HONG KONG — If all the ships over 20 years old were demolished tomorrow, the global fleet would shrink by around 750,000 TEUs, or 4 percent of the total, yet ship utilisation on the embattled Asia-Europe services would not budge one percentage point.
Drewry made this surprising point in its Container Insight Weekly newsletter to illustrate the importance of analysing capacity and the scrapping of tonnage on a trade-by-trade basis.
“The lack of scrapping activity could be viewed as a missed opportunity to redress the supply and demand imbalance, but in reality scrapping does not do anything to minimise overcapacity in the high-volume trades that have the biggest say on the leading carriers’ profitability,” the analyst said.
Measuring the impact of scrapping on the global fleet was meaningless since it was crucial to look at deployment of assets at the individual trade route level. Drewry said by only scrapping vessels of less than 6,000 TEUs that are deployed mainly in North-South and intra-regional trades, nothing was done to alleviate the pressure on East-West routes, where virtually all of the newbuild capacity is being placed.
“Scrapping can widen the cascading opportunities for smaller East-West ships into North-South trades, but beyond that it does very little,” the weekly insight found.
Drewry noted that the number of containerships that were scrapped by the half-way stage of 2015 decreased dramatically, with only 47 vessels demolished compared to 107 at the same stage in 2014. That scrapping slowdown removed just 87,500 TEUs from the world’s cellular fleet that was fast approaching the 20 million TEU mark with the steady influx of big new ships.
By the end of this year, Drewry expects the scrapping total to be the lowest since 2011, representing just a tenth of the newbuildings that have been added to the fleet. Owners of older ships have preferred this year to extend the lifecycle of their assets rather than consign them to the scrap heap because demolition prices are less attractive than they were, and because of renewed demand for panamax ships.
Drewry said the average size and age of vessels being demolished had not changed much in the last few years and was currently around 2,000 TEUs and 23 years. The analyst added that at the moment, it seemed unlikely that owners would start scrapping a large number of ships younger than 20 years old.
There are only about 40 ships above 4,000 TEU that are currently older than 20 years, meaning that most of the immediate scrapping candidates would as before come from the sub-2,000 TEU sector. However, Drewry said this would change in the next three to four years, with many more Panamaxes becoming theoretical candidates for scrapping, especially with the widened Panama Canal that would make trade route deployment more difficult.
Drewry’s conclusion was that while it expected scrapping to pick up a next year, unless owners took got rid of younger and bigger ships, scrapping was not the answer to the industry’s overcapacity problem.
The Growth of 3PL Mergers and Acquisitions
Many of the CEOs believe this recent wave of M&A will lead to defensive acquisitions by other 3PLs.
By Patrick Burnson, Executive Editor
September 28, 2015
As noted in our blog, here is the encapsulation of recent key 3PL survey findings:
Only seven of the 30 CEOs reported significant M&A activity by their companies during the past year. Following the onset of the global recession in 2008 there were relatively few large –scale acquisitions in the 3PL industry. That has changed dramatically since early 2014.
Since that time there have been ten major acquisitions by 3PLs totaling $18 billion. This is leading to a significant restructuring of the industry in many markets, and will require substantial effort on behalf of those 3PLs to integrate those operations post-acquisition. It will also result in significant brand confusion in the marketplace that will have to be addressed by those companies. Many of the CEOs involved in this year’s surveys believe this recent wave of M&A will lead to defensive acquisitions by other 3PLs.
CEOs across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific agree that the need for M&A stems from four key factors: 3PLs experiencing market pressure to expand service offerings; an increased desire to offer one-stop solutions to customers; the need to drive scale in specific markets; and a desire to expand their geographic footprint. North American CEOs predicted that 6.54 percent of their revenue growth over the next three years will come from M&A activity. European CEOs projected that figure at 3.67 percent while CEOs from the Asia-Pacific region predicted that 4 percent of their revenue growth during that period would be M&A related.
A More Focused E-Commerce Approach
Survey respondents cited significant changes in the e-commerce marketplace in the past year, referencing strong growth, an increased focus on next-day delivery and rapid expansion of international e-commerce.
In both North America and Europe, CEOs reported that Amazon had a particularly significant impact on supply chains and the e-commerce industry in their regions, highlighting the company’s focus on same-day delivery and its developing relationships with 3PL companies for last-mile delivery. On average, e-commerce now accounts for an average of 11.85 percent North American 3PLs’ revenue, and CEOs predict it will increase to 20.85 percent in three years. On average e-commerce revenues now account for 5.33 percent of European respondent revenues, and that percentage has been projected to grow to 9 percent in three years. Growth in Asia-Pacific’s e-commerce market was aided by the region’s massive e-commerce provider, Alibaba – a company Asian-Pacific CEOs believe might become a significant competitor for 3PL business in the region. For all three regions surveyed, CEOs said that the expansion of 3PL technology support for e-commerce was critical for the industry’s ongoing success.
“Amazon’s recent actions are impacting e-commerce in a major way,” said Dr. Robert Lieb, Professor of Supply Chain Management at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. “The company’s market dominance and huge popularity with customers creates a great opportunity for 3PLs to assist Amazon, and ensure customers get the goods they need – especially during peak e-commerce seasons.”
Additional Supply Chain and Logistics Industry Trends and Insights
• West Coast Port Issues: In early 2015, one of the worst labor conflicts in recent history, labor slowdowns at major West Coast ports, created significant supply chain issues for carriers, 3PLs, and shippers, particularly in the North America and Asia-Pacific regions. Consequences included long delays, the re-routing of many shipments, shipments getting stuck in ports, frequent mode shifts (ocean to air), changes in destination ports, long transit times, missed sales for customers and considerable customer unrest. Amid these significant issues, the conflict underscored the importance of companies addressing risk mitigation and choosing a proactive 3PL partner with a proven track record and strategy for handling disruptions. Despite their customer’s problems with the affected ports, 3PLs believe that few of them will significantly change their degree of reliance upon those ports in the future.
• Global 3PL Industry Concerns: In Europe and North America, CEOs continue to be concerned by the truck driver shortage and talent management issues spanning the industry. Twenty-six percent of North American CEOs and 60 percent of Asia-Pacific CEOs cited the worsening driver shortage to be a key factor effecting the global 3PL market. Additionally, an inflexible workforce, oppressive regulations, rapidly changing market conditions, increased costs for technology upgrades and capacity constraints are dynamics these CEOs believe will affect the global 3PL industry over the next several years.
• Lower Oil Prices: In North America, 80 percent of CEOs reported that the decline in oil prices had a positive impact on key customers, particularly with regard to lower transportation costs. CEOs agree that lower oil prices are not likely to have a significant impact on the environmental sustainability programs of 3PLs.
• Economic Uncertainties: Changing economic conditions are impacting the 3PL industries in Europe and Asia-Pacific, in particular. While a few European CEOs reported observing some improvement in the Eurozone, many agree that the European 3PL market has not rebounded significantly in the past year. The majority of Asian-Pacific CEOs cite the declining GDP growth rate in China as an industry dynamic impacting the region’s 3PL industry, with additional responses citing infrastructure issues in the region’s emerging markets and difficulties in developing accurate economic forecasts.
• Future Impacts of Ride-sharing Services: Ride-sharing companies, most notably Uber, are believed to potentially pose a threat to aspects of the 3PL industry in the future. As an international transportation network with technology at its core, Uber operates in more than 60 countries and has attracted significant investment capital. The company could eventually pose a threat to 3PL business, by providing last-mile delivery services, becoming a small LTL carrier and taking business away from small-volume couriers.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Supply Chain Outlook Summit: Supply Chain Uncertainty
Veteran Supply Chain Expert Larry Lapide, Ph.D., outlines the six major factors that will have significant and uncertain impacts on future supply chains.
At the upcoming Supply Chain Outlook Summit, Larry Lapide will tell supply chain managers how to best brace for the changes that lie ahead.
September 23, 2015
The upcoming Supply Chain Outlook Summit will feature 10 different speakers who have their fingers on the pulse of the most important changes impacting supply chain management over the next 2-3 years. At the event, Larry Lapide, PhD., will identify the factors that will have significant and uncertain impacts on future supply chains. While fraught with uncertainty, each factor will challenge today and tomorrow’s future managers to achieve excellence regardless of what comes to fruition.
With over 35 years of experience in industry, consulting, business research, and academia, Lapide was most recently the director of demand management at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL). He also managed the launch of MIT’s Supply Chain 2020 Project and is responsible for CTL’s Strategy Alignment Workshop. The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement in Business Forecasting & Planning Award, Lapide is a frequent presenter at supply chain events and the co-author of E-Business: The Impact on Supply Chain and Logistics.
In this Q&A with Supply Chain Outlook, Lapide highlights the key points of his presentation and tells how supply chain managers can best brace for the changes that lie ahead.
SCO: Why should supply chain managers be concerned about uncertainty?
Lapide: Because uncertainty is all around them. A few years ago we wrote an article that outlined six macro trends (oil, global trade, the use of trading blocs, and so forth) that are still prevalent today. Supply chain experts need to know that the future is always changing, and that in and of itself infuses uncertainty into their daily work as supply chains evolve in the long-run.
SCO: What are the macro trends that companies should be focused on?
Lapide: The six major factors that we feel will most affect future supply chains are: 1) the aging of developed countries; 2) oil prices; 3) a power shift toward the East; 4) trading bloc formation; 5) globalized Green Laws; and 6) pervasive technologies.
SCO: How did you come up with the six macro trends?
Lapide: While I was at MIT, our team decided to approach the
project using a Scenario Planning methodology, rather than try to do the impossible and predict the state of the world 10 to 15 years out. Our interests moved to identifying reasonable scenarios for the future, such as the worlds that supply chains might be operating in as well as the uncertainties around them.
SCO: Why do supply chain leaders struggle with uncertainty?
Lapide: Supply chain management as a discipline has enjoyed two decades of growth primarily due to the increase in global trade during this time. Along the way, the supply chain has become more fragmented, disjointed, and global in nature. As a result, the activities going on around the world impact the supply chain. The rise in fuel costs over time, for example, and despite the current price-per-barrel, is an ongoing concern for shippers because oil will remain the “fuel du jour” for a long time to come. The same goes for trading blocs, green laws, and the rest of our list, which clearly outlines the key macro trends that everyone should be thinking about and planning for right now.
Business Continuity Planning, Or What To Do When Stuff Happens
Supply chain managers must always be prepared to expect the unexpected. A well-thought business continuity plan is key to getting up and running after a disruptions.
By Candice Fan
Candice Fan is the Global Strategic Sourcing Manager for Linde Electronics
September 24, 2015
Globalization has changed the way manufacturers do business. Materials are shipped from one or multiple places, manufacturing takes place in another, and the customer is in yet a third place. The question for manufacturers now is how to navigate the challenges brought on by globalization while maintaining adequate production to meet demand? In a global economy, any major incident within the supply chain or natural disaster can subject customers to supply risks.
Think of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese government did not allow many materials needed in semiconductor manufacturing plants to come into their ports, which required organizations to make alternative plans. Two months were added onto shipment times to allow for alternate shipping plans. Without foresight and planning, this would have marked a significant problem. By implementing business continuity strategies, including proactive processes, contingency plans, and supply gap mitigation plans, this challenge was addressed and gaps in supply were averted.
These are some of the lessons we have learned about business continuity planning at Linde Electronics.
Code of Conduct For a supplier, corporate responsibility concerns are important to every step in the product value chain from research and development, to procurement, to production, to transport, to use by customers, and finally to waste and recycling. In a global economy, any major incidents within the supply chain or any natural disaster can subject customers to supply risks.
As businesses with global locations and customers, suppliers must be prepared to handle critical business functions such as customer orders, overseeing production and deliveries, and various parts of the supply chain in any situation. Business continuity can be maintained by analyzing, identifying, and mitigating the risks to business operations.
One way that we does this is by first establishing a code of conduct for suppliers and requiring their commitment to comply with this code in order to do business together. The Code of Conduct covers such issues as:
• Health and safety • Human rights and labor standards • Legal compliance and integrity • Environmental protection • Sustainability in the supply chain and monitoring through self-assessments and audits • Integration in contractual agreements
Cooperation for sustainability enhances mutual trust and long-term business relations. It pays off in reduced costs, high safety standards, compliance with national laws, and a positive impact on employee satisfaction and productivity.
Business Continuity Plan (BCP)A business continuity plan is a plan to continue operations when a place of business is affected by different levels of disaster. The BCP explains how the business will recover its operations or move operations to another location after damage by events like natural disasters, theft, or flooding. Linde Electronics engages with each supplier to develop a business continuity plan that enables them to continue to perform critical functions and provide services in the event of an unexpected interruption.
The business continuity planning cycle promotes a continuous improvement process and ensures that all designed recovery plans and solutions are in place and are efficient and effective. The cycle contains the following steps.
Analyze Business impact analysis is done to identify threats, determine the consequences of disruption, and document and plan safeguards to support critical business activities.
Design After information is collected and thoroughly analyzed, then a disaster recovery plan is designed to further determine the impact to the business of particular risks. This includes:
• Identifying back-up supply and locations • Elaborating plans for recovery process if a natural disaster or risk event should occur • Defining duration of outage • Planning drills to test business continuity plan (for exercise phase)
Exercise At this stage, the planning drills are executed and on-site audits of suppliers are conducted. These audits test the suppliers’ ability to activate emergency response plans and crisis management.
Measure As the business environment is dynamic, a mechanism to track change, assess impact, and modify planning must be employed to ensure that response to failures or events are appropriate and timely.
Maintain Once potential risks are identified and mitigation plans are developed and implemented, the goal is to maintain the business continuity plan with suppliers. Then the planning cycle restarts with Analyze to ensure that the supply chain is robust, responsive, and reliable.
Benefits of BCP The benefits of an effective business continuity plan for suppliers are that it facilitates:
• Identifying and managing current and future threats to the company • Taking a proactive and effective approach to minimize the impact of incidents • Keeping critical functions up and running during times of crisis • Working across teams with operations, technical experts, quality, and supply teams • Demonstrating a credible and resilient response to customers, suppliers, and business partners
Business continuity planning is a powerful tool to improve and deepen business partner relationships. Linde Electronics has implemented this tool to create a robust and diversified supply chain where we work with electronic material suppliers worldwide to meet global demand. If the supply of raw material is interrupted anywhere in the world, business continuity planning puts us in a stronger position to limit the long-term business effects. By working closely with suppliers, we can deliver on customers’ requirements faster and more reliably than ever before and can offer supply security to customers.
Technology and Procure-to-Pay
Many organizations seek to improve their procure-to-pay processes by adopting technology that can increase the efficiency of procurement and accounts payable activities. APQC’s research indicates that although a large amount of organizations have adopted technologies to automate procurement tasks, this has not been consistent across all areas involved in procure-to-pay.
By APQC
September 23, 2015
Efficiency in both procurement and accounts payable activities can lead to clear benefits to an organization’s procure-to-pay process. One way that organizations are looking to increase efficiency is through modernization—in particular technology adoption.
The infographic below presents the degree to which technology is used in different parts of the procure-to-pay process and the potential benefits of modernization.
The Middle-Class Squeeze
If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure
ENLARGE
The middle class is in trouble. Can we reverse course—or was Marx right about the dynamics of capitalism?ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER
Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: “I explained,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that what I was trying to do was create a society of ‘haves,’ not a class of them.”
In the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, those words carried conviction. There was plenty of argument, of course, about whether the means they chose were the best and about the fate of those who got left behind. But even critics reluctantly had to agree about which way history was heading: The society of “haves” in the West was growing; state socialism was imploding.
Most of the rest of the world was hoping to follow the West’s example. Two and a half years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Almost all the newly emerging ex-Communist regimes sought market freedoms for their people. Back home in the Anglosphere, the spread of ownership—of stocks and homes—and the expansion of economic and personal opportunity were the dominant themes of the age. As Mrs. Thatcher bustled around Whitehall urging on her program of popular capitalism, she used to shout: “Every earner an owner!”
In 2015, it is difficult to imagine a version of that Thatcher/Gorbachev conversation being replicated between any Western leader and the hostile and suspicious Vladimir Putin.Neither side seems to have an intelligible ideology. Besides, the confidence is not there anymore.
ENLARGE
We have become a society of ’have lesses,’ if not yet of ‘have nots.’ PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Since the financial crisis of 2007-08, which Western leader could boast of spreading ownership in any important way? In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”
In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s.
In Britain and the U.S., we are learning all over again that it is not the natural condition of the human race for children to be better off than their parents. Such a regression, in societies that assume constant progress, is striking. Imagine the panic if the same thing happened to life expectancy.
When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?
Great international banks and other corporations—and their top executives—can devise a life that escapes normal tax jurisdictions. Their successes are globalized and accrue chiefly to them; their failures crawl back home to die, at the expense of the rest of us.
So instead of feeling that it is a privilege to be an ordinary citizen of a free country, many of us start to feel a bit like suckers. Hope—the inseparable companion of progress—fades and is replaced by disappointment, even bitterness. It has always been understood that opportunity carries some price of insecurity, but what happens if insecurity rises and opportunity contracts?
Our politics has begun to match these uneasy feelings. “You people are suffering,” bellows Donald Trump to cheering crowds of seemingly fairly prosperous people. Material suffering is not, despite the ups and downs of his own business, an experience that he knows much about, but he finds a ready audience. Meanwhile, in Britain, an overwhelming majority of the Labor Party, which won three general elections in a row under the centrist Tony Blair, has just selected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old veteran of hard Left politics who looks forward to the end of capitalism. Until a couple of months ago, he seemed almost literally the most unelectable person in his entire party.
Extremes of both left and right are doing well. These bad times have been good for the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and the antiausterity Scottish Nationalists; but also for Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France,Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain. There is nothing contradictory about this seeming confluence of the extremes. It is happening because the center cannot hold, or at least does not know what to say about itself.
Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”
ENLARGE
Karl Marx PHOTO: CORBIS
All these quotations are from a work published in 1848 that caused quite a stir. It was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and was called “The Communist Manifesto.” Even now, people have heard of it.
By the last quarter of the 20th century, most people had seen a key aspect of Marx and Engel’s analysis disproved. The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor. Modern industrial production would inevitably depress the living standards of the proletariat, they believed, but also, in the end, increase their power. Having created a form of slavery, capitalism would be overthrown by its slaves. The proletarian masses would become the dictators.
This did not happen. Instead, the bourgeoisie grew so large that today it is commonplace for American politicians to speak of the “middle class” and mean much the same as people used to mean by “the workers.” In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels refer to “the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital.” They scorned private property, pointing out that nine-tenths of the population had none. It did not cross their minds that the bourgeois class could be numerous enough to win elections in an era of universal suffrage; yet that is what happened. Margaret Thatcher also equated the bourgeoisie with property and capital, but she saw this as empowering the many, not the few.
In the 21st century, however, it is not surprising that many members of the middle class now see themselves as prisoners of the system that they helped to create. Phrases like “negative equity” and “credit crunch” capture that. A lot of words that have a specific economic or financial meaning also draw on a moral meaning—value, bonds, goods, security, even “collateralized debt obligations.” The word “credit” itself means “trust” or “belief.”
The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade. Which means that the mass bourgeoisie (a phrase that Marx and Engels would have thought a contradiction in terms) start to feel like the new proletariat.
True, unemployment rates in the U.S. and Britain, unlike those in the eurozone, are low. Against most predictions, David Cameron’s Conservatives stayed in power in Britain, this time with an overall majority, in the general election in May. There was just enough financial prudence and just enough returning prosperity to see to that.
But pretty much the whole of the developed world is still in the convalescent ward, and no one is sure whether the wonder drug of quantitative easing can yet be abandoned, or even whether it does no more than suppress the symptoms of disease. Despite years of supposed austerity, debt is still strikingly high. It remains possible that banks, or even whole countries in the eurozone, could collapse. And who knows whether or not China’s big banks are bust?
There is clearly an unmet need for a politics that goes beyond mere grievance-peddling to develop a new way of thinking about what makes a society free and secure at the same time. If this were easy, we would have heard more of it by now, and I won’t pretend to have the answers. But certain basic principles seem like the proper foundation.
Look again at markets. “Capitalism” and “globalization” are words most commonly used by people who do not like the phenomena they describe. A better catchall term for the economic arrangements worth preserving is “markets,” and this should be emphasized. Markets provide the model for how goods should be exchanged in a free society—efficiently, amiably and under the rule of law.
To the extent that people cheat in markets, they are not real markets, any more than antifreeze labeled “wine” is real wine. Too many advocates of markets have allowed themselves to be suborned into becoming apologists for business. And too many businesses now operate as if their responsibilities are only to themselves and not to consumers.
Take ownership much more seriously. Why are so few companies owned by the people who work for them, and why do both liberal and conservative political parties not offer greater incentives, such as tax advantages, for this to change? It is extraordinary that the joint stock company, the foundation of modern commercial and industrial wealth, is still so little influenced by the views of shareholders.
This is perhaps most evident in the preposterous salaries paid, particularly in the U.S. and Britain, to top executives of public companies. If the owners of these companies truly exercised authority over what is theirs, this wouldn’t happen. If these enterprises had grown over the last 20 years at the same rate as pay for the men who run them (it usually still is men), no one would be talking of a crisis of capitalism.
Ownership of housing, stocks and pensions is an area where creativity has died. This failing of our consumer society may owe something to the baby boomers’ desire to “have it now,” but another part of the problem is that people are correctly no longer confident that what they save now will be available to them later. Savings need more long-term government protection than they receive in most Western societies. A business culture based on deals and bonuses means that the best business minds are not interested in saving.
The ideal of ownership also needs to apply more fully to civil society. It might be a good idea, for example, if citizens could establish ownership rights over their local school by becoming “members.” Under the existing arrangements, how much can parents and communities creatively affect what happens in schools? The charter-school movement in the U.S. and “academies” and “free schools” in Britain are working in the right direction but remain a long way from something citizens can feel they own.
These rights would give people a voice when things go wrong, rather as some congregations have a say in their churches. In Britain, there is an admirable and long-standing body called the Wine Society, wholly owned by its members with the sole purpose of getting them good wine at good prices. There could be some bold ideas about applying this principle to things so important that they can’t be bottled, such as health.
The Victorians were more imaginative than we are about principles of mutuality—credit unions, building societies, the cooperative movement. Such organizations feel creakier in an age when people want larger sums, faster. But is it really beyond the skill of our great modern business brains to develop these concepts and adapt them to modernity? Financial creativity, unfortunately, really has become the preserve of the few, for the few.
Balance the national and the global. This could be the hardest principle to implement but also the most important. All nations in the modern world depend on other nations and flourish if they embrace that interdependence—for the sake of trade and the sake of peace. But it does not follow, as some internationalists argue, that the age of the nation-state is dead.
Democracy and the rule of law exist only because of national jurisdictions. If those jurisdictions blur, as they do in the European Union, people’s trust in the polity weakens and the structures of answerability become too opaque. For all his love of trade, Adam Smith understood this. His great work is called “The Wealth of Nations,” not “The Wealth of the Global Community.”
Out of the allegiance that citizens feel to their country and its legal and political institutions comes the confidence to deal fairly with the wider world. The global village works best if each village householder is secure in his title to his own property and master in his own house. If the national and the global are not held in balance, popular fear of the global elites will (justifiably) grow. As happened in the 1930s, we will see weak, goody-goody international bodies wagging their finger ineffectually at strong, nasty nationalist regimes.
I am no alarmist, and no one should worry that I have become a late convert to Marxism. Marx’s prescriptions were mostly wrong, and his spirit was intolerant and coercive. He did not understand markets or respect political institutions, and he thought liberty was a sham.
But Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.
Apple’s iPhone 6s Supply Chain: Can They Handle the Global Demand?
Ron Johnson, Enjoy Technology's chief executive officer, and Mark Gurman, 9to5Mac.com's senior editor, discuss the release of Apple's iPhone 6s with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg West." By 24/7 Staff
How to use a highly accurate forecast of near-term demand to drive up perfect orders using much less inventory.
September 26, 2015
Apple’s rose gold iPhone 6s models are said to represent as much as 40% of worldwide preorders.
Can Apple’s supply chain handle the demand? (watch video above).
Though it is only one of four colors available, the new rose gold iPhone 6s is said to be the most popular option for preorders, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities.
According to supply chain sources who spoke with Kuo, the rose gold iPhone 6s series is accounting for between 30 and 40 percent of preorders.
The details were revealed in a note to investors issued Thursday, a copy of which was obtained byAppleInsider.
The main beneficiary of the popularity of the rose gold iPhone 6s will be Foxconn Precision, Kuo said. That’s because Foxconn is the only casing supplier who is capable of volume production of that version, he said.
As for total sales over the opening weekend, Kuo said Apple could realistically sell anywhere between 10 million and 13 million units. If Apple does reach the 12-to-13-million range, it would be in line with Wall Street’s high expectations, he said.
But to Kuo, it’s more likely that Apple sells under 12 million units. The analyst said it’s difficult to tell right now whether that scenario would be a result of the supply chain still ramping up production, or consumer demand.
Currently, the new Taptic Engine, backlight module, and rose gold casing are all responsible for production bottlenecks, he said.
Apple already announced earlier this month that the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are on track to set new records for the company at launch. Last year, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sold a blockbuster 10 million units in their first weekend.
A key difference this year, beyond the popular rose gold color, is the fact that the iPhone 6s series will be available from day one in China, a booming market with a voracious appetite for iPhones. Investors expect that the inclusion of China at launch will help push the iPhone 6s to new records over the first three days.
Apple is likely to announce opening weekend sales next Monday, Sept. 28. The company has taken a similar approach in years past.
