The Blog of Dato' Dr Anuar Md Nor

Introduction

Buy brewers. Buy distillers. Buy restaurant companies. This was the conclusion the other day from stock market analysts at Morgan Stanley, who predicted that the arrival of the era of driverless cars would trigger a significant pick-up in alcohol consumption.

Autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing technology will enable us to glug more than ever, the American investment bank’s analysts argued. There would be “more opportunities to drink before getting into the car” and “more opportunities to drink while in the car”.

For drivers, the hours of down time spent staying dry because of the tiresome business of twiddling the steering wheel would soon be over. That would free up another 600 billion hours of potential drinking opportunity a year, they calculated, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

Past crackdowns on drink-driving from Scotland to China to Colombia had all led to slowing demand, Morgan Stanley said. Ergo, we should expect a boost to demand once people are liberated from that constraint. Within ten years, consumers would buy $125 billion a year more alcohol than otherwise, they concluded, lurching from not unreasonable guesswork about future behaviour to over-precise forecasting (the second gin and tonic often has that effect). Average global alcohol consumption growth would accelerate from 2.2 per cent a year to 3 per cent.

We can question the many assumptions. Who’s to say we won’t use the freed-up time to read novels or do in-car yoga? We can laugh at the focus on boozing rather than the important prizes of cleaner air, less congestion, a reduction in the 3,500 per day toll of road deaths and a more slowly warming planet. And we can shake our heads at the bogus precision.

Yet financial markets are having to grapple with what automotive innovation will mean, not only for the car industry but also for the way we live our lives and spend our money.

Technology Shifts Facing the Car Industry  

Legal & General said last week that the twin technology shifts facing the car industry — electric cars and autonomous vehicles — represented the biggest change since Henry Ford pioneered assembly line working in 1913, slashing production costs and dramatically widening car ownership. Until now, the motor industry has not faced the existential shocks that have forced other sectors such as retailing, the music industry and newspapers, for example, to rethink strategy. It has made phenomenal strides since the Model T, but they have always been incremental. Now it is facing its own Kodak moment.

“Cars have the potential to become the next technology super-cycle,” according to L&G, changing behaviour in the next 20 years in the same, profound way that the smartphone has in the past ten.

For investors this kind of breathless prognostification raises as many concerns as opportunities, alongside considerable scepticism. The last “super-cycle” they were encouraged to buy into — an era of higher commodity and energy prices driven by insatiable Chinese demand — went bust in 2014. Many lost heavily backing oil explorers and miners.

Investment booms based on the promise of new technology are especially difficult to read. Some may rave about Google, Facebook and Apple. Others will recall the wreckage of crashed dotcom and telecom stocks in 2000-03.

To judge by the intensity of chatter in the equity markets, we are now getting close to peak automotive industry investing greed/fear/paranoia. Virtually every recent forecast for electric vehicle sales has been higher than the last. UBS has upped its prediction for 2025 output from nine million to 13 million to 15 million in the space of 18 months. The break-even date for when electric cars are expected to be produced as cheaply as those running on fossil fuels is constantly being brought forward as battery costs fall.

An eye-opening milestone was passed in April, when Tesla, Elon Musk’s lossmaking upstart, overtook General Motors as America’s biggest auto-maker by market value. Another symbolic moment came in July, when the British government proposed a ban on new sales of petrol and diesel cars from 2040.

There’s barely a week when regulators somewhere in the world aren’t announcing new rules to speed the push to electric, though these days this is driven more by worries about air quality than global warming. This weekend China said that it was conducting research into a ban on the internal combustion engine. This was significant because of paranoia among traditional carmakers that China, the biggest car market in the world, will leapfrog the west to auto-making dominance.

There’s barely been a week when the industry isn’t announcing a new electric model or boasting of some new breakthrough on the long, long journey to fully driverless vehicles. BMW last week announced 25 new electric models by 2025, while the Daimler-owned Mercedes Benz has promised ten by 2020. Jaguar Land Rover has said that all of its vehicles will be part-electrified from 2020.

For investors, this is not just about the choice between owning, say, newcomers like Tesla and Alphabet, the Google owner investing heavily in self-driving technology, or traditional carmakers, such as Volkswagen and Ford. The traditional incumbents are starting to look rather good value on conventional metrics. According to L&G, they now typically trade on only seven times’ profits, compared with a long-term average price/earnings ratio closer to 14.

It’s also about identifying second-order and third-order effects. Just as shovelmakers and brothels made more money than the prospectors in the 19th century gold rushes, so this seismic modern-day phenomenon is going to produce many surprise winners and losers. Morgan Stanley’s focus on drink may not be so potty after all.

Background

It was reported recently that Shell, the oil giant, had bought a company, New Motion, a Dutch firm with 30,000 private charging points at home and offices in Europe. This is an interesting development, and it indicates that the oil giants are contemplating a business life after oil.

The downstream sector, especially the retailing of petroleum products such as gasoline (petrol) and diesel, contributes a major proportion of the oil giants’ revenue. A small developing country like Malaysia has a large petroleum products retail market. The local oil giants such as Petronas, Petron and Shell enjoyed billions of RM from sales of petroleum products. The size of the petroleum products market was worth more than RM60 billion in 2014, based on the annual reports of the three companies. If sales of other smaller players like BP Petroleum and Caltex are included, the total market would be more than RM65 billion.

According to Petroleum Dealers Association of Malaysia, there are more than 3,500 petrol stations in Malaysia. As petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel are volatile and are subject to stringent safety requirements, dedicated petrol outlets are required. The first modern petrol station was established in 1913  in US.

Over the years, petrol stations have added products such as foods and drinks, and some bigger petrol stations have attached fast-food restaurants. The sales of petroleum products still make up the biggest proportion of sales of the oil giants, which result in enormous profit for them.

The Expected Withering of the Petrol Stations  

The entry of Shell into the electric car charging business shows that the oil giants are facing a major disruption to its retailing of petroleum products business sector. These petrol stations have made the oil giants into well-known brands and corporate power.

The electric car revolution would have a major impact on the long-term viability of the petrol stations as a business. Electric cars will be embraced by consumers, first in the developed countries, followed by developing countries. Car manufacturers and other companies are racing each other to develop electric cars with longer range. Many countries such as Netherlands are encouraging cities and electricity generating companies to install charging stations at housing estates, homes, hypermarkets car parks and elsewhere.

Impact of the Oil Giants’ Revenue in Malaysia

Although the penetration of electric cars in Malaysia is still small, the Malaysian government is committed by international treaties to reduce toxic emission from fossil fuels. In addition, the price of electric cars will continue to decline as innovative companies such as Tesla and Nissan are developing denser batteries at cheaper prices.

The adoption of electric cars in Malaysia will be patchy initially. We foresee tax incentives may spur consumers to purchase electric cars due to various reasons, such as convenience of recharging and advanced features of electric cars such as self-driving.  We foresee there would be no turning back to the adoption of electric cars in Malaysia.

The impact to the oil giants’ revenue would also be significant. At the market worth of petroleum products of more than RM65 billion per annum, a tenth reduction of consumption of petrol would amount to RM6.5 billion of lost revenue per year. The amount of lost revenue would be serious with higher adoption of electric cars. Tax revenue to the Malaysian government will also reduce as tax forms a major component of the price of petrol.

Shell believes that consumers will patronize its petrol stations to charge their electric cars. Currently, consumers have no choice but to go to petrol stations to fill-up petrol into their cars.

We expect that charging stations will be available in all sorts of locations as long as there is supply of electricity. Why should consumers go to a Shell petrol station to charge their electric cars when they can do it at homes?

Could we see the slow death of the ubiquitous petrol stations with the large logos of the oil giants standing high and can be seen from far?

Introduction

The recent Frankfurt Motor Show in September 2917 saw major car companies exhibited several models of electric cars. Subsequently, investors are piling-up their bets on mining companies that are involved in lithium, the key component for making batteries for electric cars. BlackRock, one of the largest fund managers in the world, has emerged as a investor of lithium start-ups.

The BlackRock World Mining  Trust, which has more than £800 million in assets and is co-managed by Evy Hambro, has become the largest shareholder in a handful of small mining companies aiming to produce lithium for use in batteries.

Demand for lithium has surged as the first mass market electric vehicles (EVs) such as the Tesla Model 3, Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet attract buyers. Growing demand for EVs has sparked a scramble to locate new supplies of lithium and prices have jumped about 26 per cent this year, making it one of the best performing commodities this year.

“Today the energy space is evolving towards a low carbon footprint and the combustion engine is going to be replaced with an alternative, “ Mr. Hambro said. “We want to be invested in companies that will be producing the raw materials that will be needed to meet this growth.”

Mr. Hambro is one of the world’s most influential mining investors, and his views are closely followed by the industry.

BlacRock’s investment parallels a growing investor interest in lithium as regulators push a transition to electric cars and battery costs continue to delcine. For example, assets in the Global X Lithium & Battery Tech exchange traded fund have quadrupled during  this year from US$114 million to $484 million, while the Solactive Global Lithium index, made up of 26 miners and battery makers, had delivered a total return of 51 per cent this year.

Lithium production is currently dominated by four large firms, Chile’s SQM, FMC, Albermarle and Tianqi Lithium. A number of smaller companies are racing to bring supply to market and get their materials  approved for use in batteries.

Over the past year around US$1.0 billion has been raised by lithium developers and explorers, but the funding will need to be increased to US$6.0 billion in 2025 to meet demand, according to Simon Moors of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence  in London, which tracks lithium prices.

A Boon for Sensor Makers   

Lithium producers are not only enjoying from electric car revolution. Sensor makers are also experiencing a boon. As electric cars become a reality, carmakers and their suppliers are confronting challenges that appeared less tangible when the dream of electric cars was a more  distant vision.

A self-driving car of the future will be quipped with at least 20 sensors using cameras, radar and lidar to “see” its surroundings.

Some of the data must be transmitted to the “cloud” so the car cam communicate with its surrounding, but programming the software to send only the relevant data is a central challenge, says Elmar Degenhart, chief executive of the parts supplier Continental.

He says a self-driving car collects raw data at a rate of up to 15 gigabytes per second. By comparison, a person watching Netflix in high definition at home would consume three gigabytes  of data per hour. “We need  a different kind of electronic architecture to handle these volumes of gigabytes, “ he says.

The energy just required to power these self-driving systems is so great that a prototype electric car with a 400 km range can drive only 200 km autonomously, notes Scott Gallett, vice-president of marketing for BorgWarner, a maker of propulsion systems.

“One of the things people don’t talk about is just how much energy is really required by by the computers, the sensors, the radars, “he says. “Some of the prototypes out right now require just as much as energy as it does to propel the vehicle.”

Mr. Gallett believes that hybrid vehicles—often considered as a stop-gap measure to full electric cars— will experience a lengthier phase  than many assume, because if autonomous technologies become popular  then cars driven solely by batteries might not have enough energy to power bith the car and the computing system.

“Don’t think autonomous  equals elecytric,” he adds.

Reference: FTWeekend 16 September/17 September 2017