US economics professor at the DLD – AirBNB, Meta, China shares: These will be the stock market stars of 2023

TikTok instead of Tesla: The US marketing professor Scott Galloway sees the stocks of Chinese Internet companies before a high. Tesla, on the other hand, he predicts a halving of the share price – despite increasing sales and profits. In a humorous lecture at the Munich digital conference DLD, he looked at the tech and stock market year 2023. And that, according to Galloway, will be tough.

150,000 jobs were cut at tech and media companies worldwide last year. The trend will continue this year: AmazonCisco or Adobe have already announced that they will cut jobs. Galloway also sees signs of layoffs at other tech companies. MetaPinterest, Google’s parent Alphabet – In many companies, personnel costs are growing faster than sales, which puts pressure on profitability. Simple conclusion: the costs have to go down.

Bad for employees, good for investors

According to Galloway, investors are happy about what employees fear: Fewer employees mean more earnings per share. He predicts Alphabet, Amazon and Meta will have their most profitable quarters ever this year.

Galloway also confirms good prospects for Chinese Internet titles – especially the TikTok group ByteDance. Its value will exceed the trillion dollar mark in 2023. The Chinese company only needed five years to gain a billion users – three years faster than Instagram, four years faster than Facebook. The usage time is even more impressive: TikTok users spend 100 minutes a day on the platform.

Tesla is growing, the stock price is shrinking

Tesla investors, on the other hand, will continue to suffer in 2023, and Galloway expects the price to halve again. Not because the electric car pioneer is doing poorly, the company is more concerned with the valuation, which is still too high.

Galloway analyses: The Tesla course is 35 times higher than the profit – for German car manufacturers like VWBMWMercedes Benz and Porsche the factor is only between 4 and 5. Since their share of electric cars is increasing and the competition for Tesla is increasing, the Tesla course will continue to fall.

Follow the lectures at the DLD here: DLD innovation conference in the live ticker – DLD 2023 in the live ticker on FOCUS online

Unsurprisingly, the firm’s belief in artificial intelligence is widely touted in the digital scene as the most important tech trend of the year (if not the decade). A company based in Munich could benefit from this. The startup Celonis, founded in 2011, develops AI-based software that analyzes business processes in companies and searches for optimization potential.

“Predicting is a pretty crappy business”

So far, the company has not officially announced that it wants to go public, but one of the founders has already expressed a fundamental interest in an IPO in a newspaper interview. Galloway is leaning out of the window in this regard and believes that this will be the most important tech IPO of 2023 or 2024.

But beware: Scott Galloway does not want his “Predictions” to be understood as concrete instructions for action – rather as food for thought. After all: Of his nine predictions for 2022, six came true. But Galloway also said straight out on the DLD stage in front of a few hundred listeners: “Predictions are a pretty shitty business.”