Talks on to resume border trade with China: Govt
"We have remained engaged with the Chinese side to facilitate the resumption of border trade through all the designated trade points, namely Lipulekh Pass in Uttarakhand, Shipki La Pass in Himachal Pradesh, and Nathu La Pass in Sikkim," external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.
It is learned that India and China are at an "advanced stage" of negotiations to resume direct flight services between the two countries soon.
In the last few months, India and China have initiated a number of measures to repair the bilateral ties that had severely nosedived following the deadly clashes between the two militaries in June 2020. Last month, India announced resumption of issuance of tourist visas to Chinese nationals.
The military standoff in eastern Ladakh began in May 2020 and the clashes at the Galwan Valley in June that year resulted in a severe strain in ties between India and China.
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Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
The Man Tasked With Nailing Ford's Next Model T Moment
Doug Field sounded a lot like Elon Musk when unveiling Ford Motor's strategy to compete against the rise of Chinese electric cars. At an event this week in Louisville, Ky., Field detailed the thinking behind Ford's affordable electric vehicle program, which promises a midsize pickup priced at around $30,000 in 2027. His ambitious plan boils down to implementing hardcore engineering to take down costs, while keeping performance; and upending 100 years of manufacturing practices to go faster, including through more automation. All of which rang familiar to anyone following Tesla's announcement in 2023 to slash the cost of building its next-generation cars by 50%. 'Physics isn't proprietary,' Field, Ford's EV chief, told me after his event Monday when I noted the similarities. Musk sent a shock wave through the automotive industry in early 2023 when he touted Tesla's strategy to build on its cost lead and dramatically reduce things even further. That focus, though, seems largely abandoned as Musk now chases robot dreams. Instead Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley is warning about the threat of Chinese rivals making more affordable EVs. He called this week's announcement Ford's new 'Model T moment.' In an industry known for hype and hyperbole, there is, perhaps, no single engineer who has been attached to more fantastical personal transportation projects in the past 20 years than Field. The Segway scooter; the Tesla Model 3; the Apple car. And, now, the Model T of tomorrow. Field is basically being asked to save the company from irrelevance—at least in the minds of Wall Street investors who think China has already won. After Monday's event, however, investors didn't seem sold on Ford's latest hype-mobile. Shares finished the day down slightly—not the sort of reaction one would expect for such a game-changer. One factor in the apparent apathy may have been that Ford didn't display an actual vehicle. Rather it showed video of employees supposedly looking at it off camera. ('That's awesome,' one employee said.) Or maybe it was Ford's timeline—2027. When Field joined Ford in 2021, it was with the promise that he would infuse the stodgy old automaker with Silicon Valley juice. He was leaving behind the Apple car project, which was stalling out. He still wore the halo of having been a big part of bringing out the Model 3 for Tesla in 2017, Musk's original dream for offering a more affordable EV to the masses. That vehicle, along with its Model Y sister, helped revolutionize the automobile industry, proving electric cars could be both desirable and profitable. It also set off a race among rivals to catch up. 'Like probably a lot of people, I came in with slightly unrealistic expectations of how quickly [things could be changed], but that's an industry thing, not just a Ford thing,' Field said. What he's doing at Ford is harder than Tesla, he said. Doing something new at an established company requires overcoming inertia, and a culture that has developed over generations. He has hired a team, including a former key Tesla engineer named Alan Clarke, that's eager to change. 'The knothole that you have to go through is to transition from that model of operation to the big industrial machine of Ford,' Field said. 'We really do have to work with the teams so that there's mutual respect—there's respect for being naive and trying new things, and there's also respect for the practicality of running a plant.' Still, he remains optimistic, even as Ford burns through cash on its EV efforts. It lost $5 billion on the EV business last year alone and has dramatically scaled back its ambitions—recently delaying an announced full-size EV pickup until 2028 and reducing plans for a new electrical architecture important for software features. The market isn't what Ford thought it would be just a few years ago. The batteries required for a large vehicle would make them too expensive. And the Chinese have figured out how to make appealing, lower priced EVs. Now, Field's $30,000 truck—which is said to have the acceleration of a Mustang and more interior room than a Toyota RAV4—is the new play. Key to his effort is a vehicle that has a smaller battery—the most expensive part of an EV—while finding ways to make the body lighter and have less drag so performance isn't diminished. Their vehicle reduces the number of parts by 20%, according to Ford. To achieve that, Field's team looked at the overall goal of the project rather than each member's own individual assignments. More expensive brakes, for example, might help lower costs in other parts of the vehicle. 'In our old systems, a chassis engineer might be actually penalized for spending an extra $5 on brakes and in cases like this project that $5 could have saved us $20 in batteries,' Field said. These were classic hallmarks of Field's work at Tesla when he was pushing development of the Model 3 to be much cheaper than its predecessor, the Model S, which regularly sold for around $100,000. Or, as Field told reporters before this week's event, his team brought to Ford product development 'first principles thinking'—a favorite Musk-ism for analyzing problems to their most basic levels. Manufacturing speed and automation have long been a focus for Musk. In 2023, Tesla began talking about its new manufacturing system that it dubbed 'unboxed,' a process to improve efficiencies that moved away from a single line to build the vehicle in sections. A key part of Field's plan, too, involves changing how the car is manufactured, updating practices as old as Ford itself. The project calls for giving up a single manufacturing line for three parallel lines that, the company said, will allow for greater speed. Ford's plans also call for massive castings of the front and back of the vehicle's frames—again similar to advances that Tesla has implemented to its vehicles. It was an idea that Musk drew inspiration from die-cast toy cars, thinking it could reduce the number of parts required. At the event, as Field talked about the changes coming, he even borrowed an old engineering axiom from his former boss. Musk, as he posted on X just this week, often preaches simplicity. And Field used Musk's exact words: 'The best part is no part.' Field obviously knows the playbook; now he just needs to score another big win. Write to Tim Higgins at
Mint
2 hours ago
- Mint
Are Silicon Valley CEOs of Indian origin at risk of facing what Intel's boss is?
According to US President Donald Trump, the rise of Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, is 'an amazing story." That's as much payoff as Tan can expect from his emergency meeting with Trump, who last week had demanded he 'resign, immediately" because he was 'highly CONFLICTED." We don't know if Intel will be able to convince the administration to view its CEO with less disfavour. Some in Washington are concerned about Malaysian-born Tan's long history of supporting and investing in the Chinese tech sector. And questions about how Intel intends to live up to government controls on the export of high-end technology under his leadership are, given this history, not unreasonable. Also Read: Rajrishi Singhal: Look East to grasp why Trump is ghosting India Nevertheless, it's a problematic precedent. That should worry Silicon Valley's powerful Indian diaspora in particular. Take a step back and ask yourself: Is there anything inherently questionable about a tech firm appointing a CEO with an eye for innovative and effective startups? At his venture capital firm Walden International, Tan invested in more than 100 Chinese companies, including an early bet on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. Normally, this would be a count in his favour. The problem is a fear, both in Washington and in Silicon Valley, that the US and Chinese tech ecosystems are not complements but rivals. This wasn't the case in 2001, when Walden put money in SMIC. But it's certainly the general feeling today. Indian tech leaders have managed to escape similar scrutiny precisely because the tech scene here is seen as providing low-end support to US industry, not high-value competition. But how long will that be true? And what happens if it changes? Also Read: Kaushik Basu: The real costs of Trump's economic agenda are staggering New Delhi is not happy being a supporting player in the AI revolution. The country has begun to stockpile chips—compute capacity has passed 34,000 GPUs in May, according to government officials—and has already selected national champions it intends to support. Given the relative dynamism of India's startups, its tech sector will at some point produce a few success stories that challenge the dominance of US companies. That's good news for Indians. But it might make things more difficult for Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley. Across America Inc, but particularly in Big Tech, people of Indian descent have been disproportionately successful as leaders, more so perhaps than their colleagues of Chinese heritage. Think of Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Adobe's Shantanu Narayen and IBM's Arvind Krishna, for example. As Intel's troubles following its choice of Tan demonstrate, this might partly be because their home nation is not considered a strategic competitor to the US. That image is slowly changing in the Trump era. Indians in Silicon Valley have already discovered that things are a bit harder now. H1-B visas, for example, are a political hot-button issue, and provided the first wedge in the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. Trump has already made it clear that he doesn't want his backing of Big Tech to mean any jobs for Indians: 'Many of our largest tech companies have reaped the blessings of American freedom while building their factories in China, hiring workers in India and stashing profits in Ireland," he said at a tech summit last month, adding: 'Under President Trump, those days are over." Also Read: India's AI boom could exceed Satya Nadella's expectations So far, corporate leaders have not had to answer any questions about their distance from the sector back home. But the political environment will get more difficult to navigate as India's tech companies achieve greater autonomy and efficiency, and the Trump administration reworks policy. The 50% tariff rate that New Delhi has been threatened with reveals how the president's mind works: He may not see India's trajectory as fundamentally different from China's, and his mercantilist soul rebels at the thought of collaborating with a future rival. An age of economic nationalism and competitive industrial policy will always be tough on cosmopolitan minorities. 'Dual loyalty' accusations gain no traction in an age of prosperous globalization, but have a long and dark history when populists seize power and turn back the clocks. The diaspora should not look at Tan's attempts to win over Trump with satisfaction or superiority. They might be next. Nor should they assume that they'll always be able to avoid similar accusations. The only reason they haven't faced them so far is that nobody thought their connections back home could ever be a problem. Here's the hard truth: India's success will mean the end of Silicon Valley's Indian-American golden age. ©Bloomberg The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
Iron ore slides on weak China data, lower steel prices
Singapore: Iron ore futures slid on Thursday, weighed down by signs of weak demand after China's new yuan loans unexpectedly contracted for the first time in two decades, while steel prices fell on high supply and seasonally lower consumption. The most-traded January iron ore contract on China's Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE) fell 1.88 per cent to 783.5 yuan ($109.25) a metric ton by 0259 GMT. The benchmark September iron ore on the Singapore Exchange was 0.78 per cent lower at $102.7 a ton. China's new yuan loans contracted in July for the first time in two decades, indicating weak private sector demand amid trade deal negotiations with Washington. Despite the first contraction in new yuan loans since July 2005 and the largest monthly decline since December 1999, improvements in broader credit growth suggest the central bank is in no rush to ease policy. China's demand for construction steel is expected to remain stable in August, supported by the launch of new projects, though recent adverse weather has disrupted outdoor construction, Chinese consultancy Mysteel said in a note. Despite speculative demand for finished steel products, high crude steel supply and seasonally lower demand are pressuring prices, said broker Galaxy Futures. Still, reports of production restrictions on steel mills later this month, a 90-day extension to a tariff truce between the United States and China, and the "anti-involution" campaign targeted at curbing price wars in China provided some support to prices, Galaxy said. Other steelmaking ingredients on the DCE slumped, with coking coal and coke down 5.17 per cent and 3.59 per cent , respectively. China's coking coal market softened following a buying spree, with end-users stepping up material cost controls, Mysteel said in a separate note. Steel benchmarks on the Shanghai Futures Exchange fell. Rebar lost 1.29 per cent , hot-rolled coil dipped 1.04 per cent , wire rod slid 1.1 per cent and stainless steel decreased 0.76 per cent .
