800m mobile subscribers in India but not much money

Posted on February 14, 2012

 From the latest Equitymaster newsletter.

With over 800 m subscribers (includes GSM and CDMA), India represents a huge telecom market. With the cheapest tariffs, it has seen telecom penetration going up from about 4% in March 2001 to around 71% in March 2011. But the huge surge in the number of subscribers has not translated to huge returns for the network providers. In fact, telecom operators have seen their profitability dwindling down. Hyper competition that led to sharp rate cuts is one big reason for this. As shown in today’s chart of the day, profitability (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation & Amortization or EBITDA) per minute has been on the fall for the telecom operators.

How many ports is ideal for the Kimberly in WA?

Posted on February 13, 2012

From Andrew Bolt:

It’s as Pat Lowe, a co-founder of Environs Kimberley, declared: “We need some places on earth that are not industrialised and we were hoping that the Kimberley would be one of them.”

Keep the vast Kimberley “not industrialised” – and not just its eight national parks? Lock up its diamonds, iron ore, copper, lead, bauxite, zinc, silver, nickel, uranium, coal, tin, mineral sands and petroleum?

What a grandiose and anti-human conceit, yet the Greens repeat it in now opposing a $600 million port in the Kimberley.

The port, near Derby, is proposed by former Labor national president and indigenous businessman Warren Mundine and Perth dealmaker John Poynton to service the huge offshore oil and gas industry.

But, sure enough, West Australian Greens MP Robin Chapple is against it: “It flies in the face of what the Premier has said – that we wouldn’t have any further industrialisation of the Kimberley.”

Excuse me, but someone who thinks the vast Kimberley can’t take another port is irrational.

Let’s compare. Greece is 132,000 sq km, and has 103 ports. Italy is bigger, at 301,000 sq km, and has 134 ports.

Germany is bigger still at 357,000 sq km, and has 98 ports.

The Kimberley dwarfs them all, at 425,000 sq km, yet has just five ports.

A sixth would ruin an almost empty stretch of country bigger than Germany?

That is not a judgment made by reason. It is not a judgment informed by a love of man, but a contempt.

How children fail

Posted on February 7, 2012

From Wikipedia on John Holt’s book:

When children are very young, they have natural curiosity about the world, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become “producers”, rather than “thinkers”, they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is “yes”, and that a “no” is defeat.

They fear wrong answers and shy away from challenges because they may not have the right answer. This fear, which rules them in the school setting, does their thinking and learning a great disservice. A teacher’s job is to help them overcome their fears of failure and explore the problem for real learning. So often, teachers are doing the opposite — building children’s fears up to monumental proportions. Children need to see that failure is honorable, and that it helps them construct meaning. It should not be seen as humiliating, but as a step to real learning. Being afraid of mistakes, they never try to understand their own mistakes and cannot and will not try to understand when their thinking is faulty. Adding to children’s fear in school is corporal punishment and humiliation, both of which can scare children into right/wrong thinking and away from their natural exploratory thinking.

Holt maintains that when teachers praise students, they rob them of the joy of discovering truth for themselves. They should be aiding them by guiding them to explore and learn as their interests move them. In mathematics, children learn algorithms, but when faced with problems with Cuisenaire rods, they cannot apply their learning to real situations. Their learning is superficial in that they can sometimes spit out the algorithm when faced with a problem on paper, but have no understanding of how or why the algorithm works and no deep understanding about numbers.

What is Social Innovation? Confused mix of everything?

Posted on February 7, 2012

The current buzzword in the world is everything to everybody as is clear from this video from the Social Innovation Summit 2011. Very confusing.

Some of the terms used in the video

license to operate
bottom of the pyramid
innovation
technology, analytics and data driven
social good
good citizenship
environmental stuff
????

This is my take and it relates more to the process of innovation and the kind of problems you deal with.

Generate Electricity for creating Well Being

Posted on February 6, 2012

Yes, CO2 may be bad but that is if you have first reached the level of usage in Australia, Kuwait or Norway. However, if you are a poor person in developing countries like India, China and Brazil, you still need a electricity to create well being even if it emits CO2 and consumption of 2,500 kw seems to be the magic number.

I think the focus to reduce CO2 to control the climate (and this is being questioned now by the solar cycle theory) we should not forget the current human beings who need electricity to survive and live a good life.

From HBR:

The greater a country’s electricity consumption, the greater the well-being of its people. Electricity doesn’t cause well- being, of course. But it is a powerful enabler. When people have lights that allow them to study and work after dark, refrigeration to keep foods and medicine fresh, pumps and purifiers to irrigate farmland and produce safe drinking water, and cell phones and computers to connect them with commercial, educational, and health care resources, they can more fully participate in the social and economic activities that drive human development.
A little electricity goes a long way. Note that when annual consumption rises from 0 to just a few thousand kilowatt hours per capita, countries move near the top of the HDI scale. Argentina, with per capita consumption of about 2,500 kWh, has an HDI score approaching that of Canada, whose consumption is seven times higher.

Happiness takes a little magic

Posted on February 5, 2012

In his words:

“The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.”

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it’s evil, but because it’s too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold.
By Brian Lam

Behaviour economics and welfare/stimulus payments

Posted on December 2, 2011

Business week has an interesting story on the role of designing policies based on behavioral economics. In short, behavioral economics suggests that people are not rational and that they will make decisions not entirely based on rational cost benefit analysis. Well, who knew.

The “making work pay” program in the US was designed to give people stimulus money in small additional payments to their salary and in theory they would have spent the money. What actually happened was that people did not see the small additional difference and saved the money. That by itself is not a bad consequence just that it does fit with the Keynesian stimulus economics.

What is interesting here is that in Australia it was the other way round. There is clear agreement here that lumpsum money is spent immediately on big ticket items. For example, Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister decided to give $900 in stimulus for most people and a lot more for families with children. There were stimulus ads everywhere for people to spend that money. And they spent.

Another example is the baby bonus. In Australia when we have a child the government provides $5000 as a baby bonus to families. What was observed that for some families that created a negative situation in how the money was spent. Now, the bonus is paid over 13 weeks and it seems to work better.

What I am not sure is how did the behavioral economists in the US came to the opposite conclusion for the spending of stimulus money?

Bill Gates Picks 4 Reads That Bring Clarity and Solutions to Energy Issues

Link

Bill Gates’s picks

Calories, food and income

Posted on November 18, 2011

Visualization of food and income.

Lots to infer but in simple terms the lower consumption countries need economic growth and more per capita income.

World is Green

Exploring the role of entrepreneurship in the social sector

Category Archives: Sustainable business