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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Personal Finance / Macroeconomic Trends & Risks
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Author: oddhack   😊 😞
Number: of 4460 
Subject: Re: China's next big problem - cars
Date: 09/22/25 10:12 AM
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I think you will need to break it down by region, or even specific countries.

While the distribution varies in different countries, we can just observe the dominant and growing Chinese position in EV batteries, storage batteries, solar panels and precursor materials like polysilicon, and other aspects of electrification. For one view, see iea.org - Executive summary .

Trying to retain a profitable position with specialty, high-margin items while the mass market gets more and more capable and eats your specialty market from underneath is probably a poor strategy. I got the standard line when I joined Silicon Graphics in 1997 - "Yes, PC graphics companies like NVIDIA sell a lot more units, but they are slow and limited and can't begin to compete with our $50K+ workstations. We will continue to own most of the profits with our high-end products while they struggle for margin with commodity products".

Cut to 9 years later, SGI down to about 15% of its headcount in 1997, declaring bankruptcy and shutting down its graphics division after utter failure to keep up with commodity GPUs.

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