1. The power of Thailand's constitutional court.
Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been removed from office... The country’s constitutional court on Friday found Paetongtarn guilty of ethics violations over a phone call with Cambodia’s former leader Hun Sen, in which she criticised the Thai military in the run-up to the border violence... she is now the fifth holder of that office to be removed by the constitutional court in the past 17 years... Paetongtarn, a political novice, assumed office last year after her predecessor, property tycoon Srettha Thavisin, was dismissed by the constitutional court for appointing a previously jailed lawyer as a cabinet member, an ethical violation... The constitutional court has dissolved more than 100 political parties over the past 30 years, including Move Forward, which received the most votes in the last nationwide election in 2023.
The success of the A320 family has been the driving force behind Airbus’s ascendancy in its five-decade rivalry with its US competitor. For years, the two companies had a roughly 50:50 split of the market for commercial single-aisle aircraft. But by the end of last year, Airbus held a market share of 61 per cent measured by order backlog and 72 per cent by deliveries... Boeing delivered 348 jets in 2024, fewer than half the 766 that Airbus managed, as 737 Max output remained subject to a 38 per month cap pending improvements to quality control. A shortage of engines has been one of the most persistent challenges for both companies. CFM International, a joint venture between France’s Safran and GE of the US, and Pratt & Whitney have struggled to keep up with demand. Both companies’ engines for the A320neo have also had durability issues.
3. India uses half the capital to raise output by one unit compared to China.
4. FT effectively calls out corporate America as a bunch of bullies who flaunt their muscle before the weak and prostrate when they are in turn bullied.
When Zohran Mamdani resoundingly won the Democratic mayoral primary for New York in June, Wall Street and Silicon Valley erupted in outrage at his promises of free buses, rent freezes and city-run groceries. Hedge fund billionaires Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and tech entrepreneur Brian Armstrong of Coinbase all warned about the risk of heavy-handed interference in the city’s economy. David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, took to LinkedIn to slam Mamdani’s proposal to freeze city-controlled rents. “When New York tried it in the 1920s and 1960s, it limited affordable housing, narrowed investment in new housing, and made housing outside the control area more expensive,” he wrote. The reaction over the past few weeks as US President Donald Trump has unveiled a series of blunt interventions into the workings of both the financial system and the operations of private companies has been very different...
Yet as Trump has stepped up his attacks on the Fed, Wall Street’s leading figures have offered only limited criticism. And while many of his corporate interventions amount to the sort of European-style dirigisme that the US business elite once loved to deride, the response to Trump’s agenda has been near silence. Indeed, some business leaders have offered praise of the president’s attempts to direct the economy... The juxtaposition with Mamdani is striking: vociferous criticism of the frontrunner to be New York’s mayor from business leaders, but calculated restraint as the president reshapes the rules of free enterprise in America... the principal explanation lies in fear. Criticising Trump, they argue, is risky business. “They’re more afraid of the guy in power in Washington than of the potential mayor of New York,” says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Even if Mamdani does become mayor of New York, he will not have the kind of power that the president of the US has.”... Jamie Dimon, who last month dismissed Mamdani’s economic views as “the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world” and criticised “idiots” in the Democratic party, has stopped short of criticising Trump directly.
5. India is now becoming a more expensive mobile services market.
6. The Ken has a nice story on how India’s private sector is making UAE as a choice investment destination.
Personal-care and pharmaceutical company Himalaya Wellness; electric-vehicle maker Omega Seiki Mobility (OSM); electric-bus manufacturer (and subsidiary of commercial-vehicle giant Ashok Leyland) Switch Mobility; and iron-and-steel-pipe manufacturer Jindal Saw. These are just a few among Indian companies who’re planning to set up fully-operational manufacturing bases across free-trade zones in the UAE. Others, such as consumer-goods company Dabur, eyewear company Lenskart, and conglomerate Tata already have operations there. Tata’s presence, in particular, is sprawling—from hospitality ventures such as Taj Exotica and The Palm Dubai, to Tata Steel Middle East’s downstream facility to manufacture steel flooring in Jafza. Of the total 11,000 companies in the Jafza free-trade zone, 2,300 are Indian… While India currently has 276 operational SEZs with around 6,300 companies, the UAE—which is smaller than the state of Bihar in area—has 40 free-trade zones boasting over 200,000 companies… The incentive comes in the form of financial backing from UAE’s sovereign-wealth funds, joint ventures, or loans. For instance, before Lenskart’s Dubai factory became operational in 2024, it had received $500 million from the sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)… Similarly, Himalaya Wellness secured $80 million in loans in 2023 from the Emirates Development Bank for its upcoming plant in Dubai’s free-trade zone. Spanning 225,000 sq ft, it is expected to create jobs for 250 professionals and produce 3 billion tablets, 15 million syrup bottles, and 3 million ointment units a year by 2030.
The numbers are truly disturbing. There are 2300 Indian companies in just one UAE FTZ, compared to 6300 firms in all of India’s 276 SEZs! Even with all the obvious attractions of UAE - tax-free zones, ports and logistics facilities, and access to international institutional finance - this scale of exit should be a matter of concern.
7. Gartner's annual "digital automaker index" which compares carmakers on their potential to monetise their software has the following line up.
Clearly, the traditional car makers have fallen behind, being overtaken by the new American and Chinese firms focusing on electric vehicles.
Ultimately, analysts warn that the auto industry is likely to go in the same direction as smartphones and PCs, with a small number of operating systems like iOS and Android eventually dominating the software space. They add that the transition will fundamentally tilt the industry’s modus operandi away from designing, building and selling cars — a business model characterised by mechanical engineering and relatively thin profit margins — and towards software and services. Toyota and its peers are aiming to use these to create new sources of revenue as the industry shifts to autonomous electric cars. Investment across the industry is already shifting from superior engines and external design to the computer systems that will control everything from batteries to safety features and, eventually, self-driving functions.
8. Unit economics of food delivery e-commerce.
Both Swiggy and Zomato typically charge restaurants a commission ranging from 15-30%, depending on the scale of the business, with smaller businesses often paying higher commissions. Most restaurants say nearly half the order value disappears before it even reaches them. Explaining the math, restaurateurs indicated to Mint that on an order of, say, ₹300, about ₹75- ₹90 goes to the aggregator as commission, while about ₹60- ₹90 is lost in discounts; ₹15- ₹30 goes towards marketing on the platforms just to stay visible. In the end, a restaurant is left with only ₹150- ₹90 out of an order worth ₹300. This is a generalized estimate and the actual numbers can be higher or lower depending on each restaurant’s commissions and ad spends. “Pre-covid, commissions were as low as 8-12%. Now, the base commission is 33% and with payment gateway charges, marketing costs, taxes, the sky's the limit. Cost-per-click (the cost a restaurant pays when a user clicks on the ad listing by a restaurant) used to be around ₹1.25 but now it is more than ₹7," the owner of a restaurant chain based in Assam told Mint... Spiralling costs aren’t the only concern for restaurants. Owners are also upset over arbitrary discounts, hidden features and a near-total lack of communication from the platforms. Several restaurateurs allege that Swiggy and Zomato launch discounts or even enable dine-in reservations without their consent.
9. Ajai Srivastava of GTRI points to how Quality Control Orders (QCOs) worsens the business environment in India. Sample this.
A recent example is the steel ministry’s June 13 order. It requires not only finished and semi-finished steel products, but also the raw materials used to make them, to have a BIS quality certificate. The rule took effect with barely one working day’s notice, causing shipments to be stuck at ports, contracts to be cancelled, and court cases to be filed... Now, every upstream raw material supplier — even if located in a third country — must also be BIS-certified... This policy imposes a double-certification requirement. The first certification — the one that matters — is for the final product, which is already in place under FMCS. The second, newly mandated certification is for upstream raw material suppliers, often in third countries far removed from the Indian market. Getting BIS certification takes 6 to 18 months, involves substantial fees, and requires performance guarantees and compliance audits. Small overseas mills producing modest volumes for an intermediary exporter have no incentive to invest the time and money needed for certification. This means limiting the number of foreign suppliers for Indian buyers...
Additional licensing for raw material suppliers adds no meaningful quality assurance. Existing safeguards — mill test certificates, port-level Positive Material Identification (PMI) tests, and customs inspections — already prevent substandard imports... No major steel-producing economy — the United States, European Union, or Japan — requires separate raw material certification if the final product meets national standards. Instead, they rely on traceability through Mill Test Certificates, accredited third-party testing, and mutual recognition agreements. India’s double-certification model diverges sharply from these norms and risks being classified as a non-tariff barrier (NTB) under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules... By forcing upstream suppliers with no commercial interest in India to undergo a burdensome certification process, the government has added avoidable costs, and jeopardised India’s reliability as a manufacturing partner.
10. Interesting that Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank run by the sons of Howard Lutnick, has been buying up tariff refund rights in the expectation that the US courts will finally rule the tariffs illegal and force the government to refund them.
11. Palantir may be the most over-valued firm in history!
Palantir’s market value has already soared to $430bn, more than 600 times its past year’s earnings and nearly triple the equivalent multiple for Cisco (or, indeed, Nvidia) at its peak. Software firms often prefer to express their valuation in terms of underlying sales, which puts Palantir’s multiple at around 120. For comparison, in 2005, the year before the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb “Google”, Google’s price-to-sales ratio peaked at 22... Adam Parker of Trivariate Research, an investment firm, has published a note entitled “Could Palantir be the best short idea?” Writing in late May, he examined the ratio of enterprise value (which adjusts market value to account for debt and cash on the balance-sheet) to forecast sales for the coming year. On this measure Palantir then scored 73 and now scores 104. Mr Parker looked for other listed companies that had hit a multiple of 70 since 2000. Excluding financial firms and those with annual revenue of less than $50m, he found 14, the largest of which has a market value around a quarter of Palantir’s... To reduce its price-to-sales valuation to “only” Google’s at its peak in 2005, while maintaining its current share price, Palantir needs to multiply its revenue by 5.6—substantially more than the barnstorming progress it has made over the past five years. Doing this over the next five would require an annual growth rate above 40%.
12. Staggering statistic about electoral support for Trump.
According to Gallup, just 1 per cent of Democrats approve of Trump’s job performance, while 93 per cent of Republicans do — equalling the biggest split since this survey started in 1979.
13. Fascinating graphic that shows the over-representation of extreme views in social media.
Recent work by US researchers Claire Robertson, Kareena S del Rosario and Jay van Bavel among others… find that social platforms’ inbuilt tendency to reward indignant and hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward the production of simplistic messages and extreme positions, while rendering moderate views less visible… with social media we essentially have a plethora of fiercely anti-establishment and ruthlessly eyeball-chasing broadcasters, and they’re reaching much larger and broader swaths of the population. This proliferation of views and narratives formerly considered beyond the pale, spread via individuals and platforms outside the control of erstwhile political and media powers, has shattered norms that previously kept radicals on the fringe...A 2019 study found that communities in Italy and Germany that received broadband internet access earlier than others also saw earlier upticks in support for populist parties. In his 2024 book The Normalization of the Radical Right, Vicente Valentim shows that support for many populist positions and politicians has long been higher than widely appreciated, and that the discovery that many others share these views — a process facilitated by the internet and social media — has led to them being voiced more confidently, and embodied at the ballot box.
14. Excellent article about the rise of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips as the "new frontier of the AI revolution" and how SK Hynix has become the dominant maker of such chips.
For decades, memory chips were the unglamorous end of the semiconductor industry, overshadowed by the logic or processor chips designed and produced by companies such as AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia and TSMC to conduct calculations and control an electronic device’s operations. But HBM designs, such as the HBM3E produced at the Icheon factory, are transforming the memory industry. Joon-yong Choi, vice-president and head of HBM business planning at SK Hynix, notes that whereas in conventional dynamic random-access memory (Dram), “cost was prioritised by customers over power and performance, with HBM power and performance are prioritised over cost”. They are helping developers of so-called large language models alleviate the effects of the “memory wall” — where limitations in storing and retrieving data are an impediment to improving performance — as well as boosting efficiency and lowering costs at thousands of data centres under construction around the world...
Intel began life in the 1960s as a memory chip company, but exited the Dram sector in the 1980s under pressure from Japanese rivals Toshiba and NEC. They, in turn, were supplanted in the 1990s by Samsung and the chip division of Hyundai Electronics, or Hynix, which would later be acquired by the SK conglomerate. The two Korean groups and Micron, of the US, have dominated the sector ever since. Samsung was until recently the undisputed leader of the heavily commoditised market in Dram chips, which are powered and store data temporarily while a processor is running. It used its superior scale to invest in production capacity during the cyclical industry’s regular downturns...
HBM chips, which Hynix began developing in 2013... involved stacking layers of Dram units connected by copper wires a tenth of the thickness of a human hair, like a multistorey library with lifts to quickly transport piles of books between floors. That means HBM chips can offer 1,024 pathways for sending data to and from a processor, Choi explains, compared with 64 for conventional advanced Dram chips. “Think of it like the number of taps filling a water tank, or the number of lanes on a highway,” he says. “When it comes to the memory requirements of AI, nothing comes close to HBM.”... Hynix’s early adoption of an advanced bonding technology called mass reflow-molded underfill, or MR-MUF, as key to its HBM success. It involves the use of a special resin-based insulation material to prevent overheating, crucial when stacking up to 16 Dram chips on top of each other...
HBM chips offer profit margins of about 50-60 per cent, compared with about 30 per cent for conventional Dram units. Because each HBM chip needs to be designed to fit the specific AI graphics processing unit to which it is paired, orders must be placed a year before production, typically on one-year contracts... while compute performance is more important for training AI models, memory is widely considered more important for deployment, also known as inference.
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