tv Bloomberg Technology Bloomberg February 2, 2021 5:00pm-6:00pm EST
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running amazon web services, will become the next ceo. amazon reports operating income and sales that beat estimates. plus, alphabet's referent debt record profits. i speak to the ceo on his explosive add growth bringing profitability to the cloud and how they will deal with mounting antitrust issues. and, over a graders -- uber agrees to buy alcohol delivery service grizzly. doordash and the venmo owner also made a play. we will speak to the grizzly ceo about what clinched the deal. u.s. stocks rallying as the daytrading frenzy collapses. get of course big news from amazon and alphabet. i want to get first to the big market picture. i want to know what the move in amazon shares was after that huge and unexpected
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announcement. >> you saw a little tough uncertainty right after that but it looks like investors are liking the news. a little more comfortable amazon up by over 1% for you also see alphabet up by 1%. it looks like those are the free market shares. post-market, you are seeing a amazon s up shy of 1%. strong beats on both those fronts. amazon stealing the spotlight with that new changing of the guard. the stock market in the united states, nasdaq, the ptech index that has to do a lot with the tech sector that rallying for second day in a row, really coming on the back of last week's losses. extremely significant to keep in mind that risk sentiment has seen a little bit of a positive
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turn as we see some of the retail bid dissipate a little bit. i do want to look at gamestop and silver, the targets of that retail trading frenzy. intraday, you saw both of those stocks take a little bit of a step back. this is extremely important. i highlight this because this has a lot to do with risk sentiment and confidently investing in the market. i also want to bring it over to our last stock, alibaba shares taking a hit today even the they also beat on fourth-quarter earnings. investors looking for any news on the antitrust probe. they did not get any and that meant some selling in those shares. emily: still cannot believe gamestop closing at $90 per share.
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thank you for that update. back to amazon. ceo jeff bezos announcing he will be stepping down from his role and that andy jaffe will become the next ceo. this coming on a day that amazon reported income and net sales beating estimates. the cofounder joins me on the phone. melissa, a longtime former amazon employee, you worked there for many years. this simply who has been covering the company for a long time, it certainly came as a surprise. curious for your take >> i think there is a signal when jeff wilkie announced he was retiring, that he would be the paper. that was about a year ago. kind of knew this was coming. andy jassy is, he has been with amazon since 1997. the inception of aws. he has led arguably amazon's
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most profitable business unit. i think it leaves patent -- leaves jeff bezos with somebody at the helm that he can really trust and can tackle the problems amazon has ahead of them, like health care, logistics delivery, a lot of great inventions and innovations. i think andy jassy will be a great leader to do that. emily: that said, jeff bezos has been so involved that amazon proper for so long. i think he is very much in the weeds with his question mark emails. i wonder if it is at all surprising to you that he is leaving now. we know he has other projects but he has had those for quite some time. >> i think that he wrote in some of his letters that he sent out
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to folks that he feels like it is a time that he wants to focus on these other areas. he is not retiring, quote unquote. but i would not be surprised if he is not still involved, he just might not get a jeff email, now you up getting a andy jassy email. emily: tell us a little bit about how andy jassy leads. i sat down with him a couple of years ago for a longform interview. we know he has got that relentless focus on customers company same relentless focus that jeff has. what kind of a boss is he and what kind of a pasta you think he will be when running the entire company? >> all of these leaders and the executive team in general, there is just so much discipline at amazon on execution. they really have a great process
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around creating leadership principles, executing on them, creating goals from the top that rolldown. that is no different with andy jassy. i think he has proven himself in building an amazing business. i think he will be able to deliver that same discipline across amazon. emily: sometimes at a loss for words. it is such a peak deal when you have this quote that you referenced, saying i intend to focus on initiatives. he will be an outstanding leader and he has my full confidence. we have been talking a lot about the regulatory issues that amazon we expect will face, we
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saw jeff bezos drag before congress. we saw lawsuits filed against facebook against google. i wonder how you expect andy jassy to navigate those issues for the next couple of years? >> i think that is where amazon will be focusing, maybe less of the hot topic areas, the areas they get in trouble with around private label and things like that. i think we will see maybe less focus in those areas where they have had some pressure against them. and i do think google and facebook are have amazon -- are ahead of amazon in some of these antitrust issues. my guess is that they will have
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more focus on wider plan areas. emily: what does this mean for aws now that andy will not be the sole leader of that business? >> i feel sorry for the person who will fill that role. he will know a lot about what questions to ask. amazon has a great way to promote within their organization and company. i am sure they have identified a leader that will take over that business. and, andy will know very well the questions to ask. like i said, very disciplined in their quarterly business review, monthly business review, and financials. they have a really great execution method around understanding this business unit. they read very well run company that can execute very well. i think that they are not going
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to have any issues with a leadership change like this. emily: i do want to talk to you on the numbers which is what you initially agreed to join us to talk about. amazon projected revenues that signaled continuing strong e-commerce demand. the question, when we come out of the pandemic, when we settle into whatever the new normal is, does amazon growth take a hit? what is your outlook? >> they have had so much growth acceleration for e-commerce, hard to company year like this year. the acceleration of e-commerce in general. the category was up 64% this quarter, the advertising revenue
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. not just a big in general but advertising was huge, too. they had a lot of opportunity heading into 2021. emily: melissa, who worked at amazon for 10 years before that, thank you for bringing us some personal commentary from your experience there on this big news that jeff bezos will be stepping down. he will be succeeded by andy jassy, becoming amazon's next ceo. alphabet reporting record profits this year. i spoke to -- i spoke about how the company is dealing with its own antitrust screwed. -- and
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emily: meantime, alphabet reporting quarterly sales that beat wall street estimates buoyed by heavy digital estimates. we are joined by the principal analyst, dan. i was on the phone with alphabet ceo ruth porat when the news that jeff bezos was stepping down broke. we talked first about and growth. we said we feel good about the acceleration of the digital transformation. we'll continue to be quite durable whether that is content, e-commerce, retail.
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what is your headline take away? >> the results were outstanding. i think half the earnings of the year in this most recent quarter. i think the cloud was the story of this quarter. my phone was ringing off the hook. people asking for comments about what was going on with the cloud business. we saw growth coming in at 46% for this quarter. over $13 billion on the year. that was probably the biggest headline for me. i had a good feeling that what ruth said was probably going to come true. that we were starting to see mobility pickup, starting to see more normal behavior. i think everyone's eyes were really on this cloud breakout. how close is google really in terms of azure and aws? now we know. it is not really close to the 12
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billion but it is vying for that third position. emily: cloud revenue up 47%. the question, when will they start focusing on profitability. i got the sense that it is still really all about growth. she said, an important element is that we have been building out our organization ahead of revenue. product portfolio, ramping data centers, ramping sales. it is interesting that we are talking about this on a day that andy jassy has been named to the next ceo of amazon given that he has started at the aws business and google and microsoft have been chasing it ever since. what is your take on jassy taking over at amazon and how that changes the competitive landscape in cloud? >> as he said, the forward look about growth and profitability,
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google has the luxury. you saw their bottom-line results. the company wants to keep pouring gasoline on investments, the company can do so. this move has so much positivity in it. if you look at the profitability of amazon over the last few quarters, aws is sort of an unsung hero. the a lot of people look at it with trucks, drones, food, but they have been delivering significantly to the bottom line with aws. well the growth for aws has come down to about 28% this quarter, we are still looking at about $12 billion on a quarter basis. andy jassy has continually been behind this philosophy, saying we will meet the customers where they are. growth in data centers, new products, expanding into
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software and larger investments in infrastructure. i think bezos will have a significant influence on this company for a long time. i think jassy has really earned this opportunity. i am excited to see, can amazon be a ceo-led company beyond its founder, something a lot of companies have to face at some point. emily: andy jassy does have $7 billion to show this quarter, so he is off to a good start. thank you so much for that perspective. coming up, fireeye also reported results, record revenue. and, more talk about what they are learning from that massive solarwinds hack. my exclusive conversation with fireeye ceo kevin mandia. so you're a small business, or a big one. you were thriving,
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emily: fireeye also out with strong fourth-quarter results two months after finding out they were one of the hundreds of u.s. companies preached in the solarwinds cyberattack campaign. i sat down with fireeye ceo kevin mantia earlier. -- kevin mandia earlier. kevin: 2020, we had a record year in revenue, record year in billings, record year in operating income. just record after record. there he pleased with the performance of the team. emily: what is your outlook of the coming quarters as the vaccine rolls out and people presumably start going back to the office? kevin: and a lot of it depends on the pandemic. i almost felt a shift change in cybersecurity after the solarwinds implant. people recognize you can have a implant and a network of 18,000
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companies can be impacted, and nothing detected it. it took fireeye doing an investigation to find, there is an implant in a third-party supply chain. the one to know, how effective is our security. it took nine months until somebody discovered this implant. that seems like a long time. i think you have a more discerning buyer. when you have a breach and a campaign like this cyber espionage campaign, everybody is turning their focus to what is our cybersecurity program and how good is it? i think it will be a big theme of 2021. emily: we are two months now since fireeye disclosed the initial attack. a lot of people want to know, what damage was done. can you elaborate? kevin: there was no doubt that
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the attacker went right in, went right for our red team tools. those are tools we use to make assessments of the programs, how good are they? i think what the impact of this breach was, or this campaign, because it was more than just a breach, really depended on the victim, whether you are a government agency or software company, and it may have impacted several other industries. what it really does is it kind of shows, what are the rules of engagement. what is acceptable cyber espionage? no one has defined the rules, so we don't have rules. i think what you are going to see is groups conduct their espionage operations and they kind of move the needle. we have to figure out as a nation, what are we going to do about it? emily: is there evidence that
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these tools have been used, and have you built new ones? kevin: there is no evidence that the fireeye red team tools have been used by another third-party. we have not seen that at all. by the way, quote -- by the way, we created over 500 rules to detect their own red team tools. we will have to re-create some of those tools in the future. but one of the nice things about fireeye, when you respond to over 1000 breaches per year, we are seeing the red teams from other nations. we just repurpose that rmd they are showing us. we are responding to intrusions from china, russia, north korea, a lot of different nations. we repurpose those. we kind of look at them and say, if they just did it that way, they may have evaded additional detection. we are already on our way to
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creating a new set of red team tools. emily: we have seen other cybersecurity companies come forward since, saying they were also the target of a russian adversary. talk about the conversation in the cybersecurity community know about this and future cyberattacks. if you are being targeted, how do you assure clients that they are safe? kevin: cyberspace is a dangerous neighborhood, period. you have to make sure you have the safeguards operating in it. we are on the front lines interacting with those executives all the time. we became victims ourselves in the fourth quarter two this cyber espionage campaign. when i talk to other security vendors, we know we are in this together. we are stewards for our shareholders as ceos but we also recognize that we have to protect cyberspace. we have to protect critical
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infrastructure. i think we have seen an elevation of communication amongst ceos and security. information sharing is at an all-time high. we are trying to formalize it, make it faster, be better at it. we are all just kind of banding together to make sure we can do a shields up for all the nations we protect. emily: how confident are you with the new administration, and has that response essentially changed with a new administration? kevin: i think whether you are republican or democrat, you care about cybersecurity and want to make sure you do your best to protect american organizations from attacks regardless of the domain those attacks occur in. i seen some good appointments. i am very confident that we will take steps to establish bright lines in cyberspace, that we will try to impose risks or
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repercussions to those who attack american organizations. i am confident that we will do things differently, even if we do something as simple as communicate doctrine. these are the rules of the road. you will see other nations adapt those. emily: fireeye ceo kevin mandia. much more on that conversation you can find on bloomberg.com. coming, more on jeff bezos stepping down. ♪
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emily: welcome back to "bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang in san francisco. back to the top story of the day -- amazon ceo jeff rizzo's will step down from his post in the third quarter of this year. he will be succeeded by the head of amazon web services. i want to bring in brad stone, our senior executive editor who has written a book on amazon
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that is about to publish his second book on amazon. i'm curious if you saw this one coming or if this surprised you like it surprised the rest of us. brad: i would be lying if i said i was not surprised, certainly that it happened now, but when i thought about it and reflected on the stories i'm telling in the upcoming book, which is coming in may, it did make a certain amount of sense. the last 10 years at amazon has just been guiding all the new stuff. alexa, the cashless store. and then letting investors run with the more mature businesses. i suspect he finds the new stuff fun and while the details of the older business are getting so intricate that it is impossible for one person to keep track of
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everything, and the second thing is that the future of amazon in large part is scrutiny. we saw when bezos was subpoenaed to talk to the house antitrust committee, i don't think he enjoys the hot seat. of course, nobody does, but i would assume he feels his time is better spent on other things. and then running blue origin and the space company, which has lacked seriously behind elon musk's spacex. i think he will get to focus on the things he likes doing while also reserving time to run this -- his increasingly complicated personal life and extracurricular activities in the end. emily: jeff bezos reached for a snack during that congressional hearing, and i believe the video of that went viral.
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talk about scrutiny. we did see a congratulatory tweet from the ceo of alphabet. of course, this overshadowed alphabet. just a peek at andy jassy's twitter page. he talks about being a dad, big sports, music, and movies fan, and experienced buffalo wings eater as well. you talked to andy jassy a lot over the years. how do you expect him to lead and how do you expect him to handle this antitrust scrutiny? brad: it is interesting. you mentioned his twitter bio. andy is someone who kind of wears his passion on his sleeves, has that kind of
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amazon-style facility, maybe even more so than bezos has had these past for years. someone you'll never catch in a private jet or the owner's box at the super bowl. it sometimes looks like he is wearing the sportcoat he got from his basement. he is enormously, and sometimes frustratingly, i have to say, for journalists, disciplined when it comes to public speaking , and i just expect him to be a very careful public spokesperson for amazon. it's kind of a homecoming for him. people who started in the retail business, his first few jobs work, like, in amazon's advertising division and the tv
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or dvd business early on in amazon's history. he has been very vocal member, so in some ways, it feels like a very natural transition. emily: bloomberg tech senior executive editor brad stone. thank you for joining us. we will all be waiting for your next book on amazon out later this year. joining us to recap the top stories of the day, amazon and alphabet, we have the founder and ceo of estimize.
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i'm sure you heard the conversation. we are all digesting this news that jeff bezos maybe stepping down from his daily. what is your take on how the company changes, and what chapter two, i guess, as they say, is? leigh: i think it's amazing how innovative and important to everything that goes on in technology today that business is and was. we totally take for granted -- that aws is and was. we totally take for granted everything. i think this makes sense going forward from an innovative perspective because he has touched everything. all of these other dizziness's. he basically is the person that drove the platform that underpins the modern internet. i think they will get rewarded
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for that in the short-term. in the long-term, stock is up. it makes total sense. aws itself, 20% year-over-year growth. the business is still firing at all cylinders, even though there are still competitors out there -- google and microsoft do have clouds that are growing faster and certainly knocking at the door here, but this is not slowing down any time soon. as we have seen with the last six to nine months, this infrastructure is not just critical to these businesses, it has been critical to the country and to the world. emily: i don't think we can expect that jeff bezos will not be involved. he will surely continue to be heavily involved in the company. that said, we are entering a new phase of regulatory scrutiny that andy jesse is going to have to deal with. how big a risk factor do you
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think that is, and how do you expect him to lead through that? leigh: i have been on one side of this for a long time. i just don't think for amazon this is going to be an issue. it will be for some other companies, but it looked at the actual concepts that are being put forward in terms of regulation, they just don't add up to something that make a lot of sense for will be super significant going forward. amazon basically is a monopoly, so we have decided in this country that monopolies are ok, and they are good for consumers -- they are certainly good for consumers. we basically handed them that in return for something, which is being neutral, and there are places they have stepped over the line in terms of not being neutral, but that is a tiny piece of, i think, what the populist rhetoric around amazon's attempts to stick them
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with that it just won't stick. there might be little pieces around the edges, but by and large, this won't be an issue. emily: i have to ask you, meantime, what is going on with these reddit retail trailers. gamestop dropping back down to $90 a share, but the markets really rattled, and the game, it seems, has been changed. the rules have been changed. the fields now look completely different. at the same time, you have some of these renters -- read it -- redditors continuing to try to rally the troops. is this just a new part of the story, or does this have to be incorporated into strategy about professionals and retail? leigh: that's a good question. there are a lot of takes at a
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lot of different vectors out of which you could approach this whole story, but for me, the most important one goes back to founding in the past years, but i don't think we ever quite foresaw the combination of the ease of getting retail investors invested in basically playing a casino game, which is what robinhood and some of these other brokerages have done. they have made it that easy, that it is a dopamine receptor casino game at this point, and i do think that is a risk that hedge funds are going to have to deal with in the future. we just saw it on the short side. that's not going away. the populist aspect of this i
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think is completely bunk. basically, you could write off that entire political populist story, but going forward, this is going to happen over and over again. we just saw the largest d grossing of hedge fund a u.n. -- hedge fund aum in 2009. there are longtail risks that have not been accounted for. certainly while i think you can write off the whole populist aspect, you definitely cannot write off the content that online crowd plus dopamine casino games being these investment apps that will be really important. emily: love your analysis. thank you for breaking it down on a big day. appreciate it.
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blasted to the ground even when -- even after federal regulators denied the company a safety waiver. meantime, hoover has agreed to buy -- uber has agreed to buy alcohol started company drizly for $1.1 billion. the start of has had a breakout year with the delivery sales soaring. i have to admit, i am a customer. got to start with the obvious. why uber and why sell? >> both good questions, especially coming after what was a defining year. two real reasons -- i think the first is when you hear dara talk about the vision for hoover, it's a world where you can get not only food delivered quickly but alcohol as well.
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i want to live in that world. i believe in that world, and i think drizly can accelerate the past two that consumer experience that we all want and deserve. we spent the last eight years building the infrastructure to bring this particular category online, and we want to be a household name. we want to be synonymous with alcohol and while we believe we can get there by ourselves in the coming five or 10 years, this is really an acceleration and gives us the ability to move quickly with platform and the technology and scale and expertise that uber brings in a way very few others can. emily: interesting company story, founded in boston before doordash and uber eats even existed, so in a way, it paved the way for these new consumer behaviors. that said, will this kind of behavior keep up in a
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post-pandemic world? will we keep ordering this much alcohol when we can go to the store? cory: i believe alcohol is going to have different dynamics and that it will be one of the few categories that has organic positive growth, and all that comes back to consumer awareness. so much happened in 2020 two drive new awareness for the legality of alcohol coming online. who is drizly and why is it a better experience than you could get walking into your local liquor store? we still have so much green space ahead of us were i believe this should be a 10%, 15%, and soon to be 20% industry in the coming years. there will be a lot of room for consumer behavior to change. emily: doordash also tried to buy. what were those offers like?
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how did you make that decision? corey: -- cory: the conversations were organic. when we discussed anything about moving forward with the company, hoover -- uber was our choice. our focus has been finding the right team with the shared vision we want to be able to work with and accelerate what we are doing and at the same time combine in such a way where we can drive value for hoover -- for uber on the other side. emily: the cannabis part of the business lantern is not included in the deal. why not, and what happened to that business? cory: it will spin out. in many ways, it was a 2.0,
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finding out the separation for a nuanced category, one that is changing over the next couple of years. it was always a separate company, and now it has the chance to go on its own with its own management team that is incredibly well prepared its own balance sheet, and i'm excited to see the next three years. i honestly believe lantern is going to be the drizly for cannabis. it has great things ahead of it as that market starts to open up. emily: we did see layoffs after hoover bought -- after uber but post-mates. will you be staying at the company? >> i will absolutely be staying at the company. i think it provides the opportunity to provide the consumer experience that we know should exist and that consumers deserve, and i think this is part of the reason why we singled in on uber very quickly.
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the way they approached the conversation, their sincerity they showed in spite of being 100 times enterprise value, we believe they want drizly. i believe the businesses are complement tree, so we are excited to do both. i think the team should be thrilled, and i think we found the right fit for drizly to grow for the coming years. emily: coming up, i will speak with the cfo of visa about the company's latest earnings in a big earnings week and economics predictions for the rest of the year. that's next. this is bloomberg. ♪
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topping earnings estimates this quarter reporting seasoned with tech and financials among the biggest winners. visa announcing a flat week, also surpassing estimates, still dependent on what the future holds for the u.s. economy. we are joined by the cfo from visa. great to have you back here on the show. what are you seeing in consumer behavior right now, and what clues does that give us about how they will be spending in 2021? vasant thank you for having me. we just reported earnings, and the consumer is holding up reasonably well around the world. in the fourth fiscal quarter, we saw sequential improvement in spending domestically. in fact, in the u.s., we had some healthy growth, about 8%. what we are seeing is a significant shift in how people are spending money. as you might expect, there is a big shift in commerce, a big
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shift to using debit. the holiday season was quite strong compared to prior holiday seasons. somewhat different, but less spending on travel and also entertainment. consumers went out right after the new year. we saw a big jump in debit card spending. in fact, for the first few weeks in january, debit card spending has been stronger than it was in the fourth quarter, and, you know, around the world, it is almost back to normal. some are going into lockdown, but all in all, the consumer is holding up fairly well. emily: this shift in debit, do you think that is a permanent shift towards debit cards? what does that mean for visa's business? vasant a significant portion of
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that has become permanent. there's a lot of categories that people are now using cards for like food and drug, and they are using debit cards online. we see that a lot with stimulus payments going to bank accounts. our visa direct business uses our debit network. in addition, even when people go to a store, using tap to pay, which has become extremely popular, that tends to be debit. on the flipside, people tend to use credit for travel and entertainment. as they recover, there will be a recovery in credit, and also in
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tough times, people do tend to spend more money than they have in the bank. some of that will revert, but we believe the debit performance is here to stay, and it reflects the deceleration move away from cash. emily: can you give us any hints about visa's crypto service in the works? vasant: we have put this thing together to enable central bank cryptocurrencies. most of the major players, as long as we can do it, we can climb, we will do what we can to enable bold transactions that enable us to hold accounts, and
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we are putting an infrastructure in place to enable all that, and in many ways, it is not that different than the infrastructure we put in place to enable trading that we currently support. emily: we will have to have you back to tell us more. thanks so much. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg technology." the big news today, jeff bezos stepping down later this year to be succeeded by andy jassy. this is bloomberg. ♪
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