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- Arvind's Newletter
1.Southeast Asia woos Indians with more flight seats and free visas, reports Business Standard
According to OAG Aviation data, the India to southeast Asian nations route operated more than double the number of seats at eight million, compared to 3.8 million between India and southeast Asia in Q3 2019 just before the pandemic.
What was striking about Q3 2023 was that the number of airline seats between China and southeast Asia was 53 per cent of the 2019 levels, or 4.24 million seats.
Contrast this with the India-south east Asia route where the number of seats was just 7 per cent lower at 3.5 million seats which effectively reduced the gap with China. The number of seats between India and Singapore, for instance, is seats by 13 per cent at 1.5 million seats in Q3 2023 over 2019 in the same quarter, according to OAG Aviation.
Vietnam has become a popular destination for Indians with low cost carriers like Vietjet, Vietnam Airlines, and IndiGo (from Kolkata) flying there with direct flights with an additional 345,000 seats. In 2019, there were no direct flights between the two countries and the number of tourists was very low.
2.Make in India: Airbus signs contracts with Mahindra Aeroscape, three others for manufacturing of aircraft components, reported Economic Times.
European aircraft and aerospace major Airbus said it has signed new contracts with multiple India-based suppliers for the manufacturing of components for commercial aircraft. Contracts have been signed with Aequs, Dynamatic, Gardner and Mahindra Aerospace for the supply of airframe and wing parts across Airbus' A320neo, A330neo and A350 programmes.
The latest contracts follow the allocation of the A320neo family cargo and bulk cargo doors manufacturing to Tata Advanced Systems earlier this year.
The company already procures components and services worth USD 750 million every year from India, and the latest round of contracts will add significantly to those volumes
3.Tuberculosis passed Covid as the deadliest infectious disease
Many scientists believe that the defeat of tuberculosis is within reach. It is preventable and curable, innovations in diagnosing and treating it is reaching developing countries, and a promising vaccine is in the last stage of clinical trials.
However, the disease killed 1.6 million people in 2021 and supplanted Covid-19 as the world’s most deadly infectious disease, reflecting the world’s continued failure to get treatments into the hands of the people who need them most.
4.Chinese authorities cracked down on two business leaders as the country recorded its first quarterly deficit in foreign investment. The probe into a former ICBC executive and detention of the founder of a popular video game-streaming site combined with a raft of reports to spotlight global unease over China’s direction: Along with the FDI deficit, global fund managers unloaded huge amounts of Chinese equities and investors. “Right now foreign investors are exiting China in a trickle,” the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post wrote, “but it will soon become a river ” unless Beijing takes immediate steps to reassure them.
5.Toyota takes on Tesla’s giga-casting in battle for car-making’s future
Financial Times reports that the two companies are upending the assembly line itself. While Tesla is revolutionising the shop floor with what its chief Elon Musk calls giga-casting technology, which casts the whole car body, Toyota is attacking the heart of the machine with its solid state batteries. Musk has also promised a better, bigger, and cheaper battery which uses dry-coat technology, a process of coating electrodes that is difficult to perfect.
Toyota placed an $8bn bet on the US electric vehicle market as it tries to persuade investors of its ability to compete with Tesla.
The way Tesla is making cars “is quickly moving to become an industry standard”, said one senior executive at a European automaker. Tesla has been using gigacasting as a manufacturing method for its Model Y sport utility vehicle since 2020. Musk has said he first had the idea after looking at his child’s die-cast toy cars — and wondering why that could not be replicated for the real thing. Traditionally, the main body of a car has been made by welding or stamping together a large number of separate parts. Gigacasting or megacasting, on the other hand, uses casting machines to force molten metal into moulds under high pressure to produce large aluminium body parts, such as the entire underside of a vehicle.
“Megacasting is the perfect example of where you can replace 100 parts with just one,” said Erik Severinson, head of strategy at Volvo Cars.
This saves time, labour, cost and factory space, replacing multiple robots that weld car parts together with a single machine. The cost of changing hundreds of parts means carmakers typically produce a vehicle for 14 years, with modest changes half way through its life cycle. Casting would change this timeframe and allow carmakers to refresh their line-ups more quickly.
Gigacasting using aluminium is also one response to the way that massively heavy auto batteries are reshaping how cars are designed. While aluminium costs more than steel, “if you combine all of the elements, the cost structure should be flattish or slightly better, but in terms of performance the gigacasting is clearly better,” said Kota Yuzawa, an analyst with Goldman Sachs.
The rest of the industry is taking notice. Volvo will integrate casting into its third generation of electric vehicles later this decade. General Motors chief executive Mary Barra said this year that the company had ordered two “giga press” machines with the intention of using the technology for mass-market vehicles.
Toyota, too, is working on the same technique as it aims for a massive ramp-up of EV production. During a series of plant tours in September its executives admitted that there was much to learn from Tesla and other EV manufacturers in China. But Toyota has signalled that it does not intend to adopt the Tesla approach to gigacasting wholesale, relying instead on its decades of experience to find its own approach. Read on
Meanwhile, India is pulling out all the stops to get Elon Musk’s Tesla to the country with government departments working to provide all the required approvals by January 2024, reports Economic Times. India's Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has told relevant departments to fast-track Tesla's proposed investment in India.
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