LyrArc Article Gist
Tata has a couple of things going for it to make a car at a price under $2500- a different vision behind it and a longer term idea of the market and its opportunities for Tata Motors. This is a personal vision of Ratan Tata, the last in the series of Tata family members who have run a company that was at the leading edge of industrialization in India since British times in the closing years of the 19th century. He sees this as a way to bring a car that is affordable to millions of Indians, the average Indian, just as his father and great grand father were pioneers in India's early steps towards industrialization. This also will serve another purpose. It will provide momentum to India's manufacturing base by putting India's auto industry on its way to sell cars by the millions in the next ten years. The cost was a challenge to Indian engineers ingenuity. It would help them develop something from scratch from a clean slate, and as he hoped reinvent the car if possible. The cost also was doable in India because of the wages paid to Indian engineers and workers are different. The entire cost structure with suppliers like Bosch providing the engine also and internet purchases of parts coming under a completely different way of doing business, again a reinvent of things. And the skimping on a lot of basics like a radio is possible in the Indian context where the inital target market is the scooter family of which in India there are millions. People who would simply be waiting for such a bare bones car, not see it as such because it is a great advance over a scooter even in terms of safety. What most people who have never been to India would not be able to grasp is that a whole family of four can be seen riding on a scooter or motorbike in India on weekends in Indian urban areas. Tata's idea of the market potential is the way it can ride the next stages of increasing incomes in India. Once it has come up with this car it can come up with enhanced versions with an airconditioning and radio and so on, and still price it way below competitors with Tata's quality and brand name and innovative design. As long as Tata can sell all the cars it makes it can expand production rapidly. Tata's costs for engineering a top selling model may be only 20% of the $350 million it costs western companies, according to Alix Partners, with savings of $300 to $1000 per car right there. Labor costs are about $1.20 per hour in India, less than what auto workers make in China, this provides more cost savings. Tata plans to supply kits to dealers who will do the final assembly in small workshops. This distribution strategy will save Tata another chunk of costs, as about 20% of the car's cost is in distribution in the USA. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Bill Keller describes the diversity of news sources available today from the BBC and Guardian websites to Al Jazeera and websites of other foreign news organizations. Radio stations are another source. Yet this diversity exists with one troubling factor- the decline in foreign news bureaus and experienced journalists covering events in distant locations. As a result many of the important foreign events are now covered by free lance journalists who take many risks and are still underpaid. Without experienced journalists it becomes more difficult to sort out the good information from the bad or poorly researched, and the average reader facing a glut of information or misinformation is faced with the prospect of being as uninformed as before or worse misinformed. Keller gives the example of NYT's journalist C. J. Chivers who carefully researched information from a UN report- compass bearings for two chemical rockets- to show that the chemical weapons attack in Syria originated with the Assad military forces in Damascus. This was after much of the media went with the stories spread by different sources that there were doubts about who was responsible. Unusual and cause for concern is that many governments around the world may have found the ambiguity useful by taking off some of the moral pressure for action, of having to intervene so soon after the Bush invasion of Iraq....

LyrArc Article Gist
India's Aakash tablet priced at $42 for the Indian market at subsidized 50% by the Indian governmnt for students at colleges and universities in India.

LyrArc Article Gist
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer launched a series of acquisitions after becoming CEO in 2012. Tumblr was acquired for $1 billion. Yahoo has disclosed in a regulatory filing that it plans to write down the entire value of that acquisition. A number of other acquisitions have also failed to deliver value as Yahoo struggles in ad revenues- mobile ad revenues for Yahoo in the 1st quarter of 2016 were $250 million compared to $4.5 billion or 17 times that for Facebook. Yahoo has 200 million visitors each month, but its display ads are not strong on mobile and its mobile apps have not done well with users. As advertising shifted to mobile Yahoo stumbled badly. The failed acquisitions investment could have been better utilized in retaining talented mobile engineers, but Yahoo's CEO resorted to cost cutting when the strategy of looking at consumer trends for news content through digital magazine investments failed. As a result Yahoo suffered from slumping morale and a brain drain.

LyrArc Article Gist
T. Rowe Price marksdown its tech startup investments, including Uber.

LyrArc Article Gist
The new Ford Focus being unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in 2009, is a new kind of car for Ford. This is a new kind of effort, a new discipline that Ford CEO Mullaly has advocated from the beginning. Making one car for all markets worldwide. Early on Mullaly told Ford's chairman Bill Ford that Boeing did not have a 737 for Europe and a 737 for the US and a 737 for Asia, why was Ford building a Focus for Europe and a Focus for the USA. In fact before Mullaly the Focus for the USA was a stripped down version of the European Focus and did not make much of an impression. The new Focus will have 80% common parts and 75% of parts from the same suppliers worldwide, so that a Focus made in Germany and the USA will share the same parts as a Focus made in Russia and a Focus made in China. And all of these plants will go into production at about the same time with the new Focus. To accomplish this transformation of Ford for "One Ford" worldwide, which is also on every business card carried by Ford managers, Mullaly appointed Derrick Kuzak as head of global manufacturing. See link for Derrick Kuzak. And the strategy was announced in mid-2008 with the start of retooling of truck factories in Mexico, Kentucky and Michigan, to make small cars designed in Europe for global markets. The task of coming up with one design for a global car was given to Martin Smith, a British designer based in Cologne, Germany. Smith says tastes are converging worldwide with the internet use, and customers are more unified than one would think, and whats emerging is a new kind of global cool if one looks for it. This is what happened when Focus protypes were shown to consumer panels in Europe, the USA and Asia, with a good impression created in all 3 markets. Aligning the US and European tastes was easier, China was a bit harder and the yellow leather interior popular in Shanghai had to be crossed out. Another challenge that had to be met in adisciplined manner was the varying safety rules and emissions around the world. For example European designers liked to have the windshield further forward, and Ford's global small car chief had to tell his engineers to move it back to meet US crumple zone standards. Similiar challenges had to be met in purchasing by global purchasing chief, Tony Brown, with a massive coordination effort needed to be done globally. And plastic trim from Michigan has to fit perfectly with sheet metal stamped in Michigan, and Ford used a virtual manufacturing system that allows the car to be built in cyberspace, and the bugs taken out at that early virtual build stage. The entire change is part of a metamorphosis at Ford, a change of culture and mastering a new discipline in coordinated effort worldwide for "One Ford." One year ago the Wayne Truck plant here in Detroit made the Navigator and the Expedition large vehicles.. With a $550 million investment this plant will make the Ford Focus a year from now. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Zombrun describes the effect of low interest rates on savings for the bottom half of households in the U.S., the pressure to invest in stocks without the skills and experience of the better educated part of households in the top 20% of households by wealth and income. This resulted in a negative effect, a depletion of savings compared to an increase under a higher interest rates scenario with less pressure to take risks in a volatile stock market. This is the direct cost of the crises in stock and financial markets of 2000 caused by a internet bubble, and the larger crisis of 2008-2009 caused by the bubble in mortgages and housing. The secondary effects of the mortgage price bubble and faulty mortgage securities was in the millions of homeowners who went into foreclosure in 2009-2013, which further depleted wealth and savings of households in the bottom half lacking the experience and skills to navigate this type of housing market. The failure of the Obama administration to stem the foreclosures with practical steps which would have helped not hurt the banking sector, as suggested by FDIC's Sheila Bair and Harvard economist Martin Feldstein in many WSJ op-eds in 2010-2012, added to the erosion of savings and wealth of the bottom half. Minorities in particular were hit hard. A third effect is of communities across America that are feeling the effects of job migration to emerging markets such as China that has been underway as part of the globalization of the last three decades. A fourth effect in the rising cost of education, particularly since 2000, has reduced the opportunities for struggling working class people to enter the middle class and enjoy the higher incomes in precisely the very period when the divergence of incomes between less educated, less killed people and the more educated and better skilled people was taking place. The last two effects were neutral as part of the overall process of emergence of a globalized economy with a premium on more skills and education, requiring action by the government, universities and business for a concerted effort to mitigate in some places the negative effects and enhance in other places the positive effects. The first two effects were man made crises which required managing in constructive and positive ways for the entire American people, taking risks where necessary such as fears about the financial system if foreclosures did not go through. The risks of a long period of extremely low interest rates for savers and the middle as well as working class were poorly understood by the Fed since 2000. A similiar crisis is being faced in Europe with extremely low interest rates. Janet Yellen was only doing the honest thing by acknowledging how far and how different the situation is now compared to the period of three decades following 1945- a question not just of values cherished in America, also of the need for societies to advance through creation of wealth across all sectors of society or regress, as described by Smith in the Wealth of Nations....

LyrArc Article Gist
The story of a Russian startup company MeshNetics, that had a research project called Golden Box with a team of software programmers. It succumbed to the global financial crisis as it hit Russia and with it dreams of a new wireless technology that would help utilities keep track of energy conservation and other uses. No new investors could be found and the Russian investors cut the funding. Even western investors could not make the investments. Programmers like Bagrak, 27, from Berkeley, California, who worked at Google on an internship and came back to Russia to build its high tech sector. Luzhetsky, 26, from Obninsk, a city built by the Soviets for nuclear and military scientists, which fell into decay and poverty in the post soviet period, this was his first programming job after being educated in the Soviet Union. Mr Grinkug, 57, from a generation of the Soviet period that considered science a religion, he headed the 12 programmer team working on the Golden Box project. The project three ers in the making was expected to release in early 2010. Suvorov who headed MesNetics, who saw his work as part of the move by President Medvedev who came into power in the spring of 2008 to take Russia away from dependence on oil, with investment of $5 billion in a state corporation for nanotechnology. Anatoly Karachinsky, President of the Russian internet technology company IBS Group, who spun off MeshNetics using the brightest talent from his software development team and financed it with his venture fund Oradell Capital. First the optimism in the face of difficulty in the fall of 2008, as the global crisis began to hit Russia, then in October the message to Suvorov that he had to look for a new investor. Then the cuts, first 10% of jobs gone, nine days late a dozen more fired, then the shutdown phase. One person fired after coffee with Suvurov, as things moved quickly. Alexei Rybakov, director of the division that makes the ZigBit, calls 50 investors aday, makiung every kind of pitch, practical, global, patriotic. Grinkug packs up his things, 40 years of codes fit into a few CD's , a few programmers are retained if things change, but for Grinkug the Golden Project he says, will probably die in his head. Its mind boggling how mistakes and unethical behaviour in the banking systems in the west can wash ashore in emerging countries like Russia, and wash away what little stability to build anew life has been achieved in a few years after the 1998 collapse of the ruble and the Russian economy. Its also a contrast between the dreams, hopes and aspirations and the innocence of ordinary young Russian tech engineers and the swings of reality that surround them, of poverty and collapse in early post soviet Russia, then optimism , and now a new kind of reality trying to salvage what has been achieved, and the difficulties in forging a new future that goes beyond 120 million people collecting around a oil wellhead....

LyrArc Article Gist
Google increased the bid for Motorola Mobility by 33% on a single day in August 2011- adding $3 billion to the cost.