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- Arvind's Newsletter -Weekend edition
1.Tata Group set to become India’s first homegrown iPhone maker after Wistron Corp approved the sale of an assembly plant near Bengaluru.
A statement by the company confirmed board approval for the sale of Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Private Ltd. to Tata for $125 million. The companies will seek regulatory approvals after the deal is confirmed by both parties.
2.Adani Group seeking to raise $4 billion to fund green hydrogen plans, reports Bloomberg.
Gautam Adani’s Adani Group is seeking to raise as much as $4 billion to help develop manufacturing plants that would produce low-cost green hydrogen.
Adani New Industries Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of flagship company Adani Enterprises Ltd., will take the lead raising the money from domestic and international banks and is in early-stage talks with several lenders.
3.India tops Mint's Emerging Market tracker for the seventh straight month
Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker provides a summary of economic activity across 10 large emerging markets based on seven high-frequency indicators. With a composite score of 79, India topped the EM league table in September. Brazil and China were second and third, respectively.
India topped the table for the seventh straight month with the highest real GDP growth in the June quarter and a PMI reading that exceeded its peers'. Brazil jumped two spots to second with a relatively weaker decline in exports than its peers. Its currency didn't fall as much as others'.China slipped a spot to third as exports growth remained slow even as other countries showed improvement.
4.It is testimony to how uncertain the world has become that Goldman Sachs is setting up an institute to advise clients on geopolitical developments and technological disruption, reported the Financial Times.
The Goldman Sachs Global Institute will initially be focused on geopolitical tensions and disruption from the rise of artificial intelligence. It will be led by Goldman partners George Lee and Jared Cohen. The two men also co-lead the investment bank’s Office of Applied Innovation, which was established last year to spot commercial opportunities related to shifts in technology and the geopolitical landscape.
“The goal here isn’t to create another think-tank,” Cohen told the Financial Times. “The goal here is to create a machinery that leverages the firm’s expertise, connects it with outside expertise and combines those things into useful, actionable and commercial insights for our clients.”
But Goldman is entering an already crowded field. Lazard last year launched a unit of advisers to counsel companies on geopolitical risks. The McKinsey Global Institute, an offshoot of the management consulting firm McKinsey, and similar corporate research and analysis units have been around for decades.
5.Plastic waste could be used to produce green hydrogen at near-zero cost in a double win for the environment.
In a new study, researchers described a method of turning unsorted, unwashed plastic waste into graphene, a valuable carbon product widely used in high-tech applications. After stripping out the plastic’s carbon atoms, the process also released pure hydrogen, which could be captured and used as fuel. The researchers said that the cost of the process was so low that if the graphene could be sold at 5% of its current market value, the hydrogen would be essentially free. But still early days.
6.The Beatles' final song, "Now and Then," written and sung by John Lennon and completed with the help of AI software, to be released on Nov. 2.
"There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,' McCartney said in the announcement. 'It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s quite an exciting thing.”
You can listen to the song below.
7.Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium, briefs the Economist.
In the early 20th century Britain’s Royal Navy converted its ships to run on oil instead of coal. But whereas coal could be produced at home, oil had to be imported. That caused jitters: what if those imports were one day cut off? Winston Churchill, who was in charge of the navy at the time, argued that the best defence was a diversity of supply. As he told a fretful Parliament: “Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone.”
These days, politicians in rich countries find themselves in an even tighter bind. They need to switch not just their navies, but their entire economies from fossil fuels to low-carbon electricity to avert the worst consequences of climate change. But they worry that doing so will leave them geopolitically exposed.
They fret in particular about batteries. The green transition will require huge numbers of them: for cars, lorries and homes, and to help balance national power grids as they come to rely on intermittent electricity from the sun and the wind. Although lots of different types of battery exist, the dominant technology is the lithium-ion battery, which offers a useful mix of low maintenance requirements and high energy density. But lithium, an essential component, is hard to come by, and the refining of it mostly takes place in China.
Western countries, particularly those in Europe that have spent the past two years trying to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, are wary of leaving their future energy security similarly compromised. Such fears are not merely theoretical. On October 20th China announced national-security restrictions on the export of graphite, another important component of lithium batteries. It was the latest salvo in a trade-and-technology war that began when America restricted chip-industry exports to China.
Fortunately, lithium is not the only game in town. As we report this week, a clutch of firms are making batteries based on sodium, lithium’s elemental cousin. Since sodium’s chemical properties are very similar to those of lithium, it too makes for good batteries. And sodium, which is found in the salt in seawater, is thousands of times more abundant on Earth than lithium and cheaper to get at. Most of the companies using sodium to make batteries today are also Chinese. But pursuing the technology in the West might be a surer route to energy security than relying heavily on lithium.
Besides its abundance, sodium has other advantages. The best lithium batteries use cobalt and nickel in their electrodes. Nickel, like lithium, is in short supply. Mining it on land is environmentally destructive. Proposals to grab it from the seabed instead have caused rows. A good deal of the world’s cobalt, meanwhile, is extracted from small mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labour is common and working conditions are dire. Sodium batteries, by contrast, can use electrodes built from iron and manganese, which are plentiful and uncontroversial. Since the chemical components are cheap, a scaled-up industry should be able to produce batteries that cost less than their lithium counterparts.
Sodium is not a perfect replacement for lithium. It is heavier, meaning sodium batteries will weigh more than lithium ones of an equivalent capacity. That is likely to rule them out in some cases where lightness is paramount. But for other applications, such as grid storage or home batteries, weight is irrelevant. Several Chinese carmakers are even beginning to put sodium batteries in electric vehicles.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of sodium batteries is their late start. Lithium-ion batteries were first commercialised in the 1990s and have benefited from decades of investment. But the rest of the world is behind China on both fronts anyway. America and the European Union have announced enormous programmes of green industrial subsidies. If they are determined to bankroll batteries, some of the pot should go to sodium.