The R&D Index for the week ending May 10, 2019 closed at 4,688.87 for the 25 companies in the R&D Index. The Index was down -3.19% (or 154.26 basis points) from the week ending May 3, 2019. Each of the 25 R&D Index members lost value from -0.26% (Oracle) to -10.72% (Intel). Investor concerns over the U.S.-China trade talks taking place in DC last week and the $300 billion in tariff threats by the U.S. last Friday were the primary reasons for the stock losses.
It was reported last week that R&D Index member Oracle will close its R&D arm in China, which will result in the layoffs of more than 900 researchers. This is expected to include 500 researchers from Oracle’s R&D center in Beijing. The company cited a restructuring that will refocus its resources on its cloud products. Oracle currently employs about 5,000 people in China and its cloud business trails cloud products from Alibaba, Tencent, China Telecom and AWS (Amazon Web Services).
R&D Index member Intel announced last week that it was opening its Athena Open Lab in Taipei, Taiwan. Three open Intel labs in Taipei, Shanghai, China and Folsom, California are expected to be staffed by Intel engineers with expertise in system-on-chip and platform optimization. The labs will focus on development of high-performance, low-power components for laptop computers built to specific designs. First devices are expected to be available by the end of 2019. The labs are soliciting independent hardware vendors to submit parts for compliance assessments.
R&D Index member General Motors announced last week that its Cruise autonomous driver division received $1.2 billion in external financing from T. Rowe Price Associates. This adds to the more than $2 billion each GM has obtained from Japan’s Softbank Group and R&D Index member Honda Motor Co. Including GM’s investment, Cruise now has more than $19 billion in investments or about a third of GM’s total market value.
R&D Index member Google/Alphabet announced last week that it had developed privacy tools that restrict tracking on the web. The tool is expected to give internet users more information about what cookies are tracking them and offer options to prevent their tracking. The Google system is said to be a more incremental approach that those used by Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
R&D Index member IBM announced last week that it had sold $20 billion in bonds to help fund its purchase of Red Hat. This narrowly outpaced the $19 billion in bonds that R&D Index member Bristol-Myers Squibb had sold a day earlier to finance its acquisition of Celgene. IBM’s sale is the largest bond sale of 2019.
| R&D Index Week Ending May 10, 2019 |
| Ticker | Exchange | 2018 R&D millions U.S. $ | 05/03/19 | 05/10/19 | 5/10/19 to 5/3/19 | 5/10/19 to 12/31/18 | ||
| 1 | Amazon | AMZN | NASDAQ | 26,750 | 1,962.46 | 1,889.98 | -3.69% | 25.83% |
| 2 | Alphabet/Google | GOOGL | NASDAQ | 18,796 | 1,189.55 | 1,167.64 | -1.84% | 11.74% |
| 3 | Apple | AAPL | NASDAQ | 14,037 | 211.75 | 197.18 | -6.88% | 25.00% |
| 4 | Intel | INTC | NASDAQ | 13,702 | 51.75 | 46.20 | -10.72% | -1.56% |
| 5 | Microsoft | MSFT | NASDAQ | 13,558 | 128.90 | 127.13 | -1.37% | 25.16% |
| 6 | Roche Pharm | RHHBY | OTC | 12,284 | 33.23 | 32.06 | -3.52% | 3.15% |
| 7 | Johnson & Johnson | JNJ | NYSE | 11,493 | 142.01 | 139.05 | -2.08% | 7.75% |
| 8 | Merck & Co. | MRK | NYSE | 11,323 | 80.00 | 78.19 | -2.26% | 2.33% |
| 9 | Volkswagen AG | VWAGY | OTC | 10,915 | 18.34 | 17.17 | -6.38% | 10.06% |
| 10 | Toyota | TM | NYSE | 10,848 | 123.65 | 119.27 | -3.54% | 2.75% |
| 11 | Novartis | NVS | NYSE | 8,934 | 82.61 | 81.88 | -0.88% | -4.58% |
| 12 | Honda | HMC | NYSE | 8,180 | 27.96 | 26.09 | -6.69% | -1.36% |
| 13 | Pfizer | PFE | NYSE | 7,942 | 41.39 | 40.72 | -1.62% | -6.71% |
| 14 | Daimler | DDAIY | OTC | 7,615 | 65.76 | 61.39 | -6.65% | 16.34% |
| 15 | General Motors | GM | NYSE | 7,278 | 38.80 | 37.89 | -2.35% | 13.27% |
| 16 | Oracle | ORCL | NYSE | 7,001 | 54.79 | 54.65 | -0.26% | 21.04% |
| 17 | Bristol-Myers Squibb | BMY | NYSE | 6,981 | 48.62 | 47.01 | -3.31% | -9.56% |
| 18 | Eli Lilly Co | LLY | NYSE | 6,769 | 116.91 | 116.22 | -0.59% | 0.43% |
| 19 | GlaxoSmithKline | GSK | NYSE | 6,394 | 40.75 | 39.53 | -2.99% | 3.45% |
| 20 | Cisco | CSCO | NASDAQ | 6,009 | 54.94 | 53.36 | -2.88% | 23.15% |
| 21 | IBM | IBM | NYSE | 5,842 | 140.25 | 135.32 | -3.52% | 19.05% |
| 22 | Bayer AG | BAYN | OTC | 5,743 | 17.33 | 16.36 | -5.60% | -6.89% |
| 23 | Astra Zeneca PLC | AZN | NYSE | 5,483 | 38.41 | 37.65 | -1.98% | -0.87% |
| 24 | Qualcomm | QCOM | NASDAQ | 5,183 | 89.29 | 85.84 | -3.86% | 50.86% |
| 25 | Sanofi SA | SNY | NYSE | 4,694 | 43.68 | 41.09 | -5.93% | -5.34% |
| Total | 243,754 | 4,843.13 | 4,688.87 | -3.19% | 16.42% | |||
| Biopharmaceutical | 684.94 | 669.76 | -2.22% | -0.17% | ||||
| Automotive | 274.51 | 261.81 | -4.63% | 7.15% | ||||
| ICT | 1,921.22 | 1,867.32 | -2.81% | 15.96% | ||||
About the R&D Index
R&D Magazine’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in research and development. The top 25 industrial spenders of R&D in 2017 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2018 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (11 companies), automotive (5), ICT (8) and conglomerate (1) organizations who invested a cumulative total of more than $209 billion in R&D in 2017, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spent in the world by government, industries and academia combined, according to R&D Magazine’s 2019 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D Index are tabulated from NASDAQ, NYSE, XETRA and OTC common stock prices (in U.S. dollars) for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the publication of the R&D Index in R&D Magazine’s R&D Daily eNewsletter.
