FT: “Once an assembler that built its success on suppliers’ components, Xiaomi is aiming to reinvent itself as a manufacturing powerhouse. Xiaomi had humbler ambitions when it was formed just 15 years ago. Its name is Chinese for millet, with founder Lei Jun saying the company was created in 2010 in the spirit of “millet plus rifles”, a reference to Mao Zedong’s description of the Communist party’s modest military resources during the civil war. But in the space of its first three years, it leapfrogged incumbents to become the world’s third largest handset vendor and expanded its product line-up to include everything from rice cookers to robot vacuums.”
Scott Sumner: “Almost everything is downstream of integrity.”
Alex Tabarrok: “Across India, Greece, and Brazil the story converges: overpaying government workers distorts education, job search, and firm dynamics. The waste shows up as socially unproductive effort devoted to entering the echelons of government employment and a private sector which is drained of top talent causing it to be less productive and to grow more slowly. In short, rent seeking and misallocation from overly generous government compensation generate large macroeconomic losses. As relative compensation tends to be higher the poorer the economy, high government pay can be a development trap.”
Morgan Housel: “You should obsess over risks that do permanent damage and care little about risks that do temporary harm, but the opposite is more common…The only way to build wealth is to have a gap between your ego and your income…Having no FOMO might be the most important investing skill…Money’s greatest intrinsic value is its ability to give you control over your time.”
Ishan Bakshi on India and China: “While addressing these issues is harder than many appreciate, in recent years, it does seem that the policy focus in both countries has shifted away from prioritising growth. And so, in the absence of deep reforms, China persists with its debt-fuelled investment-export led model of growth, the limits of which are being tested in a world that is either unable or unwilling to absorb its excess capacity, while India, in the face of sluggish manufacturing and investment growth, continues to rely on domestic consumption, fuelled by debt and tax giveaways. The question is whether the required policy changes can be engineered or will the laws of path dependency make progress difficult.”
