Arvind’s Newsletter

1. Indian PSU refiners to setup 137,000 tpa green hydrogen facility by 2030

   IOC had entered into an agreement with the renewable energy company, ReNew Power and the engineering major, L&T, for putting up green hydrogen plants, not only for IOC but for other refiners also.

2. India has overtaken France to become the UK’s largest market of Scotch whisky in terms of volume with a 60 per cent hike in imports in 2022 over the previous year. This now based on official data provided by the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA). I remember a study done by SWA in the mid 1990s had found that there was more scotch whisky drunk in India than was bottled in Scotland, referring to high level of spurious scotch sold in India at the time.

3.Mystery surrounds objects shot down US military. United States fighters shot down a fourth “unidentified flying object” in three days, this time over Canada. It follows Washington’s controversial shooting-down of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on Feb. 4. The pilots who attacked the most recent one described it as “cylindrical.” Despite speculation about aliens, the likeliest explanation is more balloons: U.S. defense radars were set to filter out slow objects and those filters have now been changed the Washington Post reported. According to the Financial Times Chinese surveillance balloons are seen over Taiwan at least once a month, while China says U.S. balloons have entered its airspace at least 10 times in the last year.

4.Increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials are making electric vehicles noticeably more affordable. The tipping point when electric vehicles become as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines could arrive this year for some mass market models and is already the case for some luxury vehicles.

Prices are likely to continue trending lower as Tesla, General Motors, Ford Motor and their battery suppliers ramp up new factories, reaping the cost savings that come from mass production. New electric vehicles from companies like Volkswagen, Nissan and Hyundai will add to competitive pressure.

The battery-powered version of G.M.’s Equinox crossover, for example, will start around $30,000 when it arrives this fall, the carmaker has said. That is $3,400 more than the least expensive gasoline-fueled Equinox. But factoring in government incentives, the electric Equinox should be cheaper. Like all electric vehicles, the car will need less maintenance, and the electricity to power it will cost less than the gasoline used by its combustion engine equivalent.

5.China market is opening up and starting to grow. Top executives from multinational companies are trickling back into China with the country’s reopening, as Beijing seeks to restore confidence from global businesses in its struggling economy and attract investments, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Volkswagen AG’s chief executive visited China from late January to early February, the company said, while Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Pfizer Inc. CEO Albert Bourla are expected to visit next month, people familiar with the matter said. Ola Källenius, Mercedes-Benz Group AG’s chairman, also plans a visit to China, the company said.

For many senior executives, it will be their first visit to the country since the Covid-19 pandemic began, after China—a top manufacturing hub and consumer market for many of the world’s largest companies—deepened its isolation for three years by slamming the door to international travel.

These days things are also looking up for China’s internet firms reports the Economist. Shoppers are “revenge spending” their way out of zero-covid gloom. The government’s clampdown on tech seems to have ended: regulators are easing off the companies’ old businesses and giving them more room to toy with possible new ones, from short-video entertainment and cloud computing to artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbots. And Tencent, whose market value has doubled to nearly $500bn in the past three months is once again the embodiment of the changing mood. If you want to understand big tech’s new normal, and what it means for the future of China’s digital economy, look to its humbled champion.

Tencent has no equivalent in the West, or anywhere else outside China. It is part Meta, part PayPal, part Epic Games (in which, as it happens, Tencent owns a big stake), with a bit of Amazon and SoftBank thrown in (Tencent offers e-commerce and cloud services, like the American giant, and, like the Japanese one, has made hundreds of tech investments globally). The disappointing third quarter notwithstanding, it is expected in March to report annual sales last year of more than $80bn. Roughly a third each comes from gaming, business services (which include payments, e-commerce and cloud computing), and social media and advertising. Its pre-tax profit is expected handily to exceed $30bn. If you exclude banks and energy companies, which had a bumper 2022, only a handful of firms in the world did better.

The linchpin of Tencent’s riches is its WeChat super-app. Companies around the world have for years attempted to ape its astute marriage of pay (the transaction economy) and play (the attention economy). Few have succeeded in doing so as seamlessly as Tencent—and none on anything like the same scale.

The thing that could trip up Tencent, or its rivals, is politics. Although regulators have declared the tech crackdown over, the party remains a spectral presence. The state is taking small stakes in subsidiaries of the biggest tech titans, including Alibaba and, reportedly, Tencent. As Sino-Western tensions mount, closeness with the state could jeopardise foreign earnings, such as Tencent’s profitable international gaming business.