Breakfast | NVIDIA is preparing to welcome the Federal Reserve meeting, TENCENT, Pinduoduo, and other earnings reports.

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Overnight Market Update

This week, the global markets will welcome a "super central bank week," with central banks from the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, and other countries all set to announce interest rate decisions. Among them, the most anticipated are the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan.

Market expectations are that the Bank of Japan will announce the end of its negative interest rate policy at the policy meetings on March 18th and 19th. This will be Japan's first interest rate hike in 17 years since February 2007, marking a significant turning point towards normalizing Japan's financial policy.

At 2 a.m. Singapore time on Thursday (March 21st), the Federal Reserve will hold its second interest rate meeting of the year. Currently, the market widely expects the Fed to maintain interest rates for the fifth time.

Today, the National Bureau of Statistics of China will introduce the economic performance for January-February 2024.

This week, companies such as China Unicom, Xiaomi Group, XPeng Motors, Li Ning, Kuaishou, Tencent, Pinduoduo, ZTO Express, Geely Auto, POP MART, Ping An of China, Meituan, and others will release their earnings reports.

Blue Chips and Hot Stocks

Apple is expected to release two fourth-generation AirPods models around September-October

Mark Gurman stated that Apple suppliers Goertek and LUXSHARE-ICT will start production of two new fourth-generation AirPods models in May this year. He predicts that the headphones will be released around September-October. Apple plans to produce 20 to 25 million units of this model, setting a new scale record.

Reports suggest that Apple will launch the iPhone SE 4 next year, with foldable screen phones/iPads and AR glasses scheduled after 2026.

Auto News: MEGA has received approximately 4,000 real orders, and Ideal's top priority is to stabilize the L series

Ideal expected around 3,000 orders for MEGA within 24 hours, but actual sales only achieved half of the target. MEGA received nearly 4,000 orders in half a month, with a factory capacity of 5,000 units this month. Currently, the daily new orders for the L series are around 1,000 units, only half of Ideal's expectations.

ZEEKR's 001 large orders have exceeded 20,000 units. ZEEKR's Vice President Lin Jinwen previously stated that "at the current rate of large orders, the brand-new 001 will exceed 30,000 units in the first month of its launch."

BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu: The penetration rate of new energy vehicles may exceed 50% in the next three months, or even higher.

BMW Group Vice President: In hydrogen technology, the company is preparing for mass production.

XPeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng: About to launch a new A-level product priced between 100,000 to 150,000 yuan globally.

Huawei's Richard Yu: The Aito S7 is expected to return to normal from April, and the car business unit is expected to turn losses into profits this year.

Tesla announced that it will raise the prices of all Model Y models in the U.S. market by $1,000 on April 1st and increase prices by €2,000 in multiple European countries on March 22nd. Tesla China responded to whether it will follow the price increase in the U.S. and Europe: There is currently no clear information. Regarding the news that "Hema and RT-Mart will be sold to COFCO", the public relations of Hema and RT-Mart denied it on WeChat Moments. Hema stated that the sale and price are both false information.

Insiders: TSMC is considering building advanced chip packaging capacity in Japan, and one of the options is to introduce its CoWoS packaging technology into Japan.

Informed sources claim that SpaceX is building a spy satellite network for U.S. intelligence agencies.

After a United Airlines Boeing aircraft landed, missing external body panels were discovered. The aircraft will undergo a thorough inspection, and all necessary repairs will be carried out before resuming flight services.

Uber has agreed to pay AUD 271.8 million (approximately USD 178.3 million) to settle lawsuits brought by local taxi operators and drivers in Australia. These taxi operators and drivers claim that Uber's entry into Australia has caused them to lose income.

Chips and Artificial Intelligence

NVIDIA's GTC conference will be held from March 18 to March 21.

Apple introduces the 300 billion parameter MM1 multimodal large model, capable of recognizing images and reasoning natural language.

Apple's multimodal large model consists of dense models and variants of Mixture of Experts (MoE), achieving SOTA in pre-training benchmarks and maintaining competitive performance after supervised fine-tuning on a range of existing multimodal benchmarks. The MM1 multimodal large model has image recognition and natural language reasoning capabilities.

The rapid development of generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) is causing industry leaders to worry about energy. As data centers are a significant part of energy consumption, their energy sources are receiving increasing attention. New energy sources, including solar, wind, and hydro energy, are gradually becoming the energy choices for data centers.

Virtual Currency

Bitcoin briefly touched $65,000 over the weekend.

IPO Opportunities

Media: Reddit's IPO has received 5 times oversubscription, making it more likely to reach its targeted $6.5 billion valuation, with a target price range of $31-34 per share.

Paradise Entertainment plans to sell 143 million shares through an IPO in Hong Kong, with an offer price of HKD 2.60 per share. The shares are expected to start trading on the Stock Exchange on March 26.

Macro: A Global Perspective

In a new budget proposal, Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan proposed to establish Hong Kong as a center for managing multinational supply chains. The changing international trade landscape has impacted Hong Kong's export performance. By setting up a single window, providing one-stop services for enterprises, Hong Kong aims to attract mainland Chinese production companies to set up regional headquarters for offshore trade management.

Central and State Offices: Promote the green and low-carbon transformation, upgrading, and clean production transformation of traditional industries such as petrochemicals, steel, and building materials.

Vice Chairman of SASAC: We will boldly explore policies and measures that are conducive to promoting the development of new energy vehicles by central SOEs.

Director of NDRC, Zheng Zhajie: NDRC will take more pragmatic measures to support the development of the new energy vehicle industry.

Vice Minister of Commerce, Sheng Qiuping: Will study reducing insurance rates for new energy vehicles, increase financial support, and promote the replacement of old cars with new ones. Cui Dongshu, Secretary-General of the China Passenger Car Association, stated that new energy vehicles have experienced a significant price drop, while traditional fuel vehicles have already reached a certain bottom line due to current promotions. This has led to a situation where new energy vehicles are lowering prices independently, gradually encroaching on the market share of fuel vehicles.