- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Adani eyes 3 global ports, prepares $3 billion cash chest
Adani Group is planning to invest up to $3 billion in the next two years to expand international ports business, primarily via acquisitions as the Ahmedabad-headquartered conglomerate aims to create a prominent presence in the crucial international business route connecting Europe and the US traversing Central and West Asian nations.
The conglomerate is likely to enhance its overall port (container-handling) capacity from around 600 million metric tonne per annum (of which 420 MMT is domestic) to 800 MT in the next two years, primarily via a series of international acquisitions.
Adani group has set its sights on at least three large ports on the coastal borders of Europe, Africa and South East Asia in line with its strategy.
2.Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that Adani is suspected of fraud by selling low-grade coal as high-value fuel.
Adani Group passed off low-quality coal as far more expensive cleaner fuel in transactions with an Indian state power utility, according to evidence seen by the Financial Times that throws fresh light on allegations of a long-running coal scam.
The documents, secured by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and reviewed by the FT, add a potential environmental dimension to accusations of corruption associated with the Indian conglomerate. They suggest that Adani may have fraudulently obtained bumper profits at the expense of air quality, since using low-grade coal for power means burning more of the fuel.
Invoices show that in January 2014 Adani purchased an Indonesian shipment of coal said to contain 3,500 calories per kilogram. The same shipment was sold to the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution company (Tangedco) as 6,000-calorie coal, one of the most valuable grades. Adani appears to have more than doubled its money in the process, after transport costs. The FT has also matched documentation for a further 22 shipments in 2014 involving the same parties that indicates a pattern of grade inflation in the supply of 1.5mn tonnes of coal.
3.The Playbook of a successful mall is changing
Cinemas are losing their centrality (with multiplexes reducing the number of screens) in the mall business, and being replaced by entertainment centres, gaming arcades, and dining options to keep foot traffic high. Over 64 shopping centres in the country have more than 40% of their units unoccupied, according to Knight Frank.
Consumers now favour Grade-A malls, which adapt better to changing tastes. These changing consumption trends have made the traditional business model of malls obsolete. Read this report in The Core to know more about what malls are doing to stay relevant.
4.Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways see 70% India flyers transit at hubs
A substantial portion — over 70 per cent — of passengers flying on Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways flights connected to India utilised the airlines’ hubs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha as transit points for travel between India and third countries in February this year, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium’s data reviewed by Business Standard.
This substantial share of ‘sixth freedom’ traffic, referring to passengers using an airline’s home hub to travel between two other nations, involving India has raised concerns within the Indian government.
Officials believe this passenger flow impedes the growth of long-haul and ultra-long-haul international operations of domestic carriers such as Air India. Consequently, the Indian government has refused to increase bilateral traffic rights to the abovementioned three Gulf hubs in recent years.
5.Johansson Versus OpenAI (Day 2 of saga)
The Hollywood actors union, SAG-AFTRA, voice support for Scarlett Johansson after the actress raised concerns over OpenAI's new artificial intelligence chatbot that features a voice that allegedly sounds similar to her own. OpenAI unveiled its latest model, GPT-4o, last week, allowing users the ability to converse with an AI system; at issue is a persona named "Sky."
Johansson revealed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached her last year to voice the AI model—the actress voiced a fictional AI assistant in the 2013 film "Her"—but she declined the offer. OpenAI agreed to remove the "Sky" voice after Johansson's lawyers demanded an explanation of how it was created. OpenAI claimed the voice belonged to a different unnamed actress and followed up with a blog post on how it created the voices.
The incident has reignited concerns over protecting artists' voices and likenesses from unauthorised replication, with SAG-AFTRA recently backing legislation to safeguard its members.
6.Imprisoned ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro predicts Fed Chair’s ouster and ‘mass deportations’ in a second presidential term
The prevailing sentiment on Wall Street is that the election is Trump’s to lose. A show of hands last week at a gathering of bank executives in Washington put his chances at 70%, reports Liz Hoffman of Semafor.
The Semafor has a preview of what a second Trump administration’s economic priorities might be, from one of his most influential advisers the first time around. Gina Chon has a interview with Peter Navarro, the uber-hawk who pushed tariffs and sparred with “globalists” in the White House.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would be gone in the first 100 days of a second Donald Trump term that would also include mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more tariffs on Chinese goods, former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro told Semafor from the federal prison where he is serving a four-month sentence for refusing to cooperate with a congressional probe into the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.
7.Is the internet bad for you?
Tyler Cowen in his blog the Marginal Revolution covered the highlights of recent study in Nature.
A global, 16-year study1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.
“It’s an important piece of the puzzle on digital-media use and mental health,” says psychologist Markus Appel at the University of Würzburg in Germany. “If social media and Internet and mobile-phone use is really such a devastating force in our society, we should see it on this bird’s-eye view [study] — but we don’t.” Such concerns are typically related to behaviours linked to social-media use, such as cyberbullying, social-media addiction and body-image issues. But the best studies have so far shown small negative effects, if any2,3 , of Internet use on well-being, says Appel.
From separate Gallup polls:
Pryzbylski and his colleagues analysed data on how Internet access was related to eight measures of well-being from the Gallup World Poll, conducted by analytics company Gallup, based in Washington DC. The data were collected annually from 2006 to 2021 from 1,000 people, aged 15 and above, in 168 countries, through phone or in-person interviews. The researchers controlled for factors that might affect Internet use and welfare, including income level, employment status, education level and health problems.
…The team found that, on average, people who had access to the Internet scored 8% higher on measures of life satisfaction, positive experiences and contentment with their social life, compared with people who lacked web access. Online activities can help people to learn new things and make friends, and this could contribute to the beneficial effects, suggests Appel.
Tyler adds, do note that in these latter data sets women ages 15-24 still are worse off from internet access.
There however certain nuances to this issue as pointed by Jonathan Haidt.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt explores the simultaneous rise in teen mental illness across various countries, attributing it to a seismic shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” around the early 2010s. He argues that the negative effects of this “great rewiring of childhood” will continue to worsen without the adoption of several norms and a more hands-on approach to regulating social media platforms.
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks, asks Tyler.
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more in Conversations with Tyler. The transcript of this interview is below as is audio version in Spotify.
8.BNEF believes the Hydrogen “bubble” may burst.
The world will probably use a lot less hydrogen in the next few decades than Big Oil would like you to think — and that could cut deeply into their future profits.
That’s one of the biggest takeaways from an in-depth forecast on energy transition this week by BloombergNEF. By 2050, the report projects, if the global economy is on track for net zero, the world will need about 390 million metric tons of hydrogen annually. That’s about 25% less than the total demand that BNEF projected in the same report last year — and about half of what the main hydrogen lobbying group, whose members include the oil majors and energy services companies like Baker Hughes, hopes to see.
The main reason for the steep cut is that BNEF decided to essentially disqualify hydrogen from any role in decarbonising commercial or residential buildings, because doing so will likely never be cheaper or easier than other options, like electric heat pumps. BNEF also dropped hydrogen as a possible low-carbon fuel for trains, and cut its expectations for how much will be needed for power and other sectors.
Whereas the Hydrogen Council trade group envisions hydrogen providing 22% of total global energy in 2050, BNEF projects it will be just 9%. A separate study by US energy researchers concluded the share could be as low as 3%. This month, the UK government scrapped a pilot project to use hydrogen for home heating because it was more expensive compared to heat pumps. And a review last year by former BNEF head Michael Liebreich — a vocal critic of bullish hydrogen forecasts — downgraded the likely viability of hydrogen for power exports, mining trucks, utility-scale batteries, and other sectors, concluding that “in the majority of cases there are cheaper, safer and more convenient zero-carbon alternatives” to hydrogen.
In this week’s BNEF forecast, hydrogen is seen to play no role in decarbonising cement or petrochemical production, buildings, or trains.
