Redburn Review - September 2026 (Rothschild & Co)

Summary

• S&P and Moody's each hold roughly 40% of the global credit rating market, serving a global debt issuance market of c$350trn.p.4
• Four-year cumulative refinancing needs across US and EMEA non-financial corporate debt total $5.2trn.p.5
• The cost of a million tokens from a frontier AI model fell from around $30 in early 2023 to roughly $2.50 in 2026.p.6
• Drug failure rates in clinical development moved from 89.7% in the 1960s to 90.8% over sixty years.p.13
• Developer AI tool Cursor reached $100m in annualised revenue in January 2025 and around $4bn by June 2026.p.26

Key insights

1. Operating margins for dominant credit rating agencies sit structurally above 60% with minimal capital intensity.p.5
2. Processing volume for AI tokens at Google expanded from 9.7 trillion per month in 2024 to over 3.2 quadrillion by 2026.p.6
3. Apple introduced its Mini App Partner Program in November 2025, lowering its in-app store toll from 30% to 15% for Super Apps.p.8
4. SpaceX was valued at $1.77trn in June 2026, which is over seventy times NASA's FY2026 budget of $24.4bn.p.12
5. Streaming accounts for c70% of global recorded-music revenue, but US subscriber growth slowed from c29% in 2019 to c7% in 2025.p.18
6. Revolut serves over seventy million customers in more than forty countries, while Nubank reaches over one hundred and thirty million customers.p.22
7. IT expenditure as a percentage of law firm revenues grew from c2% in 2020 to nearly 4% in 2025.p.34