Industry Analysis Techniques

📣 The era of aluminium surplus is over. 🛑 According to a powerful analysis by Andy Home at Reuters, the global aluminium market is "sleepwalking into the biggest deficits in 20 years." For decades, the market has been defined by excess, but a structural shift is underway. Here’s why: 🇨🇳 China is at Capacity: The world's largest producer (60% of global output) is hitting its government-mandated cap of 45 million tons per year. Their relentless production growth is grinding to a halt. 📉 Inventories are Draining: LME stocks have plummeted from over 3 million tons four years ago to just over 700,000 today. Sanctions are diverting Russian metal to China, further squeezing Western exchange liquidity. ⚡ The Energy Transition is a Double-Edged Sword: Demand is surging from solar and EV sectors, while high energy costs are stifling smelter restarts outside of China (e.g., closures threatened in Mozambique). 🇮🇩 New Supply Can't Keep Up: Hope rests on Indonesia, where Chinese companies are building new smelters. But analysts at Citi project new capacity will fall far short of expectations, reaching only 2.3M tons by 2030 due to high costs and energy challenges. The result? Citi analysts predict prices will need to rise sustainably above $3,000/metric ton (from ~$2,700 today) to prevent a shortage. This isn't just another trader squeeze; it's a fundamental reshaping of the market. The next crisis won't be caused by too much metal, but by too little. #Aluminium #Metals #Commodities #EnergyTransition #SupplyChain #Mining #Economy #Reuters 

The center of gravity in the metals world is shifting and Dubai just entered the game. This year’s London Metal Exchange Week wasn’t just another industry gathering. It was a strategic inflection point, a snapshot of how power in global metals is being redistributed. Dubai’s new role. Hong Kong Exchanges (HKEx) surprised the market by launching a pricing arm in Dubai. It’s not a side note it’s a deliberate move to link China’s metal ecosystem with the fast-growing Middle East. This positions Dubai as a bridgehead between East and West, strategically placed along new trade corridors. Smelters over mines. You don’t have security if you just have stuff in the ground, said Trafigura’s CEO. Control over processing capacity not just raw extraction is becoming the decisive factor in geopolitical metal strategy. Australia has already pledged A$135M to keep smelters alive. The West is realizing what China has mastered for decades, whoever controls the smelters, controls the flow. Copper leads the charge. Funds are shifting toward hard assets, inventories are tight, and tariffs are reshaping global trade flows. Codelco and Aurubis both raised their 2026 premiums to around $325/ton, a clear signal of scarcity and demand. Copper isn’t just a metal it’s a geopolitical pressure point. Aluminum’s unexpected turn. Veteran bears turned bullish. Analysts now expect aluminum to break the $3,000–$4,000/ton range. Why? China’s smelter capacity cap. For the first time in decades, the market fears a supply squeeze, not a glut. Germanium and critical minerals. “There is none.” China’s export restrictions on germanium have already triggered a global supply crunch. Gallium could be next. And now rare earths like holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium are entering the restricted list. Few have heard of them but they will shape tomorrow’s chip, energy, and defense industries. This isn’t just about price charts. It’s about who controls the chokepoints of the future economy. And this time, the story isn’t just China vs. the West it’s China and Dubai vs. the old order.

The producer price index data for December show we are entering 2026 with substantial levels of cost pressure for goods that have a sigificant share of their value in metals. This is shown below presenting the year-over-year percent change in the producer price indexes (PPIs) for fabricated metal products (top) and machinery (bottom). For those not familiar with these PPIs, they capture the price changes that domestic manufacturers of these goods are receiving for their products. Thoughts: •The top chart shows the PPI for domestically made fabricated metal products in the USA, which was seeing flat year-over-year price changes in 2024 that averaged just 2.2%, have accelerated sharply throughout 2025. December 2025's prices were up 7.2% year-over-year. This far outpaces the rate of price increase in 2018. What's more, this increase has occurred despite the PPI for fuels and related products & power being down 1-2% year-over-year for 2025 (https://lnkd.in/gTaKQ6Wx). This increase has also taken place in a weak demand environment, which is in stark contrast to 2018 (https://lnkd.in/g2SWfUZi). •The bottom chart showing the PPI for machinery has likewise shown a sharp accelerating of year-over-year price increases in 2025. Year-over-year price increases were trending down through 2024 and bottomed out at 2.4% in January 2025. They have since accelerated to 4.8% year-over-year as of December 2025. This has occurred in an environment characterized by falling employment in this sector (https://lnkd.in/g5qF42Bf). Implication: I hope buyers of fabricated metal products and machinery have appropriately budgeted for 2026's higher prices. As the tariffs only went into full effect over the past few months, we are in for an extended period of strong year-over-year price increases. Users of aluminum will be especially feeling the pain given the PPI for aluminum products is at record levels (https://lnkd.in/gyGHVFkG). Not the news folks want to hear, but something that must be planned for. #supplychain #supplychainmanagement #manufacturing #economics #markets #freight

Not having a benchmark for decision making is the most common mistake enterprise AI buyers make in their AI strategies. Without it, you cannot measure accuracy, latency, and cost on real workflows that matter to you. When buyers do have such a data set for benchmarking, decisions become easy. Less political. More objective. So far, we've also seen a 100% win rate when our customers ran such a comparison and engaged with us on their benchmark. Ultimately, having the best accuracy and fewest hallucinations will win. Checklist for AI leads: - Lock in objective success metrics (accuracy, latency, and cost) before any vendor demo. - Build a test set that mirrors production workflows and edge cases. - Stress-test every model and vendor with half of that test set and then do a final check with the other half so there's no cherry-picked prompts. Instrument continuous evaluation; update scores as models evolve. The marginal cost of intelligence is dropping fast. The cost of wrong answers stays high.

Every weekday at 7:30 AM, I get a one-paragraph brief for every meeting on my calendar. Last email threads with each participant, open asks, unresolved questions. Claude wrote it while I was asleep. Anthropic shipped three automation tools in four weeks. Two serve you individually. One serves your whole team. The routing decision is simple. Work needs your local files? Cowork Scheduled Tasks. Runs on your machine, reads ~/Documents. Needs to fire while your laptop is closed? Claude Routines. Cloud infrastructure. Competitor checks at 7 AM, sentiment scans on Monday morning, pre-meeting briefs before you wake up. Pro plan gets 5 runs/day. Max gets 15. Needs to serve more than just you? Managed Agents. Every PM queries the same agent, each with their own session and audit trail. Asana, Notion, Rakuten, and Sentry are already running these in production. Rakuten went from quarterly releases to biweekly. The reasoning step is what separates this from Zapier. A Zapier zap chains deterministic actions. A Routine reads a competitor pricing page, decides whether something meaningful changed, and writes a summary in your voice. Different category of work. I set up a competitor pricing monitor in 20 minutes. It visits three competitor pages every morning, compares against yesterday's Notion log, and posts only what changed to Slack. I know about pricing shifts before my sales team hears them on calls. A weekly sentiment scanner does the same thing across Reddit, G2, and Product Hunt. Four weeks of consistent themes tells you what users actually want, not what's loudest internally. I built 7 of these workflows with full prompts, connector setup, failure modes, an engineer handoff brief, and a security doc: https://lnkd.in/gyb4FkHa The PM who walks into Monday planning with automated intelligence will out-prioritize the one going off memory and escalations. That gap compounds every week.

Greetings from São Paulo, Brazil - where the next chapter of China’s global story is being written in Portuguese.   My driver picked me up in a BYD King hybrid (known in China as Destroyer 05). On the highway, he turned down the radio and said, unprompted: “I want to thank the Chinese people for bringing this car to Brazil. I am saving so much on gas. That money - I am spending it on my family now.”   I’ve read plenty of reports on China’s auto expansion in LatAm. That sentence told me more than any of them.   Brazil has quietly become BYD’s largest international market - from 260 vehicles sold here in 2022 to over 112,000 in 2025, consistently breaking into the top five auto brands in the country. But the numbers are almost beside the point. What struck me standing outside a BYD dealership in São Paulo was something harder to quantify: genuine affection and admiration. This isn’t a brand being tolerated. It’s being embraced.   A few things stood out:   🔹 Going abroad in search of margins A BYD Dolphin Mini sells for around US$24,000 here - more than double its price in China. And yet Brazilian consumers consider it extraordinary value. The involution in China has forced Chinese players to go abroad - for survival.   🔹 Go big or go home This is not a tentative export strategy. BYD took over a former Ford manufacturing complex in Bahia, retrofitting it into the largest EV hub in South America - committing massive capital, localizing production ahead of tariffs, and building proprietary fast-charging infrastructure nationwide.   🔹 The growth pains are very real Behind the sales charts are steep learning curves: complex labor union dynamics, construction delays from heavy seasonal rains, regulatory scrutiny. It is still early to declare victory.   🔹 Real localization The BYD in the photo next to me had a “blindado” sign on its window. Portuguese for bulletproof. A feature no domestic Chinese model carries - and one no market research deck would have predicted. Going global means adapting quickly to local realities.   The ambition and urgency of Chinese companies to globalize have never been higher. But the world they are entering does not reward speed alone. It rewards institutional patience, cultural humility, and the resilience to weather the operational and geopolitical headwinds.   It’s only the beginning. In the lot next door, I see the Great Wall Motor dealership. And a Geely dealership on the opposite side of the street.   We are only at the beginning of a ten-year trend. Watch this space.

How are you benchmarking “total” vs. “annualized” equity grant values? The compensation industry has generally benchmarked and priced equity compensation targets around “total” equity grant values. This works in a context when most/nearly-all grants in the market consist of four year vesting schedules… …but it falls apart when companies start utilizing varying vesting schedule lengths. Public companies, in particular, have begun experimenting with 2 and 3 year vesting schedules–generally driven from desires to keep equity burn in control. The end result of using “total” equity grant benchmarks in a sample set that combines grants with varying vesting schedule lengths is that you’re comparing "apples" and "oranges" side-by-side while mistakenly treating all the grants as "apples". Take the benchmarks from the attached slice of market data, for instance. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the “total” benchmarks are not a perfect 4x multiple from the “annual” benchmarks. 𝗠𝘆 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲: 𝗯𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝘂𝗽 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 depending on what your company’s equity program design looks like (vesting schedule length, front-weighted vs. back-weighted vs. evenly-weighted vests, cliff specifics, etc). Leveraging annualized equity benchmarks creates a more standardized comparison basis across equity grants with different vesting schedules. #pave #equitycompensation #benchmarks

Energy & Metals in 2024: What the Rankings Reveal The latest performance rankings tell a clear story about global commodities—and the macro forces shaping them. Here’s what stood out: 1. Gold (+28%) and Silver (+28%) lead the pack. • Safe-haven demand remains strong as investors navigate geopolitical risks and inflation. • Central banks, especially in emerging markets, are boosting gold reserves. • A potential pivot toward lower interest rates in 2024 is lowering the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets. 2. Crude Oil (+13%) remains resilient. • Demand is rebounding, led by emerging markets like China and India. • OPEC+ continues to manage supply, stabilizing prices amid global uncertainty. • For bond markets, stable oil prices mean reduced inflation pressures—a positive for rates. 3. Industrial Metals show mixed results. • Aluminum (+6.6%) and Copper (+5%) are supported by the green energy push. Think EVs and renewables. • But China’s property market challenges are capping demand. • Slowing industrial activity signals weaker growth, boosting safe-haven bonds. 4. Oversupply pressures hit Nickel (-6.6%) and Iron Ore (-8.5%). • Increased production, especially in Indonesia, weighs on nickel prices. • China’s stimulus hasn’t fully offset its construction slowdown, impacting iron ore. 5. Natural Gas (-32%) and Steel (-17%) are the weakest performers. • Mild weather has softened gas demand in Europe and the U.S. • Global construction activity remains subdued, hitting steel prices. The Bigger Picture These commodity trends are signals of where the global economy is headed: • Central banks could shift toward rate cuts as inflation eases. • Slowing growth boosts demand for safe-haven fixed income assets—government bonds and high-quality credit. • Emerging markets with fiscal support may offer opportunities, especially in energy and commodities. As commodities move, so does the broader macro narrative. 2024 could be a year of opportunity for fixed income markets as growth moderates and rates stabilize. #Commodities #FixedIncome #MacroOutlook #Investing #Markets2024

You don’t often get second chances in project development.   But here is a challenge: our wind farms are designed for a lifetime over 25 years. However, we typically only have a few years of wind measurement data… are those years representative? So, we blend real measurement data with modelled data from historical weather models.   At RWE, we wanted to better understand the reliability of the modelled data. Thanks to a digitalisation and automation initiative from our Smart Data Pipeline team, colleagues Sam Williams and Gibson Kersting led one of the most thorough benchmarks of modelled wind data in our industry.   We tested 9 datasets, including reanalysis, mesoscale and large-eddy simulation (LES), against 370+ wind measurements across 190+ sites in every major wind market. Each dataset was standardised, cleaned through our Smart Data Pipeline, and assessed using robust statistical metrics.   The results provided valuable insight:   ERA5, the most widely used reanalysis dataset, performed more reliably than often assumed, particularly offshore and in simple terrain. Mesoscale models offer added resolution and typically improve significantly on reanalysis, but accuracy varies by provider and setup. LES (as shown in the animation, the generated winds which capture the complex atmospheric phenomenon that govern the weather), demonstrates clear benefits in modelling large offshore clusters, complex onshore sites where small-scale atmospheric effects become decisive, and high‑quality turbulence estimates. However, for simpler sites, the added value is limited.   This wasn’t an academic exercise. It was about understanding the tools we depend on, knowing when a model is good enough and when it isn’t.   Modelled wind data is incredibly powerful, but like any tool, its value depends on how and where it’s applied. With this benchmarking, we’ve taken a major step toward using it with greater precision and confidence across our global portfolio.   In a data-driven industry, precision isn’t a luxury. It’s a competitive edge. And that edge depends not just on having more data but on understanding it deeply.

#AI benchmarking conversations I have often turn into a false choice. #Synthetic vs. #real_world. The truth? Both matter. At Dell Technologies, our TME labs not only analyze benchmarks but also work directly with customer’s production environments to see real-world challenges. Synthetic benchmarks show what the infrastructure can do under ideal conditions. They expose architectural limits, scaling characteristics, peak throughput, and theoretical efficiency. That’s important. It tells you the ceiling. But production environments don’t operate at the ceiling. Real-world benchmarking shows what the system will do under concurrency, mixed workloads, thermal pressure, network contention, and operational overhead. That’s where latency, sustained throughput, and cost per token actually determine business value. One shows maximum capability. The other reveals operational truth. If you’re evaluating AI infrastructure and only looking at peak tokens per second, you’re missing half the story. The best enterprise AI strategies validate both: • Lab performance to understand headroom • Production performance to understand reality Peak numbers sell slides. Sustained performance drives outcomes. #AI #AIBenchmarking #EnterpriseAI #Infrastructure #DataCenter #IWork4Dell