This is not a new competitor to didi and other ride sharing services. This new platform is just an aggregator platform, through which people can choose from among many ride hailing service. Just like you pick your hotel rooms and airlines through travel websites.
Chinese Economics Thread
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This is not a new competitor to didi and other ride sharing services. This new platform is just an aggregator platform, through which people can choose from among many ride hailing service. Just like you pick your hotel rooms and airlines through travel websites.
Didi's leadership went full hanjian and listed on the NYSE against Chinese government wishes to delay the listing so that could complete the investigation and forestall any security breaches. In effect, Didi sold out for Anglo money so they deserved everything that came to them. Anglos would love nothing more than the data of billions of Chinese customers and Didi almost delivered it to them on a silver platter.
I watched the video and while I agree with the diagnosis and proposed reforms, I guess the jury will be out on whether all the parties involved have the stomach for what those reforms will entail. While volume based procurements are supposed to make up for reduced margins (and thus appease the companies) a in theory, in my experience at corporate that has been a mixed bag, especially for therapeutics in new areas or those that are hard to treat. I can see it working well in areas where there is alot of competition or the therapeutic is off market, but for niche areas or those where there aren't many comparators, I am not sure if companies will blink and accept those terms or shift the innovation to somewhere more lucrative (even at those reduced margins they make still bank I know). Western markets have had a difficult time for the most part with this balance, either they get delayed innovation in the markets where there are pricing formulas based on development costs and volume driven reimbursement from the payers (OUS) or you pay nosebleed prices and healthcare becomes a huge drag on society and the economy (USA). Maybe the sheer scale of volume in China and the level of prosperity can make this balance work, will be interesting to see.
@abenomics12345
I've just thought of a better way to explain this, although it does require high school level chemistry and physics
With hydrogen/ammonia, you're essentially manipulating atoms. So you're splitting up water into the component hydrogen and oxygen atoms or trying to combine hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. Then you're compressing, storing and transporting. Then adding oxygen to burn the end product to generate heat in an engine.
The atoms you are working with are by definition pretty stable, so it takes a lot of energy to get them to combine or split up.
Everything described is essentially a mechanical process which doesn't have a lot of room for improvement
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In comparison, electricity works with the electrons that orbit around every type of atom found on the periodic table.
These atoms orbit at 2200km per second and it is relatively easy to knock electrons away from their orbit and therefore cause electrons to move to another atom, which is the basis of electricity.
Photons of light can do this in solar panels. Other wavelengths such as UV, Infrared and Radio Waves do this as well.
Then there are different way to organise how the electrons move back-and-forth in a battery, and therefore what the electromagnetic flux (fields) look like and how it transfers energy.
So you've got:
1. 100+ elements on the periodic table and you can have any combination you want. Some will be better but others worse. Each has an associated cost and other attributes.
2. That is combined with a huge number of battery/solar/engine designs and optimisations available. Again, each has costs, advantages and disadvantages
The available permutations are so large that Tesla for example uses a ML algorithm to run millions (billions?/trillions?) of permutations to figure out what is the optimal battery design for a set of criteria or constraints.
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So that is the fundamental physics/chemistry basis of why solar and batteries have a higher rate of improvement.
Plus solar/batteries have advantages in terms of scale and also in R&D development.
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Lol. This isn't even wrong. It's just irrelevant. You have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of chemistry and physics.
Do expand
How do I even start?? It is like saying "Godzilla is a mammal and thus is the fastest because cheetahs." It is not even wrong, it is just fundamentally nonfactual.
Chemical reactions are fundamentally an electron phenomenon. Electricity is also an electron phenomenon. There's nothing that fundamentally makes electronics more or less easy than chemical reactions. Trying to push any significant amount of electrons over ie the 7-8 eV bandgap of a ceramic insulator melts the ceramic long before it conducts even a picoamp. Meanwhile activation energy of some chemical reactions is 0 (they occur on contact) - see hydrazine and N2O4.
Not even going to get into the incorrect understanding of electronic orbitals, as that's a detail compared to the other stuff that's wrong.
I don't think any large country in the world has figured out healthcare. But you're quite right that the balancing act between cost control and fostering innovation is the crux of the problem.
Thus far Chinese biotech firms are at a "me too" / "quick follow" stage of development (the proliferation of PD-1 / PD-L1 molecules in oncology for example) but quickly getting to the first-in-class/best-in-class stage of development (Bi-specific, antibody drug conjugate, CAR-T etc). Additionally, everyone in the industry is abundantly clear that you will not be allowed to make extremely lucrative profits in the Chinese market (deflation, what else is new). For a sense of pricing difference:
However, what's different this time around is that the FDA has clearly made it more difficult (thus far not as blatant as other regulatory/administrative agencies of the US) for Chinese PD-1s to enter the US market. It's something to watch for sure.
This is really crazy. China straight decapitated Didi. This kind of measure is far beyond Jack Ma's "invited for tea" treatment and closing their IPO. Didi must have seriously upsetted the government for this to happen. Alternatively, this could have nothing to do with reacting to Didi itself. The government is proactively upgrading their taxi business because they never liked giving up control of Taxi to Didi in first place.
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Misinformation, its a platform to integrate the nation's ride hailing companies, so people using the app can still use Didi services on it, plus its only available to people who are CPC members. This article goes into greater detail.
Essentially the tech crackdown is ending. I mean the government has a massive unemployment problem on its hands so it has no choice, but at the same time letting companies know they are still under their supervision.
Plus, its China, if the government wanted to kill Didi it would just do it, no need to go through all the motions of ending the crackdown and creating a competitor app that may or may not succeed against it. Especially since state owned entreprises aren't exactly the most competitive against private companies.