- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Leading laptop companies to make their product in India reports Economic Times. Let us watch this space as India has not had success in the past in IT hardware manufacturing.
As many as 44 IT hardware manufacturers including global PC makers have registered for manufacturing laptops, tablets and personal computers in India.
The government has fixed August 30 as the last date for manufacturing IT hardware under Rs 17,000-crore PLI scheme.
Research Director of Counterpoint Research Tarun Pathak said the total laptop and PC market size in India is close to USD 8 billion annually, and approximately 65 per cent of the units are imported.
2.Sri Lanka is back in business, reports a opinion piece by Ruchir Desai in Nikkei Asia.
Rising interest rates and falling export demand are blunting the post-COVID economic resurgence of many Asian economies. But for Sri Lanka, the only country in the region to default on its official debt amid the economic squeeze caused by the pandemic and the Ukraine war, these are sunny days (again).
Tourism revenue and remittances from Sri Lankan workers overseas have come roaring back. Inflation, which reached 70% last September, was back down to 6.3% in July. As a result, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka has cut its benchmark interest rate by 4.5 percentage points since June.
The rupee and the country's stock market have reacted positively to recent macroeconomic developments; both have been among the world's best performers so far this year.
Execution has not been the strongest area for Sri Lankan policymakers. But with the support of the IMF, neighboring countries and investors, Sri Lanka cannot ask for a better platform to generate sustainable and all-around economic growth.
3.Three rules to express your thoughts so that everyone will understand you
Whether you are a public speaker or having a heart-to-heart, it can be challenging to express your thoughts clearly.
Alan Alda recommends making no more than three points, explaining difficult ideas in three ways, and repeating key points three times.
However, these strategies will fall flat if not paired with an honest desire to connect with other people.
Alan Alda best known for his role on the 1970s sitcom M*A*S*H, Alda is a public speaker, science enthusiast, and long-time advocate for better science communication. He has interviewed scientists as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.
In that time, he has developed a playbook of strategies to help people engage in conversation and voice their ideas clearly.
4.Digital replicas, a fear of striking actors, are filling screens reports New York Times.
Striking television and movie actors fear that Hollywood studios could use digital replicas of performers without compensating them. The technology for morphing flesh-and-blood performers into virtual avatars has been improving for years and is already being employed by some in the industry.
The Apple TV+ comedy “Ted Lasso” has used a technique known as crowd tiling when groups of extras are filmed in various alignments for scenes of filled soccer stadiums. In “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the character Grand Moff Tarkin was portrayed by a composite of the actor Peter Cushing, who died decades earlier, and another actor who performed motion capture work.
5.An opinion piece by Elaine Moore of the Financial Times is in “In praise of the boring chief executive“
Five US companies have surpassed a trillion dollars in market valuation. In the past few weeks, the chief executives of four of those companies have presented earnings to the world. Not a single one said anything memorable.
That is not to say that the companies are not doing interesting things. There are plans for higher spending on generative artificial intelligence and the introduction of spatial computing. But the way in which the CEOs spokewas understated. All appear studiously uncontroversial. Consider this the case for the measured CEO. Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai is known for being good natured and polite, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has been described as “low key” and Amazon’s Andy Jassy tends to lean on data when asked difficult questions.
At Apple, Tim Cook has taken the company from a market cap of less than $350bn to the world’s first $3tn company. Yet when the company presented its first new hardware product in years, the widely anticipated Vision Pro virtual reality headset, he stepped back and handed the stage over to Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface Design. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has a black leather jacket that garnered a fashion write up in the New York Times. But when speaking, he tends to be calm and considered.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, whose companies take places six and seven in the US market cap ranking, produce plenty of headlines, including their recent social media back and forth about a potential cage match.
The pair come at things rather differently. Zuckerberg has actively tried to cultivate a public persona with mixed results. Remember the muted reaction to his politician-like tour of the US in 2017? Or the awkward live video that showed his smiley avatar looking at the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, after which he felt the need to add a comment explaining that his goal was to show how VR can create empathy.
Musk has a drama queen’s instinct for attention — tweeting pictures of guns on his bedside table and making pronouncements about US politics. His social media presence seems to have encouraged similar behaviour from other leaders. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, tweets up a storm. He has also moved into the world of YouTubers, uploading a near two hour video with co-founder Ben Horowitz in which they discussed the film Oppenheimer among other things.
All seem to think that it is important for the public to know their opinions about a lot more than just the companies they lead. By contrast, the CEOs of the five largest companies are rarely heard in public talking about anything else. Huang spoke to the Financial Times earlier this year about the dangers of an escalating battle over chips between the US and China, but this was in relation to his semiconductor business. When they use social media — Nadella has a Twitter account with 3mn followers — they tend to stick to talking about their companies.
The benefits of restraint are clearest when accusations are coming thick and fast. Earlier this year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before Congress to defend the app’s links to China and the impact it was having on American teenagers. Over the course of more than five hours he answered questions politely and carefully. There were no meme-worthy moments as when Zuckerberg replied to a question five years ago about how Facebook made money with the snippy “Senator, we run ads”.
See also the way in which mild mannered Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has smoothed over the problems left by his predecessor Travis Kalanick. Khosrowshahi will probably not inspire a drama series, like Kalanick did. But under his reign Uber has reported profits.
Flaunting idiosyncrasies and cavorting for an online audience drives attention. But for established companies, boring is better.