1 CEOs ‘less optimistic’ on economy (Emily Young on
BBC) Chief executives are less optimistic about the economy this year than
last, a survey unveiled at the World Economic Forum suggests. PwC's annual
survey shows that just 37% think the economy will improve in 2015, down from
44% last year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russia's bosses have gone
from the most confident to the least, due to problems caused by sanctions and
the falling oil price. In the UK, concern had risen sharply about the
availability of talent.
The number of chief executives concerned about the
skills gap rose from 64% last year to 84% this year. That is considerably
higher than in Germany, France or Spain. This was partly put down to the high
level of employment in the UK, which means that there is a smaller pool of
workers to choose from, and partly due to concerns about the education system.
On a global level, the biggest worries that chief
executives have are geo-political uncertainties, over-regulation and cyber
security. Chief executives ranked the US as their most important market for
growth over the next year, putting it ahead of China for the first time in the
five years that the question has been asked.
2 Solving housing crisis through 3-D printing
(Alastair Parvin in The Guardian) Since the Industrial Revolution the
assumption has always been that the only people who can build homes at scale
are large organisations – either state or market – building whole estates; rows
of one-size-fits-all boxes for imaginary “average” humans. Form follows
finance.
The hidden flaw is that in the “current trader”
model, the houses built by property developers are not actually designed as
places to live, but as financial assets; to be sold to the mortgage lending
market. The term “housebuilder” is actually a little misleading. A better
description might be “land developer” a company that buys land and seeks to
resell it with a 20% margin for its shareholders.
In other words, traditional property developers
cannot solve the housing crisis, because they are almost perfectly designed not
to. So who can? Unlike property developers, custom builders (individuals or
groups who buy land and procure a home for themselves as a place to live) can
usually procure their homes at a fraction of the equivalent property market
cost. They can also break the cycle of community resistance to new, topdown
developments.
Our first step might be to develop open source tools
and platforms that radically simplify the process of planning, designing and
constructing customised, high performance, sustainable, low-cost homes, and to
put those tools into the hands of citizens, communities and businesses. That is
the aim of the WikiHouse project, an open source construction system that
allows online self-build models to be shared, improved, 3D printed and
self-assembled.
But we also need to reform the land market, to make
it dramatically easier for those without much capital to buy a plot of land and
commission their own homes – either individually or as a group. There can be a
parallel land market that differentiates between a house built as a speculative
asset, and a house built as a place to live. Let’s create space for both, and
see which works. That is the real economic shift that citizens, with open tools
and data will bring to housing.
3 Winners and losers in China’s slowdown (San
Francisco Chronicle) China's economy, the world's second largest, grew 7.4
percent last year, its slowest expansion in nearly a quarter century.
Forecasters expect growth to wane further in the next several years. The IMF
predicts growth of 6.3 percent in 2016, a dramatic shift from double digit
rates in previous years that is creating winners and losers.
The losers: Industries that profited from China's
building boom are being battered by the ruling Communist Party's effort to
reduce reliance on investment and nurture more sustainable growth based on
domestic consumption. Developers are losing access to credit and building
permissions. Suppliers of steel, copper, cement and other building materials
have seen orders dry up. That has wiped out jobs in construction and real
estate sales and sent shockwaves abroad, hitting countries as far away as
Australia and Brazil that export iron ore and other commodities.
As explosive growth in auto sales cools, China's
domestic brands are losing market share to global rivals and their state-owned
manufacturing partners. Sales of cognac, Swiss watches, designer clothing and
other luxury goods have been hurt by a ruling party campaign to rein in
corruption and official extravagance. So has revenue at upscale restaurants and
Macau casinos.
The winners: Big winners straddle the worlds of
technology, private business and consumer brands — areas communist leaders want
to promote as new sources of growth. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group's revenue
rose 54 percent in the quarter that ended in September. Revenue for rival
JD.com jumped 61 percent. Milk producer Modern Dairy Ltd.'s revenue rose 86
percent in the six months ending in June. Novice entrepreneurs in some areas
are benefiting from rule changes meant to make it easier to set up barber
shops, restaurants and other small businesses.
Energy-intensive industries including trucking
benefit from the slump in global crude prices. E-commerce has produced unusual
winners, including fledgling smartphone maker Xiaomi, which used Internet-based
sales and marketing to slash costs and passed Samsung last year to become
China's No. 1 brand by number of handsets sold. A stock market boom has brought
a surge of revenue and profit to brokerages and finance firms.
The state industry: Government-owned companies in
oil, steel, banking, telecoms and other industries still enjoy monopolies and
other privileges, but the ruling party's plans, if carried out, will force them
to compete. State-owned steel and aluminum mills are under pressure to make
their operations cleaner and more efficient. Oil giant Sinopec Ltd. is looking
at ways to use its thousands of filling stations to sell groceries and other
goods.
No comments:
Post a Comment