Arvind's Newsletter

1.Disney’s struggles globally are spilling off in India. The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney is exploring strategic options for its Star India business, including a joint venture or a sale, a sign of strain at one of the properties it acquired from Fox.

The talks are in the early stages and it is unclear which options, if any, Disney might pursue.Disney Star India, bought at a valuation of $15 billion, could be on the block for roughly one-third that amount.

Media Partners Asia, a regional consultancy and research firm, has estimated that Disney+ Hotstar will drop about 15 million subscribers in 2023 after losing the IPL digital rights.

The obvious options for strategic partnership/sale are Reliance/Jio Cinema directly or with Viacom18 a JV between Paramount Global, Reliance/Jio and Bodhi Tree systems. The other potential partner is Sony which is in midst of merger with Zee TV, which is awaiting regulatory approvals.

2.Investment in critical minerals rose 30% in 2022, raising hopes that the clean energy transition will not run out of resources. More than $40 billion was invested in finding and producing metals vital to electric vehicles and renewable energy, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. That was up from about $32 billion in 2021, itself a 20% increase from the previous year. The International Energy Agency chief said, “ We are less worried than we were two years ago” about the availability of relevant minerals, but that efforts to diversify supply sources have made “limited” progress, with too much reliance on a small number of countries, notably China in a report in Financial Times.

Shortages of raw materials, including lithium and copper, are one of the biggest threats that could slow the shift to clean energy, and the report highlights how surging prices for a commodity such as lithium have boosted investment. However, the report also pointed out the high probability of delays to mining projects that can be beset by ‘permitting issues’, funding challenges and technical risks. 

Demand for critical minerals is expected to more than double by 2030, adding to the challenge for the slow-moving mining sector to scale up on time. The market, which was worth $320bn in revenue last year, doubled in size in the previous five years, in part because of higher prices, the report added.

Meanwhile, India’s union cabinet approved amendments to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act allowing commercial mining of lithium, titanium and a few other minerals/

The Geological Survey of India has found the presence of significant lithium reserves totalling 5.9 million tonnes in Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir. Another reserve has been found in Rajasthan.

3.The ocean’s colour is changing as a consequence of climate change. Its becoming greener.

The ocean’s colour has changed significantly over the last 20 years, and the global trend is likely a consequence of human-induced climate change, report scientists at MIT, the National Oceanography Center in the U.K., and elsewhere.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the team writes that they have detected changes in ocean colour over the past two decades that cannot be explained by natural, year-to-year variability alone. These colour shifts, though subtle to the human eye, have occurred over 56 percent of the world’s oceans — an expanse that is larger than the total land area on Earth.

4.Nominations for the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards were announced and HBO dominating other outlets with 127 total nods. Three shows—"Succession" (27), "The Last of Us" (24), and "The White Lotus" (23)—combined for 74 nominations. "Ted Lasso," on Apple TV+, came in fourth with 21 nominations.

"Succession," which follows the dynamics of the billionaire Roy family and their media mogul patriarch, wrapped its final season in May. All four main actors—Brian Cox (Logan Roy), Kieran Culkin (Roman), Jeremy Strong (Kendall), and Sarah Snook (Siobhan)—are up for best lead in a drama. The nominations haul comes despite notching only a third of average viewership compared to "The Last of Us" and another HBO hit, "House of the Dragon" (9 million versus 30 million per episode, respectively).

The announcement came against the backdrop of the ongoing writers strike, while the actors union held a vote whether to also boycott over a pay dispute.

5The fight over working from home goes global, reports The Economist.

Remote work has a target on its back. Banking CEOs, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, are intent on making working from home a relic of the pandemic.

For staff at America’s biggest lender and other Wall Street stalwarts like Goldman Sachs, five-day weeks are back for good. Big tech firms are also cracking the whip.

Google’s return-to-work mandate threatens to track attendance and factor it in performance reviews. Meta and Lyft want staff back at their desks, demanding at least three days of the week in the office by the end of the summer. With bosses clamping down on the practice, the pandemic-era days of mutual

Fresh data from a global survey shows how far this consensus has broken down. Across the world, employers’ plans for remote work fall short of what employees want, according to WFH Research, a group that includes Stanford University and Ifo Institute, a German think-tank, which tracks the sentiment of full-time workers with at least a secondary education in 34 countries. Bosses fear that fully remote work dents productivity, a concern reinforced by recent research. A study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than office-frequenting peers; another found that employees at a big Asian it firm were 19% less productive at home than they had been in the office. Communication records of nearly 62,000 employees at Microsoft showed that professional networks within the company ossified and became more isolated as remote work took hold. on the desirability of remote work seem to be over.

Yet all the pressure from above has done little to dent employees’ appetite for remote working.

They want to be able to work more days from the comfort of their living rooms than they currently do, according to WFH Research. On average, workers across the world want two days at home, a full day more than they get. In English-speaking countries, which have the highest levels of home-working, there is an appetite for more. And the trend is spreading to places where remote work has been less common (see chart). Japanese and South Korean employees, some of the most office-bound anywhere, want more than a quarter of the week to themselves. Europeans and Latin American crave a third and half, respectively.

Desire for more remote work is not surprising. The time saved not having to battle public transport or congested roads allows for a better work-life balance. On average, 72 minutes each day is saved when working remotely, which adds up to two weeks over a year, according to a paper by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, who helps run WFH Research, and colleagues.

Employees also report that they feel most engaged when working remotely, according to a poll last year by Gallup.

On average globally, workers value all these benefits to the tune of an 8% pay rise, implying that some would take a pay cut to keep the privileges.

Until recently, as firms desperately sought workers amid the post-pandemic hiring bonanza, employees’ demands and employers’ plans seemed to be converging in America, the best-studied market. This convergence is tailing off. At the same time, the pandemic has entrenched work-from-home patterns.

At the moment, a third of workers surveyed by WFH Research have a hybrid or fully remote arrangement. Those practices will not be easy to unwind.

It is no coincidence that the crackdown on remote work is happening as some industries cool. Job cuts across Wall Street and Silicon Valley have handed power back to businesses. However, even in tech and finance some employees are standing their ground. In May Amazon said that 300 employees staged walkouts over the e-empire’s return-to-work policies (the organisers said it was closer to 2,000).

Other firms are quietly adapting with the times. HSBC, a British bank, is planning to relocate from its 45-storey tower in Canary Wharf to smaller digs in the City of London. Deloitte and KPMG, two professional-services giants, want to reduce their office footprint in favour of more remote work. The gap between the two sides of the work-from-home battle may yet narrow.

The question is whether the bosses or the bossed will yield the most.