Volkswagen Cuts Profit Outlook, Triggering Protests by 100,000 German Auto Workers

Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch said Tesla is unlikely to generate meaningful sales revenue from its Optimus humanoid robot before 2029, pushing his Optimus ramp assumptions out by two quarters. Following a visit to Tesla's Austin operations, Rusch said the company pointed to finalizing the hardware design for Optimus's initial ramp and is targeting first commercial revenue in late 2027, but he wrote that Street expectations for humanoid revenue scale-up are overly optimistic, citing hardware and operating software complexity and supply chain preparedness. Rusch, who rates Tesla at Perform, was more upbeat on other parts of the business, saying the Cybercab is ramping and driving manufacturing costs materially lower, with a modular design enabling parallel production and up to 40% mass reduction, and describing Tesla's 50% to 60% robotaxi cost advantage as becoming a reality. He also flagged Tesla's push into semiconductor manufacturing as bold but critically important, with a pilot facility tracking toward a $25 billion-plus capital spending target. Oppenheimer kept its 2026 revenue estimate at $105 billion but trimmed 2027 to $108.8 billion, reflecting the slower Optimus ramp offset by faster Cybercab production.

Qualcomm is counting on automotive and data center growth to replace its shrinking Apple business, with the first hard test arriving in the December quarter when management expects its two custom data center wins to start producing revenue. Automotive sales rose 61% year over year in fiscal Q3 2026, and management raised its fiscal 2026 annual run-rate expectation from above $6 billion in April to about $7 billion by July, helped by BMW choosing Qualcomm as lead compute silicon provider for its next-generation ADAS and digital cockpit. Apple is leaving faster than planned, with Qualcomm now expecting its share of Apple's new iPhone launch to fall materially below the 20% it had assumed and forecasting Apple product revenue to drop about 50% from the September quarter to the December quarter. Management expects non-handset revenue growth over the prior year to jump from 24% in fiscal 2026 to more than 60% in fiscal 2027, growth it says will replace all of Apple's fiscal 2026 product revenue, and it sizes data center revenue at $5 billion in fiscal 2027 and $15 billion in fiscal 2029 inside a non-handset target of $40 billion by fiscal 2029. The doubt is execution, and the CEO concedes the data center business is just starting and that investors want proof a new entrant can deliver.