Snapshots That Wow!

Drill baby Drill!

After a long period of wanting to have a lean balance sheet, we are now finally seeing mining companies putting their neck out and leveraging up!

Source: Rio Tinto Investor Presentation

Bob the builder, kar ke dikhayenge!

In talking of global trends, the global mining giant sites the biggest construction investment boom to come about in India for the next 15+ years!

Source: Rio Tinto Presentation

How many frauds are too many?

Over 50 frauds for every day the bank was open in FY24 seems like a number that is too staggering and points to a systemic failure even as the total amount involved in the frauds has come off.

Source: Company Annual Report

Maybe the DOGE is required?

In 2021, U.S. healthcare spending totaled $4.3 trillion, which averages to about $12,900 per person. What’s more, 34 percent of the nation’s healthcare spending is funded by the federal government — placing a strain on the federal budget and contributing to the nation’s growing national debt.

Approximately 25 percent of healthcare spending in the United States is considered wasteful with a third of this amount going towards admin complexity and frauds.

Source: Peter G Peterson Foundation

Companies too follow the natural law

“Companies are not species, but they also need to adapt and compete. Remarkably, the relationship between company age and delistings also follows an exponential function for public companies in the U.S. Exhibit 9 shows the empirical regularity for close to 23,000 companies that were public from 1926 to 2022. The data come from Hendrik Bessembinder, a professor of finance at Arizona State University.13 A company is “born” when it is listed on an exchange and “dies” when it is delisted. The x-axis is age at death and the y-axis is frequency, measured on a log scale.”

Source: Michael Mauboussin Paper

IVF Boom!

Despite regulations relegating IVF only for heterosexual, married couples there has been a surge in IVF treatments in Hong Kong. However even with the surge only 4-5% are officially born in HK through IVF. Most prefer to go to Mainland China or Thailand to get their treatments in.

“In the meantime, online forums are flooded with information from Hong Kong couples and single women on alternative destinations for infertility treatments, with some licensed clinics and hospitals offering travel assistance for foreign patients. Dating app-like services have also sprouted to connect single women with sperm donors overseas. Black-market brokerages for egg donors and surrogates are doing brisk business.”

Source: Bloomberg