Again, the name of this panel is Building a Stable Balkans. In the past five years, the Institute of Peace has become a leading center of expertise on the Balkans in conflict there. And the person who has been principally responsible for putting the Institute on the map, having a tremendous impact in policy centers and in the Balkans conflict zone itself, happens to be our next moderator. She is also the principal peacemaker within the Institute where she serves with distinction as the executive vice president. Please welcome Dr. Harriet Hentges. Thank you, Patrick. And never was that statement more true than in putting on a conference like this, to have a great team to work with. In crafting the day's program, we tried to focus on issues likely to provide the biggest challenge to the administration, but also the greatest potential and opportunities. The Balkans presents both. And the issues facing the administration on policies in the Balkans are a microcosm of the issues on the foreign policy agenda. Three practitioners today will take a look back in order to look forward. And the Institute itself is doing that, looking at its own considerable work to decide to shape its future work. The recent changes in Belgrade and Zagreb bring historic opportunities to advance towards genuine peace and stability in the region. Few would have predicted during the last presidential transition that the Balkans would be a focal point of international peacemaking efforts. While there is cause for optimism, there are certainly unresolved issues likely to affect regional security in the Balkans over the next five years. The destabilizing influence of Milosevic has been removed, but his legacy of corruption, criminal networks, nationalism, and degraded political and economic institutions has not. And there are still disputes over what territory and ethnic groups constitute a state, poor economies exacerbated by violent conflicts, sanctions against Yugoslavia, and failure to make the necessary market reforms, and continued dislocation of refugees and displaced persons. There are lessons to be learned and basic questions to be asked at this historic juncture. Does the common objective of these former combatants to join Europe mean that the significant locus of action is that of the Europeans and that the time is right for the US to disengage? If so, how do we do it and what signals will it send our allies and others? What will the Europeans do in the region without us? How critical are we? And where should we in the foreign policy community concentrate the resources? The Institute has devoted considerable resources to the Balkans over the past five years, trying to capture the lessons learned from years of work on post-conflict societies. We have gathered some 30 senior fellows of very diverse backgrounds working on a diverse set of issues, added them to our resident research capacity on issues of the role of the media in the Bosnian conflict and reconciliation, the UN preventive deployment in Macedonia, the creation of a goodwill classroom, and the impact of the Kosovo intervention on international law. We've given some 58 grants worth 1.8 million since 1998, and much of it to indigenous groups on the ground, working with very focused problems and in their own language. The demands on the ground and our capacity that we built up shifted the nature of our work. As a result, the present director of the Balkans Initiative describes the Institute as a think and do tank. Four themes have emerged from our work. You might say lessons learned. The first, recognizing the centrality of the issues of justice to reconciliation peacemaking. In that light, we have advised justice officials in Bosnia on war crimes accountability, supported the work of the Hague Tribunal, and trained lawyers in Bosnia how to use the Dayton-created human rights institutions. Second, in recognizing that justice for the perpetrators must be coupled with addressing the needs of the victims. In that regard, we made the Institute extensive work on truth commissions in its various forms available to justice officials in Bosnia. Justice officials of all three ethnic groups. As a consequence, all three of them asked us to play a role in developing an appropriate commission for Bosnia. And the seed we planted has taken root with indigenous efforts. The commission will become a forum for victims to come forward and tell their stories. Some of them horrendous, but some of them also positive. It will bring to light the abuses committed by all three ethnic groups as well as the suffering experienced by each. And this is a necessary step in writing one history of the conflict rather than the three that now exist. We will also be assisting Serbia in the development of the commission. And there, the commission can serve to educate the passive or the uninformed as to the atrocities that were done in their name. A third theme is that key players to the resolution of conflict and reconciliation are not always the official government players. Think broadly about who the actors are. The list is quite long. Religious leaders, justice officials, police, military, both the national ones and the international peace groups, NGOs, emerging leaders, local leaders, the young, educators, the media. But these are actors that need nurturing, training, and support. The Institute has worked with each of these in the Balkans. We facilitated the creation of the Interreligious Council among the four major religious leaders of Bosnia, giving them a venue and a vehicle for cooperation, while giving their communities a symbol of tolerance and potential unity. We trained members of the International Police Task Force and local police in mediation skills, NGOs and consensus building skills, and emerging foreign affairs practitioners in negotiations. And in February, we will train Serb and Albanian mayors from Kosovo in conflict resolution skills, all with the intent of equipping a broader group of actors with more tools to prevent and resolve conflict. Finally, one of the most important lessons of our work is that dialogue among combatants can be facilitated even when the wounds are still open. And this can change the nature of the communication and open up new paths of problem solving. The Institute conducted a series of these dialogues with the support of the Department of State following the Kosovo War to initiate dialogue between the Serbs and the Albanians. And the final one, it was described by Archbishop Artemia, is historic. And it gave the participants their first positive experience of discussing differences and articulating hopes. It resulted in a campaign and a day against violence that helped calm inter-ethnic tensions in Kosovo. And while the relations established at early are undoubtedly hard to maintain back in Kosovo, all have agreed to participate in a cyber dialogue, meant to enable further collaboration on common interests, which the Institute will facilitate. This dialogue was made possible by a gift of laptop computers by the Waite Foundation to the various participants of the early House conference. Today's presenters have ample competence to look back and give wisdom for the future for the new administration in this region. Morta Baramowicz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, has had a brilliant career in foreign service, serving as Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, Ambassador to Thailand and Turkey, to the Mutual and Balance Force Reduction Negotiations, and a founder of the International Crisis Group. In recognition of the fact that the risk of the conflict in the Balkans has shifted south to the dangerous triangle of Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo with the potential to destabilize Macedonia and Albania, we asked Mort to look at the triangle, review the present policy, and to suggest a framework for looking forward. Morta. Thank you, Harjit. As Harjit said, I am going to look at the most immediate and the most difficult problem to sort out in the form of Yugoslavia. The future of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the FYI, as it's usually referred to, are more accurately the Serbian Montenegro-Koslo relationship. I'm afraid there's always danger in such a partial focus, because not looking at the whole of the form of Yugoslavia, however difficult that is to do intellectually, inevitably leads to policy problems and the law of unintended consequences. A case in point is our handling of Milosevic and Kosovo in our absorption with protecting with eight agreements. Macedonia and Bosnia, of course, come to mind in considering the final status of Kosovo. The new administration inherits a much better situation than the first Bush administration left the Clinton administration. The Balkan issue has lost much of its gravity. Milosevic and Kosovo are, of course, gone. The West has constructive relations with both of the largest countries. And while violence is quite possible in Kosovo or in Bosnia, if it should disintegrate, the notion of large-scale violence a la 1991-92 is unlikely, certainly as long as NATO forces remain in the area. And there is no realistic likelihood of Allied forces departing until some distant day, although NATO can adjust the numbers and the burden sharing. Indeed, NATO forces will not be able to constructively depart until after final status issues, particularly for Kosovo, are somehow resolved. The principal questions, however, today are different, but familiar. It's no longer, as it has been for the last two or three years, how do we get rid of Milosevic? They are now the more excruciating questions of nationality and development, where objectives often conflict and national perspectives are divided and hard to reconcile. At stake, humanitarian considerations aside, and people seem to be putting them aside more today, are still the stability of the wider area, not just the whole of Southeast Europe and the cohesion of the NATO alliance. I have been asked to delineate the new changes, the challenges the new administration faces in the area, and what useful steps might be taken to better deal with them. I see four closely related challenges. Most important is the policy challenge, to figure out in the post-Milosevic era what to do and how to proceed to build a reasonably peaceful, reasonably stable region to use a bad word these days, nation-building, if you like. And it involves existential issues which can erupt into violence and hinder economic reconstruction. Its center remains Serbia. What is it, and where do Montenegro and Kosovo fit in? How do we help establish a more democratic Serbia that can be at ease with its neighbors and able to adjust to the realities of the Kosovo scene? In short, can the Serbian national issue be resolved? And how long will it take? There's also a problem of timing. Serbia, after all, has enormous, enormous political and economic problems. And the political stability of the area is fragile. One policy school holds that over time, political development and economic construction throughout the area will reduce ethnic and national sentiments to dimensions that permit and cost of either separation, that is less painful, or allow for some form of continued association. Indeed, that assumption seems to be Western policy today. So let me, in very concrete and very crude terms, sort of state what I believe to be the principal tenets of Western policy toward this triangle. First, to give priority to Serbian political change built to democracy and Serbian economic reconstruction and to keep the FRY intact and avoid dealing with questions of final status in part to avoid creating instability in Serbia. More specifically, to discourage Montenegro from breaking away and refuse to consider cost of independence. EU countries in particular are presently strongly opposed to cost of independence. And many want to go slow and holding cost of a wide elections to create a more or less autonomous entity. And third, to provide large-scale economic assistance and to create a process leading to greater regional and European integration for countries in the area, although no roadmap has been established. Another policy approach, an alternate one, holds that proceeding in the slow fashion will more likely keep the nationalist issue in Serbia festering. To discourage Serbian leaders from dealing candidly with their public on the future of Kosovo and ultimately harm political democracy in Serbia. Simply keeping the international protected in Kosovo indefinitely will inevitably arouse Kosovo anger and make the Kosovo region much more difficult to control. This school holds the view that a Hague trial for Milosevic is essential and some conditionality on aid may be required. It also maintains that Montenegro should be allowed to go its own way if its people want to. Doing away with UN 1244 and better forcing Serbia to face the question of what it is. This school, however, does not deal with handling the impact of a change in Serbian voters on Macedonia and on Bosnia. Now determining what to do, however, leads to a different sort of challenge which could ultimately shape what is in fact done. And that's the handling of the EU and our alliance partners. Countries are divided on the issues and feelings are strong. Changing the current approach will not be easy. And that enhances the attachment to existing strains of policy. Given the extent of European involvement in the region, many here want to turn over to Europe the principal responsibility for allied involvement in the area, much as we did in the early 90s. What does that mean for effective policymaking and what impact would that have on the peoples of the area? Maintaining harmony in the alliance, however important, does not necessarily facilitate achieving our goals. There is another management dilemma for the United Nations. It has been given an important role in Kosovo and making serious changes in current lines of policy, risk troubles with China and Russia and a variety of others, many of whom we have large equities with. How do we handle the UN of Montenegro leaves the federal republic? These dilemmas reinforce the attachment to existing lines of policy. Finally, there's a significant domestic political challenge. The requirements for the Balkans are variable, but they are long term. Progress is likely to be slow and uneven with ups and downs. Governments usually have short time horizons and so does the public and the Congress, particularly when they find progress slow or undulating. Any administration has its work cut out even to retain existing policy for any length of time. So they may well look for shortcuts, which may not be so bad, and they search for ways to reduce the American civil left. Whether that produces the right results is another matter. But a continuous US government effort to sustain a long term posture in the Balkans could cost a lot of domestic political capital. So briefly, are there any course adjustments that might facilitate progress toward a more stable Balkans or a more stable triangle? My own belief is that we are not in a position to do anything radical. But there are measures that need to be taken, which will still cause consternation and raise the challenges of management and politics that have already raised. In the case of Montenegro, first in the case of Montenegro, we can let it go its own way if the people really support it. We do not have to fear a military takeover and it may force, the separation may force Serbia to begin to face its essential national issue. Whether Montenegro goes or stays does not resolve the cost of a problem a little less accentuate. On Kosovo, there is no need to face the status issue now. There's not even an ex-Kosovo entity. But it is important, I believe, to set a direction, to establish some facts on the ground, so to speak. This means we should finish producing a Kosovo Constitution as we have been working on. All the elections there as soon as possible and see the emergence of a cost of a wide government under international support. Serbia will probably fight this all the way and they will have considerable support in Europe and in the United Nations. Finally, a matter I have skirted. It's a very important matter, but there's not much time. Every effort must be made to get Europe to go beyond the stability pact, ensure the rapid disbursement of funds, and set forth as much as possible the detailed roadmap for the countries of the region that may lead to some better form of European integration for them. I have left out much and avoided many difficult questions, but let me close with a general observation about policy. While the former Yugoslavia is not the pressing policy matter it once was, it is still a region that will consume sizable resources and attention, and one still subject to violence and disorder if the West proceeds wrongly. Resolution and stability are not on the horizon. Relegating the issue to second-class diplomatic consideration or making it one of a lion's burden sharing may diminish short-term domestic political problems or convince us we are tough in getting our international priority straight. But it also risks a huge investment and ultimately pose a great danger for the cohesion of the alliance and US credibility if it goes sour or shows little progress. In great part, after all, that is what the past decade has been about. The only successful exit strategy after 10 years of horrors and enormous expenditures remains a lion's success. That is a long way off. I'm skeptical that it will be achieved without continuing large American involvement and a determined policy which requires resources to back up our voice. And achieving that and pursuing that will be no mean feat for any administration who wants to try. Thank you. Thank you, Mort.


Good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. I think whenever finance and sustainability leaders join forces, there is a big opportunity for innovation and impact that I hope to be unleashed and I'm delighted to be joining you. I'd also like to acknowledge my fellow speakers here at the conference. I've enjoyed hearing from you this week. It's a privilege to be included in this group and very inspiring to hear your commitment and ambition to help deliver a sustainable future. I guess it's almost poetic that Freedmen's now infamous New York Times essay headlined, the sole responsibility of businesses to increase its profits would market 50th anniversary here in the middle of this global pandemic. As most of us here today dealing numbers, I'll stand by sharing a few to underscore what I think is the magnitude of the challenge that we are facing. 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2001. In the last 20 years, we've lost 50% of the coral reefs with an expected 90% to be lost by 2050 if we don't do something. And men own more than 50% of the world's wealth. And the 22 richest men have more wealth than all women in Africa. And that's why about a decade ago, Mars, a company where I worked for almost 20 years, we asked ourselves, what is the right level of profit for the corporation? And is the balance of value sharing really, you know, sustainable? I think at the time we asked that question, it may have seemed a little unusual for a business. Right now here in the middle of this global pandemic that has exposed also a lot of inequalities and flaws in our global systems, I think it's a very appropriate question and probably an existential question. I'm sitting here as a CFO in this reality of COVID-19, racial injustice and an emerging climate crisis, and I'm focused on what we call holistic value creation driven by sustainable growth, positive societal impact and really transforming the business of Mars Incorporated. Of course, performance management on the near term, compliance and good governance and controls are still very important. But really increasingly, you know, our measures of performance at Mars include non-financial metrics because we strongly believe that sustainability investment must be an integral part of our company's growth of our investment and ultimately of our value creation strategy. So if we as finance leaders really start to focus on strategy, embedding sustainable growth and transformation, and focus as much as that as we do on the financial work we do, then we can really create a new accountability culture that is bound to change things as we go forward. I think at a more practical level, what does that look like? Well, it means increased focus on responsible business practices, like key financial decisions, like when we make M&A decisions, the way we do capital allocation, and the way we follow up on compliance and energy efficiency and carbon regulation. So in my books, it means taking a holistic and long-term approach to finance, considering a broader set of outcomes that goes beyond, you know, just the current economy and the fiscal reality of the current environment and making decisions that make good business sense today and tomorrow, as well as decisions that are just the right thing to do to make the business sustainable or, as I like to call it, modern to the times. And I think to be, you know, truly successful, business needs to stand for more than just near-term financial performance, and I'm sure many of you would agree to that. And in this world we're in right now, winning is really much more about financial performance in the short term. It's about having a positive impact on the society in which we operate. And it does come with a set of metrics that finance teams needs to assess being capable of measuring and being able to use when we make investment decisions. And I think the challenge comes from finding the right balance between these new metrics and ensuring that we as a company are not winning on one at the exclusion of the other or vice versa. You know, at Mars, we are driven by the belief that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. And the idea and the purpose of the center of all of this, I really think it has been all the time we've been in business, is that the strategy that we have needs to drive the decisions we make starting today. We at Mars employ 135,000 employees. We call them associates at Mars.  And many of you would probably know some of our great confectionary brands, Skittles, Snickers, Twix, M&M's, or Wrigley chewing gum, but actually our biggest business is pet care, more than half the company, more than half of these associates. And we are also the largest veterinary health operator in the world with more than 2,500 veterinary hospitals. And really regardless where you are in the Mars system, purpose is a common threat. And at our company, we believe it's important to recognize purpose and recognize that purpose without profit isn't possible, but also that profit without a purpose isn't really meaningful. And our job as business leaders is in fact to pursue both. There's a strong commitment to mutuality at Mars. We really believe in creating enduring value for our business as well as our stakeholders is pivotal as we look ahead. And that is really at the heart of our value set, something we call the five principles. And these principles are really built on a fundamental belief that an imbalance between the value that a company creates and the value that we create for the ecosystem around us needs to be balanced and if it's not, it leads to an unsustainable environment. And we actually believe so deeply in this that we posed that question 10 years ago. And this year we are we launched an independent economics and mutuality platform in short EOM. It's a groundbreaking management innovation that empowers company to adopt some responsible approaches to a more complete form of capitalism. And we've developed this for a decade together with a number of academic partners. And if you do have an interest, I encourage you to Google economics of mutuality and you will be able to find that website. I think what differentiates us as Mars, therefore, is how we do things. Our financial freedom is clearly helped and enabled by being privately owned. It allows us to take a longer term view and not so much think only in quarters, but more long term in generations. And I'm really asking ourselves what impact the decisions we make today will have on the future as opposed to just on the next few quarters and managing that balance intention is critical. And despite the challenges we face as a business, also in the current environment, we are not wavering from key commitments such as our sustainability and the generation plan that we launched a few years ago. We've invested more than $1 billion in driving transformational chains in the areas of broad sustainability or ESG, not incremental improvements, but really fundamental chains. And some of those big ambitions include slashing our greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain, extended value chain by 67% by 2050. Improving the lives of 1 million people, farmers in our value chain. We have lots of small whole farmers around the world and a lot of third world countries and we want to treat them with fairness and respect. And we want to help billions of people that enjoy our products and services, whether they're humans or pet to lead healthier, happier lives. And one of our most recent achievements, which we're really proud of is last month we announced the palm positive plan where we've already now delivered a deforestation free palm oil supply chain from us incorporated. This is a significant milestone in our efforts to address two things, deforestation, big challenge in our greenhouse gas emission, and also advance significantly on human rights aspect of our sustainability plan. What we've done here is we've simplified our supply chain, reduced the number of mills, obviously given those fewer mills more business in return for a long term contract where we are very clear about our commitments to our plan and the expectations we have of our suppliers and how we're going to monitor them on an ongoing basis. It's really a big step forward. It's just one of the examples where we've been able to improve and take action and not just talk about it. As a purposeless company, we are holding ourselves accountable for delivering across multi dimensions of measures, not just financials. And really, I'd like to think we're fostering a new finance culture that ensure we're living up to that ambition. I'll come back to that. We refer to this set of metrics as our mass compass, and it charges us really to pursue what I like to call holistic value creation. This compass is guiding our board, the mass family, the mass leadership team, and we operationalize it through our business strategies. And it's really an enterprise tool that helps us assess whether we are living up to our purpose and also creating mutual benefits in a sustainable world. So the four quadrants in Simplim, yes, it is about financial performance. Clearly, we cannot ensure investments for tomorrow without also having a healthy financial performance. So we need to ensure that on an ongoing basis. And it's focused very much on growth in the second quadrant. Are we in sustainable categories? Sustainable here in a very broad sense that also create good growth, which is a source of prosperity and ability to invest. And the third quadrant is about positive societal impact. We are choosing here for the moment to focus on greenhouse gases as defined in our sustainable energy generation plan, as well as how we are improving the working lives of 1 million people and nourishing well-being of our consumers. And finally, in our fourth quadrant, we're talking about trusted partnership. We are measuring amongst our stakeholders whether that is NGOs around us, governmental bodies, peers and consumers. And that's a proxy for whether we are living up to the commitment and the expectations that are of us. So that's how we are running things from the very top of the organization. I think beyond the senior leadership and that objective said there is a significant opportunity for the finance team to step up and challenge and ensure that we are actually doing the things that we say that we are setting out as objectives. And in doing so, we're working hard on finance to continue to be a trusted business partner, not just on finance, but actually on a broad range of transformation and really helping ensure the organization is delivering on that holistic purpose-led value creation. One of the initiatives in ensuring that is the effort that I'm really proud of that we've joined the Accounting for Sustainability Movement, or A4S, an organization established by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in 2004 with really the aim of transforming finance to deliver a sustainable future. Very brave and bold move and I'm working alongside my fellow leaders in Europe and North America where we're working to take action together, transform decision making and scale of efforts at all levels of our organizations and beyond. What's crucial about this effort is that we are focused on practical action by sharing best practices and mobilizing really a unique global community that A4S has built to catalyze action and drive improvements. As a group, what we've agreed on is that transformation of finance is essential to achieve a sustainable future. Our team sit at the center of organizations across the economy, from asset owners, through banks, governments and companies like the one I'm representing. And I'm sure in the audience here we've got a very broad range of finance leaders represented as well. And when we come together, I think it can be very powerful in transforming a number of the decisions that have been made every day in business for a more sustainable future. So we really believe that finance teams are winning catalysts for James and really showing that there is no trade-off between being responsible and being successful, but that is a possibility. At Mars, our purpose is that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. And it's not just a phrase for us. It's our inspiration for pushing the boundaries and challenging ourselves, whether talking about innovating in our portfolio, exploring new ways to connect with consumers or fixing what's really broken in our global supply chain. The finance team at Mars is a dynamic one and integrating finance and sustainability is key to unlocking real long-term change. I believe we cannot uncouple or decouple sustainability from financial performance. In fact, you know, they are mutually reinforcing. As business transformation enables, finance is also uniquely positioned to bring the same rigor as we do in our balance sheet to implementing and measuring sustainability goals. And at my organization, you know, the finance function must lead the sustainability strategy implementation by fully integrating it into the way we talk about business strategy. The way we talk about strategic resource allocation and the way we define our accountability matrix in the organization. And we're doing that. We are subscribing very much to the six dimensions that A4S has identified in order to integrate sustainability and finance. And for ease, we cluster those within three groups, strategy and business partnering, governance and measurement and execution of excellence and give a bit more detail. I mean, within strategy and business partnering, you will find dimensions of leadership, vision and strategy and integrating with business processes. We bring that to life through the mass compass, of course, but really also the way we are driving strategy, resource allocation and business performance conversations are critical. That needs to be enabled by strong governance and measurements and clearly defining those measurements and incentivizing those measurements is critical. And I can't say we're all the way there, but we've made a good first step forward and have already got many of our most senior leaders rewarded for half of their incentives, you know, on sustainability metrics as well. And then clearly we need to execute with excellence and here we are working hard on putting in the right data and systems and build knowledge and capabilities in order to create these new metrics, have robust data around them and let that flow through to our decision making. And one of the big challenges is all of that is how do we measure the performance of a company's sustainability commitments, really with the same robustness and detail as we are calculating the profit of a company. And what are the accounting standards that we need to adapt in order to do that so it's meaningful comparable and consistent over time and as many companies look to balance profit and purpose or sustainability efforts the demands for standards are ever increasing and the measures of ESG has has sought and I think we're probably all caught up in what is famously been phrased now as the as the alphabet soup, SASB, TCFD, IFRS that all of them out there. And, and I think a number of organizations has has called for an end to this and let's come up with one set of standards that's at least what I would like to call for a single globally recognized sustainability reporting framework. So before I leave you, I'm going to pose a question that Mars asked itself 10 years ago, what is the right level of profit, and is the balance of value sharing sustainable. What I hope you will now consider is that this is one that fully weighs the multi stakeholder point of view and accounts for the often intangible value of non financial capitals, human, social, etc, environmental. And it is mutual, creating enduring value for both the business and the world around it. And I want to reinforce the concept of holistic value creation in that, in that context in encapsulate it in the idea that purpose without profit isn't possible but profit without purpose isn't meaningful. I think when prioritized equally, it can unlock so much more good for the people everywhere. And finally, I'll call on all of you to lead with purpose while delivering of course some great, you know, business result and beyond the near term implications of co in 19 we, we cannot lose sight on the future that we want to build for ourselves, our children, society and of course the planet. We all have an urgent responsibility and opportunity to step up to drive that and I'm confident that you will do that. Thank you.


Hey everyone, this is Dan with another episode of my AMD and NVIDIA videos. Since I posted my last video on this topic about a month ago, both AMD and NVIDIA moved up in the direction that I predicted. There have been quite a few positive developments for the two companies in the last few weeks. Particularly, the latest developments on the metaverse will profoundly impact AMD and NVIDIA. I will spend a few minutes in this video to talk about metaverse and, as usual, I will talk about my new valuation for the companies. Let's get into the details. First of all, let's look at the charts for AMD and NVIDIA in the last 6 months. This is a daily chart. As you can see, AMD, which is the candlestick chart, went up by about 95-96% in the last 6 months. NVIDIA went up by about the same amount. If you look at the broad market, QQQ, which is the blue line here, went up by 18%, not nearly as good as NVIDIA and AMD, and SPY went up by even less than that by about 9-10%. Definitely, AMD and NVIDIA have been performing very well. As far as my price predictions from my last video, which was posted on October 30, I predicted that AMD would be at $160 a share and NVIDIA at $280 a share by the end of January 2022 next year. When I posted that video, AMD was at $120 and NVIDIA at $255. As of today, November 30th, AMD is at $158, definitely went up quite a bit, and NVIDIA is at $326, also went up a lot, and actually NVIDIA already exceeded my price target. I will certainly be posting new price targets in this video, and I'll get to that in next few minutes. Stay tuned. Because I will spend quite a few minutes talking about metaverse in this video, I will not repeat what I already covered with regard to some of the fundamentals related to the two companies. If you're interested, you can refer back to the October 29th video, which looked like this. In that video, I talked about the company profiles, the products, their merge activities, market share, product performance, benchmarking, and all these other things. So please do look back to that video if you want to have more details on the fundamentals of the two companies. Let's talk about the metaverse, or it's called the omniverse by NVIDIA. Metaverse is a fairly new word. It covers what used to be called 3D or three-dimensional computer simulation. But in addition to 3D simulation, metaverse or omniverse also leverages some of the latest computer technologies, such as 3D visualization, such as what you can do with the Oculus goggles. So by Facebook, or now it's called Meta, and voice recognition, motion sensing, artificial intelligence, voice synthesis, and even more features. As you incorporate all these high-tech features into your computer system, or even onto your cell phone in the future, what you have is the metaverse or omniverse. Up until now, the most active use of metaverse is the video gaming industry, which is estimated to be worth $180 billion in 2020. The gaming industry is very computational intensive, and that's why NVIDIA and AMD have been selling a lot of processors for the gaming industry. NVIDIA's version of metaverse, which they call omniverse, emphasizes industrial and commercial applications, such as using 3D simulation to build sections of a city in the virtual world. Then they can decide how to place cell phone towers to cover most areas effectively. Or you can use metaverse to design the entire factory in the virtual world to check for placement of equipment, how to run pipes and ducts before the factory is even built in the physical world, which will lead to significant savings in time and money. The company Meta, or Facebook, also has been promoting its version of the metaverse. Metaverse emphasizes education, office automation, and telecommuting. Microsoft has also been promoting metaverse. Just like when we find a 5-year-old cell phone to be antiquated because it's too slow and lacks the high-resolution camera and high-resolution display and other latest apps on a new cell phone, we will find our cell phones and computers today to be obsolete a few years from now because of the advent of the metaverse. We will pretty soon want to operate in the metaverse or interact with our computers and cell phones in the metaverse in a 3D environment instead of the mostly two-dimensional world we see today on our cell phones and computers. Even a presentation like this will become obsolete because this is in 2D.  Imagine how many semiconductor processors will have to be provided to power the data behind a metaverse, and that just means more businesses for companies like AMD and NVIDIA. If you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to encourage you to click the like, subscribe, and notification button that will enable you to receive notifications when I publish my next video. It will also encourage me to make more videos like this in the future. Thank you very much. Let's continue. We have a lot more to cover. Let's talk more about AMD. Recently, as of November 30th actually today, it was announced that Tesla has agreed to purchase AMD Ryzen processors for their Model Y vehicles. Although at this point, it will only be implemented in China, but I won't be surprised that later on Tesla also implements the AMD processors on their cars made in the United States. That's definitely a big boost for AMD. Now November 8th, it was announced that AMD won the partnership with Meta or Facebook to equip the data center with semiconductor chips. And definitely that's a big win for AMD because Meta or Facebook is committed to expanding the business activities and sales volume in the Metaverse area. In my last video, I talked about the AMD side links merger. I won't repeat the same bullet points. Just want to highlight two or three bullet points here. Number one is targeted to be completed by the end of 2021. It's a $300 million merger that will be funded by doing a stock exchange and issuing new shares of AMD stock. Xilinx is expected to enhance AMD's coverage in the field programmable gate array market. And there will be also synergy between the two companies which will lead to cost reduction. From what we heard, the Xilinx acquisition is reaching the final stage. It already secured approval from the EU, from UK, from the US government. And the last piece is to secure the final approval from the Chinese government. As far as AMD strength, I won't go through every single bullet point. The most important strength is that they have been increasing the CPU market share and they've been increasing their revenues and EPS very significantly since 2016 ever since they had the new CEO. And the partnership with Meta is definitely important as well as a new deal with Tesla and the Xilinx merger. As far as witnesses, AMD does not have their own foundry, but they're not any more disadvantaged than NVIDIA, which also does not have their own foundry in the same Qualcomm. Many of the semiconductor companies design chips, but they don't fabricate their own chips. They rely on such as Taiwan semiconductor or Samsung to build the processors. In the GPU market, the performance of AMD chips and the market share of the AMD chips have been trailing NVIDIA, which has 80% market share. Let's look at their financial data. The sales have been growing nicely ever since 2016. And if you compare the sales increase to Intel, which is the green line here and the industry average, definitely they're outperforming both Intel and the industry average. The EPS definitely has been growing very fast since 2016. I drew this dotted line to predict their future EPS growth in the next five years. And the slope of this line represents 35.3% annual growth in EPS. And as you compare that to the historical growth since 2016, the 35.3% growth is very conservative. I'll actually be using this number for my calculation of the stock price of AMD. So let's talk that in the back of our mind. The return on equity has been pretty good, also increasing since 2016. At this point, they're better than Intel, better than industry average. Debt to capital ratio is very impressive. It's been declining quickly. That means they've been paying off the debts while making a lot of profit, generating a lot of cash. For the valuation, first I looked at the market cap, the trailing P ratio, forward P ratio and PEC ratio for the leading semiconductor companies. AMD is here with the trailing P ratio of 49.94 now. And the forward P ratio according to Yahoo are 48.62. For my assumption for the next few years, I assume the P ratio will be 40, which is very conservative compared to the current trailing and forward P ratios. And the EPS growth of 35.3%, remember we saw that in the last page in that chart. And the last five years, their EPS growth was actually 39.8%, therefore 35.3% is a very conservative estimate. And based on the current stock price, market cap and net income, I calculated the figures for 2021-22-23 based on these assumptions and arrived at the stock price of 143 for 2021, 193 for 2022 and 261 for 2023. And from this range of numbers, I decided to set my target at $180 a share by the end of January 2022. Let's talk about NVIDIA. This is the chart showing the GPU market share of NVIDIA. GPU is the main product of NVIDIA. As you can see, NVIDIA has 83% of the market share. And the rest of the market share, 17% belongs to AMD. As I mentioned, GPU is the main source of revenues for NVIDIA. Currently they have 83% of the market share in the GPU market. More impressively, they have 90% market share in the supercomputer accelerator market. In addition to GPU, NVIDIA has been building data processing units, DPU, and also they're getting into the traditional CPU market to challenge head-on Intel and AMD. Definitely, this is not a company that's sitting still. They are growing, expanding, and continually coming up with new ideas. But on NVIDIA's strength, I would not read through every single bullet point. Just want to highlight that they have the leadership in the GPU market. And recently the CEO of NVIDIA said that he estimated the metaverse or omniverse sales will soon approach $40 billion a year. Let's hope he's right because that will be greatly beneficial to NVIDIA and actually also beneficial to AMD. They will definitely benefit from the fast growth in the gaming business because the gamers like to use graphic cards, specifically graphic cards from NVIDIA. And they have the leadership and continual development in deep learning and AI by virtue of the power of the processors. They have some weaknesses. For example, they are dependent on semiconductor foundries to build their processors just like AMD. And they're facing competition from AMD now in the GPU market, although NVIDIA still has more than 80% of the market share. They are also trying to merge with this company ARM, which has a design license that's used by almost every semiconductor company. However, this merger might be blocked by the UK government and also by EU. At this point, the chances of having the merger between ARM and NVIDIA is at best 50-50. But it's not going to affect my valuation of NVIDIA, whether they merge with ARM or not. Let's look at their financial data. Their sales are being growing very impressively, definitely outpacing Intel and the industry average. The EPS has been growing very fast also. And I extrapolated the EPS for the next few years with a 39.4% annual EPS growth, which is a dotted line here, as you can see. That's a fairly conservative estimate compared to the EPS growth since 2015. And we will be using this number 39.4 in the next slide. Return of equity is shot up in 1916-17, and then it came down a little bit. It's pretty much on par with the industry average at this point and with Intel. That to capital ratio is shot up recently, but it came down a little bit in the last quarter. Apparently, they are building up towards something big. But at this point, it's just about the same as the industry average. NVIDIA is definitely a very powerful sales profit and cash generating engine. For valuation, again, I look at the trailing PE ratio for PE ratio for the leading semiconductor companies. NVIDIA is here with the trailing PE ratio 102, which is pretty high. But then they have the fast growth to justify that. And the PE ratio is 64.1A, given to them by Yahoo, although as you remember in the last page, I'm only assuming an EPS growth of 39.4%. In the last five years, their EPS growth is at 52%. Therefore, 39.4% is a very conservative estimate. For PE ratio going forward, I assume 70, which is much smaller than the current PE ratio of 102. And then using the current stock price market cap and net income, and based on these assumptions, I extrapolate their stock prices for 2021, 2022, and 2023 and arrive at these figures. And from this range of numbers, I decided to pick $360 a share as my target to be reached by the end of January, 2022. Let's look at the analyst's opinions. I'm comparing here the analyst's opinions from October 29th to today, November 30th. The price for AMD went up from $120 a share to $158 a share, and my target was $160 a share. And now I'm increasing that to $180 a share to be reached by the end of January, 2022. Yahoo Business maintains their buy rating and maintains their high target. The average target went up from $133 to $141, and low target went up a little bit from $100 to $101. TipRanks.com maintains their moderate buy rating and keeps the same high rating. The average rating went up from $137 to $141, and they keep their low rating at $113. CN Money maintains their buy rating and also keeps their high target at $180. Their medium target went from $138 to $140 just a little bit, up a little bit, and the low target went up from $77 to $80. Luz Navalier actually upgraded the stock from an overall C rating to B rating, that's a buy rating. And the quantitative rating went up from C to B. Fundamental rating remains at B. For NVIDIA, the stock price went up from $255 to $326. My target now is revised up from $280 to $360 to be reached by the end of January, 2022. Yahoo Business maintains its buy rating and increased their high target from $300 to $400 and increased their average target from $233 to $331 and also increased their low target from $110 to $177. TipRanks.com maintains their strong buy rating, increased their high target from $300 to $400, increased their average target from $241 to $358 and increased also their low rating or low target from $185 to $285. C&Money maintains a buy rating and increased the high target from $328 to $400, increased their median rating from $235 to $350 and maintains a low target at $200. Luz Navalier also upgraded NVIDIA from an overall C rating to a B rating, so that's a buy rating and upgraded the quantitative rating from C to A and maintaining the fundamental rating at B. Overall, I see a lot of upgrades for price targets as well as overall rating particularly from Luz Navalier, so definitely the picture is looking very bullish for both AMD and NVIDIA. What are my strategies? First of all, as I have shared by way of my Twitter account, I bought AMD and NVIDIA shares on November 24th and today because the market was dropping in general, I sold the shares I bought on November 24th for small profits about 1% to 2%. In the meanwhile, I bought shares of AMD on August 11th and NVIDIA on September 22nd and I'm still holding those shares and seeing more than 40% paper gain on those, so I'm doing pretty well so far. In general, I'll be holding some AMD and NVIDIA shares for the long term because I have confidence in the two companies and I've been swing trading the rest of the shares like what I did today. I will sell when the price pulls back at a key resistance level or fails to be supported at a key support level or when adverse news develops like what happened today. The broad market was sinking and I quickly sold the shares I bought on November 24th to lock in my profit and I'll buy when the price bounces back from a key support level or when positive news develops. I'll definitely be mindful of news developments regarding the two companies and I'll be watching for the RSI level for any overboard and oversold situations and I will update my subscribers by way of my Twitter messages. At this point, I'd like to remind you to subscribe to my Twitter account. In addition to subscribing to my YouTube channel, I'd like to remind you again to click the like, subscribe and notification button. As usual, I will very much appreciate your comments, questions and suggestions. Let's recap my price targets. For AMD, I expect the share price to reach $180 and NVIDIA to reach $360 a share by the end of January 2022. I'd like to remind you that I'm not a financial advisor. I share my stock trading strategies and analyses for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you'd like to buy or sell stocks, you should make your own decisions and you should consult with your financial advisors before you do so. That's about wraps up my video for now. I will chat with you again in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I'd like to wish you the very best of luck with your financial investments.