In retrospect, Kalkine Equities LLC will publish its “Global Fully Charged” or “Battery” report in the United States. The report aims to provide insight into several high quality battery storage companies. The electric vehicle sector offers some earnings potential; and with the evolving focus on the climate crisis, recent automakers’ announcements to go fully electric by 2030-2035, and overwhelming policy commitments (via $ 3.5 billion Funding from the European Commission according to the Federal Ministry of Economics), immense opportunities can arise in this area.

Companies in the battery storage space seem to benefit from the shift in focus to decarbonization. As oil consumption declines, battery cell and car manufacturers, chemical companies, solar and utility companies will grow, while lithium-ion batteries can serve as the main energy storage due to their longer service life and power density.

Increasing battery storage space with increasing demand

With lithium-ion battery prices falling and battery applications more prevalent, the Global X Lithium and Battery Tech ETF delivered 1-year returns of +53.14%, outperforming the S&P 500 index by ~ 27.0% (December 17, 2021, Source: REFINITIV)

Measures to contain COVID-19 affected deployments in 2019, but when restrictions were lifted, global economies resumed production near pre-COVID-19 levels. With increasing solar coupled storage, the global market for energy storage is expected to make a leap. In the midst of the global outlook, the US is the largest market for energy storage, driven by regulatory requirements and the opening up of the energy wholesale market. Besides that, Australia The residential storage market could be supported by the rise in residential buildings. Other markets, including the UK, Canada, and New Zealand are also constantly changing.

Still, a few factors should be considered, including the lack of market penetration given the early stage, the cost of batteries, government support, and the preference for corporate investment.

With this in mind, Kalkine’s Global Fully Charged Research aims to provide insights into various companies with an emphasis on fundamentals, technical proficiency, climate change strategies, scalability and applicability, and risks and opportunities.

Media contact:
Honey bhargava
[email protected]

SOURCE Kalkine Equities LLC

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LOS ANGELES (CBS / AP) – Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you might be talking to Tori – an artificially intelligent voice assistant who takes your order and sends it to the chefs.

“It doesn’t make you sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI ​​voice at Arby’s Franchise in Ontario, California this year. “It doesn’t get a corona. And the reliability is great. “

Not only did the pandemic threaten the health of Americans when it struck the US in 2020 – it could also pose a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with labor shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate jobs in the service sector that economists once considered safe, on the assumption that machines couldn’t simply make the human contact they believed customers required .

Past experience suggests that such waves of automation ultimately create more jobs than they destroy, but also disproportionately destroy less qualified jobs, on which many low-income workers are dependent. The resulting growing pains for the US economy could be severe.

Without the pandemic, Siddiqi likely would not have bothered to invest in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it went smoothly, he says: “Basically fewer people are needed, but these people now work in the kitchen and other areas.”

Ideally, automation can convert workers into better and more interesting jobs, as long as they get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But while that’s happening now, it’s not going fast enough, he says.

Worse, a whole class of service jobs that were created when manufacturing began to use more automation can now be at risk. “The robots have fled the manufacturing sector and immigrated to the much larger service sector,” he says. “I thought contact jobs were safe. I was completely surprised. “

Improvements in robotic technology are allowing machines to do many tasks that used to require humans – throwing pizza dough, moving hospital linen, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated its rollout. After all, robots cannot get sick or spread disease. They also do not require any leave of absence to deal with unexpected childcare emergencies.

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As KPIX reported last year, robotic food service was a trend even before the coronavirus pandemic as hospitals, campus cafeterias, and others tried to meet demand for fresh, bespoke options around the clock while keeping labor costs in To keep check. Robot chefs have performed in places like Creator, a burger joint in San Francisco, and Dal.komm coffee outlets in South Korea.

Prior to 2020, Hayward-based tech company Chowbotics had sold around 125 of its $ 35,000 robots, mostly to hospitals and colleges. Shortly after the coronavirus outbreak, sales rose more than 60%, CEO Rick Wilmer said, with growing interest from grocery stores, senior housing communities and even the U.S. Department of Defense.

International Monetary Fund economists found that past pandemics had encouraged companies to invest in machines that could increase productivity – but could also kill low-skilled jobs. “Our results suggest that concerns about the rise of robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January newspaper.

The consequences could hit the less educated women who disproportionately fill the low- and middle-wage jobs most exposed to automation – and viral infections. These professions include salespeople, administrative assistants, cashiers and helpers in hospitals, as well as nurses and geriatric nurses.

Employers seem eager to introduce the machines. A survey by the not-for-profit World Economic Forum last year found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce due to new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, corporate investment in equipment has increased 26%, more than twice the rate of the economy as a whole.

The fastest growth is expected in roving machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trading group. The same group also expects increased sales of robots that provide information to shoppers or deliver room service orders in hotels.

Restaurants are among the most visible robot users. At the end of August, for example, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced that it was buying the kitchen robot startup Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks vegetables and grains and pours them into bowls.

It’s not just robots either – software and AI-supported services are also on the rise. Starbucks has automated the work behind the scenes to keep track of a store’s inventory. More shops have moved to self-checkout.

Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington, Virginia-based restaurant chain Bartaco, struggled to get waiters to return to his restaurants last fall when they reopened during the pandemic.

So he decided to give it up. With the help of a software company, his company developed an online ordering and payment system that customers could use over their phones. Guests now simply scan a barcode in the center of each table to access a menu and order their food without having to wait for a waiter. Workers bring food and drinks to their tables. And when they finish eating, customers pay on their phone and leave.

Innovation has reduced the number of employees, but employees are not necessarily worse off. Each Bartaco location – there are 21 – now has up to eight deputy managers, roughly double the pre-pandemic total. Many are former servers and they wander between the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. They receive annual salaries of $ 55,000 or more instead of hourly wages.

Tips are now shared among all other employees, including dishwashers, which now typically make $ 20 an hour or more, far more than their pre-pandemic salary. “We don’t have the labor shortage you read about on the news,” Lawton says.

The rise in automation has not stalled a breathtaking rebound in the US labor market – at least so far.

The US economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs in March and April 2020 when the pandemic storm hit the US. Attitudes have since recovered rapidly: employers have brought back 17 million jobs since April 2020. In June they posted a record 10.1 million vacancies and complain that they cannot find enough workers.

Behind the hiring boom is an increase in consumer spending, many of whom have come through the crisis unexpectedly financially – thanks to both federal relief checks and, in many cases, the accumulated savings from working from home and the elimination of the daily commute.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, assumes that employers will likely be looking for workers for a long time to come.

For one thing, many Americans are taking their time to get back to work – some because they are still concerned about the health risks and childcare issues posed by COVID-19, others because of the generous federal unemployment benefits that came out on September 6th nationwide expires.

In addition, many baby boom workers are retiring. “The job market will be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” says Zandi.

Currently, the short-term benefits of economic snapback outweigh any job losses from automation, the effects of which are gradually becoming apparent over a period of years. That can’t last. Last year, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of British Columbia found that the so-called unemployment rallies of the past 35 years, in which economic output recovered from the recession faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of automation-vulnerable jobs .

Despite strong hires since the middle of last year, the US economy is still missing 5.3 million jobs compared to February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, calculated last month that 40% of the missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially in food preparation, retail and manufacturing.

Some economists fear that automation will push workers into lower-paying positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of the stagnation in US wages between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines replacing humans in routine tasks.

“Many of the jobs that are being automated were in the middle of the skill distribution,” says Acemoglu. “They no longer exist and the workers who used to do them are now doing less skilled jobs.”

© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report

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MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF / AP) – The European Union accused Google of stifling competition in digital advertising technology, and regulators there announced Tuesday that they launched a new technology giant for antitrust investigations on Tuesday.

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it had opened a formal investigation to investigate whether Google has violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of competing publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services.

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The study underscores the European concerns about Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry and whether Google is using its data lead to consolidate its position in the display advertising market, which the EU Commission estimates is valued at 20 billion euros annually. This month, the French antitrust authority fined Google more than 220 million euros for abusing its dominance in online advertising, while in the UK it entrusted the competition watchdog with the task of setting “cookies” for ad tracking from the Chrome browser to monitor to clarify an investigation.

Online display ads are banners and text that appear on websites such as newspaper home pages and are personalized based on an Internet user’s browsing history. Search ads, on the other hand, appear next to search engine results and are based on keywords that users are searching for.

The Commission, the EU executive and the bloc’s top antitrust authority, signaled that it is looking into YouTube in particular and whether Google is using the video-sharing site’s dominant position to favor its own ad-buying services by placing restrictions on competitors imposed.

According to Google, competition in online ads has made them more affordable and relevant, lowered fees, and expanded options for publishers and advertisers.

“Thousands of European companies use our advertising products to reach new customers every day and to fund their websites,” said a prepared statement from Google. “They choose them because they are competitive and effective. We will continue to work constructively with the European Commission to answer their questions and to show European businesses and consumers the benefits of our products. ”

The investigation signals a renewed attempt by Margrethe Vestager, head of competition and executive vice president for digital of the EU commission, to curb the market power of Google. It has already fined Google 8.2 billion euros (now 9.7 billion US dollars) in three different antitrust proceedings. However, it was criticized that the investigations lasted too long and the fines were little deterrent because the company could easily afford them.

“Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetize their online services,” said Vestager. Google collects data to be used for targeted advertising while it also sells ad space and acts as an intermediary between online advertisers and publishers, she said.

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“We are concerned that Google has made it difficult for competing online advertising services to compete in what is known as the ad tech stack,” said Vestager.

The European Commission has announced that it is investigating how Google is using technology to mediate display ad sales between online advertisers and publishers.

For one, officials are reviewing the requirements for purchasing display ads on YouTube through Google’s internal advertising platforms, while competing services may be limited in how they can serve ads on the video sharing site. They also check to see if Google’s various ad platforms are mutually beneficial.

Another area the Commission is investigating is restrictions that Google places on advertisers, publishers and competing ad brokers to access data on the identity and behavior of users who have access to Google’s own advertising services. This data can be used to tailor online advertising to individual web users.

Also under review are Google’s plans to phase out third-party browser cookies on Chrome and ad identification tags on Android devices for users who opt out of personalized advertising, as part of the company’s plans to do so Reinforce data protection measures. The Commission is examining how these plans will affect the digital advertising markets.

EU regulators have the power to impose fines of up to 10% of a company’s annual turnover. But it’s a small price to pay for wealthy tech companies like Google, which made $ 17.9 billion in profits last quarter, and the commission is turning to other methods beyond headline-grabbing fines.

Vestager has begun using “interim measures” to quickly stop anti-competitive behavior during the investigation. It also plays a leading role in updating the EU’s digital rulebook with measures aimed at containing the tech giants and preventing them from cornering digital markets in the first place.

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