WaffleStomper,
You don't need to be economically productive to be economically active. You can live off benefits, have all your housing paid and the money is still spent on goods and services, you just have to take the money from other taxpayers or the government has to borrow it leaving an overall debt burden and burden per head (plus interest). The level of unemployment / underemployent (16 hour a week workers on tax credits) is very large compared to the size of the workforce. It is not at the level of a floating pool of unemployed waiting their next job at all.
Fordm,
Brexit decisions were in the end based on some very personal circumstances/experiences/situations.
Some were motivated to vote one way because of concerns about their cheap lattes, access to retire anywhere in the EU, affects on their EU business / EU funded interests, or ideologically they wanted to be European . Others, it was about labour arbitrage and displaced jobs / work, more political / ideological / social associated factors with sovereignty and the right to unilaterally have policies that determine outcomes, not least immigration. Thatcher voting patterns were all about attracting Mondeo man, the Brexit decision was heavily Transit man, lesson, don't kick a large voting block in the economic nuts, what was promised to be tens of thousands of competing economic units (a lie from the start), was millions. You can't get away with orders of magnitude mistakes/lies without serious consequences.
That the UK is not flourishing is not all (or even large part) down to Brexit - pandemic, war, inflation, dreadful planning and a whole list of other of factors in the mix. It transpires politicians never really had any intention of making the UK flourish. Post Brexit the labour arbitrage cannon was fired again, this time largely targeting middle income earners - tech related displacement is off the scale, a large kick in the nuts is again in the process of being delivered, this time to the Conservative party.
Behind all this is the pathetic prop to GDP figures by using bodycount to spruce the numbers, it doesn't work, GDP per capita has been and continues to fall.
RR. are in extremely good position to commercialise SMR. If you have design authority and the ability to build/fit out nuclear in a sub you should be able to make a damned good job of deigning drop in nuclear facilities into a minimal pre-built site designed specifically for that one task. The cost and time overruns at Hinckley for example are huge and the infrastructure. labour, management and supervision , local disruption, local grid expansion of a full blown nuclear facility are insane. I think what might happen is once SMR is proven many countries won't even bother looking at large scale nuclear again, just drop in SMR sites where there are appropriate )or low cost upgrade) grid tie ins already and throw all the ideas of upgrading the main grid for standard scale nuclear at great time/expense in the bin.
Hardly surprising RR have seen a massive boom in their generator sales, as suggested yesterday, looking at growth across the board. We've not seen blackouts yet, been lucky, the potential energy supply / grid supply issues across the board are huge thanks to a lack of balance of generation. It was a very big mistake to shut down the existing power stations until there was an appropriate mix of green tech / fossil / nuclear. These datacentres simply cannot have their power go down, cloud computing / online services are worth pretty much nothing if they do not have near 100% uptime. Much more to come from this segment.
PEAKDREAD,
I get less interested in the UK decision by the day, other countries who actually do want to have what remains of their industrial infrastructure will be calling the tune, it is not just SMR either, all the other generation kit that RR have in the mix might play a surprising part too. Without a functional, reliable and affordable base load you will not have industry, which Germany is learning very quickly, to the point of panic when you read what some of their ministers are now putting out. Wins all round. Very rare to see a company with a mix of operating arms where every single one of them is positioned to have a surge in demand simultaneously, handling that growth is the biggest issue. I used to work for a mixed conglomerate, 3 main business arms, over the years there always seemed to be one that was going gangbusters, one muddling along and the other in trouble/shrinking.
There's that Polish company/entity I mentioned but couldn't remember the name of.
Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting the boss of Industria EU, the Polish development agency who visited Berkeley to discuss how our local expertise can train the next generation of nuclear technicians.
PEAKDREAD,
Have no additional info other than I don't think Tufan's comments in the past on being left behind were an empty warning. Europe is potentially in a desperate state on the energy front, German manufacturing is falling apart, nearly all countries apart from France have almost no functional plans to fill the energy gaps that are opening up other than a quick dash to spin up coal stations (which our politicians have gleefully blown up, so too late). The EU elections last night were behind the headlines most notable for the collapse of the Green vote, the public know that the situation is unsustainable without an affordable and just as importantly reliable energy supply. If it really takes off in Europe I could see RR. moving the production facilities to Poland as they seem very receptive with an industrial partnership already signed up there and the UK getting sidelined and that result would be all the fault of the UK political class.
Wingman engine partnership.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/2024/05-06-2024-rr-deutschland-and-itp-aero-join-forces-for-a-world-class-wingman-engine.aspx?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=defence&utm_content=Adv2_PR
Rolls-Royce Deutschland and ITP Aero today jointly announced that they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore a partnership to design, develop, manufacture and support a Wingman Engine, a state-of-the-art, powerful solution for large remote carriers.
Sam,
In terms of existential risk this has been a rather good week. You saw how pandemic rules crippled RR income stream. This week the WHO (on a power and money grab have failed to get their grubby hands on the tiller) and Fauci and co have been roundly called out under questioning in public view. I don't think they can play the same trick again and get away with it, or use the cover of the WHO to do it. The potentially crippling travel restraints and carbon budgets are rapidly losing their shine too, the hottest May ever messaging is being openly derided. The control and racketeering freaks' plans are all falling apart. What remains is an energy strategy which is in tatters and baseload still needed to fill the gaps as the power stations have all been gleefully torn down, oh and the insane push for WW3 to bat away.
CO2 goes up and down with temperature too. At one point the climate tax merchants were trying to pin the rise and fall of CO2 in causing ice ages, until it was proven it was purely cooler seas being able to hold far more CO2 in solution. The sun, cosmic events, volcanology, all contribute to the cyclic behaviour of the climate and there is sod all we can do about it, except paradoxically we might have saved the earth by raising the CO2 level. That level drops down to around 180ppm during ice ages, at 150ppm the biology as we know it starts shutting down as photosynthesis shuts down and plants on the margins / species die.
The huge trees / forests of the Carboniferous age which thrived on 1500/2000ppm CO2 nearly turned the planet into a ball of ice.
https://www.livingcarbon.com/post/how-the-first-trees-nearly-froze-the-earth
He's not wrong.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: "The world is going to be short power, short power. And to power these data companies you cannot have just this intermittent power like wind and solar. You need dispatchable power because you can't turn off and on these data centers."
PEAKDREAD,
Here's the current forecasts below, yes it is just plain wrong, positive on every metric is the trend. I suspect that a lot of sites are using AI/autogenerated commentary in order to boost their rankings and income and appear on as many searches as possible by continually pushing out content and in the case of shares / investments argument and counter argument to cover all the bases. Mistakes can be made when picking up data sources and there could often be no corrective mechanism before publishing.
https://www.rolls-royce.com/investors/investor-centre/analyst-consensus.aspx
Tax selling season (particularly with lots of retail investors having made good profits) was a too good an opportunity for the market to shake things around a bit and hoover up some shares which otherwise not be forthcoming. Looking at the institutional change of ownership only a smattering of reductions in holdings. Now that is out of the way normal service has resumed, the expectation is for more growth, more balance sheet improvement and higher share price.
Thanks PEAKDREAD.
Got lucky (at one point in the afternoon it was bobbling around 444 on the nose, that would have been funny), in reality the guess was just observation from earlier that RR. has been tracking analyst consensus average forecast for ages and AGM time would be as good a time as any to hit the mark again. Coverage has been light the last few weeks, hopefully a few more brokers will follow and be near the upper end like UBS and GS and drag the target up again and we see the same behaviour.
Not seen these mentioned, talking of targets a couple of reiterations.
https://uk.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ROLLS-ROYCE-HOLDINGS-PLC-4004084/news/ROLLS-ROYCE-Goldman-Sachs-keeps-its-Buy-rating-46804225/
ROLLS-ROYCE : Goldman Sachs keeps its Buy rating
In a research note published by Victor Allard, Goldman Sachs advises its customers to buy the stock. The target price is still set at GBX 524
ROLLS-ROYCE : UBS keeps its Buy rating
Analyst Ian Douglas-Pennant from UBS research considers the stock attractive and recommends it with a Buy rating. The target price remains set at GBX 550.
Peakdread,
Only yesterday stumbled across a whole new product line from Rolls that I was totally unaware of - Orpheus small engines .
https://x.com/RollsRoyce/status/1790653728594223428
Decision in principle. Looks like rather than going all in with one supplier most if not all countries are going to have a mix of suppliers and various sites. Distributed power makes sense as relying even more on an electric grid for basic energy supply across the board is going to require vast investment in the grid to balance the supply / demand. The sweet spot for wind has already been hit in many places and the struggle is to distribute the power at peak times and then fill the gaping hole in production when the wind stops, it is not a solution.