This past week, Boeing secured a multi-billion dollar contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter program last week, while tech rivals Anthropic and DataBricks formed a $100 million partnership as R&D stocks broadly declined amid market uncertainty. Meanwhile, there were mixed signals for the AI market, and the R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending March 28, 2025 closed at 3,865.17 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was down -2.66% (or 105.70 basis points). Four RDWI members gained value last week from 0.05% (Johnson & Johnson) to 0.93% (Cisco). Twenty-one RDWI members lost value last week from -0.17% (Apple) to -9.22% (Honda).
Automotive & Manufacturing
1. Geely reorganizes smart cockpit R&D teams
Geely Holding, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, announced last week that it is merging three existing units employing 2,000 engineers to develop digital cockpit systems into a single unified team. The reorganization is the company’s latest move to integrate its smart driving R&D teams. The company said it is optimizing internal resources to enhance synergies in technology and R&D across its brands with no plans for redundancies. Smart cockpit systems are a key selling point for Chinese automakers looking to woo consumers in the hypercompetitive Chinese domestic market as they enhance the driving experience with features such as voice recognition and navigation maps. Geely buys technology for its smart cockpit systems from Ecarx and Chinese smartphone maker Meizu. Geely has also partnered with artificial intelligence (AI) company Qianli Technology, Nanshan Park, China.
[File photo: Boeing logo on building in El Segundo]
2. Boeing wins Next Generation Air Dominance contract
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) last week awarded the contract for the initial development of its Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft to Boeing, Crystal City, Virginia. NGAD is expected to replace the F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft. Initial development is expected to cost between $16 and $50 billion. With follow-on production contracts running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The new aircraft, dubbed the F-47 is designed to fight with semiautonomous drones and will have new stealth and long-range strike capabilities. It is expected to compete against anything that China’s military could develop in the decades ahead. This contract comes amidst delays in Boeing’s delivery of two Air Force One (modified Boeing 747) aircraft, production issues with its 737 Max commercial aircraft, delays in its Starliner spacecraft and fierce competition with rival Airbus and even Chinese commercial aircraft C919.
Technology & Electronics
[Adobe Stock]
3. OpenAI releases enhanced GPT-4o
OpenAI announced the updated release of its AI GPT-4o that can generate more realistic images following its years-long development. The new release is a less expensive version of the company’s most advanced AI modeling software and able to create more life-like images and paragraphs of comprehensible text and company logos and slide decks. The new model is also able to create transparent backgrounds.
4. Anthropic and DataBricks form $100 million pact
AI software developer Anthropic, San Francisco, California, and AI cloud-based platform DataBricks, San Francisco, agreed last week to form a five-year, $100 million pact to sell AI tools to businesses, seeking those who build their own AI agents. The two companies are seeking to justify their high stock valuations as they begin to compete with the likes of Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google and OpenAI. Each company’s sales teams will be able to sell each other’s products. Anthropic’s Claude models will be directly available to businesses that store and analyze their corporate data in DataBrick’s platform, allowing them to build AI agents using their own data.
5. CoreWeave IPO disappoints
Cloud computing infrastructure provider CoreWeave, Livington, New Jersey, filed for an initial public offering (IPO) late last week. The IPO closed nearly 3% below its offer price on Nasdaq providing the Nvidia-backed AI infrastructure firm a valuation of about $23 billion on a fully diluted basis. This lackluster performance is likely to dampen sentiment toward AI infrastructures amid rising uncertainty over Big Tech’s massive spending spree and fears of lower-cost options, such as China’s DeepSeek which supposedly require less high-end GPUs than the models trained by many Western firms. Meanwhile, many American firms accuse DeepSeek of piggybacking off their own work through distillation.
Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
[Adobe Stock]
6. HHS to reduce workforce by 10,000
The U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) agency announced last week that it will reduce its workforce by an additional 10,000 people. The cuts follow a similar wave of departures earlier this year. The positions poised for elimination are spread across all parts of the HHS and are in addition to roughly 10,000 employees eliminated at the beginning of 2025 who choose to leave the department through voluntary separation offers, thus reducing the HHS to 62,000 and losing five of its 10 regional offices. The moves would centralize the department’s communications, procurement, human resources, information technology and policy planning services. These reductions would include 3,500 from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 2,400 from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 1,200 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and 300 from the Centers for Medicare. Funding for R&D programs within these subagencies would be affected, with specific details not currently available.
Government & Policy
7. Trump administration sets new OSTP priorities
The Trump administration last week directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to focus on three key challenges:
- Secure the U.S. as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technology.
- Enable the U.S. science and technology enterprise to achieve breakthrough discoveries and innovations.
- Identify how U.S. scientific discoveries can be leveraged to benefit all Americans.
8. AAAS releases federal R&D funding estimates
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Washington, DC, last week released its estimated summary of federal R&D funding. The continuing resolution (CR) appropriations are estimated to be $193.4 billion for FY2025, a 3.7% reduction from the estimated FY2024 similar budget. As in previous reports in this timeframe, these budgets are estimates with several agency data missing and will not be finalized until later in 2025.
The R&D World Index
R&D World’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in R&D. The top 25 industrial R&D spenders in 2020 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2020 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (10 companies), automotive (6 companies) and ICT (9 companies) who invested a cumulative total of nearly 260 billion dollars in R&D in 2019, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spent in the world by government, industries and academia combined, according to R&D World’s 2021 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D World Index are tabulated from NASDAQ, NYSE, and OTC common stock prices for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the online publication of the R&D World Index.
