3 charts for you today:
Electric supercar company Rimac is set to take control of Bugatti, the brand owned by Volkswagen Group that is most famous for producing the Bugatti Veyron and Chiron — both of which are reportedly capable of reaching speeds in excess of 260mph.
This deal takes the strategic direction of Bugatti, which has long been a lossmaking business despite the eye-watering prices of its cars, out of VW Group's hands. With VW Group delivering 9-10 million cars per year, across a variety of brands, Bugatti has felt increasingly out of place. In 2020 it delivered just 77 cars, down 5 from the 82 it delivered in 2019, which is a number so small that it basically shouldn't show up at all in this chart of VW Group deliveries.
Better together
The new company formed is set to be called Bugatti Rimac, and it brings together a traditional and well established hypercar brand with the exact opposite — a scrappy electric vehicle start-up founded by an ambitious 23-year old Croatian called Mate Rimac who initially gained notoriety for his custom built electric BMW.
For VW Group, which has ambitious plans in mass-market electric vehicles, this deal is a clean way of passing operational control of a storied brand to a start-up that is embracing the challenge of building the next generation of electric supercars. For Rimac, it solidifies their pole position in the niche world of electric hypercars.
The United States has now withdrawn more than 90% of its troops and equipment from Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced yesterday. That update comes less than 48 hrs since reports emerged from Afghan military officials that the US military had left Bagram airfield "in the middle of the night", switching off the electricity at the base that had been occupied for almost 20 years.
Hundreds, not thousands
The update from the Pentagon suggests that the number of US troops left in Afghanistan is likely to now be in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, for pretty much the first time since 2001.
At one point in 2011, around 100,000 US troops were stationed in various parts of Afghanistan, which is not to mention the thousands of contractors and the thousands of troops from allies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, France and others.
Much of the withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan came in the years after the killing of Osama Bin laden in 2011, who had been the founder and militant leader of al-Qaeda. Since 2014 a much smaller force of 8-10k troops has remained, although all will be gone by September 11th — the date set by President Biden for complete withdrawal.
Jeff Bezos has officially stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, exactly 27 years since he founded the company in July 1994. Bezos is likely to keep himself busy with space exploration, the Washington Post, the Amazon exec chairman role and figuring out how to spend (or maybe give away?) his $200bn fortune.
The individual succeeding him is Andy Jassy, the trusted lieutenant who has grown Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, into a $45bn+ industry leader.
Andy's Amazon CV
After bouncing around the marketing department, and serving as Bezos' "shadow", Jassy and the other top executives realized that Amazon had, through its e-commerce endeavours, become quite good at building and managing tech infrastructure services like databases, storage and computing. And — in true Amazon fashion — they had gotten good at doing it cheaply.
The team wondered whether there might be something in offering these services to other developers or companies, and in 2003 AWS was formed, with its first products launching in 2006 under the leadership of Jassy.
Since then Jassy and his team have stacked countless services and products on top of each other into AWS, building it into an industry leader — ahead of rivals such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure (the revenues of which Microsoft doesn't explicitly disclose). This week Jassy's tenure got off to a good start as the $10bn Pentagon JEDI contract, which was previously awarded to Microsoft, was cancelled.
1) Iceland's trials of a 4-day working week, which took place between 2015 and 2019, have been branded an "overwhelming success" with productivity holding steady, or even rising.
2) Myopia, also known as short-sightedness, might be becoming more common as we all stare at our screens more.
3) Shares in Chinese ride-hailing company Didi have plummeted more than 25% just days after the company's IPO after Chinese authorities banned the download of the app, pending a cybersecurity review.
4) Over 2,000 businesses around the world rely on Sisense for game-changing business insights. Find out why they trust Sisense to go beyond business intelligence to infuse analytics everywhere.**
5) An impressive visualization of the world's population sliced by different latitudes.
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