BYD Is Running China’s “Manufacturing to the World” Playbook (Tech Strategy – Podcast 192)

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This week’s podcast is a deep dive into BYD. And about how Chinese manufacturers go international.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the article on the AI influencer.

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Related articles:

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

  • n/a

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

  • BYD

Photo by P. L. on Unsplash

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Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Tausen and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from Tecmo Consulting. And the topic for today, how BYD is running the China Manufacturing to the World Playbook. Now BYD, two years ago, yes, most people in most parts of the world, BYD Auto really, they wouldn’t know what this is. A lot of people know what it is now. and I think in the next year everybody’s gonna know. I mean, this is the other Tesla, and by some metrics it’s much bigger, and it is going international at huge speed right now. You’re seeing it everywhere. So I’m going to talk about, one, it’s a good company to do a bit of a deep dive on, but really the part I wanted to talk about was more the international strategy, which is sort of more in my strike zone than auto. I’m not really an auto guy. So I’m gonna focus more on the China aspect than that. Anyways, that will be the topic for today. Pretty cool company showing up everywhere. Let’s see, Stan, a couple announcements. We are doing a China tech tour in May. It’s gonna be, I don’t wanna say the word discount, but we are gonna do a short one that’s only a couple days to Beijing. Hit some, you know, hit the who’s who of the tech companies. And the reason we’re doing it as opposed to flying all over the country, going to multiple cities, which is, you know, kind of the standard tour. This basically makes it a lot more affordable for a lot more people. And I know, particularly in Southeast Asia, there’s, you know, some significant interest. So that’s kind of what we’re doing. If you’re interested in that, go over to tech or just send a note to info at 1000Rupee. get you all the information. But that’s coming up in May, other announcement, nothing really, just my book, the One Hour Motes and Marathons, which is another sort of simple product, which is let’s take the six books, motes of marathons, about how to build competitive advantage in digital, and let’s boil, not boil it all down, but let’s make a real short version that anyone can read in an hour. instead of reading all six. And that’s one hour modes and marathons, which is on Amazon right now. If you could leave a review, that would actually be helpful, that matters. Anyways, that’s that standard disclaimer, nothing in this podcast or my writing website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guess may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may not only be relevant or accurate overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the content. Okay, let’s start with some tech news. I’ve only got one thing on my list today, which is Emily Pellegrina, which is an Instagram model. In four months since launching, obviously Instagram model very, very attractive. In four months since launching, she has garnered 123,000 followers. She’s making pretty good money, you know, thousands for posting and things like that, and she’s getting lots of contacts from some fairly famous people, including sports stars, you know, DMing her and offering her dates to restaurants. Hey, you want to come to Dubai, which is a total thing. Okay, it turns out she’s an AI generated image. Doesn’t exist. Somebody coded it. You can’t tell the difference. You really can’t. Like… You know, this whole generative AI thing, you know, there’s a lot of degrees of disruption happening to various things. The creative space is getting hit harder because there’s not a right or wrong answer, which generative AI has a problem with. It’s just creativity. And, general sort of creative endeavors that don’t require a lot of talent seem to be getting hit first. Well, I mean, Instagram models, OnlyFan models. I mean, there’s really no talent there at all. It’s just the visual. Even if you’re chatting with an OnlyFans or an Instagram model, it’s just the visual. The person you’re chatting with is probably a dude behind the scenes who’s probably taking the photos as well. So is it a big surprise that Instagram models are let’s say the first to get completely disrupted? I think models are next. OnlyFans definitely gonna get hit. And then obviously this is just JPEGs, but going from JPEGs to video, that’s happening pretty fast. And sort of my list of who’s gonna get disrupted first, they’re pretty much first. Next on the list in video is probably animated movies, which Generative AI is really good at that. So anyways, I’ll put the link in the show notes if you’re curious, because obviously. the photos. I’ll put the link into the Daily Mail article that covered this. But yeah, there’s…apparently they’re not saying who, which famous sports stars contacted her to like ask her out. But apparently it’s some pretty famous people DM’d her, which is…that’s a whole new type of catfishing really if you think about it. Anyways, okay. Interesting story for today. Alright, let me get into the content. Now… You know, as mentioned, these podcasts, I’m trying to do them quicker, about 30 minutes, and I’m trying to either do a deep dive on a company or a digital strategy sort of lecture. Today’s a deep dive, but it’s not really too much. Well, it’s more about the international aspect of BYD and the China aspect of BYD, as opposed to is their technology better than Tesla? And I don’t know, I’m not a tech guy in auto. but I understand China manufacturing in China to the world. I mean, I’ve been teaching case studies at business schools about Volkswagen in China since like, I don’t know, 2012 or something. So that part I thought was interesting to talk about and that’s what I wanna talk about. Now, as for BYD itself, I’ll give you some of the basic information, but I’m not gonna go through the whole history and. Wang Chun Fu and how he built the company and all of that. Those of you who are subscribers, I sent you a lot of the history yesterday, and I’m gonna send you another pretty long article today, so there’s a lot more. If you wanna be a subscriber, I’ve put the subscription button back on the website. I took it down for most of last year, but if you’re interested in being a subscriber, it’s up there now. You can find it at jefftausen.com. But okay, here’s the basics of BYD. They vertically integrated, they were a manufacturer and they’ve always been a manufacturer. Founded in 1995, those were kind of the heydays of China manufacturing. That’s when Huawei was founded. That’s when most of these companies were founded that are now sort of the manufacturing giants based in Shenzhen, which is where most of them started from, or not most, a lot of them. The first wave of entrepreneurs of China really showed up 1988, 1992, 1993 out of Shenzhen. Okay, so, you know, Wang Chuanfu, 1995, he founds it in Shenzhen, and it is a manufacturing company, and they did batteries, because it turns out Wang Chuanfu has like a bachelor’s and a master’s in physical chemistry, metallurgy. I mean, he’s a real scientist who understood this stuff. And, you know, they make batteries, and he takes this, batteries would be rechargeable batteries. which you can put into three buckets, sort of consumer batteries, power batteries, and storage batteries. They have different specs. Consumer batteries, that’s where they got their start. That’s everything in a laptop. That’s the lithium battery in a laptop. It’s everybody’s smartphone. It’s smart devices. All of those batteries rechargeable. That’s where they started. And cadmium originally, but then obviously lithium ion. And… And within about 10 years, not even 10 years, 7 years, they just took down the leading Japanese manufacturers of batteries. And, you know, BYD goes from, you know, Wang Chunfu and his cousin founding it to 200,000 employees in 7 years, 8 years. And they have 50% of the global market. So if you had a smartphone in 2005, 2008, 50% chance you had a BYD battery. Okay, from that battery expertise, and really manufacturing scale, they vertically integrate into automobiles 2002, 2003. This was by no means an obvious move. And in fact, it’s very similar to Elon Musk, just deciding that electric vehicles are the future and going into it before anyone else based on conviction and forcing it to happen. And you know, the same time he was doing that with Tesla, BYD was doing that in China. Very similar sort of course. Okay, fast, they go into cars, you know, 2003, 2005, first hybrid, plug-in hybrid, fully electric, 2008, 2009. Fast forward, fast forward. It’s all about 2020 to 2023. This is when the world ships, EVs take off, BYD and Tesla, top of the world. I’ll give you some basics ones. They’re the number one BYD, world’s largest plug-in hybrid electric vehicle manufacturer. So making cars that are plug-in hybrids, Tesla doesn’t make hybrids, Texas only does pure EVs, no engine. BYD does hybrids and they do plug-in hybrids where you plug in it at home and then you drive it on the battery and then at a certain point it switches to the engine. Full hybrids that sort of go between battery and engine, based on if you’re slowing or stopping or whatever. and full EVs like Tesla. They do all three. But they’re number one for largest plug-in hybrid. They’re number one, probably number two for fully electric. Right after Tesla, they have the number one best-selling car brand in China. And they basically took down Volkswagen, which had the number one car brand in China since like 1985. I mean, they’ve been number one forever as a brand, one of their brands. Well, that’s BYD now. BYD has about 36% of the new energy vehicle market of China, which is the largest in the world. China auto sales about 26 million per year. The US number two is about 13, 14. Within China’s 26 million vehicles sold about 25% are now electric, which is hybrid, plug-in hybrid, fully electric. So that’s about 7 million cars per year in China. I mean… That’s why you kind of have to be in China if you want to be an electric vehicle manufacturer, because it’s a game of scale. Okay, BYD is still based in Shenzhen. They have about 570,000 employees now. Tesla’s about 127,000. So they’re about four to five times bigger. And they got lots of car models. They got… They have what they call a dynasty group, which is like where they have all these models of cars named after the Han and the Qing dynasty and whatever. Then they have the ocean group where they have a whole series of cars named after things like dolphin. So if you’re in Thailand, you’re going to see the dolphin BYD all over the place. That’s as at the Atta. I think it’s the dolphin and the Atta. Anyways, they got brands everywhere. They got SUVs. They got sedans. They got things that look just like the Tesla. They got compacts, their price ranges are, you know, 10,000, 12,000 up to 100,000 full spectrum. So they’re basically riding the wave. They’re leaning heavily into their manufacturing capabilities. In 2023, BYD sells 3 million vehicles globally. That was a seven-fold increase from 2020. So just absolutely surging. If you actually look at their annual report, they’re listed in China, eight shares, but they’re also listed in Hong Kong, the eight shares, so you can pull their annual report. It’s not a great annual report. It doesn’t have a whole lot in there, but they basically break their business down into four business units. Obviously, the auto business is the big one. They have a second business, which is rechargeable battery manufacturing. Now, Are they selling this? Yes, but really this is supporting their primary business of auto. And they do consumer batteries, so they would sell those to companies like Samsung and Dell. That is obviously their sort of legacy business. They have power batteries, which are high capacity, high ability to deploy power quickly. Well, that’s what you put in cars. Energy storage batteries, these are the ones you put in your house, in an industrial site, they’re very good at storage. Anyways, they’re doing their battery manufacturing. Fully integrated. Like they have lithium mines. They do lithium, you know, I don’t even know what you do, how you get it out of the dirt. They assemble the batteries. They are fully integrated all the way up in batteries. Now Tesla is also fully integrated in the sense that they write their own code, they do their own stuff, but at a certain point they do outsource certain stuff like getting lithium and batteries to some B-White is almost entirely integrated, virtually everything in the car they’re doing in-house. So that’s sort of their second business and then they have a photovoltaic business which is basically just solar and again they do everything. They make the silicon wafers, they make solar cells, they make the PV modules, they’re you know they’re doing everything in terms of energy collection, transmission, storage, application and then their fourth business is handset components and assembly, which is again, this is kind of a legacy business from 2002. They basically are one stop shop. If you want to have a smartphone made, you know, they will handle everything for you. They’ll do the design, they’ll do the R&D, they’ll do the materials development, they’ll do the component manufacturing, supply chain, the whole thing. Okay. But when you actually look at their revenue. 75% is auto and it’s going up and Where is that happening? 75% of that’s in China Well, we’ll call that greater China mainland China Macau Hong Kong and those numbers include Taiwan Which obviously people argue about that, but if when you look at their financials, that’s what’s included Okay, so pretty good when you sort of take apart the revenue Big surprise, it’s kind of doing what you’d expect. It’s growing up rapidly. 2022, their revenue was 424 billion renminbi, which is about 60 billion US dollars. And that had basically doubled from 2021. So, you know, they’re riding the growth wave. The gross profit, 17%, which is fairly stable. It tends to be 13, 15, 17% over the last four or five years. Not surprising for auto at this point and also that would be different than Tesla, which is more profitable, but they sell at much higher price points. And then net profit is pretty negligible. They’re obviously reinvesting in going for growth. The financials are pretty straightforward. There’s nothing terribly surprising there. Basically, it’s a huge growth story and they are playing to win, not just in China, but globally, which is sort of the point of today’s talk. It’s the global It’s the idea of a fundamentally a manufacturing centric company in China that is now going international in a fairly complicated manufactured product. I mean, it’s not batteries anymore, it’s cars. So it’s sort of at the leading frontier of technology for this China manufacturing to the world playbook. Okay, let’s get to the digital strategy or at least the strategy points within all of this. Now what is their plan going forward? Okay, their annual report lays it out. Their plan for auto going forward is make lots and lots of really good cars, lots of models, and make them better and better. Big surprise. Flood lots of money into batteries and into technology. Again, big surprise. Number three, increase their capacity. Like Tesla, they’re struggling to keep up with demand, manufacturing capacity, things like that. And, you know, go international and stay number one or stay number two, right? That’s the game is maintain leadership, which means you gotta get bigger, you gotta go international, you have to keep flooding money into R&D and into technology to stay on the cutting edge. And you gotta keep rolling out cars that are better and faster as fast as you can. which is pretty much what Tesla’s doing as well. Okay. Now, if we change the subject a little bit and we talk about Chinese manufacturers who get very big at home domestically, because there’s a large domestic market, and then they eventually go international and have done this very successfully for a long time. And you can point to company after company, smartphones. You know, it used to be that there was Nokia and Microsoft and all of these various companies. You go anywhere in the world now, there is Apple, there is Samsung, and then it’s all Chinese players. Pretty much everywhere you go. When you look at refrigerators, same thing. When you look at speakers, when you look at scooters, I mean, you go sector after sector, you see Chinese manufacturers getting big at home and then going abroad. And what has happened over time, is the technological level of these products has increased. Back in 2000, most Chinese exports that were manufactured were toys, socks, underwear, tennis balls. Okay, most things coming out of the port of Shanghai now, you know, 70, 75% in that range are classified as high tech, laptops, smartphones. If you have cameras in your home, if you have any sort of camera. home devices, all of it, industrial. And the technological sophistication keeps improving and raising, but it’s never gone beyond a certain point. We don’t see MRI machines coming out of China. They come out of Siemens and other places. Ultrasound machines, if you go into a hospital in the US, all the hospital beds are probably from China. The doors are from China, the lights are from China. but the MRM machine is not. And the ultrasounds are actually now pretty good. So that one’s kind of moving. But we’ve never really seen Chinese automobiles go outside of China in a major way. The economy levels, the Geely, the Great Wall Company. Okay, if you go to Ecuador, you’ll see Geely and Great Wall, but you don’t see them in the US or Europe really. They don’t make SUVs, they don’t make sedans. Airplanes are not coming out of China. People are buying Boeing and Airbus. So there’s always been a level. Well. And that has, there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is it’s technologically difficult, two because there were entrenched players in the other parts of the world already. So it’s very hard to dislodge them. But when a major technological shift happens, like traditional combustion-based cars going to electric cars, it creates an opening. And that’s what’s happening out of China, is all these companies, all their investors and the government, are putting the pedal to the metal to use this window to break into foreign markets and become the Volkswagen and the Toyota of the next 20 years. The technological shift opened the door for this against fairly entrenched companies, and it appears to be working, no doubt about it. Okay, now if you’re looking at traditional manufacturing of a complicated product, but not a digital product, how do you win? Well, typically it’s a game of global economies of scale. You gotta get bigger than everybody else. You can’t just be big in China, you can’t just be big in the US, you have to be big globally. When you get bigger globally with economies of scale, you get lower per unit costs, you are then able to outspend your rivals on R&D and other things that give you an advantage. And that’s pretty much the Huawei playbook. A lot of these companies. get to global scale, there’s only three companies that make telco equipment in the world. There’s Ericsson, Nokia, and there’s Huawei. Huawei is bigger. You get global scale and then you flood money into R&D and you sort of advance over time. Okay, that could be what’s happening with BYD. But outside of that, you don’t usually get a lot of competitive strength as a global manufacturer. You don’t really get a lot of branding power. People aren’t loyal to cars. They buy one every several years at best. There’s no loyalty. You don’t get really any switching costs. You can get some process advantages, which Toyota has, but generally speaking, the playbook as a global manufacturer is you got to get big on the manufacturing side. You need to get economies of scale. in R&D and then you just have to have outstanding management and operating performance and keep rolling out new models. That is kind of the playbook historically. Now one of the questions I’m thinking about a lot is as products go digital, does that change the game? And in some cases like refrigerators, the answer is no. The economics and the competitive dynamics of global refrigerators. is still pretty much the same. Digital is not changing the business model, it’s not changing the customer interface, it’s not really changing it. Okay, but as cars go digital, as they become autonomous, not just electric, but autonomous, that is most likely gonna change the dynamics of how you compete. Now, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think right now, when I look at BYD, I mostly see a manufacturing store. But Tesla is definitely, if BYD is a manufacturing centered company, Tesla is not. Tesla is a technology and digitally centered company. Much more, I mean they’re in manufacturing now but that’s not where they live. So they may be pushing that quickly and we may see the dynamics change. But right now I don’t think they’ve changed. All right, so let me get to the so what. I think there are three to four things to pay attention to as BYD goes global. As mostly a manufactured product at this point, but becoming more digital over time. And here’s how I would take it apart. Number one, they are following the well proven formula for how you win as a Chinese manufacturer. And that formula is manufacturing scale plus R&D scale plus. debt and other types of state support. That’s the playbook. We’ve seen it over and over. We saw it in solar panels. Chinese companies basically took over the entire solar market about 2004. We’ve seen it in sector after sector, and it’s pretty much just what I said. You get big as a manufacturer. As you get bigger, you’re cheaper. You flood money into R&D, flooding money into R&D over time. in a rapidly advancing technological product can make a big difference, which is basically what Huawei is doing. They are outspending everybody in telco equipment R&D, and they’re planning to do this for 10 years. And then the third bit is you get either cheap debt or state support, which makes it even better. Now in solar, which was a big China story, 2003, 2010, there was so much government debt being provided in solar that basically people built factories that didn’t make sense. And it kind of collapsed eventually. So you play the debt state support game. That can be problematic. It does create booms, but it can also create busts. Okay. What we see is, we see this in smartphones, we see this in washing machines, we see this in drones, we see all that, that’s the playbook. And we’re now seeing that playbook in electric and autonomous vehicles coming out of China. Now, given that playbook, we’ll call that point number one, I would expect the leaders to behave in a very strategic fashion where they’re going for market share and growth and leadership. not-profits, and definitely that’s what BYD is doing. Now, a lot of the other EV companies coming out of China are not doing that. I’ll talk about them in a minute. And a lot of the Western companies, GM, Ford, they’re not really doing that either. I don’t think this is, I think Tesla, Toyota, and BYD, and maybe one other, are leaders who are well positioned for long-term growth and dominance. That would kind of be what I’d expect from BYD. Now, if I look at other companies in the space, this is sort of point number two. I see lots of irrational competition and I see barriers to exit that are a problem. Now, those are two concepts. If you go to my concept library, I actually talk about, I don’t talk about them a lot, but those two concepts are there. Irrational competition. When competition makes no sense. It’s an idiot CEO, it’s cheap debt, it’s something where you are seeing behavior coming out of companies that is illogical. And how long can that go on is a question. I think we’re gonna see from the legacy auto companies in the West, and I think out of a lot of the startups in China that are struggling at the back of the pack, I think we’re gonna see. lot of irrational competition especially from the let’s say the not to point fingers Ford and GM If they don’t go all in on EVs, what are they supposed to do? At what point, I mean, do you just keep going even though it’s clear that you can’t win when you’re so far behind? And I’m not saying Ford and GM are fine, but at a certain point, it’s a logical to keep pursuing. But what is their alternative? Well, their alternative is, I don’t know, to close down, to slow down. And this is where you get to the other concept, which is barriers to exit. Everyone talks about barriers to entry. I talk about barriers to entry a lot. You have a business, you have a lot of assets, and this business and these assets have no value outside of the market you’re in. If you have a lot of real estate assets, the barriers to exit are quite low because you can sell the buildings and you can sell the land and a lot of people can use those for different things. If you have highly specialized, you know, battery manufacturing equipment. It’s not of any value to anybody who’s not in that business. So when you have high barriers to exit, people tend to stay in the business, which I would call that a type of irrational competition. You know, people don’t wanna lose their jobs. People don’t wanna close down. The investors may want to, but the managers don’t. So I think in a lot of these companies, we’re gonna see that. Irrational competition and the barriers to exit are a big problem. These massive supply chains that have been built in the auto industry over 30 years. What do you do with those when a car doesn’t even have a combustion engine? That’s a problem. All right, so that’s concept number two. Third, really last concept. I think so. Number one, I think we are going to see the winning formula of Chinese going to the world. Manufacturing plus R&D plus state support. Number two, I think we are going to see the leaders continue a very sort of strategic approach to markets. They’re going to win. And if it takes five to 10 years, they’re going to keep going after it. From the laggards, I think we’re going to see irrational competition and barriers to exit our problem last point. I Think there is a long list of external uncertainties risks and other factors that Are just going to knock this business around. I mean it it’s just when When I read Tesla’s annual report, this must have been five years ago for the first time, and I got to the risk section, and the risk section for Tesla, I mean, it went on for like 10 pages. I couldn’t believe, I’d never seen a risk section like this in an annual report. It was all the things that could go wrong. And, you know, it was like, okay, supply issues. Where are we gonna get lithium? Where are we gonna get batteries? Do we have capacity? What about semiconductors? There’s a chip shortage in the last year. A lot of Chinese companies are having a hard time getting chips. What about the lithium? What about the raw materials prices? What if the demand gets ahead of supply, which is what’s happening, because the demand is pretty unpredictable, and we can’t ramp up the supply chain? Okay, that would be one type of risk you could go into. What about… the fact that we need to keep innovating successfully in battery technology. How are we gonna build all these batteries that do all this? This is all new technology. What about the AI and other sort of technological innovation required? You know, building these cars for the first time. What about scaling up manufacturing successfully? Which is something that was a huge problem for Tesla for years. What about protectionism? You think the European countries are going to let a lot of these large automakers just go under when Chinese electric vehicles flood into Europe, which they’re already doing? I think we’ve already heard certain EU countries talk about, we’ve got to do something to protect EU automakers. What about American automakers? I mean, Tesla is doing well, but what about GM and Ford? So there’s protectionism there. There’s regulation and let’s say you’re gonna do an autonomous vehicle in China. Well, one of the things we know that the Chinese government cares deeply about is location data. When Didi went public and the Chinese government basically stopped it, it had a lot to do with the data that Didi had as a major ride-sharing company of China. So you can’t have Western autonomous vehicles moving around China, running all that data. That’s a big problem. So there’s regulatory issues, there’s protection issues. How much of a strategic priority is this for certain governments in the world, like China? I would put Japan in the same bucket. There is not a natural separation of government and commercial activity in a lot of countries. They’re gonna be actively involved in the way that the US government is not. Anyways, you can just go down the list of factors and… I mean, it is crazy how many things can change and go wrong. And when I read the Tesla AR for the first time, like I was like, this guy is insane. I have never, I mean, I remember my notes. I read them recently and my notes basically said, if Tesla can scale up and achieve the growth that it argues is potentially there, this will be a massive success. If anything goes wrong, this company’s dead. If any of these 120 things goes wrong, because they were kind of loaded up with debt, this company, I mean, it reminded me of someone walking between two buildings on a tightrope. You know, if you get to the other side, okay, fantastic, you’ve changed the world, but if anything goes wrong, you fall. There are so many external factors that are gonna impact BYD, especially as they go international. So. Those are kind of my three to four points that I really sort of took away from this. And that’s what I’m looking for. But it’s gonna be a very good story. And I think the internationalization aspect is gonna be important, because we’re gonna see it in cars. We’ll probably see it in robots. We will probably see it in planes one day. Anyways, that is kind of my take on BYD. It’s sort of out of my strike zone. I am not an auto guy, but I’m kind of keeping a close eye on it. because as it becomes more and more digital and it becomes more and more about the AI, I think it’s gonna be in my strike zone. Like I think it’s coming my way. So I’m kind of keeping a close eye on, you know, these autonomous vehicles and really, I mean, the way Elon Musk has been talking about it, he basically says it’s not a car, these Teslas. Really what it is this is an AI robotics company and it just so happens that their first robot has four wheels. But it’s really, and I think that’s right. I think we’re really looking at the first iteration of an AI robotics company, not an auto company. So anyways, I figured it’s heading my direction. Anyways, that’s my take. Hopefully that is helpful. I’m gonna send out another article about this in the next day. And then I’m gonna switch over to Meta Facebook. I’m basically building out the US side. So let’s say 50% US companies, 50% China, Asia. That’s where I’m headed. Anyways, that is it for today and I think I’m right on time. 32 minutes, something like that. As for me, not much going on, just working like crazy, which I generally feel pretty good about. I’m happy when I make progress. Any recommendations? I did see a good movie yesterday, The Man From Earth. I saw a movie called The Man From Earth, which is like from 2007. There’s a newer version which sucks, but this one’s like. Someone recommended it to me and it’s like a low budget movie where it’s just five people talking in a cabin for two hours. That’s the movie. And the one guy basically tells them that he’s 13,000 years old and they just talk and no one believes him. It’s really pretty great. It’s really interesting how they also talk about it. Is it true? Is he crazy? Is he telling the truth? Anyways, I’d recommend that. I really kind of enjoyed that. But don’t see the new one. See the 2006-2007. That was a really good one. I heard the other one kind of sucks. Anyways, Man From Earth. There’s a recommendation. Okay, that is it for me. I hope everyone is doing well and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

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