serious about the compute biz.

Expanding data centers is the most straightforward prep. Mass-producing in-house ASICs aims to cut cost and lift ROI.

The newly launched LLM, Muse Spark 1.1, is the true upside surprise in Dolphin Research's view. These three changes will likely push near-term Capex higher...

Memory is one of the hottest—and most crowded—plays in global tech right now. AI has ignited HBM, DRAM, and NAND all at once, sending shares of SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron up several times over in six months.

0710 ｜Dolphin Focus: 🐬 Stock 1, $TENCENT(00700.HK) There are reports that Tencent, together with Sequoia China and ZhenFund, plans to buy back 100% of Manus from Meta at the original price of $2 bn. The deal would be executed via a consortium.

0709 | Dolphin Research Focus: 🐬 Macro/Industry 1) NBS: Jun CPI +1.0% YoY, -0.3% MoM; core CPI also +1.0% YoY. Food prices fell YoY, while non-food ticked up slightly, and services consumption stayed resilient. PPI rose +4.1% YoY.

Household consumption demand is recovering slowly, a near-term tailwind for baijiu, retail, and services consumption. However, softer food prices cap the agriculture sector's beta. The policy backdrop remains accommodative, leaving room for follow-on growth-stabilization measures.

Space-based data centers are not just the linchpin of SpaceX's grand narrative.

0708 | Dolphin Research Focus: Macro/Sector.

$Broadcom(AVGO.US) shares have trended lower recently, pressured by chatter around 'Meta selling compute capacity' and by key downstream customers exploring alternate supply options. The former looks like a market-beta overhang, while the latter stokes company-specific alpha concerns.

Initially, investor interest in AVGO centered on its potential to counterbalance Nvidia's ecosystem. Now Broadcom is facing similar questions itself...

0707 | Dolphin Focus: 🐬 Macro/Sector

Last week, Bloomberg reported that $Meta Platforms(META.US) is building a cloud infra biz and plans to lease compute externally.

🐬 Stock 1, $TENCENT(00700.HK) WorkBuddy, Tencent's breakout enterprise agent, continues to see strong traction. Today Tencent simultaneously unveiled Hunyuan Hy3 and open-sourced it under Apache 2.0. The 295B-parameter MoE (21B active) supports a 256K context window and delivers agent/coding prowess on par with flagships that have 2–5x the parameters.

On the surface, it sells fried chicken and pizza. In essence, it sells a hard-to-replicate operating system built for low cost, high efficiency, and high repeat purchase.