rogermunibond

Not sure what the big deal is. PetroChina, a state owned enterprise, has been making dividend payments to shareholders since the 2000s. Sure the VIE is cumbersome and has never had its regulatory status "blessed" but there are SOEs that have listed using the VIE. And China VIE controlled companies have made dividend payments to ADR/ADS over the last 4-5 years. No issues. SAFE review and approval, but if you read the rules it's mostly related to payment of dividends or share buybacks funded from retained earnings.

Of course, but if you read the Economist piece or the presentation deck, that's not what's going on Chinese pharma are licensing the compounds or setting up US spincos. They're all aware of the risk of tariffs so want production to be in the market, unless they like the cozy Irish tax arrangements and put US market pharma manufacturing in Ireland as most all of the big pharma are doing.

https://www.economist.com/business/2025/02/16/its-not-just-ai-chinas-medicines-are-surprising-the-world-too

Grok-3 release looks pretty good. Not blow the doors off of OpenAi or Deepseek good but an improvement. Has anyone looked at it closely enough to say whether the massive GPU/token investment to train Grok-3 paid off?

It's like the whole world has forgotten the work of Adam Smith.

Flows before pros.

What's the optimal solution for the school drop off/pick up queues? Buses, AV, private vehicles - they all have time, cost, flexibility constraints. Is a mix of autonomous buses and vehicles the solution? Sidenote - is there a way to connect the various AV threads within this thread, GOOG, UBER, LYFT, and TSLA?

@dinar China is still a small % of the bioprocessing exposure for TMO/DHR. And you can't produce medicines in China and export to OECD without clinical trials in those countries. Still a long way off imo.

FT column on China and it's trade advantages. The size of China monthly exports to emerging countries is rather astounding. https://on.ft.com/3CJtRt4

The Stifel report is talking about big pharma licensing deals for Chinese molecules and compounds. These Chinese biopharma companies don't have the ability to do US/Europe clinical trials and launch products across the sales platforms that the big pharma folks have. Bioprocessing like TMO, DHR, Sartorius sell to China for their own market, but with licensing deals they'll be producing the new drugs when they get approved in US and Europe. I'm not sure what you both think the threat is? There's more threat currently to US/European biopharma VCs.

Regarding research indirect cost - there are a few things that gets factored into it that probably shouldn't - D&A for new research buildings, interest expense for construction of new research facilities. There have been myriad white papers from the NAS and Rand and OSTP that have looked at indirect cost. Otherwise, there are a lot of legitimate costs that are covered. BTW direct cost can include salaries of faculty, postdocs, research scientists etc. And also include capex, equipment, supplies, travel, etc.

@Cod Liver Oil I've been sniffing around NKE a lot. What's gotten you more optimistic? I've been considering slowly adding to a NKE position. Maybe first 10% here and then adding if it weakens.

Speaking of biopharma adjacent biomedical research news. Biotools and research firms TMO, BRKR, BIO, QGEN, ILMN, DHR, down 2-4% on cut in the NIH F&A (Indirect cost) rate from average of 50-70% to 15%

Hypersonic missile make short work of surface vessels.

Lockheed Martin down 19% GD down 14% NOC down 9% LHX down 20% RTX is the only major defense contractor that's bucked the trend. Anyone think that DOGE brings these down even more? Once Elon starts digging into the DoD budget.

https://www.stifel.com/newsletters/investmentbanking/bal/marketing/healthcare/biopharma_timopler/2025/BiopharmaMarketUpdate_Outlook_2025.pdf Presentation at the end of the letter

https://t.co/9PzDKJc9J8

More accessible link https://www.reuters.com/world/china/images-show-china-building-huge-fusion-research-facility-analysts-say-2025-01-28/

EQIX, DLR - data centers CEG, VST - IPP electric producers VRT, ATKR - electrical equipment BE - onsite power There are a lot more. Look at all the companies that sold off on that Monday when NVDA was down 17%

@MungerWunger thanks. great write up with incisive points from Ben Thompson.

Bernstein take

Unregulated utitlities/electricity providers and data center builders down much more than semiconductors. Still need chips. Data center buildout, maybe not so much. Short Stargate.

Carter appointed Paul Volcker. Enuff said.

So far the claims of performance appear legit. Training cost of $5.6M is amazing if corroborated. Extrapolating can kill you if you think GPUs, electricity etc are straight line trends. https://venturebeat.com/ai/deepseek-v3-ultra-large-open-source-ai-outperforms-llama-and-qwen-on-launch/