At our small fruit garden at the back of our house in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, snails are a menace, eating young papaya leaves through the night. These slow-moving snails can be found in the morning before they manage to hide under the stones and small logs or run across my neighbour’s fence. We will […]
New energy technologies require mineral resources such as copper, cobalt and lithium. A shift in the global energy system from fossil fuels- driven by cost reductions that are making new technologies are increasingly competitive and by government policies to fight global warming and local pollution-is expected to result in steep increases in demand for some […]
In late 2008 I was tasked by the then Chief Minister of the industrial state of Selangor of Malaysia, in which Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia is also located, to re-organize the state’s sand industry. The sand industry has been rife with illegal sand extraction and corrupt officials. The state collected only a small […]
Beyond Meat Inc., covered in our blog, went where no company in the US had gone in more than a decade as its shares nearly tripled on their first day of listing on NASDAQ last Thursday. The pre-IPO price of US$25 per share opened at US$46 per share, closing the day at US$67.75 per share. […]
We were drawn to an article by Ed Crooks and Anjli Raval in the on-line Financial Times on 26th, March 2019. There used to be a hierarchy where oil companies sold fuel, while utility companies supplied electricity and gas to consumers. Today, these lines of demarcation of business activities are no longer applied. Utility companies […]
We noted a new health drink in a recent article in The Times of London on December 29th, 2018. Non-alcoholic beer has become a health drink for fitness enthusiasts in Germany. The health benefits of beer are derived from the use of hops (hop flower) in making beer. The hops are what make beer taste […]
The year is almost over. Old technologies can take longer to die and the timing is unpredictable, according to an article in the Lex column of FTWeekend 15/16 December 2018. Sony announced that it was stopping production of Betamax tapes in 2015, for example, more than 50 years after it lost a format war with […]