- Sunday CET
- Posts
- leverage
Good morning,
Welcome to Sunday CET, guys - big freshly brewed cuppa coffee by my side, and ready to rock’n’roll. How’s 2025 treating you so far? Let me know 😀
Cheers,
Dragos
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Market talk
🇪🇺 The aspiration to turn Germany into a semiconductor superpower looks increasingly hopeless - same with the seemingly unattainable EU’s goal to raise market share in global semiconductor output to 20% by 2030.
take a step back and think about it in sport terms - Germany/Europe used to be top athletes competing at high levels, but now they’re so out of shape that they can hardly count in regional competitions.
but at the public level, they still live off and talk out loud of the gold medals they have won 30 years ago, as if they now count for the big international championship.
they do not, and it’s not only poor conditioning but also participants are so out of touch from the global context that they don’t even realize it - a disconnected narrative driven by politicians, which sadly translates into eligible voters propaganda.
when you’re out of shape, you don’t brag about how you win the Olympics today or even some day, you just put your head down, get your shit together and prepare quietly to be at least decently able to compete. Train hard every day, you know, under promise and over deliver - does this kind of attitude look like what you’re seeing from Europe’s heads? And oh my god, there’s so much shit to clean in Europe before even being able to open the mouth for being considered at the big boys table.
if you are into history, here’s another analogy - btw, I am of belief that history tends to repeat itself, and knowing the past of a company/industry/country helps tremendously understand and plan its future opportunity.
👇️
the Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes and both endemic and epidemic disease drove many of these immediate factors.
it’s Europe today, every single point, right?
🇨🇳 Chinese car producers f-ed up the Japanese car market too - on a broader level, anybody doubting that China rules Asia is just naive, you need to spend a bit of time there if nothing else (I just did), the Chinese are omni-present, everywhere you look around.
and remember mentioning in last week’s email how the Chinese are using Vietnam as a gateway to the Western world? Here’s more evidence of it, leading to Vietnam attracting similar levels of manufacturing FDI than India despite being 14x smaller in population.
that FDI is mostly Chinese targeting exports to the US, maybe? 👇️
💲 Quickies:
Ubisoft of France hired advisors to weigh strategic options, including a takeover.
same Ubisoft whose workers went on a strike last year to protest the company’s request asking employees to return to the office three days a week.
Tencent was designated a Chinese military company by the U.S. Department of Defense.
looks like a way for Trump getting more leverage, the listing has no legal consequences beyond barring U.S. government contractors from doing business with Tencent starting in 2026.
more on American leverage further below.
It’s a new year, and we’ve gotten a new commission dedicated to startups in the EU.
who knows, maybe the EU people don’t get the startup world because it is not properly organised 😀
jokes aside, actions speak louder than words, nobody will the take the EU seriously unless it actually does something that’s i) actionable and ii) impactful in a specific way for the startup companies. The coulda-woulda-shoulda is just talk that scores great on Linkedin engagement.
Japan flags foreign takeover of 7-Eleven owner as a security issue - 7-Eleven is like an institution in Asia, btw.
Private equity and venture capital funds looking for the next big thing in sport have turned to one of the most popular summer Olympic events: volleyball.
Nvidia chief says that AI agents are the new digital workforce and that the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.
Dell is re-branding its PCs in an Apple-like manner in an effort to make its computers look cool and spur demand.
it’s what a boomer would do - founder Michael Dell, still CEO at the company, is now 59 years old. He started Dell when he was 19.
OpenAI sent tens of thousands of server requests as it was scraping the content of an ecommerce site with 65,000 products, each with its own page and three photos - it took it down, of course.
to add insult to injury, the owner expects a jacked-up AWS bill thanks to all of the CPU and downloading activity from the bot.
Fintech ad spend has grown an average of more than 45% year-over-year, a sign of growth and maturity but also setting the stage for potential initial public offerings or acquisitions.
Also notable
💲 Cheat sheets:
🗣️ Speaking of which, Sequoia has done a marketing makeover - crisp. Is the below statement differentiating enough?
🇪🇸 Meanwhile, the Spanish VCs have taken the Linkedin takes pollution to the next level and hired ghost writers to produce marketing materials. Wait until they discover that ghost writers use ChatGPT for making money off VCs.
🇬🇧 London sucks, where is everybody else moving? - the Harry Stebbings edition.
and it’s not only an anecdote of a rich boy getting robbed in a posh touristic neighborhood - the real talk is that it’s gotten so bad in the UK that normal people are leaving it in historic droves, as the standard of living of regular joes has consistently been declining over the past few years, while the economy is heading to a severe economic crash.
while pondering where to move - a top recurring topic in the European startup world in the past 24 months - it is also worthy noting that no place is perfect and we live in a fragile world i.e look at the way the Americans have treated the LA fires situation that destroyed some of the most expensive properties in the United States.
🇨🇳 China, circa 2025:
A 60 years old Chinese guy pleaded guilty in connection with opening and operating an undeclared overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, for the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
China expanded visa-free transit travel policy for foreigners to 10 days - namely 240 hours, up from 144 hours, given you provide an outgoing ticket reservation for a third country.
Tips for surviving in cashless China.
China plans to build Three Gorges dam in space to harness solar power.
China is trying to stop workers and equipment from going to India's iPhone factories.
China has been cutting the world's internet cables lately and patented devices to sever such cables quickly and cheaply, widely installed & used on China's private ships (including foreign registered vessels) with high likelihood the technology has been transferred to Russia - not a joke.
China is playing military chess with Taiwan as it looks like it is going to invade sooner rather than later. Taiwanese know this, of course.
🤡 2025 predictions - 1, 2 & Africa + 2024 in review & 52 things I learnt in 2024.
💲 More doom and gloom hypothesis from a finance guy - i.e. the governments will mandate where investors should deploy their capital.
🇺🇦 A realistic current situation on the war in Ukraine.
🇺🇸 Apart from giving Trump leverage in his talks to Putin and Xi (see also Panama and Canada) - why Greenland is of growing strategic significance.
this week, Trump Jr was sent to Greenland add weight to the idea of a purchase, and where apparently the Americans used the oldest trick in the book to stage local support - bribed homeless people to play Trump supporters.
whatever it takes, right? Speaking of leverage, the American back and forth gaming of an eventual Tiktok sale of its local assets with a January 19 deadline, should also be looked through the lens of Trump building leverage, just like Tencent’s case above, as he’s trying to outsmart Xi. He actually invited Xi to his January 20 inauguration, though it is not customary - declined but the Chinese will send a representative though and everybody will save face.
it’s a more of a theater play that should look like a chess game, all Trump’s declarations are intent expressions for getting leverage - and probably a reason for which he got the Danish people puzzled. All those sudden ideas thrown out publicly rather indicate that the Americans don’t really have a specific plan, only some sort of a direction and play whatever the market brings their way - kinda like building a startup, which is scary for running a country while avoiding world war three. And btw, the survival odds for a startup are super low.
finally, speaking of buying islands, there is historic precedents between US and DK - as recent as less than 100 years ago, during World War I, Denmark sold three Carribean islands - Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix - to the US for $25 million in gold coin.
🇺🇸 More American politics - let that sink in for a minute:
the guy who bought a social media platform for $44 billion in order to become part of the American government, reportedly has been speaking with allies about how to unseat Britain's prime minister, Keir Starmer.
same guy also unequivocally urged Germans to back the far right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the forthcoming elections.
politics and diplomacy are all about soft power rather than brute force that’s only an ultimate resort leading to conflicts and confrontations - and what’s above can easily be labelled as meddling with other countries affairs, right? Turn the tables around and imagine any European public figure doing so for undermining the American establishment and we would be at war with the US in a day.
what’s behind that, apart from an inflated ego and use of drugs? Regulations, power and money.
can also be leverage as he acts on behalf of Trump’s interests but that’s pushing it a bit. Or is it? 😀
🇳🇱 Dutch Central Bank restores Amsterdam’s ‘ Ugliest Building, following nearly five years of renovations for its headquarters at Frederiksplein, Amsterdam.
🤌 Italian village forbids residents from becoming ill.
🇩🇪 Germans are the world champions in sick leave.
🇪🇸 Americans in Spain, according to pre-Trump getting elected data - 41k yankee souls as of June 2023, +39% from three years ago. The country will cancel the golden visa program this coming March.
😱 What does an AI-powered hotel look like.
💸 The average tip at full-service restaurants in the US hit its lowest level in six years, declining to 19.3% in Q3 2024.
That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!
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