Quick bites

Ok, to be honest, I’m not feeling great now. I’m not a young man anymore, and let’s just say that yesterday saw lots of imbibing! Getting old sucks. Anyway, it’s post-Turkey, current-pie eating, and I want to get through a few small items that have been hogging my browser:

Coal use in electric production has declined for the first time. I saw this story, which included a great chart showing the amount of electricity produced from coal. It fell 3% so far this year! I don’t have a ton to say about this except it’s good news. The article does mention that coal use in Southeast Asia is growing, but it is a small part of world usage.

It just doesn’t make sense to invest in coal production when renewables are mostly cheaper, and that’s not counting the externalities from air pollution and other environment disadvantages of coal.

Ho Chi Minh City is the #3 real estate market to watch in Asia Paciifc in 2020. This is according to pwc, and the report points to manufacturing companies setting up in Vietnam. It does say risk is high and “good investment opportunities are hard to pin down.” Seems about par for the case. What is exciting is that HCMC beat out all of China, Korea, Australia, and the rest of ASEAN, except for Singapore. Tokyo was second.

Viettel set up 1,000 NB-IoT stations and 5G stations in HCMC. Narrow-band Internet-of-Things is a frequency that cell phone operators are setting up to connect things like sensors that are meant to last for many years and need little to no service. I didn’t know what this was before googling it, so I am not entirely clear. It’s basically a network that allows lots of devices to connect, doesn’t drain their batteries and is always on. So maybe something like sensor on on doors or windows, or to make sure that something is still in place. As more and more devices need to connect to the internet, this should help.

And of course, Viettel is pushing 5G hard. It will be nice to have, but not sure that it will change my world. Although my podcasts take forever to download.

Tata Steel sells Vietnamese unit. Since we talked about steel earlier this month, I thought I would follow up with this news. The factory sold makes about 200,000 tons a year, which is tiny. It takes steel and produces things like rebar and wire rod. This isn’t really a view on Vietnam: Tata is trying to clean up its operations - it has too many subsidiaries. This has been in the works for a while: here’s an article from 2017 that talks about restructuring.

Have a great weekend!