GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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G+ is a community for professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to connect through online discussions and in-person meetings. You will continue to see G+ Insights (formerly GLG News) here as well as on the G+ website, where you can share and discuss the G+ Insights you read.
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Ford Should Have Bought Tata Instead of Jaguar and Land Rover
November 23, 2007
U.K. Union Says, "Tata, Ford" | www.forbes.com
Tata is trying to buy the Jaguar and Land Rover brands as an entre into the western European and North American markets for its future higher end, but still commodity, cars.
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November 23, 2007
Mexico's Elektra Plans To Sell, Produce Chinese Automobiles | online.wsj.com
The business model of Mexico's Elektra Stores is as attractive to Chinese car makers as it is frightening to all of the others.
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November 20, 2007
Worth its weight in platinum | www.nature.com
The production of platinum and palladium has doubled in the last ten years. Chinese demand for platinum for automotive emission control catalyst has just begun. Will western usage at current rates be possible if Chinese demand ramps up?
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November 19, 2007
Honda to lease fuel cell cars in Calif. | www.businessweek.com
Honda has a state-of-the-art fuel cell reliable enough, small enough, and powerful enough to demonstrate as a short range capable power train for a small car. Honda is far from being ready to sell this vehicle outright, and the market is even farther away from being ready for it. The fuel cell is expensive to manufacture and the metals it requires are strategic and in short supply. There is no hydrogen fuel distribution system in place anywhere in the world.
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November 9, 2007
China tightens foreign investment rules | afp.google.com
A crisis is looming for those American OEM heavy industrial companies who depend on imports of key specialty metals from China for production of their products in the US. China wants to create and maintain employment in China, and it feels that it is only logical to restrict access to strategic and rare domestic Chinese raw materials to companies that make their products in China. American companies that have outsourced to China, for return to the US, the production of goods, which can only be made with raw materials produced in or controlled by China are now in trouble. China, for example, is today the world's largest producer of tungsten.
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GM Purchasing Made an Incredibly Bad Short-Sighted Bet on Outsourcing from China
November 8, 2007
Can Wagoner Outlast GM's Loss? | www.businessweek.com
All of GM's real losses lately are not just due to legacy costs and product mix. GM is hiding, in plain site, its massive exposure to Chinese currency fluctuations and raw material costs.
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Are Ford and Ballard each Floundering Outside of Their Core Competencies to Salvage Something?
November 7, 2007
Ballard is in talks with Daimler, Ford to sell fuel cell unit | www.freep.com
Ballard Power Systems was originally a battery company; it made lithium technology batteries for military power storage applications. Ford Motor Company was the first large industrial company to mass produce a car intended for middle income customers. Ballard knows very little about the design, power trains, and manufacturing of automobiles for mass consumption. Ford doesn't seem to know much about those topics either. This move, by Ford, is a poorly thought out idea, and just a waste of money.
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Would Anyone Notice, Or, Even, Care, If Ford Stopped Selling Hybrids in America?
November 7, 2007
Ford will not sell hybrids in Europe | www.autonews.com
The Ford Motor Company hardly sells any hybrid vehicles. Ford Europe has announced that they will not even offer hybrids there. Is there then any reason to continue to sell hybrids in America? I think the answer is no.
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November 6, 2007
GM Will Color Its Strategy Green in China | online.wsj.com
General Motors' corporate managers have for decades adopted a business model based on a shortsighted belief in mainly short term solutions to long term problems; this managerial class, which is typical of most large American corporations, and universal within the American OEM automotive industry, assumes that market forces will always level the playing field, because they, the market forces, will affect all participants equally. This American B-school thinking has led them to their latest mistake with regard to the Chinese OEM automotive industry.
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November 5, 2007
Rusal to take smelting nuclear | business.timesonline.co.uk
No aluminum producer yet has successfully managed to vertically integrate the production of its total needs for electric power into its process, because it turned out not to be possible to control its access to the coal, oil, or gas fuel for a dedicated electric power plant, or even if it might have been , it would not have been possible to predict or control the price of those energy producing natural resources. No where on earth, up until now, did any aluminum producer have 1.) the backing of a sovereign government, or 2.) the capital, or 3.) the access to technology to even consider the idea of a nuclear plant to produce the energy needed for its processing of aluminum. Rusal, Russian Aluminum has all three necessary factors just enumerated in place. Therefore, Rusal's project is logical and market driven. The opposition will be fanatic, irrational, and driven by a total lack of understanding of advances in safety and risk management, and come from the outside and be ignored.
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Doesn't BHP Billiton Benefit More From its Proposed Pricing Index Than Either CVRD or Rio Tinto?
November 2, 2007
BHP Billiton Faces China's Anger on Index | www.ft.com
BHP Billiton is geographically the closest supplier to China of iron ore. BHP wants the 2008 price for its iron ore to be indexed to the Cinese spot market. Who would benefit most from this "first step,' perhaps, towards an exchange traded iron ore contract? I think not.
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November 2, 2007
Pale Green -- Lexus's $100,000 Hybrid | online.wsj.com
Toyota has clearly decided not to wait around any longer for a safe, reliable, cost effective lithium battery for its next generation hybrids. Toyota also continues to rely on 125 year old lead acid battery technology for starting its hybrid cars, and safe reliable proven in mass production nickel metal hydride batteries for the battery part of the hybrid power train for its, and, so far, the world's, largest most expensive hybrid ever. What does it say, though, about Toyota engineering that a first test of the $100,000+ Lexus top of the line hybrid results in a dead (lead acid) starting battery, caused it is guessed by leaving a light or accessory on overnight, converting the luxury sedan into a 2 1/2 ton paperweight? It actually tells us all we need to know about this turkey; It was either a rush to market to try and steal the thunder from GM's newest SUV hybrids or to try and take the head off a presumed to be imminent Tesla introduction. Score it an error, not a run.
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Lithium Takes a Step Backwards as Toyota Both Hesitates and Covers Its Bets
October 29, 2007
Toyota's First Lithium Will Most Likely Be A Lexus | www.egmcartech.com
The misleading title of this source article should be rewritten for clarity as "Lithium batteries downplayed for use anytime soon by Toyota.
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Ford makes an incredibly insensitive blunder in communicating with retirees
October 29, 2007
Ford Retirees Receive False Benefits Letter | www.clickondetroit.com
Did Ford outsource the computer sorting of the ages and names of who should receive the letter it sent out to all of its retirees announcing a cut in health benefits? If it did doesn't this tell us a lot about the quality of IT outsourcing vendors chosen by Ford? If it didn't should some very careless and insensitive internal employees be disciplined or terminated? In any case how far does $1800 a month go to reduce out of pocket expenses for retirees buying supplemental health endurance to Medicare?
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Toyota is Stumbling in the American Market over the Issue of Being 'Green.'
October 24, 2007
Toyota's Cautious Green Strategy | online.wsj.com
The US business media are biased in favor of Toyota today, only because of a clever stratagem, the introduction of the Prius hybrid into the US market, in 1999. This bias has lately begun to backfire as introspection proves that the truth is the opposite of what even the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the New York Times, tells us about Toyota's product planning drivers.
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What does a Strong Tiger want with a Weak Bear Stearns?
October 24, 2007
Bear's Slow Boat to China | online.wsj.com
The CITIC tiger is far the stronger of the two, so why does it wish to hunt with the weak Bear Stearns? The answer may be that CITIC will control any joint ventures between the two.
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Will Car Makers Go Back Again to the Electric Car Future?
October 24, 2007
Hybrid or All-Electric? Car Makers Take Sides | online.wsj.com
The most recent uncoerced, by government, attempt to build and market an all-electric battery powered car was GM's EV1 in the mid to late 1990s. GM decided that the EV1 was a failure due to limited range and performance, for its size, and withdrew it. Before GM could, if it even wanted to, introduce any further generations of electric cars Toyota surprised everyone with the hybrid Prius. Now the debate has begun again, but this time everyone will take a position and enter the market. What will now be the drivers for success in the market for the automotive power train of the future?
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October 22, 2007
China's continued steel demand bolsters iron ore prices, miners | online.wsj.com
There is today, in 2007, simply not enough producing capacity for iron ore, globally, to allow the Chinese steel industry leverage in resisting price increases.
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Should a reservation for a Tesla really be called a Ponzi?
October 22, 2007
The Spinal Tap Economy | www.slate.com
A late writer for London's Economist, Fred Hirsch, coined the term "positional goods" to define the buying habits of those we now call the ultrarich, the inhabitants of Richistan. The most important attribute of a positional good is that only a very few, ultimately, hopefully, just one, can own them. Isn't this exactly what a reservation for a Tesla, electric high performance car, has become? Is the reservation, itself, perhaps the only thing that a customer will ever get from Tesla, and even If so, does it matter?
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October 22, 2007
EnerDel to Unveil Lithium-ion Hybrid Battery | www.evworld.com
Lithium carbonate is not expensive; it costs today when its supply exceeds the demand only about USD$7 per kilogram. It will take about 2 kg of lithium for the proposed battery pack of a Prius size, or Saturn Aura size, car. The cost problem is not therefore for the fundamental raw material but for the construction cost and the cost of warranty and replacement service. Could it be that EnerDel is just guessing at service and warranty costs when it says its battery will originally sell for half the price of currently used nickel metal hydride battery packs?
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