Bloom energy

 His company, publicly traded Bloom Energy, sells fuel cells—steel boxes that generate electricity using natural gas. The boxes, which it calls energy servers, emit a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, but they are supposed to make much less of it than traditional power plants and do so without generating lots of smog ingredients like nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides.

Every time there is a disaster your power price is going to go up, because somebody has to pay for the damage, Bloom is capitalizing on the outages by wooing potential customers in fire-risk zones to protect against grid failure with Bloom-powered

Over its 19 years in business, Bloom has installed several thousand of its 15-ton boxes worldwide for big tech companies including Apple, AT&T and Paypal, which are willing to pay up to guarantee 24/7 power for data centers where the cost of downtime is nearly $9,000 per minute. A lot of its customers are in states with the highest power prices and big clean-energy subsidies, like New York, where Home Depot has installed them as backup generators “wherever they make economic sense

The natural gas, thanks to fracking, is already there,” Sridhar says. And yet, despite big promises, Sridhar’s boxes are highly unlikely to transform the grid in California, or anywhere else. The reasons are manifold 多樣化的, but boil down to this: Bloom’s technology is too dirty and too costly.

decade ago, Sridhar envisioned that by now his fuel cell technology would be in every home, costing $3,000 a pop. In reality, not a single home in America has its own Bloom box. Instead, his boxes are used mostly for industrial and commercial customers, costing approximately $1.2 million each. Without subsidies, they generate power at a cost of roughly 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour versus 10 cents per kwh for grid power nationally.

He later worked at the University of Arizona’s Space Technologies Lab, building an oxygen-generating machine for NASA’s missions to Mars. When the Mars Polar Lander crashed in 1999, his project was canceled. Undeterred, he worked to more or less reverse that technology, to turn methane and oxygen into carbon dioxide and electricity.

Those initial machines were hand-assembled, Sridhar recalls, in a hobby shop at Moffett Federal Airfield in Santa Clara County, rather than on today’s automated assembly line. A former Bloom executive claims that those early boxes had to be monitored 24/7, and that internal modules stacked with hundreds of 4-by-4-inch fuel cell wafers needed to be swapped out a couple times a year, at $225,000 a pop. Another complication of these Rube Goldberg devices was the filtration systems—metal canisters filled with pebbles of solid catalysts that separate sulfur compounds and other contaminants from the methane gas 甲皖. According to the same executive, the first time technicians went to empty the canisters, they simply sucked out the used catalyst with a Shop-Vac and ended up spreading a rotten-egg smell across the neighborhood. Bloom called the executive’s account “hearsay

IAS 21 The Effects of Changes in Foreign Exchange Rates

The following procedures apply when an entity accounts for transactions in a foreign currency. A foreign currency transaction is recorded, on initial recognition in the functional currency, by applying to the foreign currency amount the spot exchange rate at the date of the transaction. At the end of each reporting period:

• foreign currency monetary items are translated into the functional currency using the closing rate;
• non-monetary items that are measured in terms of historical cost in a foreign currency continue to be translated using the exchange rate that prevailed at the date of the transaction; and
• non-monetary items that are measured at fair value in a foreign currency are translated using the exchange rates that prevailed at the date when the fair value was measured.

The resulting exchange differences are recognised in profit or loss when they arise except for some exchange differences that form part of a reporting entity’s net investment in a foreign operation.  The latter are recognised initially in other comprehensive income and reclassified to profit or loss on disposal of the net investment.

For translation into the functional currency or into a presentation currency, the following procedures apply, except in limited circumstances:

• assets and liabilities are translated at the exchange rate at the end of the period;
• income and expenses are translated at exchange rates at the dates of the transactions; and
• resulting exchange differences are recognised in other comprehensive income and reclassified to profit or loss on disposal of the related foreign operation.

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]hh

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]

Exchange differences arising when monetary items are settled or when monetary items are translated at rates different from those at which they were translated when initially recognised or in previous financial statements are reported in profit or loss in the period, with one exception. [IAS 21.28] The exception is that exchange differences arising on monetary items that form part of the reporting entity's net investment in a foreign operation are recognised, in the consolidated financial statements that include the foreign operation, in other comprehensive income; they will be recognised in profit or loss on disposal of the net investment. [IAS 21.32]

Competition Demystified Chapter 2

 

Page 20  

Differentiation may keep your product from being a generic commodity item, but it does not eliminate the intense competition and low profitability that characterize a commodity business. Although nature of the competition may change, the damage to profit persists because the problem is not lack of differentiation, but the absence of barriers to entry. Understanding the significance of barriers to entry and how they operate is the key to developing effective strategy.

But with a wider variety of luxury cars available, the sales and market shares of Cadillac and Lincoln began to decline. Meanwhile, the fixed costs of their differentiation strategy—product development, advertising, maintaining dealer and service networks—did not contract. As a result,  the fixed cost for each auto went up, and the overall profit margin per car dropped. Cadillac and Lincoln found themselves selling fewer cars with lower profit margins. Their profitability shrank even though their products were thoroughly differentiated.

If no forces interfere with the process of entry by competitors, profitability will be driven to levels at which efficient firms earn no more than a “normal” return on their invested capital. It is barriers to entry, not differentiation by itself, that creates strategic opportunities.

Efficiency matters

In copper, steel, or bulk textiles, it is clear that if a company cannot produce at a cost at or below the price established in the market, it will fail and ultimately disappear. Since the market price of a commodity is determined in the long run by the cost levels of the most efficient producers, competitors who cannot match this level of efficiency will not survive. But essentially the same conditions also apply in markets with differentiated products.

Competition Demystified Chapter 10 Into the Henhouse 筆記 (二)

 

AFFILIATING WITH THE LOCAL STATIONS

The networks did not steal one another’s affiliated stations. Government regulations permitted only one affiliate per network in a given market, so there was room for all. Also, regulations made it difficult to shift a license from one local station to another, another constraint on network poaching. Still, the genteel attitude of the networks toward one another did as much as the regulatory environment to temper their competitive zeal.

Still, a handicapper giving odds on a brawl between Fox and the existing networks would have had to favor the networks. They had the audiences, and they were not going to lose them quickly. Therefore, they could pay more for programs than could Fox, and they could charge more for their ads. They already had strong local affiliates in addition to their owned and operated stations. NBC, now owned by General Electric, and ABC, a division of Capital Cities Communications, had the resources to withstand a protracted conflict. CBS, in an effort to stay independent, had loaded its balance sheet with debt and was more vulnerable. Still, it had valuable assets it could sell, like the local stations it owned, and it could cut costs by consolidating operations. The lavish management style by which the networks had operated for years left them with plenty of fat to trim (修剪 整理) before they started to hit muscle or bone.

There is no doubt that a frontal assault by Murdoch, even one that ended in defeat for Fox, would have been costly for the networks. Had he competed on the price of ads, they could have matched him. But since his revenue stream was much smaller, the dollar damage to them would have been far greater. Had he bid for their programs, they could afford to pay more, but again, they had a whole schedule to defend and he was just starting out. For Fox and for the networks, abandoning the old game of carefully moderated competition for a bruising, no-holds-barred battle would have been painful.

生命的點點滴滴

 

你不能預先把人生的點點滴滴串在一起 ; 唯有未來回顧時, 你才會明白那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起. 所以你得相信, 你現在所體會的東西, 將來多少會連接在一起. 你得信任某個時間, 直覺也好, 命運也好, 生命也好, 或者業力. 這種作法從來沒讓我失望, 也讓我整個人生開始不同起來 !  

  Steve Jobes (1955-2011)

【30歲了，妳終於喜歡自己】

30歲最大的好處是，妳已經經歷過了一個完整的生命歷程，但在人生旅途裡卻還年輕。妳脫離了學校，遇見形形色色的人，學會保護自己；工作了幾年，有點小積蓄，終於可以自食其力，妳還規畫了一年一次的旅行；有幾個好的老朋友，你們會為彼此打氣與支持，不再覺得認識新朋友很重要；當然也談過了幾次戀愛，包含了那種不再單純而是算計的感情。然後，愛過人、也被人愛過；被傷害過，也同樣傷害過別人……而這些，都豐富了妳的生命。這些，都讓妳變成了現在的自己

這或許是我看過最誠實的私小說， 令人感動地不是揭露出不堪， 而是很坦蕩地說出當時的迷惘跟放縱。 讓許多對過往有陰影的人，欣然接受 正是因為那樣的過 往，才會建構了現在的自己 無論年輕時你犯了什麼錯，輟學、吸毒、濫交、偷 竊、 自暴自棄…或一副鳥樣被霸凌， 讓自己飛到都無法掌握的地方， 可某一天，當你回頭時， 都該對這一切感到微笑

 .................村上龍「看見無限透明的藍」

Competition Demystified Chapter 10 Into the Henhouse 筆記 (一)

 Chapter 10 

Into the Henhouse

They knew how to deal with advertisers, with local station affiliates and independents, with running news organizations, and with the entertainment component that made up a large part of the product they delivered to consumers. A fourth network, started by the engineer Allen DuMont, whose background was in the set manufacturing part of the business, lasted into the 1950s but then disappeared. Other efforts by entertainment companies like Paramount Pictures to establish themselves in the network broadcast game did not last very long. As it evolved in the three decades after the end of WWII, the network broadcasting business was only one segment of the complete industry that brought news, sports, entertainment, and advertising—which paid for the rest—into the American home

P201

The networks and the local stations produced national and local news, sporting events, and a range of other shows. The major entertainment pieces that filled the evening (prime time) hours—the comedies 喜劇, dramas, and made-for-television movies—they bought from the studios. The movie studios already had the experience and the infrastructure to produce this fare, and they leapt at ( 抓住機會) the opportunity to grow a new revenue stream after the government ended their direct ownership of movie theaters on antitrust grounds. 反托拉斯

The glamour of the movie business, even with the “movie” confined(侷限在) to the small-screen world of television, attracted a number of smaller players into the production business, to compete with the established studios. There was no shortage of creative talent pitching show concepts to the networks.

沒有對手的競爭: 提高市場障礙的求勝法則 Competition Demystified

Chapter 7  

The first obstacles : The record companies would not want to produce multiple versions of the same music, nor would the potential manufacturers of disc players be as eager to get involved without some guarantee of a large market 

The second potential obstacle was the relationship between cost and price. To be successful, the compact disc would have to be offered at a price that would be sufficiently competitive with the alternatives to attract enough customers to make the business profitable. The disc player would also have to be available at a price consumers would pay, The more difficult question was the cost of putting the music on a compact disc and moving it down the distribution channel until it reached the ultimate buyer. 

Demand and Supply

Within the U.S. market, they bought around 25 million records in 1979, less than 10 percent of the total number of LPs sold. As a group, these listeners had already shown a willingness to pay a 30 percent premium for digitally remastered records

The executives estimated that it would take around five years before even half of this market made the move to compact disc. They figured that annual demand would exceed 18 million discs by the third year after introduction and 120 million by the seventh year. 

.