Arvind's Newsletter

1.Mukesh Ambani’s three children appointed to Reliance board as part of succession plan

Reliance Industries has appointed its chair Mukesh Ambani’s three children to its board, as Asia’s wealthiest man rolls out a choreographed succession plan to lead India’s biggest company by market valuation. Twins Isha and Akash, 31, and Anant, 28, will join the board following shareholder approval. Their mother Nita will step down from her seat to focus on her work with Reliance’s charity.

Ambani’s careful succession planning aims to avoid a repeat of the family feuding that followed his father Dhirubhai’s death in 2002. Without a will to divide the Reliance founder’s assets, Mukesh and his brother Anil ended up in a power struggle over the business empire, before reaching a truce in 2010 that was mediated by their mother.

Ambani said he would spend his next five years as chair preparing Reliance’s “Next-Gen leaders” and mentoring his children “so that they can provide collective leadership and dependably take Reliance to greater heights”. Companies linked to the Ambani family own 50.4 per cent of Reliance’s shares.

2.How India pulled of its frugal moon landing, reported in Wall Street Journal.

Indian Space Research Organisation has turned the country of 1.4 billion into a major space power—for a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that first-generation space powers such as the U.S. and Russia have spent on their space programs.

On Wednesday, when India became the fourth country ever to safely land a spacecraft on the moon, proud Indians were quick to note the achievement, estimated to have cost about $70 million, was far cheaper than making the Hollywood sci-fi epic “Interstellar."

India on Wednesday also became the first country to land near the moon’s South Pole, where scientists hope to find water resources to facilitate missions to other parts of the solar system and future efforts for long-term settlements on the moon. Space experts say it is especially challenging lunar terrain to land on due to the long shadows cast by boulders and deep craters.

India is now the world’s fifth-biggest economy. Its latest budget has earmarked $1.5 billion for its Department of Space, which includes ISRO. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budget stands at $25 billion. While China doesn’t publish figures for its space agency’s budget, researchers estimate it at upward of $10 billion.

The space agency in recent years has also begun earning revenues from launching satellites for other countries.

India opened up its space sector to private firms in 2020 and last year saw a space startup launch the country’s first privately built rocket. Eyeing the rise of U.S. space companies like SpaceX, which dominates the commercial satellite launch market, India’s government hopes the move will draw billions of dollars in funding toward private companies to add momentum to the government space program. Read on.

3.Farm subsidy : France will pay its winegrowers $215 million to destroy their surplus wine, after collapsing demand and increased competition led to a glut.

The wine industry estimates that 300 million litres of wine will go unsold this year, 7% of the total.French young peoples consumption of red wine fell by 32% over the last decade, the Financial Times reported, as they moved to beer and spirits or simply drank less.

Sales in China, a key market, are also down. The government will compensate wine producers for distilling the alcohol from their wine for use in industrial or medical products: They will also offer farmers money to leave their land fallow or convert it to woodland.

4.Leasing an electric vehicle is the cheapest option for new-car buyers in the United States.

Tax breaks and falling prices, lower maintenance and operating costs, and rising prices of gasoline have made EVs thousands of dollars per year cheaper than buying or leasing equivalent internal combustion engine cars, according to Forbes.

The same is true in China for awhile, The Washington Post reported: A price war, led by Tesla, has driven costs down hugely, and in June seven of the 10 best-selling cars in China came with a plug.

5.Scientists brew stronger concrete with coffee grounds

Mixing coffee biochar into concrete can strengthen the building material by as much as 30 percent reports Popular Science.

Humans are predicted to go through nearly 175 million bags of coffee over the next year, totalling over 23 billion pounds of spent coffee grounds. For decades, most of that waste has been generally destined for landfills, the transport of which results in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. It stands to reason that these spent coffee grounds (after a cup of joe or two) offer a massive, untapped recyclable resource opportunity—and researchers at Australia’s RMIT University have potentially figured out just what to do with them.

According to findings recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, engineers have developed concrete that is almost 30 percent stronger than existing standards after mixing in coffee-derived biochar. To create the new, charcoal-like additive, the team employed a low-energy process known as pyrolysis, in which organic waste is heated to 350 degrees Celsius without oxygen to avoid generating carbon dioxide.