meek-investor

This post is about a movie !  It takes some gall for a blogger who knows zilch about movies and doesn't see them, to do a post on something his readers are masters of. But that's the beauty of this medium - you can fearlessly propound  on things you don't have a clue about. I am told actors are key to movies ! This one stars a legend as a hero. Across continents, this man is reputed to be with the midas touch - anything he touches turns into gold. There are assorted villains, but the beauty of the movie is that you often don't know who the real villain is. There is a faceless foreign government, who everybody loves to bash these days (not America - in movies, America is all mom and apple pie). The only slight trouble is that there isn't a very pretty heroine. There is a lady actress who comes roaring to defend the hero , but alas, she will not set Zeno's heart go flutter flutter and her role casts her as a Minister. She does manage to be exotic though, speaking...

Businesses have to anticipate and plan for all sorts of eventualities. A business continuity plan for an ebola outbreak or a response to gang warfare in the Niger delta may raise an eyebrow as to the extremes businesses go. But surely, planning a national response to an itsy bitsy spider takes the cake. And yet this is precisely what Mazda is discovering it ought to have done in the US of A. The problem is this. Apparently a common spider called yellow sac spider has taken a distinct liking for Mazda cars. Or more precisely, the rubber hoses that are connected to the fuel tank. The spiders being rather fond of a long siesta during day time, find the inside of a tube the perfect place for somnolence in the hours of light. For some reason, the Mazda car tubes seem a superior choice to a Chevy tube, for instance.This apparently can lead to pressurisation or ventilation problems and in extreme cases could also crack the gas tank. So, Mazda has a problem on its hands. Reportedly 20 such in...

The bribery mess at Daimler makes sorry reading. Every party involved is showing up in the worst possible manner. Whatever promoted a global corporation of the standing of Daimler to be in this situation ? The case is as follows. Daimler is accused by the US authorities of paying bribes of tens of millions of dollars in over 22 countries over a 10 year period. Daimler, it is reported, has agreed to pay a $185 m fine to settle civil and criminal charges. Daimler, it is alleged, set up shell companies to channelise the bribes, Bribes have included gifting an armoured car to a Turkmenistan official, siphoning of funds to the bank account of the wife of an official in China, 10% kickback to Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein, and so on and so on. It makes sordid reading. First culprit is Daimler , of course. This has been going on systematically over a number of years. A lot of people have turned a blind eye to the goings on. At best, this can be calculated ignorance, and at worst, acti...

You may have noticed the news item that Maruti announced that it had rolled out its millionth car in a single year ; apparently it joins global giants like Toyota, GM, Ford etc ; a handful of companies to have achieved this. For non Indian readers of this blog, Maruti is a Suzuki controlled Indian car company that’s the market leader in India. Such statistics mean little except dubious PR value. But it certainly set me off to wax nostalgic about when Maruti first came. Readers of this blog are refreshingly young. Teenagers like AJCL, Gils, Deepa, Sandhya, et all, were hardly born when the first Maruti car rolled out on Indian roads :) Being slightly elder to this sprightly young lot, I have some credentials to a “those were the days” kind of post. This is the late seventies; early 80s. India was firmly a socialist country. This was the time we actually amended the preamble to the Constitution to include the words socialist India (it still sits in the preamble). The Taliban would have ...

Much of the press on the calamitous state of the US auto industry centered around General Motors. Spare a thought for Ford, which has quietly done some amazing things. Ford was the only one among the Big Three that did not take the US government bailout. They also were the only one that did not go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And yesterday, they announced pretty good 2009 results. They made a profit of $ 2.7 billion in 2009. Yes, t-h-e-y m-a-d-e a p-r-o-f-i-t- i-n 2-0-0-9 ; one of the most brutal years for the auto industry. They gained market share in the US. Their fourth quarter volumes were up 26%. By any standards, an impressive performance. Sure the numbers hide some real worries (as they always do). Their main business of selling cars actually lost $1.4 bn in 2009. That loss was offset by their finance arm – Ford Motor Credit which made a profit of $1.9 bn. (just goes to show that taking a loan to buy a car is for suckers). But in Ford’s favour, in the fourth quarter, the car bus...

You drive on the left side of the road in some countries and right in others. Except , of course, if you drive in India where you drive on the left, right, up, down, under, over, fifth dimension, whatever. Now this is no big deal. Except for some some confusion if you travel between countries which practice the opposite system. Typically in the UK and its former colonies you drive on the left. And in Japan. Everywhere else you drive on the right. Why this is so, is history – if you are really interested in how this came to be, click here . As is the reason with everything that is non standard in the world – voltages, plug pins, mobile frequencies, etc. There are however a few countries in the world which decide to change ! Now , why they do this, is beyond comprehension. But they do. Nigeria was one famous case decades ago (left to right) – easy to speculate why ; some car companies must have made some people very rich. Since 1970, things have been pretty much stable. But on Sep 7th, t...

Germany started this and other countries picked it. The US had its “cash for clunkers” programme this month and is closing it on Aug 24 after “a wild success ”. Cash for clunkers, is a dole the US government gives Americans for trading in their old car and buying a new one. The subsidy that Uncle Sam is willing to give could be as much as $4500 per car. The US government has just spent $1.9 bn on it. In Germany, it was “successful” in that auto sales went up by some 20% or so. It is estimated that it cost Germany some $ 3.5 bn and it is claimed that it saved “thousands of auto jobs”. The moral justification under which politicians have sold this idea is that carbon spewing clunkers will be replaced by fuel efficient cars and that this is helping the environment. Balderdash. They are doing this because its wildly popular as everybody loves a subsidy, if its given to them. And in car crazy countries like Germany and the US, that's pretty much everybody. I can’t fathom the economic r...