Arvind’s Newsletter

1. iPhone maker Foxconn plans US$700 million India plant in shift from China

APPLE partner Foxconn Technology Group plans to invest about US$700 million on a new plant in India to ramp up local production, people familiar with the matter said, underscoring an accelerating shift of manufacturing away from China as Washington-Beijing tensions grow.

The Taiwanese company, also known for its flagship unit Hon Hai Precision Industry, plans to build the plant to make iPhone parts on a 300-acre site close to the airport in Bengaluru, the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka, according to the people, who asked not to be named as the information is not public. The factory may also assemble Apple’s handsets, some of the people said, and Foxconn may also use the site to produce some parts for its nascent electric vehicle business.

2.Tigers and leopards are moving into higher and more northerly regions of Nepal as the climate warms, leading to more contact between those two species and their relative, the snow leopard. Tigers tend to live in Nepal’s southern lowlands, leopards in the hills, and snow leopards in northern mountains, but the two southerly species have moved. Tigers have been spotted as high as 10,000 feet in Nepal, and higher still in Bhutan and India, Mongabay reported. The pressure on the big cats is unlikely to change soon: The International Energy Agency said that global emissions hit a new record in 2022. The tigers may have to keep moving north for some years to come.

3.Moonshots are dead. Silicon Valley’s favorite risky ventures have run out of road.

Eight years ago, Google’s founders split the company up into separate entities and named the collection Alphabet. The idea was to separate the core business — the company’s giant advertising machine that made it one of the most powerful corporations in the world — from the side projects that needed time to develop but could one day become Google’s next big moneymaker.

But that next big moneymaker hasn’t materialized. Revenue still comes overwhelmingly from advertising. Google has shuttered most of its so-called “moonshots” — from internet-delivering balloons to glucose-measuring contact lenses.

And even the most advanced of its side projects — self-driving car lab Waymo and health-care tech start-up Verily — are now confined by the limits of regular businesses. On Wednesday, Waymo laid off 8 percent of its workforce, adding to a previous round of cuts in January.

4.Half of world on track to be overweight by 2035, according to a new report The World Obesity Federation predicted that four billion people will be affected, with the greatest growth in countries in Africa and Asia. It’s a dramatic change: Until 2016, there were more underweight people in the world than obese ones, but the increased availability of food means that fewer people go hungry. The flip side is that more are overweight. Whether the predictions for 2035 will be accurate is unclear: The rise of anti-obesity drugs such as semaglutide may well change the picture again, at least in high-income countries.

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