Recently, Musk was again in news due to his tweets — probably not his most famous or costliest tweet ever — for threatening to move Tesla HQ out of California and manufacturing out of the Fremont CA plant. Supply chains and production has been sputtered in the US and elsewhere due to COVID. It is true that maintaining idle plants is prohibitively expensive. I take a look at how Fremont plant works well for Tesla, and how shifting capacity is complicated.
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Supply Chains ran our lives quietly and without fuss, but due to the pandemic, they have gained media attention.
The pandemic has created stress on business and efficient supply chains. Many journalists seek to write on why we are seeing massive stock-outs for some products and not for others. The best strategy would be to directly talk to supply chain experts and practitioners who deal with global supply chains. This post is a quick note arguing, no, toilet paper shortage are not due to asset bubbles like tulip mania. It is just supply inflexibility for a functional product, what we call as “bullwhip” in supply chains.
Leave a CommentEvery reader likely knows Barbara Tuchman as one of the excellent writers and historians from the 20th century. This book was an apertif before heading into her Pulitzer-winning book on Stilwell. These notes are based her visit to China with her daughter, over six weeks covering eleven cities and some rural towns. (About double the time spent compared to my last trip to China). A fascinating snapshot of life in China in 1970s, particularly the black and white plates, and her observations of art in China. Tuchman herself notes that this book was a brief project between considerably important projects. The second part is based on her New Yorker essay, “If Mao Had Come to Washington“ discussing how Roosevelt-Mao meeting (which…
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The 2020 INFORMS Analytics Conference is FREE and online! This is a great opportunity to see some cool talks from your sofa! Here is the LINK! [More …]
Leave a CommentIt has been a tough April, and I am among the fortunate ones. I know from the extraordinary people around me, how difficult and dire the conditions have been for many people.
Here are my pandemic recommendations. Some light, some heavy. Some funny, some serious. Instead of reviewing them fully, I recall the associative memories from reading experience that came back to me, as I thumbed through these copies.
Even in this uncertain climate, some supply chains are doing well. Apple going by their 2020 Q1 reports has got some positive news to share. I wrote last year on the blog, while discussing Peak iPhone, that iPhone as a product is maturing and argued that, Apple will soon pivot to become a services company. More evidence is now in.
I revisit the thesis in this post. Apple earned a record $12.7 billion in services revenue during the first quarter of its fiscal year — a year-over-year increase of roughly 17%, growing faster than the rest. Add to this information, the margins are higher than every segment, with margins exceeding 65% in services — Apple will increasingly focus on services going forward.
Leave a CommentRonan Farrow, along with journalists like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, deserve our deepest gratitude. While they make it clear that they are not the story, it requires a certain guileless audacity to jump into unknown dangers where “angels fear to tread”. Much like Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Catch and Kill is a peerless example of investigative journalism into strange realities that we believe exist only in fiction.
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