3 charts for you today:
The Tokyo Olympics are officially starting today, about a year late and after months of tumultuous buildup. Of the 339 gold medals that are potentially up for grabs, two will be of particular interest to the world of athletics — the men's and women's marathon events.
The first Olympic marathon, held in 1896, was completed in a little under 3 hours and won by a Greek water carrier. Over the next 100 years Olympic marathon times tumbled, as athletes got faster thanks to modern training techniques and nutrition. Shoes were unlikely to be the deciding factor on whether you won a marathon race or not.
Nice sneakers
Recently though, that has changed. If you watch the long distance running events closely this year you'll notice how many will be rocking shoes that have a distinctive "chunky heel". That style was started by Nike back in 2016, with the release of its controversial "Vaporfly" running shoe, which some have described as running on "trampolines" thanks to a thick layer of foam and a carbon-fiber plate, which allows for maximum spring in each step.
Estimates suggest that the original Vaporfly, and its successive offspring, can improve running efficiency by around 4%. That doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a 26.2 mile race, it can add up to a few minutes of time. It was the shoe of choice for Brigid Kosgei when she broke the seemingly untouchable world record in 2019 and what Eliud Kipchoge ran in when he (unofficially) ran the first ever sub 2-hour marathon in the INEOS 1:59 challenge.
Long distance running at the Tokyo Olympics will be all about resilience, grit, determination, skill, hard work and... shoes.
With a market cap of more than €265bn ($300bn), ASML has a good chance of being the biggest tech company you've never heard of. ASML is the world's leading supplier to the computer chip industry, growing into a $15bn+ a year giant since being founded in the Netherlands in the 1980s.
Tiny chips, big business
ASML makes various machines that allow chipmakers to make tiny computer chips. Most notable among ASML's products is its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machine, which ASML sells for more than $150m a pop and which allows manufacturers to build the kind of tiny integrated circuits that are commonly found in smartphones, cars and medical equipment.
Chip shortage
At the moment there is a global computer chip shortage which has hobbled supply chains for carmakers and consumer electronic companies. To put it mildly, that has put ASML in quite an advantageous position. Basically they sell the thing that makes the thing that everyone wants but no-one has — and ASML expects that demand to translate into more than $5bn in extra revenue this year.
What do Crocs, maker of those distinctive foam clogs and sandals, and Zoom have in common? Not much, except that they both benefited from the pandemic — turning in record results in 2020 as we decided we wanted to have the most comfortable shoes on as we logged on for our fourth Zoom call of the day.
When we wrote about the Crocs renaissance in January we kind of expected Crocs — like Zoom and other beneficiaries of the pandemic — to have a more relaxed year in 2021. But that has not been the case. Zoom is expecting revenue growth to slowdown this year. Crocs is not. In fact, just as much of the world begins to open up, the footwear brand just posted its best ever quarter, selling more than $640m worth of Crocs and Crocs accessories in Q2.
Crocs are cool
The fact that Crocs are crushing it well into 2021 suggests that their marketing and rebranding may have had more to do with their renaissance than just the pandemic. Crocs have leaned heavily into collaborations, with their website currently listing Croc designs in collaboration with tonnes of brands and music artists like Post Malone and Justin Bieber.
1) Facebook reportedly spent more than $23m last year on Mark Zuckerberg's personal security detail.
2) Scientists in Dubai are reportedly having some success in manipulating the weather using electrical charges from drones to try and increase rainfall in the region, which is notoriously dry.
3) A poll run by Gallup has confirmed what we probably all knew already — that 2020 was the most stressful year in recent history, with 40% of those polled across 115 countries saying they had experienced stress recently — up from 29% in 2006.
4) The majority of premium users (90%+) who cancelled their InterviewQs subscription did so because they landed a data science job. If you want to break into one of the hottest fields there is, get some secret help from InterviewQs.**
5) The CDC estimates that 83% of current COVID cases in the United States are now the Delta variant.
6) State attorneys have reached a $26bn settlement with opioid manufacturers this week, just a few days after data showed that 2020 was the worst in the history of the opioid crisis.
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