What I Wrote Last Week
Apple Q3 FY2024 Earnings – Growth Opportunities & Risks
Business
EXCLUSIVE: Lidl Fine-Tunes U.S. Shopping Experience One Store at a Time. Grocery is a highly competitive space. Not only do grocers have to get endless things right such as assortment, customer services, freshness, location, to name a few, and keep their prices competitive, but they also need to carve out an identity for themselves. Lidl is trying to localize its offerings to the American shoppers by overhauling a lot of things that still carry European influence. It’s important to know that it took Aldi, another brand from Germany, to learn the American shopper way and expand. I like that Lidl is using bakery as one of the differentiation points. I’d love to walk into a shop that shows me fresh bakery right away to wake up my smell.
FedEx Tackles the Ultimate Logistics Challenge: Getting Rid of Duplicate Trucks. FedEx is undergoing a transformational change that can decide the outlook for years to come. It’s positive that the management team recognized the need to go through the pain. The problem is that it sounds super complex with a lot of moving parts and a high degree of uncertainty. And there is a little company from Seattle, Washington named Amazon that is expanding its own delivery system to reduce reliance on FedEx.
Business Breakdown did an episode on the economics of the Olympic Games.
Activist hedge fund Starboard took a sizable stake in Autodesk and published a deck to call for changes at the company. Worth a read. I once owned Autodesk’s stock and it baffled me as to why the stock underperformed so badly for a company with a sticky business and market leadership.
What Works in Taiwan Doesn’t Always in Arizona, a Chipmaking Giant Learns. Hedging the risk of China’s aggression is not going to be cheap or fast. It’ll benefit TSMC over the long term to have a factory in the US, but the company will have to solve the talent issue and the cutural clash.
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
He Skipped College to Become a Repairman. He’s On His Way to $175,000 a Year. The advantage of this line of career and others is that they are recession-proof. Every one needs their HVAC and plumbing fixed regardless of what the economy is like.
Why Californians Have Some of the Highest Power Bills in the U.S. It’s bleak to see people struggle to pay utilities when everything else also gets more expensive and the hot weather continues to break record after record.
Vietnam is the latest battleground in BYD’s bid to dominate Southeast Asia’s EV market. As a Vietnamese, I wouldn’t bet on BYD’s success in Vietnam. First, Vietnamese consumers may not like Chinese products if there are already Vietnamese alternatives. Second, Vinfast is owned by Vingroup, a very powerful enterprise. One way or another, Vingroup is going to use its influence in the country to make life difficult for BYD. Vingroup withdrew from several industries to pour resources into electric vehicles. There is no way that they will let a competitor take their lunch. Right now, BYD relies on Vinfast’s infrastructure. What if that access is turned off? It will take several years for BYD to import cars from a fellow Southeast Asian country to avoid high import taxes. By then, Vinfast will already have a sizable lead. And remember, scale matters in every business.
Why ‘doing nothing, intentionally’ is good for us: The rise of the slow living movement. “Chronic burnout is, at root, the result of living under global capitalism – and deciding to live at a slower pace is a reaction against the acquisitive, never-satisfied mindset capitalism promotes“
A good Hacker News thread by technical folks on the difference between GCP, AWS and Azure
Stats
US credit card balances climb to $1.14 trillion
Minh Quang Duong 
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