You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
What you see in Indian cities is a result of multiple factors (like everything):
- Low GDP per-capita, offset by immense scale, which means the central government can mobilize massive resources for national projects, but municipal bodies are financially starved (municipal revenues in India are < 1% of total tax collections, for context it's 6% in South Africa and 10% in Brazil). Cities are completely dependent on the state for money, unlike countries where cities control their own property and commercial taxes, so they raise very little on their own, and states have multiple other priorities so cities never get as much money as they need.
- Leading off the previous point - executive power over cities is very fragmented, most authority rests with state chief ministers and state-appointed bureaucrats rather than empowered local mayors, so city planning is subordinate to state-level political priorities. City management itself is divided among uncoordinated state-level bodies (separate agencies for roads, water, power, and transit). There's a lot of accountability voids where something goes wrong and everybody thinks it's a different body's responsibility. The poor coordination also means you'll have things like a road laid on Monday, and on Wednesday the water authority digs it up to fix pipes underneath.
- The Indian constitution guarantees freedom to move and reside anywhere, so it's not legally possible to control rural to urban migration like China did with its Hukou system. E.g. Bangalore adds anywhere from 350k to 600k people a year almost entirely from internal migration. Much faster than housing, transit, and civic utilities can keep up with.
Things are getting better, although slowly and unevenly:
- Mass transit is expanding rapidly
- Door-to-door solid waste collection now reaches roughly 98% of urban wards (tougher than you would think because the unrestricted migration tends to create a lot of ad-hoc unplanned settlements on the outer parts of cities)
- The central government is working on allowing cities to issue municipal bonds to raise their own funds.
- Bangalore now (as of last year) has a single body called the Greater Bangalore Authority that has statutory oversight over previously uncoordinated agencies that handle water, transport, power, transit etc. Other state governments with major cities are watching to see how it plays out, and will likely copy + adapt it to their own major cities based on how it goes.
The account you're replying to was created 49 minutes ago and has 2 comments, both on this thread, one already flagged and dead. Please don't waste your time engaging bait.
If you're a grocery chain you know exactly how much an item costs and exactly how much you sell it for. You also simply order more or less stock of the item depending on how it's selling.
If you're a video game company, you invest millions of dollars in a project up front, for years, and you don't know until after release whether you:
- Make back all the money you spent plus a healthy profit on top.
- Just break even, but you lost the opportunity cost of all the other things that money could have been spent on with better utility.
- Your game flops and you wasted all the money you spent developing it.
It's also highly uneven. Extremely likely that King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) are making a ton of money, and everything else is a money pit where you pour in millions of dollars and you don't even make your money back.
The stores themselves aren't losing money if there's a natural disaster.. the farm does, the distributor likely does.. but not the store. The store just raises prices against future inventory pricing, often ahead of the inventory itself.
It's not about the cost, it's about ideology. Same reason they've paid nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to energy developers to abandon offshore wind farm projects. The point isn't to save money, it's to stop green energy projects, which is an ideological goal. If their decisions don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing them through their ideological lens.
The way I thought it worked was that congress would set a budget and scientists would decide how to spend it.
Perhaps naively I thought these scientists would want to do science and would be unwilling to steer funds away from whichever projects they liked in order to fund the removal of some sensors.
I guess maybe the scientists who make these decisions are also partisan and happy to do as the administration asks.
It's not an ideological goal, it's a profit goal. Ideology is just part of the propaganda engine. Isn't it funny how conservatism always seems to benefit big business? Have you ever noticed how quiet conservative politicians get when some supposedly conservative ideology ends up being bad for big business?
If this ends up being the case, 15 years from now we might look back at this as the catalyst for supercharging the energy transition across the world ex-US.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
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