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This Company’s Robots Are Making Everything—and Reshaping the World
Fanuc, a secretive Japanese factory-automation business, might be the planet’s most important manufacturer.
By Joshua Hunt

The headquarters of Fanuc sit in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, on a sprawling, secluded campus of 22 windowless factories and dozens of office buildings. The grounds approach the lower slopes of Japan’s most famous peak, encircled by a dense forest that Fanuc’s founding CEO, Seiuemon Inaba, planted decades ago to shield the company’s operations from prying eyes—an example of the preoccupation with secrecy that once led Fortune to compare him to a bond villain.
Since taking over as chairman and chief executive officer in 2003, Inaba’s son, Yoshiharu, has continued the tradition of privacy. He takes questions from investors only twice a year, wearing a blazer in the lemon yellow the company uses to brand the factory automation robots it produces, the factories its robots work in, its employees’ uniforms, and the company cars that shuttle engineers and executives around the neighboring village of Oshino.
The elder Inaba once explained this uncharacteristically loud touch by calling yellow “the emperor’s color.” It also helps security guards quickly identify outsiders. In Seiuemon’s day, the fear was industrial espionage; today’s spies are more likely to be working for investors or stock analysts who want to peek behind the lemon curtain for insight into everything from global automobile manufacturing to iPhone orders.



The elder Inaba once explained this uncharacteristically loud touch by calling yellow “the emperor’s color.” It also helps security guards quickly identify outsiders. In Seiuemon’s day, the fear was industrial espionage; today’s spies are more likely to be working for investors or stock analysts who want to peek behind the lemon curtain for insight into everything from global automobile manufacturing to iPhone orders.

On a warm afternoon in May, the company cars come and go like bees from a hive, ferrying visitors through the front gates near a towering green dormitory. Keisuke Fujii, who manages public relations for Fanuc Ltd., isn’t scheduled to meet me, having already offered the expected “no comment” on behalf of executives and the company. When I arrive unannounced at the security checkpoint, hoping to persuade him to do otherwise, he’s away from his office phone; a guard offers to escort me while I search the grounds for him.
We don’t find Fujii, so I leave the campus with little more than a glimpse of the world behind Inaba’s forest: a clock above the entrance to the main research facility that ticks at 10 times the usual speed, as if innovation can’t happen quickly enough for the world leader in factory automation technology, plus several 40,000-square-foot factories, each of which contains hundreds of bright yellow Fanuc robots working around the clock to build other Fanuc robots, stopping only when no storage space remains. Some robots will be shipped elsewhere in Japan, where strict immigration policies and a declining birthrate have left manufacturers of all sizes more dependent on factory automation. But most are bound for China.
Automation has been rising over the past decade there, partly because, as wages and living standards have risen, workers have proved less willing to perform dangerous, monotonous tasks, and partly because Chinese manufacturers are seeking the same efficiencies as their overseas counterparts. More and more, it’s Fanuc’s industrial robots that assemble and paint automobiles in China, construct complex motors, and make injection-molded parts and electrical components. At pharmaceutical companies, Fanuc’s sorting robots categorize and package pills. At food-packaging facilities, they slice, squirt, and wrap edibles.

King of them all is the Robodrill, which plays first violin in one of the great symphonies of modern production: machining the metal casing for Apple Inc.’s iPhones. In the fiscal year surrounding the 2010 introduction of the iPhone 4, the first to use an all-metal casing, Robodrill sales more than doubled.
Since then, this relationship has become so chummy that, based solely on strong first-quarter Robodrill sales, analysts discounted early rumors the iPhone 8 would eschew metal casing for front-and-back glass panels. Instead, the recent iPhone 8 release and coming iPhone X launch spurred higher Robodrill sales to Apple’s manufacturers in China, some of which are building new factories to assemble the company’s phones. New iPhones also mean more demand for Robodrills from Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo Electronics, and Huawei Technologies, which often present their own more affordable models in the wake of each fresh offering from Apple.
And as China goes, so goes the rest of the industrial world. Multinationals that are reshoring operations from East Asia to North America and Europe are doing so in part because automation promises sophisticated production methods and labor savings; they, and companies who stayed out of China in the first place, are spending more than ever on industrial robots. The overarching pattern is less a reversal of the 20th century’s offshore manufacturing boom than an unraveling, with jobs vanishing from developing and developed nations alike.
Amid the tumult, there’s one clear winner: the $50 billion company that controls most of the world’s market for factory automation and industrial robotics. In fact, Fanuc might just be the single most important manufacturing company in the world right now, because everything Fanuc does is designed to make it part of what every other manufacturing company is doing.

In 1955, Fujitsu Ltd., the world’s third-oldest information technology company after International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., tapped Seiuemon Inaba, who was then a young engineer, to lead a new subsidiary dedicated to the field of numerical control. This nascent form of automation involved sending instructions encoded into punched or magnetic tape to motors that controlled the movement of tools, effectively creating programmable versions of the lathes, presses, and milling machines you might find in shop class.
From the beginning, Inaba spent heavily on research and development without concern for dividends—a corporate mission he described as “walking the narrow path.” But within three years, he and his team of 500 employees were shipping Fujitsu’s first numerical-control machine to Makino Milling Machine Co. In 1972, Fujitsu-Fanuc Ltd.—the “Fanuc” an acronym for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control—was founded as a separate entity, with Inaba in charge.
The next phase of global manufacturing, he believed, would be computer numerical control, which relied on a standard programming language. At the time, the 10 largest CNC companies in the world were based in the U.S., but within a few years Fanuc had overtaken them all. By 1981, almost solely because of Inaba’s innovations, more than 11,000 industrial robots were being used in Japanese manufacturing operations, helping streamline processes such as sheet-metal cutting and engine-part machining.
These were welcome advances for manufacturers in most developed economies, where employment costs had been rising steadily since the beginning of the 1970s. Even so, these early robots required enough human participation (and unions and labor laws were sometimes strong enough) that many industries ended up focusing more on increasing productivity than on slashing jobs and wages. That meant, for example, that machinists who worked more slowly than robots might instead become swift assemblers of finished parts.

The next step for Inaba was to take Fanuc’s CNC systems and make them networkable. With this frontier in mind, he built the Oshino headquarters and, in January 1981, while his new forest grew, invited media and industry leaders from around the world to come watch robots make parts for other robots. The factory he showcased was staffed by 100 human workers, each of whom did the work of five men, aided by NC machine tools and industrial robots that turned out parts which they then assembled.
The resulting press coverage caught the attention of Roger Smith, who had recently become president and CEO of General Motors Corp. Smith had joined GM’s accounting division 30 years earlier, after spending the final two years of World War II in the U.S. Navy. He’d risen through the corporate ranks slowly, gaining prominence as GM deftly navigated the gasoline crisis of the 1970s to become America’s top automaker.
When Smith took over, GM held 46 percent of the U.S. auto market, but the industry was in decline, and most companies were looking to cut costs and improve efficiency to compete with Japanese automakers. GM was in the enviable position of being flush with cash, and Smith had ideas, most of which sought to restore the company’s focus on technological innovation. Like Fanuc, GM had pioneered early developments in numerical control, including the use of a storage system to record the movements of a human machinist, then mimic them on demand. Such experiments had led Smith to imagine what he called a “lights-out factory of the future,” which would so limit reliance on assembly workers at GM plants that lights and air-conditioning would be unnecessary. The company failed to advance very far in that direction, though, choosing to focus instead on the traditional manufacturing methods that were helping it dominate the U.S. auto market.
Fanuc’s robots were unlike anything Smith had seen outside his own dreams, and he soon decided he’d found the way forward for GM. A year after he became CEO, on a humid June afternoon in Troy, Mich., a yellow robot bowed first to Smith and then Inaba before swinging its arm to cut the ribbon for a joint venture called GMFanuc Robotics Corp.

The partnership assured Fanuc a lucrative future with one of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, in the world’s biggest car market. But for Smith, the moment was tinged with regret. In meeting with his executives to sell them on the partnership, he hadn’t bothered to mask his feelings about the Japanese. “Never again can we let them take our technology and beat us at our own game,” he said, according to Steven Parissien’s history The Life of the Automobile.
With the deal struck, a staff of 70 workers in Japan set about developing GMFanuc’s first robots, which were bound for the $600 million Buick City complex in Flint, Mich. Smith suggested to the New York Times that their work could eventually expand beyond automobiles. “We may make the first electronic, automatic vacuum cleaner,” he said. “You walk out the door in the morning, and at 11 o’clock this thing comes out and vacuums the whole house while you’re gone.”
In 1986, after four years of development, the Buick City factory’s first industrial robots were unveiled. But as soon as they were put into service building GM cars, they proved problematic, even embarrassing. According to Parissien, the factory’s 260 industrial robots “frequently gave cockeyed instructions, ordering up the wrong bumpers, the wrong trim, the wrong welds, or the wrong paint, sending instructions to the next robot, which was too simple-minded to notice the errors. The paint robots were particularly cantankerous, slopping gobs of paint on one car, then not enough on the next.” More cantankerous still were robot arms meant to delicately attach windshields to Buick LeSabres, which instead would ram them inside the cars, forcing human workers to retrieve and set them by hand. Engineers strained their eyes trying to manage the endless lines of code necessary to keep the robots working in concert, and when the code needed to be updated, the factory’s 5,000 human workers would stand idly by.

Well before Silicon Valley adopted the mantra “fail fast, fail often,” Fanuc had observed its own version of the dictum, allowing Inaba to innovate through ambitious trial and error. But GM seemed to learn little from GMFanuc’s failures, never much improving the efficiency of its robot or human workforces. Jim Hall, a former GM executive, told Automotive News the problem hadn’t been Fanuc’s technology as much as how the American company had tried to use it. “GM saw that the average Japanese plant had so many robots, so GM thought more would be better,” Hall said. “They didn’t know how and why the robots were being used, they just wanted to use more of them.”
The sheer quantity of robots may have overwhelmed GM’s engineers, but it did wonders for Fanuc’s bottom line. The automaker spent tens of billions of dollars on the GMFanuc project, funding Inaba’s investments in the next iteration of Fanuc’s factory of the future. The Japanese company made huge technological strides in the first six years of the partnership, becoming in 1988 the world’s largest supplier of industrial robots.
Agreements between Fanuc and other manufacturing giants, such as General Electric Co., soon followed, but for GM’s investors, improvement wasn’t coming swiftly enough. Smith was additionally chastened by another money-losing initiative, the $7 billion GM-10 project, which had produced cars derided as overpriced and unimaginative. He took still more heat when he backed away from robotization and instead embraced offshoring, becoming the villain of Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary, Roger & Me, about 30,000 GM workers who’d been laid off in Michigan. Late on the morning of July 30, 1990, Smith drove off into retirement in the first car from the (non-GMFanuc) assembly line at the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., with nine troubled years staring at him in the rearview mirror. GM’s share of the U.S. auto market had plunged from 46 percent to 35 percent during his tenure.
Fanuc made a final score from the U.S. automaker in 1993, when Smith’s successor, John Smith (no relation), sold GM’s share in the robotics venture back to Fanuc. After years of GM-funded innovation, the Japanese company had regained its independence and managed to keep its former partner as a customer. A decade later, as Yoshiharu was taking over from his father, the Japanese company fulfilled Roger Smith’s dream, opening a factory in Oshino where robots made other robots in the dark.

Earlier this year, during one of Fanuc’s rare open houses, Vice President Kenji Yamaguchi told investors that about 80 percent of the company’s assembly work is automated. “Only the wiring is done by engineers,” he said. And when you have lots of efficient robots making your other robots, you can sell those robots more cheaply—about $25,500 for a new Robodrill. (You can find a well-used older model on EBay for $8,500.) Volkswagen Group, for instance, pays about 10 percent less for Fanuc robots than it paid for ones it previously purchased from Kuka AG, a German company.
Fanuc manages to offer these savings while maintaining 40 percent operating profit margins, a success that Yamaguchi also traced to the company’s centralized production in Japan, which is made possible, even though most of its products are sold outside the country, by the 243 global service centers that keep its robots operational. The company even profits from its competitors’ sales, because more than half of all industrial robots are directed by its numerical-control software. Between the almost 4 million CNC systems and half-million or so industrial robots it has installed around the world, Fanuc has captured about one-quarter of the global market, making it the industry leader over competitors such as Yaskawa Motoman and ABB Robotics in Germany, each of which has about 300,000 industrial robots installed globally. Fanuc’s Robodrills now command an 80 percent share of the market for smartphone manufacturing robots.
In the first quarter of 2017, North American manufacturers spent $516 million on industrial robots, a 32 percent jump from the same period a year earlier. A study published by the Brookings Institution shows many of them are ending up in steel and auto manufacturing centers such as Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. According to the report, there are about nine industrial robots for every 1,000 workers in Toledo and Detroit—three times the figure for 2010. Many of these robots are Fanuc’s. Its machines are also in Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory, in Nevada, lifting heavy chassis and delicately assembling battery trays, among other tasks. Its sorting robots, meanwhile, are ubiquitous at Amazon.com Inc.’s massive warehousing and shipping facilities.

Orders from the U.S., though, are dwarfed by those from China—some 90,000 units, almost a third of the world’s total industrial robot orders last year. Sales to China amounted to about 55 percent of the $5 billion Fanuc’s automation unit generated in the fiscal year ended March 2017. The International Federation of Robotics estimates that, by 2019, China’s annual industrial robot orders will rise to 160,000 units, suggesting Fanuc  will be insulated from any slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy. Yoshiharu told investors at his most recent Q&A session in April that the company expects demand in China to outstrip supply even after Fanuc opens a factory next August in Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture. The facility will be dedicated solely to keeping up with Chinese demand.
Research into the effects and possible consequences of widespread robotization has yet to clarify whether it will make life distressingly idle or wondrously drudge-free. In a study published earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economics Research, researchers from Boston University and MIT estimated that from 1990 to 2007 each new industrial robot displaced five human workers. A recent German study of the period from 1994 to 2014 put the figure at two workers but noted that unions and workers’ councils may have limited manufacturing job losses there and that medium-skilled workers’ wages were nevertheless depressed. (The same study found that Germany hadn’t experienced net job losses, because younger workers were entering other sectors.)
Automation in China, meanwhile, has yet to harm wages, and a recent report by Bloomberg Intelligence suggests the country’s medium-skilled workers are still seeing wage gains. Those workers’ fortunes are perhaps being buffered, for now at least, by electronics manufacturing. Song Wufong, a middleman in Shanghai who connects foreigners with small and midsize factories in provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong, says that workers in Shenzhen, Guangdong’s manufacturing hub, have so far been somewhat insulated from automation because electronics manufacturing still relies “on human hands that can perform very detailed tasks,” such as wiring and assembly.

But Song says this will change as industrial robots become smaller and more affordable. “Just a few years ago it was unusual to see a small or midsize factory using robots,” he says. “Now I see it more and more often as I travel around meeting with factory owners.” Song was born in the much poorer province of Jiangxi, just north of Fujian and Guangdong, where he worked for years doing unskilled factory labor. He made shoes, toys, and eventually auto parts. “I’m lucky I left when I did,” he says. “Every time I visit, I meet another friend who lost his job to a robot.”
This trend was confirmed by Hong Tao, director of operations at the Beijing office of Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations Inc. Hong says that when he joined the China wing of the world’s oldest international detective agency in 2001, the company mostly concerned itself with busting counterfeiters, investigating fraud and embezzlement, and providing security for foreign executives, with the odd kidnapping case mixed in. Then, around 2012, U.S. companies that once wanted his help opening factories began asking for help closing them down.
“When one of our clients closes a factory in China, it’s my job to prevent any violence or unrest by negotiating a severance package that the workers and the company can both live with,” Hong says over tea at Pinkerton’s Beijing office. This has become a growth industry for Pinkerton, as wages continue to rise and foreign manufacturers continue to flee. About one-third of the dozens of companies Hong has helped move their factories to Thailand or Vietnam, where labor is cheaper. “The rest of them,” he says, “are replacing Chinese peasants with Japanese robots.”

Toward the end of 2015, Fanuc joined a handful of other Japanese companies to invest a combined $20 million in Preferred Networks Inc., an artificial intelligence startup with 60 employees. The modest funding masked a hugely ambitious goal: becoming as dominant in manufacturing AI as Amazon and Google Inc. are in their fields, which Preferred Networks planned to do by partnering with Japanese manufacturers that generate immense troves of data.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Toru Nishikawa, told the Financial Times that while visiting Fanuc’s factory, he’d noticed the absence of AI technology. He saw a chance to apply deep-learning techniques to data culled from Fanuc’s army of manufacturing robots throughout the world so they can improve their own capabilities. When robots make other robots ceaselessly, without human intervention, he said, “data can be collected infinitely.”
The result of Nishikawa’s insight was the Fanuc Intelligent Edge Link and Drive, or Field. The system, introduced in 2016, is an open, cloud-based platform that allows Fanuc to collect global manufacturing data in real time on a previously unimaginable scale and funnel it to self-teaching robots. According to Fanuc, Field has already yielded advancements for tasks such as robotic bin-picking. Previously, the selection of a single part from a bin full of similar parts arranged in random orientations required skilled programmers to “teach” the robots how to perform the task. Now, Fanuc’s robots are teaching themselves. “After 1,000 attempts, the robot has a success rate of 60%,” a company release said. “After 5,000 attempts it can already pick up 90% of all parts—without a single line of program code having to be written.”
Fanuc has so far declined to discuss its strategy concerning its venture into AI and machine learning. An employee who would only identify himself as Mr. Tanaka, because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, says the company will continue to focus on China. But, he adds, “we cannot rely on our past. As a company, we must adapt to new technology before we can create new technology. This will take time, but it’s necessary—the next generation of products have more functions, more connectivity, and more intelligence.”
A few years ago, in response to criticism from investor activist Daniel Loeb, who accused Fanuc of hoarding cash and investing in long-term growth to the detriment of annual returns, Yoshiharu held another of the company’s rare access sessions on the Oshino campus. Speaking with Japan’s largest daily business newspaper, the Nikkei, he addressed more directly than ever before the rising anxiety about robots taking jobs away from human workers.
After describing new “human-friendly robots” that can help workers lift heavy loads, he insisted that “robots are merely tools to make our lives better and easier. They reduce the time we must spend on routine tasks, giving us more time to focus on process control and other managerial duties. Robots will not replace us completely.”
His explanation was arguably less comforting for workers in other countries than for those in Japan, which is experiencing its worst labor shortage in decades and where worker-friendly labor laws make it difficult for companies to lay off employees for almost any reason, least of all so they can be replaced by robots. Japan also has a legacy of successfully balancing human and robotic labor. Toyota Motor Co., for example, uses hundreds of Robodrills to machine and drill parts, but the company says it has relied on robots for less than 8 percent of the work done on its global assembly lines in the past decade.
Factory automation, Mr. Tanaka says, clears a path for new ways of doing things even as it upends the old ways. “Any process which can be automated frees the human hands,” he says, “which in turn frees the human mind.”

Daimler Trucks launches E-FUSO and all-electric heavy-duty truck Vision One



http://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Daimler-Trucks-launches-E-FUSO-and-all-electric-heavy-duty-truck-Vision-On.xhtml?oid=30010405



Daimler Steals Tesla’s Thunder With Heavy-Duty Electric Truck
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-25/daimler-steals-tesla-s-thunder-with-heavy-duty-electric-truck

Nema drugog resenja, mora da se aktivira ECHELON:

Though Wednesday's German government statement does not mention Echelon, the document alludes to the specter of industrial espionage.
"For reasons of national security, and the security of business and society, the federal government considers the ability of German manufacturers to develop and manufacture secure and efficient encryption products indispensable," the statement said.

IBM Watson Health Teams Up With The CDC To Research Blockchain

Rhee said he believes AI applications in healthcare will eventually enable consumers to purchase a home health system as easily as they can now acquire a home security system. “Think about where we were with the internet in 1993,” he said. “That’s about where we are today with AI.”
. “The AI revolution is going to create a lot of new-collar jobs,” Rhee added. “The standard physician’s team will likely include a data scientist in the future.”
Ebadollahi believes that blockchain and AI are on the verge of revolutionizing healthcare globally. “When a bunch of physicists collaborated and created this thing called the World Wide Web a few decades ago, nobody imagined Facebook and Google and Amazon,” he said. “With blockchain we can collect data and extract insights through AI, and the future will have an economy around that we can hardly even imagine right now.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/40481883/ibm-watson-health-is-teaming-up-with-the-cdc-to-research-blockchain


Bele manitle ce zameniti beli okovratnici...

Da bi masine lecile moraju da imaju ogromnu bazu podataka sa tacnim podacima za svakog pacijenta, lekovima... blockchain moze delimicno to da resi.
Inace, blockchain se pijavio u monetarnom svetu, za kriptovalute tipa eteruma ili bitkoina ali se brzo siri i na npr. energetski sektor, sektor usluga, vidimo i zdravstvo...,

Na kraju ce se ispostaviti da ce za sto godina bolje biti drustvenjak. Robot može svašta, ali da napiše neku genealogiju morala ili o apsolutnoj i relativnoj istini - to malo teže.  

Naravno, to pod uslovom da ne streljaju onog ko slobodno misli

To moze efikasnije od ljudi vestacka inteligencija.
Ali tesko da ces da ides kod popa robota...

zasto, pa najlakse je napraviti robota popa ili nadrilekara, samo stancaju pastvi isto, ko oni aparati sto izbacuju fortune cookies ili 

Lepo kazem:

Saudi Arabia First Country to Grant a Robot Citizenship

“Thank you to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction,” Sophia told the panel. “It is historic to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with citizenship.”

https://www.afp.com/en/news/1315/saudi-arabia-first-country-grant-robot-citizenship

Zuper wrote:To moze efikasnije od ljudi vestacka inteligencija.

Tesko. Ali to ne znači da ne može da uništi potrebu za tim.

Pa ni u vreme tih što su pisali to nije bilo puno ljudi koji su se bavili tim, niti treba da ih ima samo da bi se reklo da ih ima.

Potrebno je razdvojiti koncept zanimanja od rada kao sredstvo zadovoljenja osnovnih životnih potreba, to je prosto neminovno uz automatizaciju i AI. To je valjda ideal kome se teži od davnina. Ako ni uz svu tehnologiju i produktivnost svim ljudima ne mogu da se obezbede osnovne stvari za život, onda bujrum Elizijum.

Iskreno, stvarno se plašim da li ćemo mi kao vrsta uspeti da preživimo sve ovo. Desetine hiljada godina evolucije, a sad treba u 200-300 godina da doguramo od parne mašine do deljenja planete sa robotima i dizajniranjem DNK (da ne pominjem recimo VR i nuklearno naoružanje). A mi, biološki, mentalno, porivima, više-manje, ista ona bića iz vremena srednjeg veka.

Zuper wrote:blockchain

Do jaja, sad si i Ethereum apsolvirao... Hajde savladaš na brzaka Hyperledger Fabric, pa da javljamo Allianzu da sve vreme traže senior blockchain system analysts na pogrešnim mestima.

Pa da, tehnologija se mnogo brže menja nego društvene strukture.

Amazon Takes Secrecy to a Comic Extreme
Investors have been fine with it so far, but a hiccup in the company's business could make them dig in harder.

Companies and their investors are in a constant tug-of-war over financial disclosure. Investors want as many numbers as they can get about a company's performance and potential -- for them, there's no such thing as too many metrics. Companies, of course, would prefer to reveal as little as possible. And then there's Amazon.com Inc., which takes financial disclosure stinginess to the next level. So far, investors have been fine with it.

Here's what investors don't know about Amazon: how many Prime customers it has (with a caveat); how much of its growing spending is devoted to big investments such as its network of merchandise warehouses or web-video business; how much money it's bringing in from sales of Amazon's voice-activated speakers, electronic readers or other gadgets; and how Amazon plans to profit from the $13.7 billion purchase of the Whole Foods supermarket chain. Don't expect answers to be forthcoming when it releases third-quarter earnings results on Thursday. 
When it comes to financial disclosure it sometimes feels like Amazon is playing a joke on its investors and the public. The company gives quarterly financial forecasts but they are comically broad. For the three months that ended in September, Amazon said it expects its operating profit to be somewhere between negative $400 million and positive $300 million. Super helpful, guys. 
Amazon also loves to show charts without labels. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Amazon Prime membership program, the company released bars of increasing size representing the supposed yearly growth of Prime subscribers. What was missing were the actual numbers. Were the bars even to scale? Who knows. In case you thought this was a one-time thing, it most certainly was not.

Amazon initially said it didn't believe an analysis of its Prime customer numbers "is meaningful or practical," but after further back-and-forth with the SEC, the company agreed to begin disclosing its subscription revenue. The SEC also tried, but failed, to get Amazon to disclose sales figures of other products, including its line of Echo home speakers. Good try, bureaucrats. 
Mind you, Amazon has no problem blabbing about its financials when it's in the company's interests to do so. Amazon in 2015 started to disclose the revenue and segment operating profit of its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, and it's not an exaggeration to say that the financial reveal boosted the company's stock market value by tens of billions of dollars.

Mozda da krenu od toga kako ne placaju svoje dobavljace...

"Rio Tinto" je, kao rudarska kompanija, globalna supersila. Ima svoj štab u Londonu, drugi u Australiji, ali jedinica koja razvija ovaj program u Jadru je iz njihovog američkog dela, iz Kolorada. To su krupne investicije. Mene je najviše impresioniralo što su to dugoročni programi, samo treba strpljenja. To je program za investiciju za 50 godina i rad rudnika od 50 godina, ako sve bude uspešno - rekao je ambasador Amerike u Beogradu Kajl Skot prilikom nedavne posete Loznici.
 

Litijum je srpska nafta, stižu dolari!

 

http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/ekonomija/aktuelno.239.html:694158-Litijum-je-srpska-nafta-stizu-dolari

Kako ce se neko debelo obogatiti dok ce ostalo da pokupe Ameri, Nemci...dok budu pravili finalne proizvode od rude iz Srbije.

Najveci pokusaj "neprijateljskog" preuzimanja u istoriji tehnoloskog sektora, $130 milijardi,

Broadcom launches $130bn bid for Qualcomm
28 minutes ago
by James Fontanella-Khan in New York and Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco


Chipmaker’s swoop on rival would be biggest ever tech takeover

Chipmaker Broadcom unveiled a $130bn offer, including net debt, for Qualcomm on Monday, in what could be the largest tech deal in history. Under Broadcom’s proposal, Qualcomm shareholders would receive $70 per share — $60 in cash and $10 in shares of its rival. It would value Qualcomm’s equity at roughly $103bn. Qualcomm is set to reject Broadcom’s takeover offer, as the US chipmaker views its rival’s $130bn proposal as too low and fraught with regulatory risks, people familiar with the matter said. The offer represents a 28 per cent premium over Qualcomm’s share price on November 2, after it first emerged that Broadcom was preparing an offer. Broadcom also said that its offer stands whether or not Qualcomm completes its $38bn acquisition of NXP, which has yet to close. If completed, it would be the biggest ever takeover in the technology sector and create a company with a combined market capitalisation of more than $200bn. Hock Tan, chief executive and master dealmaker behind Broadcom, said the “proposal is compelling for stockholders and stakeholders in both companies”. “Our proposal provides Qualcomm stockholders with a substantial and immediate premium in cash for their shares, as well as the opportunity to participate in the upside potential of the combined company,” he said. However, the offer is seen as opportunistic and highly risky from an antitrust perspective by Qualcomm’s senior management, according to people briefed on the situation. One of these people said that a $70-a-share offer was far from a level that Qualcomm’s board would consider seriously. Another person added that the offer was opportunistic because Qualcomm’s share price had been depressed because of its licensing dispute with Apple. The shares traded as high as $81.97 in 2014, according to Reuters data. The person added that once Qualcomm receives regulatory approval for its acquisition of NXP and solves the dispute with Apple, the stock would trade significantly higher. If Mr Tan is ultimately successful in convincing Qualcomm’s board, its shareholders and regulators of the merits of the deal, it will cap a stunning run of multibillion-dollar deals for the semiconductor industry in general and Broadcom in particular. Chipmakers are jostling for position amid the shift from an industry dominated by personal computers and smartphones to a world of self-driving cars and the heterogeneous “internet of things”, all fuelled by the emergence of 5G wireless networking. This has already triggered Softbank’s $32bn takeover of Arm and Intel’s $17bn purchase of Altera, as well as Qualcomm’s recent $39bn bid for NXP. Qualcomm’s mobile processors and modems, backed by a strong portfolio of intellectual property that underpins cellular communications in most modern mobile phones, have left it well placed as the rollout of 5G begins in the next few years. Broadcom sells a wide range of chip designs for networking equipment, from back-end telecoms infrastructure to the WiFi and Bluetooth controllers in the latest iPhones.

QUALCOMM IS SAID POISED TO REJECT BROADCOM’S OFFER: FT

Sredinom 2011 si mogao kupiti  50 bitcoin-a za $25-30. Da si to uradio i zadrzao bitcoin-e imao bi danas oko $350 000

Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye

'Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap'

(Bob Lutz is a former vice chairman and head of product development at General Motors. He also held senior executive positions with Ford, Chrysler, BMW and Opel.)

This article will be included in “Redesigning the Industry,” a five-part Automotive News series exploring the future of a business in the throes of change.  Part I begins in our Nov. 6 issue with a focus on “Predictions & Possibilities.”
It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.
The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.
Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.
The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you'll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.
On the freeway, it will merge seamlessly into a stream of other modules traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn't matter. You have a blending of rail-type with individual transportation.
Then, as you approach your exit, your module will enter deceleration lanes, exit and go to your final destination. You will be billed for the transportation. You will enter your credit card number or your thumbprint or whatever it will be then. The module will take off and go to its collection point, ready for the next person to call.
Most of these standardized modules will be purchased and owned by the Ubers and Lyfts and God knows what other companies that will enter the transportation business in the future.
A minority of individuals may elect to have personalized modules sitting at home so they can leave their vacation stuff and the kids' soccer gear in them. They'll still want that convenience.
The vehicles, however, will no longer be driven by humans because in 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.
The tipping point will come when 20 to 30 percent of vehicles are fully autonomous. Countries will look at the accident statistics and figure out that human drivers are causing 99.9 percent of the accidents.
Of course, there will be a transition period. Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.

The big fleets
CNBC recently asked me to comment on a study showing that people don't want to buy an autonomous car because they would be scared of it. They don't trust traditional automakers, so the only autonomous car they'd buy would have to come from Apple or Google. Only then would they trust it.
My reply was that we don't need public acceptance of autonomous vehicles at first. All we need is acceptance by the big fleets: Uber, Lyft, FedEx, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, utility companies, delivery services. Amazon will probably buy a slew of them. These fleet owners will account for several million vehicles a year. Every few months they will order 100,000 low-end modules, 100,000 medium and 100,000 high-end. The low-cost provider that delivers the specification will get the business.
These modules won't be branded Chevrolet, Ford or Toyota. They'll be branded Uber or Lyft or who-ever else is competing in the market.
The manufacturers of the modules will be much like Nokia — basically building handsets. But that's not where the value is going to be in the future. The value is going to be captured by the companies with the fully autonomous fleets.
The end of performance
These transportation companies will be able to order modules of various sizes — short ones, medium ones, long ones, even pickup modules. But the performance will be the same for all because nobody will be passing anybody else on the highway. That is the death knell for companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. That kind of performance is not going to count anymore.
In each size vehicle, you will be able to order different equipment levels. There will be basic modules, and there will be luxury modules that will have a refrigerator, a TV and computer terminals with full connectivity. There will be no limit to what you can cram into these things because drinking while driving or texting while driving will no longer be an issue.
The importance of styling will be minimized because the modules in the high-speed trains will have to be blunt at both ends. There will be minimum separation in the train. Air resistance will be minimal because the modules will just be inserted into the train and spat out when you get close to your exit.
The future of dealers?
Unfortunately, I think this is the demise of automotive retailing as we know it.
Think about it: A horse dealer had a stable of horses of all ages, and you would come in and get the horse that suited you. You'd trade in your old horse and take your new horse home.
Car dealers will continue to exist as a fringe business for people who want personalized modules or who buy reproduction vintage Ferraris or reproduction Formula 3 cars. Automotive sport — using the cars for fun — will survive, just not on public highways. It will survive in country clubs such as Monticello in New York and Autobahn in Joliet, Ill. It will be the well-to-do, to the amazement of all their friends, who still know how to drive and who will teach their kids how to drive. It is going to be an elitist thing, though there might be public tracks, like public golf courses, where you sign up for a certain car and you go over and have fun for a few hours.
And like racehorse breeders, there will be manufacturers of race cars and sports cars and off-road vehicles. But it will be a cottage industry.
Yes, there will be dealers for this, but they will be few and far between. People will be unable to drive the car to the dealership, so dealers will probably all be on these motorsports and off-road dude ranches. It is there where people will be able to buy the car, drive it, get it serviced and get it repainted. In the early days, those tracks may be relatively numerous, but they will decline over time.
So auto retailing will be OK for the next 10, maybe 15 years as the auto companies make autonomous vehicles that still carry the manufacturer's brand and are still on the highway.
But dealerships are ultimately doomed. And I think Automotive News is doomed. Car and Driver is done; Road & Track is done. They are all facing a finite future. They'll be replaced by a magazine called Battery and Module read by the big fleets.
The era of the human-driven automobile, its repair facilities, its dealerships, the media surrounding it — all will be gone in 20 years.
Today's automakers?
The companies that can move downstream and get into value creation will do OK. But unless they develop superior technical capability, the manufacturers of the modules, the handset providers, if you will, will have their specifications set by the big transportation companies.
The fleets will say, "We want a module of a certain length, a certain weight and a certain range."
They will prescribe the mileage and the acceleration and take bids.
Automakers, if they are smart, may be able to adapt. General Motors sees the handwriting on the wall. It has created Maven and has bought into Cruise Automation and Lyft.
It doesn't want to be the handset provider. It wants to be the company that creates the value and captures the value, and it is making the right moves to be around when the transition occurs.
I think probably everybody sees it coming, but no one wants to talk about it. They know they will be OK for a few years if they keep providing superior technology, superior design and have good software for autonomous driving.
So for a while, the autonomous thing will be captured by the automobile companies. But then it's going to flip, and the value will be captured by the big fleets.
This transition will be largely complete in 20 years.
I won't be around to say, "I told you so," though if I do make it to 105, I could no longer drive anyway because driving will be banned. So my timing once again is impeccable.

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