Macroscope | Technology remains the economic driver of the future, despite recent data access scares

Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen Silicon Valley lose some of its sheen. Casual watchers of the tech phenomenon could be forgiven for thinking that, for all the talk of intelligent robots, sentient algorithms and autonomous vehicles, technology’s wheels have rather come off. But for all its recent travails, global technology remains the best performing sector of 2018, outperforming its nearest rival (the consumer discretionary sector) by 2 percentage points.  

FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) stocks may have retreated from their 2018 highs, but are still up almost 6 per cent year-to-date, compared to the Morgan Stanley Capital International All Country World Index, which is roughly flat. So how should we think about technology today? Dotcom bubble 2.0 or a structural trend?  

Widespread technology adoption is a structural theme affecting all industries. Comparisons with the dotcom era of the late 1990s are inevitable but can be misleading. Certainly, the tech sector has led throughout the post-global financial crisis period, with the Nasdaq beating the S&P 500 by more than 200 per cent in the nine years since the crisis. But the dotcom bubble was of a wholly different order, with the Nasdaq beating the S&P 500 by more than 760 per cent between 1995 and 2000.  

More important than price, though, is valuation. In the dotcom bubble, valuation measures were stretched to the point of absurdity; today’s tech valuations are above those of the broader index, but more anchored in reality. Instead of valuing ideas – and dreaming up outlandish new metrics to explain them – we are now valuing real businesses with real cash flows and real earnings. In short, if the late 1990s were a proof of concept, today’s technology boom is the implementation phase; the implications of which are profound for both the sector and the economy as a whole.  

To a degree, the recent jitters in the tech sector can be thought of as growing pains. Innovation, by its very nature, runs ahead of the crowd but, as it becomes more mainstream, there will inevitably be scrutiny. Recent headlines over data access and usage are just one example of this. To make an analogy, data is to an information economy what oil is to an industrial one. Hitherto, data was essentially treated as a free good, but this is changing rapidly. Oil certainly isn’t free and even today the price discovery mechanisms that govern its value lead to market gyrations that have widely felt implications.