Edition #7 - Ni hao 🙇♂️
Ford Electric Pickup, Tesla U Turn, Ransom Attacks
Nî hao (nee-how), and welcome back to another edition of Business News for Kids (BNFK for short; genius isn’t it?). If you’re wondering, that’s not quite good morning but more like “you ok/good” as they say in Mandarin.
Earnings season is in full swing and would you believe it, in-spite of Losses companies can be valued for billions?
Wait, what’s Losses?! 🙂 Checkout the “Wait, what” section 👇
[Note: the situation in India remains grim. If you are able, and would like to, please consider making a donation to support relief efforts here.]
About BNFK
Knowledge is at the heart of being. To be more, you must know more.
With this weekly we distill the latest, most interesting, Business News 📰 .. to an emoji filled Newsletter for Kids. A dad 👽 & son 👾 experiment, delivered every Sunday.
Catch our previous editions here > Edition #0 , Edition #1, Edition #2, Edition #3, Edition #4, Edition #5, Edition #6
If you’re forwarding this to someone, they can hit this 👇 to subscribe for Free.
Busy business this week 💼
Amazon sells over 350 million products, but as you can imagine many turn out to be fakes and cause losses for Amazon! And so.. Amazon destroyed 💥 2 million fake products sent for sale to its warehouses in 2020.
Tesla said it will stop accepting Bitcoin over climate concerns 🧐! Tanking the price of Bitcoin by 15% 📉. Transacting in bitcoins involves a process called Mining; it doesn’t involve digging 🚜 but instead requires finding the solution to a complex puzzle.. and while it might sound simple, this process uses up a lot of computer servers and hence a lot of energy 🔌. Though it’s rumoured that’s not the only reason why Tesla decided to make a U turn in less than 2 months. Discuss about Bitcoins & Mining with Mom or a big person at home.
Ford just announced the name of its Electric Pickup truck - it will be called the F-150 Lightning ⚡️. The F-150 has been the best selling vehicle for over 40 years in the US so this is big big competition news. It’ll launch coming Wednesday May 19th and we’ll have those pics for you. Till then enjoy this one of the Humvee EV 🛻
Seattle teenagers Sage Khanuja, 17, & Nikolas Ioannou, 18, sold their healthcare technology startup Spiro to telephony medical care company Galileo - the teenagers created a ‘smart’ form that uses machine learning 🪄 ⚙️ to record symptoms and screen patients.
Hackers 💻, seeking a ransom💰, were able to access and block a major oil supply pipeline in Amercia. The Colonial Pipeline which carries more than 50% of the fuel supply to the US East Coast 🗽 had its entire network shut down leading to major fuel shortages. Whats a Ransomware attack? Discuss with Dad or a big person at home.
Wait, what is..
Loss: Recall profits in Edition #5 as the amount of money a company makes? A loss, is well a loss.. i.e. the amount of money a company Loses. This happens when its Costs are more than its Revenue. Re-read Profits & Earnings 💸
[Homework 🤣 : How is it that companies can be valued in billions, in-spite of losses? Discuss with Dad or a big person at home.]
Invest: Investing is a way to put money or time into something, usually a company or project, that will give you some benefit in the future. ⏰
Cryptocurrency, Bitcoins (refresher): Cryptocurrencies for e.g. Bitcoin are digital currency created, and owned, by the people. Usually currencies, be they $ or £ or ₹, are created by the Government of a country; for e.g. Bitcoins have been created by a person(s) rumoured to be known as Satoshi 🥷. They are not always considered to be a legal currency.
Servers: Servers 🌐 are nothing but more powerful computers. They are able to process much more data, information or commands, and are also capable of handling many of these information or processing requests in one go.
Machine Learning: Machine Learning or ML is a super exciting space in computing. You might guess what it is by its name.. ML is the process by which a machine 🤖 learns something on its own 🧠, based on some sample data that we feed into it. Discuss more with Mom or a big person at home.
Quarter or Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 (refresher): A ‘quarter’ like every other quarter is 1/4th of a Financial Year. Businesses report their performance by each Quarter of the year, divided into a set of 3 months. For e.g. January, February, March is usually Q1 in the US, but Q4 in India. 😅
Woah 😱 Weird 🥴
Were you spooked by the possibility of Robots giving you a hair cut 💇 from Edition #4’s Amazon Salon? Well.. get ready for them 🤖 to operate ✂️ on you some day 😱.
We aren’t getting rid of Robots 🤖 anytime soon, while that 👆 is a while off, 👇 will happen sooner than later. Robotaxi services, Waymo & Cruise, have applied for permits in San Francisco to start plying their taxis commercially 🚖 🎉
Inspiring business people to know 🙏
Meet Marissa Mayer, our inspiring business person of this week.
You recall last week’s news about Yahoo & AOL being sold for $5 billion? Well Marissa Mayer was it’s CEO from 2012 to 2017. She was also an early engineer in Google’s Search team, joining them as employee number 20 in 1999. She influenced some of the most important Google products including Search, Maps, News, Gmail & more.
Stocks, stonks and.. ⚡️
Homestays & vacation rental company Airbnb 🏖 announced Q1 results for 2021 - with revenues increasing 5% and a loss of $1.2 billion (its market cap or value is still $86 billion 🤯). 5% is a tiny tiny revenue increase for a company with such fast paced growth, but the pandemic really hit them hard and they’re hoping to be back in business soon enough.
Hyperlocal food delivery company Doordash 🛵 on the other hand reported a 219% year-over-year growth in revenue but had a loss of $110 million (its market cap is $45 billion), thanks to all of us being locked in 🔒 and ordering in 😅 - its stock was up over 30% 📈 two days after the results were announced.
Read about Market Capitalisation vs. Valuation (Market Value) here.
Mental models.. whaaaat! 🤯
My dad insisted we put this section in here, even though I protested saying its going to be a while before kids need to apply mental models. Mental models are nothing but ways of thinking, you can use as a framework, to take decisions or solve problems. Who knows, they might just be useful!
One Step Model 🎢 - Sometimes when we are faced with a problem or challenge, they simply seem unsurmountable 🏔. Impossible to solve or achieve. It's then that you must apply the One Step Mental Model.
Breakdown the problem or challenge into multiple singular steps. And just focus on ONE STEP at a time in the sequence. Solve that, and then move to the next. And then the next, and next, and so on.🧘
You know a great example? Imagine how messy your room gets. When you look around, you wonder - how in the world will I ever clean this up. But then you pick one thing, and then another and then another, and possibly 50 items later and many long hours.. you'll find that you in-fact did clean up that messy room after all. Real world problems are quite the same. So next time, begin by just thinking of.. One Step! 🪜Tech, products, toys ++ 🤖
Windows folding phone 📂 the Surface Duo just dropped its price by a whopping 50% - it was launched for $1399 (you could get a top of the line mac for that much) and now is available on a special sale for $699 📉.
Nintendo just released a report saying “almost 6 million households bought a second Switch” 😡 🎮 - how in the world is that fair; I haven’t even gotten lucky with one! Did you know over 84 million Switch consoles have been sold so far? This along with the Wii and other consoles helped Nintendo hit record revenues of $16.6 billion in 2020 🚀
Pro Tip: The magic of learning is in curiosity. Don’t shy away from clicking those hyperlinked texts to read and learn more. We mostly hyperlink to text we have read ourselves to make sure it is safe, but please be aware that comments and ads shown on these pages are beyond our control. We recommend using a kids friendly browser to view the links.
Disclaimers: Please preview, review, and make sure to pass on only that content which you feel is appropriate for your kids. Stocks or cryptocurrencies covered are in no way a recommendation and shared only for news / information purposes. We have near zero expertise on investing, and it’s always good to know that Cryptocurrencies are a highly risky, and even illegal, investment in many markets :)
Thank you so much for reading - Arv 👾 & Dad 👽 - Pls hit share to make someone’s day. And please take care. 🙏