DIVERSIFYING WITH COLLECTIBLES

The collectibles market is booming. During the pandemic, folks with old collections dug them out, new collectors came to market, and trading activity and prices across categories from sports memorabilia to fine wines soared.

“I can’t even count the number of people who contacted us during the pandemic who hadn’t touched their collections in more than 10 years,” says Scott English, executive director of the American Philatelic Society in Bellefonte, Pa., who welcomed attention on stamps when four 1918 Inverted Jenny stamps—so-called because they were printed with an upside down airplane—fetched a record US$4.9 million at Sotheby’s last year.

Sales of global collectibles are expected to grow to US$692 billion from $412 billion over the next 10 years, according to Market Decipher, a Canadian market research firm.

For investors, a long view is advisable, says David Savir, CEO of Element Pointe Advisors, a wealth management firm in Miami. “Many collectibles are at values that may not be sustainable for the next two to three years,” he says. “Anyone buying should be holding them for over a decade and not expect to profit in the short term.”

The highest level of trading activity is in sports collectibles, boosted by the entry of sports-related nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which exploded to $1 billion in sales last year—bigger than the entire 2020 NFT market—and are expected to reach $2 billion this year, according to the London-based consultancy Deloitte.

The overall NFT market surged to $24.9 billion last year, including digital creations from high-end fine art to collectibles. Sales of popular collectible series haven’t waned: In March, sales of Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks hit $257 million and $81 million, respectively, according to CryptoSlam, an aggregator of NFT data.

Tangible sports memorabilia aren’t taking a back seat to NFTs: Sales in the traditional $4 billion arena have been breaking records. Last year, a Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic rookie NBA trading card sold for $4.6 million—the most fetched for a basketball card—and a 1952 Mickey Mantle card hit a record for baseball cards, at $5.2 million.

For classic cars, the first quarter of each year is when three of the biggest car auctions take place, says Juan Calle, co-founder and CEO of Classic.com, a site that tracks car market data. This year’s quarter closed with a total sales volume of $1.3 billion, double the same period last year, Calle says.

While other categories have less practical value, they can be attractive diversifiers for investment portfolios.

Consider fine wine’s low correlation to the S&P 500: just 0.3, which is lower than gold, real estate, or any traditional portfolio-balancing asset class, says Anthony Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Vinovest, which runs a portfolio of 500,000 collectible wine bottles stored in custom-built warehouses around the world. “We’ve seen a big uptick in interest from people who you wouldn’t traditionally think of as wine enthusiasts,” he says.

The wine market tends to shrug off factors that send stocks reeling, but has other sensitivities, such as tariffs and even gift-giving policies in authoritarian nations. When China banned gifts to government employees in 2011, popular Bordeaux wine values plummeted, says Robbie Stevens, Americas Territory Manager for London-based Liv-ex, a global marketplace for fine wine.

The broad Liv-ex 1000 index was up 19% in 2021, driven primarily by the popularity of Champagne and Burgundy. In the 12 months through March, Liv-ex’s index for Champagne was up 47.8%, and for Burgundy, 36.8%.

But no category is immune to broad economic trends, says financial advisor Savir. “Collectibles are more vulnerable to price declines in a recession than other assets, given the nonessential nature of many of them.”

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Penta magazine.

Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.

Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.

Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.

Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.

Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.

Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.

“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.

AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.

Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.

Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.

The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.

“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.

That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.

By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.

Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.

Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.

Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.

These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.

Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.

Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.

Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.

Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.

To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.

Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.

Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.

Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.

Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.

TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.

Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.

One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.

Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.

Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.

However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.

DIVERSIFYING WITH COLLECTIBLES

Sales of global collectibles are expected to grow to US$692 billion over the next 10 years.

Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.