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Technology Was Supposed to Transform Insurance Pricing. It Hasn't.

This article from the Wall Street Journal may be of interest. Here is a section: 

At first, the insurance pricing process -- heavily reliant on algorithms and mathematical modeling -- seemed ripe for upending, thanks to advances in the sheer amount and variety of data digitally-native companies could suddenly collect on customers.

But the Silicon Valley axiom to move-fast-and-break-things hasn't been enough to transform an industry built on centuries of observed human behavior, massive marketing budgets and a savvy grasp of the regulatory environment.

Founded in 2015, Lemonade initially aimed to sell renters and homeowners insurance. It was worth $9.87 billion at its peak in 2021; it's now worth $1.23 billion. Root Insurance, also founded in 2015, began with the idea of using telematics -- or in-car data -- to offer personalized auto insurance based on how people drive. In 2020, it was worth roughly $6.8 billion, and has since swooned to about $67 million. Property and casualty insurance startup Hippo went public at a $5 billion valuation in 2021. It is now worth around $425 million.

So far, the insurtechs have been slow to gather and contextualize enough data to actually build better models. Regulations have restricted the use of some of their data and differentiated pricing. And it has been difficult to chip away market share from established industry giants.



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New type of quasiparticle emerges to tame quantum computing errors

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The Quantinuum group, meanwhile, made non-Abelian anyons in a different way. Using the Honeywell 32-qubit H2 quantum processor, which holds ytterbium ions in an electromagnetic trap and alters their quantum states using lasers, they created a quasi-one-dimensional chain of interacting trapped-ion qubits.

Here, the anyons correspond to natural excitations of the ground state of the qubit system – which technically means they are not quasiparticles, since quasiparticles must be excited states. “The Majorana zero modes at the end of superconducting wires in the Microsoft experiment and the lattice defects in the Google experiment are non-Abelian defects,” emphasizes Ashvin Vishwanath of Harvard University, who collaborated with the Quantinuum team. “Unlike our experiment, they are not realized on top of true non-Abelian topological order.”



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Why So Many Electric Car Chargers in America Don't Work

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section: 

There isn’t a single reason for EV charger failures. Some of the problems, particularly with older machines, can be chalked up to a new technology going through the usual learning curve of improvements, all while sitting outside, exposed to the weather. There have been cycles of needed upgrades, such as replacing modems to deal with 5G wireless internet service. The myriad networks, retail outlets and garage owners who own the machines don’t always stay on top of maintenance. And chargers must communicate with a rapidly expanding variety of cars. 

To that end, the precise scope of the problem isn’t known. EV drivers face a complex landscape of competing charging companies, each with its own stations and app, and there is no central repository of data on station performance. One widely cited 2022 study of fast-charging stations in the San Francisco Bay Area (excluding Tesla Inc.’s Superchargers), found that about 25% of the 657 plugs weren’t working. While J.D. Power doesn’t disclose reliability rankings, Gruber said the worst-performing charging company leaves drivers unable to plug in about 39% of the time. 

“With public charging, it’s a bit of the wild, wild West,” he said.

Tesla proved that reliable charging is possible. The all-electric automaker runs a global network of 45,000 Superchargers, which can add up to 200 miles of range in just 15 minutes. Tesla consistently gets the highest customer-satisfaction marks of any charging company in J.D. Power’s surveys, Gruber said. Its drivers report charger downtime of just 3%.

But Tesla has the advantage of keeping everything in-house. Until recently, Superchargers could only be used by Tesla cars, and didn’t need to work with the growing array of other EVs and batteries. Tesla also owns its Supercharger network, whereas many of the public chargers installed over the past decade are owned by whoever owns the parking lot where they’re located. Such property owners, Gruber said, don’t have as strong an incentive to maintain their machines.



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BT Plans to Cut Up to 55,000 Jobs Following Fiber Rollout

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section: 

BT Group Plc said it plans to cut its workforce by as many as 55,000 people by the end of the decade, after the UK’s biggest network operator completes its nationwide fiber-optic rollout. 

The company’s workforce will drop to 75,000 to 90,000 people by the fiscal year ending in March 2030 from about 130,000 currently, counting employees and contractors, the company said in its full-year earnings statement on Thursday. That’s a decline of about 42%.

Chief Executive Officer Philip Jansen is slashing costs at BT, fighting an industrywide slump as telecom carriers spend heavily on networks to keep up with surging data demand without a corresponding rise in revenues. On Tuesday, British rival Vodafone Group Plc announced plans to reduce headcount by 11,000 over the next three years. Jansen has pledged to cut expenses by £3 billion ($3.7 billion) a year by 2025 against 2020 levels, and has been weighing more dramatic job cuts since at least 2019. 



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Automakers Speeding Platinum Substitution Push Market to Deficit

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

Automakers are accelerating the substitution of platinum for pricier palladium in catalytic converters,
putting the market for the metal on track for a deficit for the first time in two years, according to Johnson Matthey Plc.

Demand from automakers will exceed 3 million ounces for the first time since 2018 as platinum is increasingly preferred over palladium, which will continue to see its usage decline, the firm wrote in a report on Monday. Both precious metals are used to cut emissions from car exhausts.

The car industry’s switch has taken years, but is finally having a sizeable impact on the fundamentals of platinum group metals. While palladium has traded at a premium to platinum since 2017, the gap has narrowed to near the smallest in more than four years.

“Just as substitution benefits platinum, it disadvantages palladium,” said Rupen Raithatha, market research director at Johnson Matthey. “These are all incremental trends.”

Investors are increasingly eyeing risks to platinum supplies from South Africa, the world’s top miner, as power blackouts threaten to cripple its output. So far, the country’s miners have limited the impact by idling processing plants, allowing mining to continue, though more severe outages could hit overall production, according to Johnson Matthey.

The firm sees platinum in a small deficit of 128,000 ounces in 2023, following two years of large surpluses. That compares to the record shortfall forecast by the World Platinum Investment Council.
 



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Sea's Path to Profit Paved With Layoffs, Single-Ply Toilet Paper

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section: 

Li’s shock treatment paid off. In March, Sea reported the first quarterly profit in its 14-year history, $427 million in GAAP-sanctioned net income. Its stock soared 22%. Last week, it said it would hand out 5% raises to most staff. Sea has now more than doubled its market value since November.

Like so many tech startups of its generation, Sea had bled red ink for years. In fact, it lost more than $8 billion since its founding to pay for growth in its e-commerce, games and finance operations. For now at least, Sea is setting a different kind of example: It’s demonstrating that if your underlying business is sound and substantial, you can pull back on subsidies and expansions to break even.

That’s proving a challenge for rivals. Among Sea’s regional competitors, Singapore’s Grab Holdings Ltd. is still losing more than $300 million a quarter, while Indonesia’s GoTo Group’s losses exceed $250 million. Sea may also cause trouble for global tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Amazon.com Inc., which are both seeking growth in emerging markets. 

“What you’re seeing is a separation of proper, monetizable business models from something that is a work-in-progress,” said Amit Kunal, managing partner of Growtheum Capital, a private equity firm in Singapore, speaking broadly about the tech industry. “Sea read the market much earlier, took appropriate steps — and delivered.”



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Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI

This article from Futurism may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

But it's not unfair to say that Google, which in April, according to data from SimilarWeb, hosted roughly 91 percent of all search traffic, is somewhat synonymous with, well, the internet. And the internet isn't just some ethereal, predetermined thing, as natural water or air. The internet is a marketplace, and Google is its kingmaker.

As such, the demo raises an extremely important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry: if Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?

Google has unveiled its vision for how it will incorporate AI into search," tweeted The Verge's James Vincent. "The quick answer: it's going to gobble up the open web and then summarize/rewrite/regurgitate it (pick the adjective that reflects your level of disquiet) in a shiny Google UI."



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Boeing Wins $40 Billion Ryanair Order for 737 Max Jets

This article from Bloomberg may be of interest. Here is a section: 

The huge commitment to Boeing’s largest 737 variant marks an important endorsement from one of the US manufacturer’s most loyal customers and highlights how carriers are willing to splurge on fleet upgrades again as air travel rebounds. Ryanair said the deal —  the largest order ever placed by an Irish company for US manufactured goods — was more expensive than its current crop of 737 deliveries. 

“We paid more per seat but we’re still incredibly happy with the deal we’ve done,” Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary said at a news conference. “We think the extra seats give us the revenue-earning potential.”

Deliveries will start in 2027 and run through 2033. Ryanair said discussions surrounding the purchase started in January, and half the order is earmarked for replacement of older 737NG models while the other half is reserved for growth.



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Lilly's fortunes rise on back-to-back success for Alzheimer's, obesity drugs

This article from Industry Dive may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

Eli Lilly is at the forefront of two of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest fields, and it’s paying off for the Indianapolis company’s investors.

Over the past year, Lilly’s valuation has climbed nearly 50% to exceed $400 billion, a few percentage points’ swing away from eclipsing Johnson & Johnson as the world’s largest drugmaker by market capitalization. It’s worth nearly as much as Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb and Moderna combined, despite earning less than one-third as much revenue as J&J or Pfizer in 2022.

Lilly’s skyrocketing stock price is largely due to two drugs: the diabetes and weight loss treatment Mounjaro, and the experimental Alzheimer’s treatment donanemab. Investors and Wall Street analysts expect both to become blockbusters in large markets with few established competitors.

On Wednesday, results from a large clinical trial of donanemab in people with mild Alzheimer’s showed treatment slowed cognitive and physical decline by 35% versus a placebo, sending Lilly shares higher by nearly 7%. 



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Money isn't Enough: getting Serious About Precious Munitions

This article from Warontherocks.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

Finally, the Department of Defense should, as Julia van der Colff argued in these pages, consider rapidly fielding “second tier” precision munitions that take advantage of existing technologies to provide large quantities of minimum-capability weapons at reduced costs. Next-generation stealth, sensor, and precision capabilities are key to competing with China in the long run, but these simpler munitions could be more easily (and cheaply) produced in the volumes necessitated by great-power conflict. Combined with unmanned munitions carriers and teamed with manned strike platforms, second-tier weapons could be essential to providing the volume of effects required by these other concepts. As Russia’s use of Iranian drones in Ukraine has shown, not every target requires an exquisite precision munition. Unlike ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Defense should not wait until a crisis to explore and test these designs.



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