Arvind's Newsletter

1.Family offices in India rise from 45 to 300 in 6 yrs, handle $30 bn in AUM

Family offices in India, managing ultra-high-net-worth families' wealth  like Catamaran Ventures and Premji Invest, among others have surged from 45 in 2018 to nearly 300 in 2024, according to a PwC report.

This sevenfold surge is fueled by a focus on structured investment, succession planning and philanthropy. Their assets under management (AUM) are estimated at US $30 billion, a fraction of the global US $6 trillion. With a projected 14% annual growth rate, AUM could increase 1.5 times in the next three years, according to Sundaram Alternates.

2.Ta-ta Vistara: With Air India-Vistara merger, it's curtains for the popular brand; opines Santosh Desai in Moneycontrol

Its curtains for Vistara. The airline is being merged with Air India on November 11, bidding goodbye to its many patrons and admirers. This move has been in the works for a while, so it's not exactly a surprise, but it's still an unusual step, one that would have given the Tatas much to think about before finally pulling the plug on Vistara.

Post mergers and acquisitions, it is not uncommon for companies to choose a single brand out of the options they have. It makes financial sense, lends focus, makes investment decisions easier, and simplifies the business. What stands out here is the fact that, in spite of being a younger brand, Vistara is a far more well-regarded brand than Air India.

In an industry where building a good reputation is notoriously difficult, Vistara is seen by many as India’s best airline. One has only to look at Indigo to appreciate just how easy it is for a brand to lose lustre. Indigo started out extremely well, but the pressure of growth seems to have taken a toll if one goes. By the many tales of woe that passengers have been narrating of late. Vistara, on the other hand, is seen to have maintained its level of service; its food is unusually well thought of, going by airline standards, and overall it is seen as a premium and responsive brand. Read on.

3.Rising awareness about infertility is making IVF a $4.6 bn opportunity in India

Infertility, once shrouded in cultural taboos and superstition, has emerged as a critical health issue worldwide. In India, the narrative is no different. 

The Indian fertility market has witnessed a remarkable 20% growth. As per current estimates, India conducts an average of 2 lakh-2.5 lakh IVF cycles a per year with a market value expected to reach USD4.6 billion by 2032 and growing at a CAGR of 18.08% (2023-32).

4.Maharashtra Says Tower-Adani to Set Up $10b Semicon Unit

A Maharashtra cabinet panel Thursday approved a $10-billion (₹83,947 crore) investment proposal by a Tower Semiconductor-Adani Group joint venture to set up a semiconductor chip manufacturing unit at Taloja in Panvel, the state’s deputy chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, wrote on X.

The semiconductor manufacturing unit, in the Navi Mumbai suburbs in Raigad district, will have a total capacity of 40,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM) in the first phase and an overall capacity of 80,000 WPSM. Of the total investment in the project, ₹58,763 crore will be infused in the first phase and the remaining ₹25,184 crore in the second phase, Fadnavis said.

Interesting that Gujarat headquartered Adani should set-up the project in Maharashtra, when 3 out of the 4 earlier semicon projects have been approved and are setting-up in their home state.

5.Waymo thinks it can overcome robotaxi skepticism with lots of safety data

The self-driving car company Waymo unveiled a safety data site in an attempt to demonstrate that its robotaxis are safer than human drivers. The Alphabet subsidiary’s vehicles now have 22 million fully autonomous miles under their belts in four US cities.

It claims that, compared to human drivers, its taxis are 84% less likely to have deployed their airbags, 73% less likely to have been in an injury-causing crash, and 48% less likely to have been in a crash reported to police.

“Self-driving cars have an image pronlem,” The Verge reported, and Waymo is betting that the way to convince a still somewhat skeptical public is with “data — and lots of it.”

6.An antibody discovered at University of Texas could protect against all COVID variants

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say they have discovered an antibody that could effectively fight against all variants of COVID-19, along with other related viruses.

Scientists at UT Austin and several other universities collaborated on a new study focusing on how the antibody, called SC27, functions. The study is the latest in a mounting body of research on COVID-19 from UT Austin researchers, who have contributed to several milestone advancements in the fight against the virus, including the development of mRNA COVID vaccines.

For this study, researchers collected the blood of infected Austinites and analysed the antibodies they produced, one researcher told KUT. SC27 was isolated from a single patient, but researchers were able to identify the molecular sequence of the antibody. That paves the way for it to be replicated for use in COVID-19 treatments.

7.Chanel No 2: The many reasons why dogs love to roll in poo

Dogs have a baffling obsession with rolling in foul-smelling substances. It may be part of a form of communication we are only just starting to understand.

Humans first domesticated dogs from wolves up to 23,000 years ago and we have lived side-by-side with them ever since. Yet, despite this long history together, there is surprisingly little research on exactly why dogs seem to get such joy from rolling in another animal's faeces.

One leading theory is that the predilection for smearing poo on their coats is simply an evolutionary hangover from their days as wild predators. If that's the case, while we may have taught them to sit, stay and lie down, we apparently couldn't suppress this stinky basic instinct.

"It may have had a very important function at some point a long time ago," says Simon Gadbois, a researcher. "Over time that function has vanished, but they still do it." Read on.

8.Clean energy’s next trillion-dollar business; The Economist

Decarbonising the world’s electricity supply will take more than solar panels and wind turbines, which rely on sunshine and a steady breeze to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it about. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an official forecaster, reckons that the global installed capacity of battery storage will need to rise from less than 200 gigawatts (GW) last year to more than a terawatt (TW) by the end of the decade, and nearly 5TW by 2050, if the world is to reach net-zero emissions (see chart 1 ). Fortunately, though, the business of storing energy on the grid is at last being turbocharged.

Grid-scale storage traditionally relied on hydroelectric systems that moved water between reservoirs at the top and bottom of a slope. These days giant batteries stacked in rows of sheds are increasingly the method of choice. According to the IEA, 90GW of battery storage was installed globally last year, double the amount in 2022, of which roughly two-thirds was for the grid and the remainder for other applications such as residential solar. Prices are falling and new chemistries are being developed. Bain, a consultancy, estimates that the market for grid-scale storage could expand from around $15bn in 2023 to between $200bn and $700bn by 2030, and $1trn-3trn by 2040.

A plunge in the price of lithium batteries is fuelling their adoption on the grid. According to BloombergNEF, a research group, the average price of stationary lithium batteries per kilowatt-hour of storage fell by around 40% between 2019 and 2023. A global deceleration in the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), which run on similar technology, has led battery manufacturers to take a keener interest in grid storage. In 2019 stationary lithium batteries were almost 50% more expensive than those used in EVs; that difference has fallen to less than 20% as producers have piled in (see chart 2). The IEA reckons that solar power combined with batteries is now competitive with coal-fired electricity in India, and is on track to be cheaper than gas-fired power in America in a few years.

The centre of global battery production is China. It is home to four of the world’s five biggest manufacturers, including CATL and BYD (see chart 3). The share of China’s battery production destined for stationary storage has risen from almost nothing in 2020 to around a fifth last year, overtaking the share used in consumer electronics. Growth has been helped by policies at home mandating that big solar and wind projects also install storage.

China’s battery firms are intensely innovative. CATL, for example, has increased its investment in research and development eight-fold since 2018, to $2.5bn last year. BYD, which has invested heavily in robotics and artificial intelligence, has built a battery facility in the Chinese city of Hefei that is almost entirely automated. But the industry is also swimming in overcapacity. According to BloombergNEF, China already produces enough lithium batteries to satisfy global demand of all types. Its industry has announced plans for a further 5.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) of capacity by 2025, more than double the current global capacity of 2.6TWh.

That will be catastrophic for many firms in the battery industry, including those producing for the grid. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, another research outfit, construction on 19 battery gigafactories in China was cancelled or postponed in the first seven months of 2024. The collapse in prices has also pummelled many Western battery startups. One example is Sweden’s Northvolt, seen by some as Europe’s answer to China’s champions. Last year it reported a loss of $1.2bn, up from $285m in 2022. The consequence of all this is likely to be a wave of consolidation, as Robin Zeng, the boss of CATL, predicted earlier this year.

Even so, a bloodbath among battery-makers could help, rather than hurt, the adoption of battery storage. Prices could fall further as the most productive companies take a greater share of the market. Fierce competition is already spurring innovation, as companies seek out new technologies to help them compete. Sodium-ion batteries are one promising alternative. They do not require pricey lithium, and although they offer lower energy density, that is less of a problem for stationary batteries than for those powering EVs.

Incumbents are rushing to develop the technology for the grid. Several startups are betting big on it, too. Natron, an American firm backed by Chevron, an oil giant, is investing $1.4bn to build a sodium-ion battery factory in North Carolina, which is scheduled to open in 2027. Landon Mossburg, the chief executive of Peak Energy, a sodium-ion startup, says he wants his firm to be “the CATL of America”.

Tom Jensen, the boss of Freyr Battery, another startup, thinks the only way that Western battery companies will be able to compete is with new technologies. The list of innovative approaches is growing. EnerVenue, one more startup, is commercialising a nickel-hydrogen battery. The firm has raised over $400m and will build a plant in Kentucky that it hopes will crank out cheap batteries that can store power for long periods.

It helps that these new technologies are well-suited to meeting the growing demand for energy from data centres, which tech giants are eager to run on renewable power. The fact that sodium-ion batteries are less prone to catching fire than lithium-based ones makes them particularly attractive for tech companies, not least because it lowers the cost of insurance, notes Jeff Chamberlain, the boss of Volta Energy Technologies, an investment firm focused on the energy-storage business. Colin Wessels, the co-chief of Natron, notes that his startup plans to supply batteries largely to data centres.

The rapid rollout of data centres is also leading to gaps in the grid infrastructure needed to produce and transmit power, which longer-duration batteries like EnerVenue’s could help plug. Aaron Zubaty, the boss of Eolian, a renewable-energy developer, predicts a boom in storage solutions of four to eight hours to cope with the growing demand on power grids over the coming decade.

Grid-scale storage, then, is advancing quickly. “Batteries have done in five years what took solar 15 years,” notes a veteran analyst of the solar boom, who now covers the industry. As Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA, sums up, “Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.