How to Invest in Tomorrow’s Tech Trends Today
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How to Invest in Tomorrow’s Tech Trends Today

We put the question to Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo!

By LAUREN R. RUBLIN
Tue, May 11, 2021 3:31pmGrey Clock 3 min

Which companies, public and private, are best-positioned for the next 100 years—or at least the next few years? We put the question to Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo!, and a member of Barron’s Centennial Roundtable. Yang, a longtime venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley, has seen his share of start-ups and innovations. He highlights some of today’s most promising companies and trends in the edited interview below.

Barron’s: Which companies excite you these days, and why?

Jerry Yang: I’ll start with Zoom Video Communications [ticker: ZM]. Never in a thousand years would we have thought that ‘Zoom’ would become a verb in this context. This company took the opportunity to become massively skilled in the past 15 months. In hindsight, we might say it was easy for them to have done that, but they had to overcome a lot of privacy and scale issues. They really matured in a hurry. The future for video is huge. How do we enhance it? How do we make video more intelligent and productive?

Will the future belong to Zoom or a host of competitors?

From the big competitors to start-ups, everyone is emulating or attempting to catch up to Zoom’s capabilities. Zoom has announced a platform marketplace for applications. It is adding more intelligence to its platform, and more productivity tools. In my view, by launching an app store of sorts, Zoom can create an ecosystem that is a defensible barrier to competition.

Zipline, an on-demand delivery service, is another company to watch. It operates fixed-wing drones that carry a few kilograms of payload. They can fly 160 kilometres round trip. When they reach their destination, they drop an insulated package with a parachute. Zipline was founded in Silicon Valley, but its first scaled deployment is medical supply in Rwanda, Africa. Zipline delivers blood supplies and critical medicines. It continues to scale. It is an incredibly exciting company.

Do you expect Zipline to go public in the next few years?

That’s a good question. Companies are raising as much money now in private funding rounds as they would have in an initial public offering. IPOs help with branding and maybe create a new investor base, but if a company just needs capital, there is plenty in the private market. From 2012 to 2015 or ’16, there were few companies coming public. The IPO market goes in cycles. With today’s abundance of low-cost capital, private companies can take risks and have the money to grow.

What other industries or companies look promising to you?

In the area of artificial intelligence and drug discovery, we invested in Recursion Pharmaceuticals [RXRX], which went public in April. Recursion is based in Salt Lake City, which has become a hotbed for biotech start-ups. The company uses massive data computational tools, lab robotics, and a petabyte-level database to speed up the drug-discovery process. Zymergen [ZY] also operates in an area I’m pretty excited about—biofacturing. This is a materials manufacturing company, using AI, automation, and biology for scale manufacturing.

How does biology fit into the equation?

Instead of using chemicals, for instance, they’re using yeast fermentation to make new materials and products—from new electronic displays to naturally derived bug repellents. Ginkgo Bioworks is another biofacturing company I’m excited about. More broadly, the birth of genetic sequencing launched a whole industry that’s exciting, including gene editing. Synthetic biology is at an early stage, but we’re already starting to see companies come to fruition, such as Twist Bioscience [TWST], which manufactures and sells synthetic DNA-based products. The world will need more of these technologies in coming years. Ten years ago, we hadn’t “printed” a single gene. Now we’re printing tens of millions, and that will go to billions in the next few years.

What other technologies should we be watching?

I’ll emphasize a couple of trends. We’re moving into a world where cameras will be smarter. Whether cameras are manned by Zoom apps or cars or your watch, they will be equipped with more sensors, and the sensors will get smarter. That means more data will be fed into the cloud. We’re also seeing huge investments in natural-language processing. A lot of theoretical work was done in this area, and now we’re starting to see practical applications. All of this means the cloud is getting smarter. We’re going to need a lot more bandwidth. If we build bandwidth, the applications will come. Sensors and devices will be communicating with each other, without human intervention. That’s another massive source of new data that will come online.

The idea of using biomaterials in sensors is still in the research lab, but it’s something to watch. Sensors made of carbon, instead of silicon, could be much more responsive to an individual’s biology.

We haven’t talked about longevity. Science tells us the average life span for today’s teenagers could be well beyond 100.



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It Just Had an Energy Crisis, Now Europe Faces a Food Shock

Food prices continue to rise at a rapid pace, surprising central banks and pressuring debt-laden governments

By PAUL HANNON
Thu, May 25, 2023 4 min

LONDON—Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally.

This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices, presenting a new policy challenge for governments that deployed billions in aid last year to keep businesses and households afloat through the worst energy crisis in decades.

New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier.

The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments that are still reeling from the cost of last year’s emergency support to come to the rescue. And it is pressuring household budgets that are also under strain from rising borrowing costs.

In France, households have cut their food purchases by more than 10% since the invasion of Ukraine, while their purchases of energy have fallen by 4.8%.

In Germany, sales of food fell 1.1% in March from the previous month, and were down 10.3% from a year earlier, the largest drop since records began in 1994. According to the Federal Information Centre for Agriculture, meat consumption was lower in 2022 than at any time since records began in 1989, although it said that might partly reflect a continuing shift toward more plant-based diets.

Food retailers’ profit margins have contracted because they can’t pass on the entire price increases from their suppliers to their customers. Markus Mosa, chief executive of the Edeka supermarket chain, told German media that the company had stopped ordering products from several large suppliers because of rocketing prices.

A survey by the U.K.’s statistics agency earlier this month found that almost three-fifths of the poorest 20% of households were cutting back on food purchases.

“This is an access problem,” said Ludovic Subran, chief economist at insurer Allianz, who previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program. “Total food production has not plummeted. This is an entitlement crisis.”

Food accounts for a much larger share of consumer spending than energy, so a smaller rise in prices has a greater impact on budgets. The U.K.’s Resolution Foundation estimates that by the summer, the cumulative rise in food bills since 2020 will have amounted to 28 billion pounds, equivalent to $34.76 billion, outstripping the rise in energy bills, estimated at £25 billion.

“The cost of living crisis isn’t ending, it is just entering a new phase,” Torsten Bell, the research group’s chief executive, wrote in a recent report.

Food isn’t the only driver of inflation. In the U.K., the core rate of inflation—which excludes food and energy—rose to 6.8% in April from 6.2% in March, its highest level since 1992. Core inflation was close to its record high in the eurozone during the same month.

Still, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told lawmakers Tuesday that food prices now constitute a “fourth shock” to inflation after the bottlenecks that jammed supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in energy prices that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and surprisingly tight labor markets.

Europe’s governments spent heavily on supporting households as energy prices soared. Now they have less room to borrow given the surge in debt since the pandemic struck in 2020.

Some governments—including those of Italy, Spain and Portugal—have cut sales taxes on food products to ease the burden on consumers. Others are leaning on food retailers to keep their prices in check. In March, the French government negotiated an agreement with leading retailers to refrain from price rises if it is possible to do so.

Retailers have also come under scrutiny in Ireland and a number of other European countries. In the U.K., lawmakers have launched an investigation into the entire food supply chain “from farm to fork.”

“Yesterday I had the food producers into Downing Street, and we’ve also been talking to the supermarkets, to the farmers, looking at every element of the supply chain and what we can do to pass on some of the reduction in costs that are coming through to consumers as fast as possible,” U.K. Treasury Chief Jeremy Hunt said during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.

The government’s Competition and Markets Authority last week said it would take a closer look at retailers.

“Given ongoing concerns about high prices, we are stepping up our work in the grocery sector to help ensure competition is working well,” said Sarah Cardell, who heads the CMA.

Some economists expect that added scrutiny to yield concrete results, assuming retailers won’t want to tarnish their image and will lean on their suppliers to keep prices down.

“With supermarkets now more heavily under the political spotlight, we think it more likely that price momentum in the food basket slows,” said Sanjay Raja, an economist at Deutsche Bank.

It isn’t entirely clear why food prices have risen so fast for so long. In world commodity markets, which set the prices received by farmers, food prices have been falling since April 2022. But raw commodity costs are just one part of the final price. Consumers are also paying for processing, packaging, transport and distribution, and the size of the gap between the farm and the dining table is unusually wide.

The BOE’s Bailey thinks one reason for the bank having misjudged food prices is that food producers entered into longer-term but relatively expensive contracts with fertilizer, energy and other suppliers around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in their eagerness to guarantee availability at a time of uncertainty.

But as the pressures being placed on retailers suggest, some policy makers suspect that an increase in profit margins may also have played a role. Speaking to lawmakers, Bailey was wary of placing any blame on food suppliers.

“It’s a story about rebuilding margins that were squeezed in the early part of last year,” he said.

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