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- [00:00]
Michael McDermott
At CES, Michael McDermott, EVP of Samsung, spoke with Bloomberg Media Studios about what the company calls its next AI chapter, your companion to AI Living. It's a shift from AI as a feature to AI as a trusted partner in everyday life.
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Adina Friedman
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Joining.
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Interviewer
Us now is Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adina Friedman. Adina, thank you so much for joining.
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Adina Friedman
It's great to be here.
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Interviewer
So many highlights in this from IPOs coming back to your other fintech tech businesses which are fascinating. But for me the switching to the Nasdaq for certain companies like Wal Mart coming over your numbers a record $1.2 trillion in listing transfers with everybody wanting to become a tech company. How many inbounds are you getting for more companies to make a Wal Mart move and become listed on the Nasdaq?
- [00:54]
Adina Friedman
Well first of all, thank you so much. It's great to be here and we are really proud of the results that we delivered for the quarter and for the year with 12% growth overall and 11% growth in our solutions business with every part of our business contributing, including our listings business. And when it comes to transfers from the New York Stock Exchange to Nasdaq, we really focus on several different key differentiators for us. First is we are the home to great innovative tech companies but innovators across every sector. And I think that's what's really come to everyone's attention is that everyone has is becoming much more tech enabled. Technology is becoming an integral part of their innovation story. But you can innovate across industries and these innovative growth companies gravitate to Nasdaq including Wal Mart which we're so excited. It's such an amazing, amazing company with amazing leadership. But we also have the index business we had. We closed the year with $882 billion in our index business, $99 billion of inflows just in the year. And what that does is it allows us through our partners to become investors in these great companies through the NASDAQ 100 index franchise. And in the case of some, some companies we could be as much as a 4% owner of their shares which creates a really nice long term passive owners addition to the fact we also have market quality. We've invested so much in our technology to drive market modernization. It's showing up in the quality of our markets and their level of participation we have which is actually become a real differentiator for us for and particularly with these mega cap companies. And then of course lastly we have all these great marketing assets that we do to help promote their brand as an innovative growth company. And so all of those things combined has really created a great opportunity for us to talk to Shopify and Kimberly Clark and to Thompson, Reuters in addition to Walmart and bring them to NASDAQ in 2025.
- [02:42]
Michael McDermott
So your first time over $5 billion in revenue. It's a record solutions, sales growth, record index inflows. And the one part that I keep thinking about is the concentration. I've been thinking about it since I read your piece on LinkedIn actually more. Is that a risk that you're worried about that there's so much concentration risk in these heavy companies?
- [03:10]
Adina Friedman
Well, I think the first thing is what we have actually seen is returns start to come be more broad based with interest rates coming down. Small cap companies over the last couple of years they've had as much as 40% of their income have to be spent on interest expense. So as the interest rates are coming down, the cost of capital is coming down. It is allowing them to invest more in their business and deliver more for their shareholders. And you are seeing a broader based return profile with large cap and small cap companies as we go into 2026, which we're encouraged by. But we also do have these great mega cap companies that are delivering the future of technology to every industry. And I think that as a result the investment that they've been making is, is critically important. Very large still, though not even it's about, you know, if you look at all of the hyperscalers and the semiconductor companies that have really been investing heavily here, it represents about less than 70% of their annual cash flows in aggregate. So imagine how cash generative these companies are. So there's a huge ballast of cash capabilities in addition to having very large scale investors like Blackst be an underwriter of these types of investments. And I do think the public capital markets are going to play a bigger role. This investment is a change in the infrastructure of our economy and more and more of the industry experts are going to be coming in and delivering against that opportunity. So we see the capital markets playing a bigger and bigger role going forward.
- [04:34]
Michael McDermott
Can I just follow up on your, on your LinkedIn piece, which I thought was fascinating. I think your core argument is that this is not some kind of flimsy stock bubble. This is a generational sea change like the railroads or the Internet. But with the Internet it was both, you know, an industrial shift and a bubble. Right. Because I was looking at the NASDAQ high March of 2000 and it took 15 years to get back there. Okay, now we're 6x that. But is it possible that we have the same kind of delayed revenue problem that we had then?
- [05:12]
Adina Friedman
So first I would say I was at NASDAQ back then. So I've actually lived through that experience. And a big difference here is that the companies that are underwriting the risk and the opportunity are very large scale, well capitalized companies. Number two, when you look at certainly the NASDAQ 100 today, the minimum market cap on the NASDAQ 100 today is about 30 to 40 billion dollars, whereas back then it was like 5 billion dollars. And also as you said, the revenue generation, if you look at companies that are these are revenue generating, very strong companies that have strong business momentum, KPIs, all of those things. And so as much as I do think that there's going to be a lot of investment here, I also think that they're going to be winners and losers. Of course, you know, as these trends come through, I believe that the underpinning of this investment cycle has much more capital and much more ballast that underpins it as we move forward. And it's a long term trend, it's the future of our economy that we are underwriting right now.
- [06:12]
Interviewer
One of the things that's also really transformed in market markets and I think how much your index business has grown is also a testament to this. It's just a wider participation of investors, more retail investors, more happy to jump in the market. But a strange kind of like, I don't know, stepchild has arisen with it and that is the prediction markets. We, we had a guest on Amy, Lou Silverman of RBC who framed it as a threat that maybe prediction markets grow and people go into there and less into equity markets. How are you viewing kind of the booming, I guess asset class, I don't know what we want to call it, of prediction markets?
- [06:44]
Adina Friedman
Well, I think first of all we are very clear that we view regulation as an important ballast and an important underpinning of markets. But really just for the purpose of investor protection and all the things that it comes with it, the guardrails that are really necessary to make sure that investors have a sustainable, lasting experience. When you are putting your savings to work and you are a true investor, the equities markets are an amazing opportunity to, to find, you know, defined returns. When you are looking at this more as a way to spend your afternoon, that's a different, you know, it's a different investor type, it's a different use of capital. But also even then the rules have to be clear. And I think that's where we've been engaging with regulators to understand, you know, how are they thinking about shaping the rules. The CFTC and the SEC are working together better than we've ever seen before because a lot of these prediction markets sit kind of in between. And so it's really a matter of how do we make sure that the rules of the road are clear so that investors are protected.
- [07:43]
Michael McDermott
Adina, great having you with us on set today. Really appreciate you joining us. Adina Friedman there, the CEO of the nasdaq. How do you shift AI from being a flashy feature to a trusted partner in consumers everyday lives on the ground at CES Bloomberg Media Studios, asked Michael McDermott, EVP of Samsung. Our 2026 vision is built around an AI companion. It understands you and responds intuitively. This intelligence works quietly in the background across TVs, home appliances and mobile devices. By putting AI at the center of everything we do, we're simply improving everyday life for everyone everywhere.