Category: Economics of Technology

Higher Demand and Lower Supply Cause Higher Electric Bike Prices

(p. A1) For a glimpse at why inflationary pressures aren’t likely to ease anytime soon, consider the bicycle.

Bike prices in the U.S. and Europe rose sharply at the start of the pandemic because of booming consumer spending and snarl-ups in global supply chains that meant long delays and higher costs for manufacturers.

Now, manufacturers are working on building bikes for 2022 in a continuing environment of economic uncertainty—with more questions added recently by the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Today’s rampant demand and strangled supply are already pushing next year’s prices higher.

“The cost of our product is not going down,” says Richard Thorpe, chief executive of Karbon Kinetics Ltd., which sells Gocycle electric bikes world-wide from its base in Chessington, southern England. “If that is inflation, I wouldn’t call it transitory.”

. . .

(p. A12) Mr. Thorpe resisted pushing up prices for Gocycles in 2021 because he spent a chunk of the year explaining to unhappy customers why supply-chain disruptions meant there would be delays to their orders.  . . .

He says he is pressing ahead with price increases for 2022 because he doesn’t expect these supply-chain issues to get much better. He estimates the cost to the company of producing a single bike has shot up by 20% to 25% compared with the cost before the pandemic, as competition between manufacturers for common parts pushes prices skyward.

Seatpost prices have gone up 20% in the past 12 months. So have prices for the cranks the rider turns when pedaling. Handlebars are up 11%. Brake levers and calipers are up 14%. Chain prices are up 17%, and reflectors are up 50%, according to Karbon Kinetics.

Mr. Thorpe learned by email Wednesday that higher prices for magnesium—used in Gocycle wheels—mean future shipments of wheels will be 17% more expensive than they are now.

Multiple industries are competing for the batteries, semiconductor chips and tiny electronic components Gocycle uses for its dashboard displays, power management systems and charging ports.

. . .

Shipping a container full of parts from China costs him around $20,000, Mr. Thorpe says. It used to cost $4,000. Shortages of pallets and blockages at ports mean he can’t be certain when shipments will arrive. He estimates shipping costs for a single bike have effectively doubled, on average, depending on where exactly it is destined.

The flood of demand for bikes as the pandemic arrived took the industry by surprise, executives say, an example of how unprepared the global economy was for the mass switch in consumption to goods from services as the pandemic forced people to stay home.

. . .

Part of the explanation for consumer demand for bikes is a Covid-19-related trend that is pushing up prices for all sorts of manufactured goods. The pandemic has meant people are less able to spend their income on eating out, overseas travel and other services, so have been splashing out on gadgets and recreational products instead.

Retailers say consumer demand pushing up bicycle prices is still intense. Some bike buyers are seeking ways to avoid traffic or public transport as they return to the regular commute, a trend that is fueling adoption of pricey electric bikes in particular. Some retailers say they are seeing recent converts to cycling upgrade basic models for more expensive rides.

For the full story, see:

Jason Douglas. “Bicycle Makers Offer Clues on the Persistence of Inflation.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Dec. 02, 2021): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 1, 2021, and has the title “Is Inflation Sticking Around? Bicycle Makers Offer Some Clues.”)

Entrepreneurs Explore Using Hydrogen to Fuel Future Airplanes

(p. B4) A fully fueled Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner can fly roughly 8,000 miles while ferrying 300 or so passengers and their luggage. A battery with the energy equivalent to that fuel would weigh about 6.6 million pounds. That’s why — despite environmental advantages — we don’t have battery-powered electric airliners.

But aviation companies working to make cleaner aircraft are exploring the use of hydrogen, the world’s most abundant element, to power both electric and combustion engines — and to make air travel more eco-friendly

. . .

When Val Miftakhov founded ZeroAvia to develop electric aircraft, he first considered battery power. A Siberian émigré and physicist, his earlier start-up converted gasoline cars to electric, then incorporated an improved charging system. But batteries can sustain only the shortest excursions, like training flights. . . .

ZeroAvia instead chose fuel cells, which are essentially a chemical battery that substitutes lighter-than-air hydrogen for the weighty lithium ion. Hydrogen is notable for its energy density — the amount of energy per kilogram — which is about three times that of jet fuel. The byproduct of burning hydrogen is water. Hydrogen can be made from water and renewable energy, although most is now made from natural gas, which is not particularly green.

Mr. Miftakhov acknowledged that hydrogen storage containers, which were generally designed for ground transportation, were not practical for aircraft. “We need to focus on reducing the weight,” he said, “We have some fairly low-hanging fruit.”

For the full story, see:

Roy Furchgott. “Will Hydrogen Be Aviation’s Eco-Friendly Fuel?” The New York Times (Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 22, 2021, and has the title “Can Hydrogen Save Aviation’s Fuel Challenges? It’s Got a Way to Go.”)

Firms Nimbly Pivot to Build Innovative Products That Use Fewer Chips

(p. A1) Manufacturers struggling with a shortage of semiconductor chips are finding workarounds, executives said, redesigning products, shipping uncompleted units and focusing on older, lower-tech models.

. . .

Boss Products typically used hand-held controls with computer chips to angle snow truck blades. The company, which is owned by Toro Co., hasn’t been able to find enough chips. So employees started looking for ways to use fewer of them. Some remembered that joysticks, without computer chips, were used to control these features until electronics became affordable and commonplace.

“Let’s go back to the old design,” said Rick Rodier, a Toro executive. “It still does the job. It was done this way for 30 years. It was reliable. It was fine. It was just a little more cumbersome to build and assemble.”

. . .

(p. A6) T3 Motion, which makes electric stand-up vehicles for airport and university security officers, is redesigning its products to use fewer computer chips and electronics.

William Tsumpes, the company’s CEO, said instead of multiple components to control features like batteries, lighting and sirens, the redesigned vehicle will use a centralized, integrated board with a single processor to control all the parts of the vehicle. This move will eliminate the other five individual circuit boards, he said. Mr. Tsumpes said it was tough to quickly execute the redesign, but the moves, and an engine change, will lead to increased vehicle range.

“It’s spurring innovation,” Mr. Tsumpes said.

For the full story, see:

Austen Hufford. “Chip Shortage Leads to Redesigned Products.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov. 15, 2021): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 14, 2021, and has the title “Chip Shortage Sees Manufacturers Pitch Lower-Tech Models.”)

New Nuclear Designs Are “Cheap, Efficient, Extremely Reliable”, “Nearly Carbon-Free” and Much Safer

(p. A17) Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste, the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output, the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste. Even including the Chernobyl disaster, human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives.

Although the federal government tends to resist nuclear power, many nuclear technologies are being investigated and funded by private capital including molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal reactors, advanced small modular reactors, microreactors and much more. More than 70 development projects are under way in the U.S., with many designs intended to create assembly-line construction facilities to simplify and standardize testing, licensing and installations. One appealing approach is to replace large-scale facilities with many smaller but safer, cheaper and more-manageable ones. The $10 billion 10-year planning and implementation cycle for a large nuclear plant can be cut in half with a small modular reactor and another half with a microreactor.

. . .

Nuclear power is cheap, efficient, extremely reliable and nearly carbon-free. New designs, including smaller reactors, drastically reduce the risk of large-scale radioactive contamination.

. . .

Sacrifice isn’t always the path to progress.

For the full commentary, see:

Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller. “Nuclear Power Is the Best Climate-Change Solution by Far.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 5, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 4, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Michael Dell Is a Project Entrepreneur

(p. C18) A decade ago, the rise of smartphones and tablets seemed to spell doom for the Dell computer company, which had tried to enter both markets without success. (Does anyone remember the “phablet”?) By 2012 Dell’s market share for PCs had eroded to just over 10%, and its share price had sunk below $9, from around $30 in 2007.

“I felt abandoned by the public shareholders,” admits Michael Dell, the company’s founder and CEO, in his new autobiography, “Play Nice But Win,” published next week. But Dell’s historically low stock price also offered a silver lining. With help from Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, in 2013 Mr. Dell paid $24.9 billion to take his company private. This rare maneuver freed him to transform his company “without the tyranny, the ever-ticking shot clock, of a quarterly earnings report,” he writes.

Today the company rebranded as Dell Technologies is worth around $80 billion, more than four times its value before going private.

. . .

In his efforts to take the company private in 2013 and then take it public again in 2018, Mr. Dell locked horns with Carl Icahn, an activist investor, who publicly compared Mr. Dell to Machiavelli and threatened to purchase the company himself and install a new CEO. In his book and in conversation, Mr. Dell is unsparing about Mr. Icahn, calling him a “circus clown” with “zero moral compass” and “no idea what Dell does.” Mr. Icahn, in turn, calls Mr. Dell a “bamboozler” who tried to “swindle” shareholders.

. . .

A range of supply-chain problems have meant that demand for PCs has been outstripping supply. But Dell has done a better job than its rivals of getting the relevant parts, and the company has moved more quickly than Hewlett-Packard Inc. and others in anticipating a shift in PC sales from consumers to businesses as offices open back up. Mr. Dell explains that the company’s approach to manufacturing has shifted in recent years from “just in time to just in case,” with supply chains that are geographically diverse enough to handle disruptions. He adds that the company’s longstanding approach of selling directly to customers has meant Dell’s “signal quality is higher” than its competitors when it comes to registering what people and companies actually want.

. . .

Mr. Dell is the last computer pioneer who is still running his own company. Although he acknowledges it is harder at his age to cultivate the “beginner’s mind” capable of generating radical new ideas, he says he has no plans to step aside any time soon. The work feels too interesting and too important, he explains, and he’s having too much fun: “I love what I do.”

For the full essay, see:

Emily Bobrow, interviewer(?). “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Michael Dell.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 02, 2021): C18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 1, 2021, and has the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Tech Founder Michael Dell Is Navigating a Changing Industry.” The article does not indicate whether the quotes from Michael Dell are from his book or from an interview. I am guessing that except for a quote explicitly identified as from the book, the quotes are from an interview.)

The book by Dell mentioned in the essay is:

Dell, Michael. Play Nice but Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader. New York: Portfolio, 2021.

Chinese Communists Know How to Replicate and Mimic But Not How to Create

(p. A21) Taiwan is an austere rock in a typhoon-laden sea with 24 million people. But this little island has — by universal acclaim — the most sophisticated microchip manufacturer in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC.

About 100 miles away, across the straits, is mainland China, with 1.4 billion people. Most are the same ethnicity, speak the same language and eat the same food as the people of Taiwan. But they have never been able to master the manufacture of the most advanced logic chips that TSMC makes.

. . .

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it builds the chips that lots of different companies design — particularly Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and even Intel. Over the years, TSMC has built an amazing ecosystem of trusted partners that share their intellectual property with TSMC to build their proprietary chips. At the same time, leading tool companies — like America’s Applied Materials and the Netherlands’ ASML — are happy to sell their best chip-making tools to TSMC. This ensures that the company is always on the cutting edge of the material science and lithography that go into building and etching the base of every semiconductor.

I used to worry that Xi’s big idea — “Made in China 2025,” his plan to dominate all the new 21st-century technologies — would leave the West in the dust. But I worry a little less now.

. . .

And everything that Xi is doing — from Australia to Taiwan to Jack Ma — is driving them away. As one U.S. chip executive said to me of Xi, “The Chinese have replicated and mimicked,” but they have never created the kind of ecosystem like TSMC’s, “because there is no trust.”

For the full commentary, see:

Thomas L. Friedman. “China Is Becoming a Real Danger.” The New York Times (Wednesday, October 20, 2021): A21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date October 19, 2021, and has the title “China’s Bullying Is Becoming a Danger to the World and Itself.” The passages quoted above are in both the online and print versions. The ellipses are appropriate for the print version, but would be slightly different for the online version because it has some additional passages that are not quoted above.)

Entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield Failed With “Glitch” Before Succeeding With “Slack”

(p. A15) Entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield once tried to build a multiplayer online game but switched to photo sharing, selling Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 for $25 million. Success, but not a home run in Silicon Valley. Mr. Butterfield left Yahoo in 2008 to help found a company called Tiny Speck and build another multiplayer online game called “Glitch.” Persistence! “Glitch” attracted tens of thousands of gamers, but not enough to cover its costs, so Mr. Butterfield killed it in 2012.

Tiny Speck pivoted, which in Silicon Valley means fail and scramble to do something else. The company had built its own crude internal communications system for employees to chat digitally during the development of “Glitch.” Maybe others would use it. Seven months after they started work on Slack, the company announced its preview release. On the first day of the press blitz, 8,000 people requested the preview version. In February 2014 Slack had 16,000 users and by November it had 285,000, with 73,000 paying for it. Now more than 10 million people use it daily. Mr. Butterfield sold Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion last year. That’s failing upward!

For the full commentary, see:

Andy Kessler. “INSIDE VIEW; Failure Is Always an Option.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Oct. 18, 2021): A15.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date October 17, 2021, and has the title “INSIDE VIEW; Failure Was Always an Option for Elizabeth Holmes.”)

Virtual Reality (VR) Used to Better See Cancer Cell Mutations

(p. R3) Chemist and entrepreneur Jackie von Salm recently walked inside a receptor in the brain to inspect a new drug compound. As she looked at the brightly colored, cascading ribbons around her, she noted something: Part of the atomic structure, a series of thick, orange rods and hexagons, jutted toward her in an odd way, suggesting that the compound, a derivative of the psychedelic DMT, might be effective at treating addiction without having hallucinogenic effects.

“This is weird,” says Dr. von Salm, the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Psilera Inc., a Tampa, Fla.-based company working to turn psychedelics into treatments for addiction, neurodegenerative diseases and mood disorders. “But it might be really unique and special.”

The odd positioning of the compound might be the right shape to latch onto serotonin receptors in the brain that are involved with hallucination and addiction. That insight was possible thanks to a technology more closely associated with gamers than scientists: Virtual reality.

Dr. von Salm is one of a growing number of drug-discovery researchers who are using VR to see, in new ways, the molecules they have long studied on computer screens. Their goal is to investigate subtle changes in the distance, shape and chemical properties of atomic structures that could give them clues about how well a drug might work and speed up the drug-discovery process.

. . .

Since 2018, cancer researchers at the University of California San Francisco have been using VR to better understand the genetic mutations in cancer cells that might make a patient resistant to treatment. For example, in VR, it was clear that the reason a drug didn’t bind properly to its protein target in the cancer cell was because of the movement of a portion of the protein called the P-loop. The movement was caused by a mutation in the target.

On a computer monitor, it was difficult to see the tiny change in the movement. “When there are changes like that, the VR is critical,” says Beth Apsel Winger, a hematologist and oncologist at the university’s department of pediatrics.

For the full commentary, see:

Sara Castellanos. “VR Rx.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Sept. 10, 2021): R3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 7, 2021, and has the title “Virtual Reality Puts Drug Researchers Inside the Molecules They Study.”)

Amazon Hiring 55,000 Workers

(p. B3) Amazon.com Inc. said it is seeking to hire about 55,000 people globally among its corporate and technology ranks during a recruiting event set for Sept. 15, [2021] as the e-commerce giant continues a hiring spree begun at start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Seattle-based company is aiming to fill roles in cloud-computing unit Amazon Web Services, as well as in divisions such as Amazon Studios, advertising and its broadband satellite Project Kuiper. The open positions include more than 40,000 roles in the U.S. across 220 locations, including in New York City; Bellevue, Wash.; and Arlington, Va., where the company is opening a large corporate office.

. . .

The company employs about 950,000 people in the U.S. and has said it has made more than 450,000 hires throughout the country since the public-health crisis began.

For the full story, see:

Dave Sebastian. “Amazon Seeks to Hire 55,000 for Office, Tech Roles.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021): B3.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 1, 2021, and has the title “Amazon Seeks to Hire 55,000 for Corporate, Tech Roles.”)

Walmart Hiring 20,000 Workers

(p. B3) Walmart Inc. is hiring 20,000 workers for its supply-chain operations ahead of the holidays, highlighting the growing role of distribution and delivery as the retailer competes with e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.

The new hires will be permanent positions aimed at supporting Walmart through the holiday surge and beyond, the retailer said Wednesday [Sept. 1, 2021]. The full- and part-time jobs range from order pickers, freight handlers and forklift operators to technician and management roles at more than 250 Walmart and Sam’s Club distribution and fulfillment centers and transportation offices.

For the full story, see:

Jennifer Smith. “Walmart Plans to Add 20,000 Workers.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Sept. 02, 2021): B3.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 1, 2021, and has the title “Walmart Will Add 20,000 Workers to Supply-Chain Operations This Year.”)