Strategies in the news (May 2, 2022)
Staying on Top (a supplement to The Strategy Toolkit)
1. What semiconductors are in Chinese smartphones now? Are made-in-China chips good enough?
“A teardown of Honor's X30 showed that 39% of the components by value came from U.S. companies. This is a sharp increase from just 10% for the previous 30S model, when Honor was still under Huawei.
Most of the core parts, namely the processor and 5G chipsets, were provided by American manufacturers like Qualcomm rather than Chinese suppliers such as Huawei chip unit HiSilicon. The overall proportion of Chinese components, moreover, dipped to about 10% from 37.5%.”
Sanctions-evading strategies are all the rage these days, making the careers of many lawyers and supply-chain logistics consultants…
2. What are the geopolitical implications of China’s moves in the Solomon Islands and Panama?
“Strategic chokepoints: the new U.S.-China battlegrounds
Washington wary of Beijing's advances in Solomon Islands, Panama Canal”
The scope and scale of US-China geopolitical rivalry is far beyond anything seen today between the US and Russia, much more like between the US and the USSR, i.e. anywhere and everywhere. Some commentators (e.g. historian Niall Ferguson) refer to this as the new (Second) Cold War…
3. Challenges of Creating a Decentralised, Open Source Twitter
“Creating a small social network software package isn’t that hard. I think that a developer who could build a TODO app or a blog platform could manage it in a few weeks. The big problem is scaling up to hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of users. The data gets big very fast, and solutions that work with slow, small sites just can’t keep up.
A good way to deal with this problem is to have lots of small, slow sites that connect across the internet with open protocols. It’s a lot easier than running one big site!”
https://thenewstack.io/challenges-of-creating-a-decentralized-open-source-twitter/
Shifting Twitter to something more open and more decentralised will take serious resources and a lot of investor patience (hence the need to go private)...
4. Pfizer loses top vaccine scientist Jansen who led drive for COVID-19 shot, searches for successor
“It was Jansen's most recent accomplishment on Comirnaty that turned Pfizer into a household name. In partnership with BioNTech, Pfizer's vaccine division—under Jansen's leadership—scored the first COVID-19 vaccine emergency use authorization from the FDA in December 2020, less than a year into the pandemic.
In 2021, the company manufactured more than 3 billion doses of the vaccine. Aside from the shot's impact on the pandemic fight, Pfizer has recorded tens of billions of dollars in sales from the program.”
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-loses-top-vaccine-scientist-jansen-searches-successor
Kathryn Jansen was already a leader in vaccine technology from her work with Gardasil at Merck Research Labs. Add in Pfizer’s Prevnar and covid-19 vaccines, and she was a key executive. Having a succession strategy in place (before she announced her retirement) would have been wise…
5. Sanofi moves patients out of Ukraine warzone in 'Herculean effort' to preserve MS trials
“Sanofi has moved clinical trial patients out of Ukraine, as European pharma companies scramble to maintain their multiple sclerosis studies in the wake of the conflict brought on by the Russian invasion.
About 11% of Sanofi’s study sites for its MS molecule tolebrutinib are in Ukraine and Russia, John Reed, global head of research and development, said on an April 28 earnings call.
The French pharma company’s teams on the ground have made “really heroic efforts” to move patients from the study out of Ukrainian territories affected by the conflict, and to the relatively safer west of the country or into clinical sites in neighbouring countries, Reed said.”
Talk about a clinical trials strategy - being able to execute so quickly and effectively in response to such a black swan contingency is impressive…