Ruction
A disturbance or quarrel.
The Ruction is a weekly rundown of the top ten emerging issues from the past seven days shaping commerce + culture.
The Ruction is for communication strategists and global business executives.
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Memo: The Ruction | Edition 9 | February 12, 2021
1. Bitcoin surged to a record high after Tesla revealed it had bought $1.5 bn-worth of the cryptocurrency and would accept it as payment. Mastercard and BNY Mellon also moved to make it easier for their customers to use cryptocurrencies. The news isn't all cash money. Crypto is a carbon monster. Analysis by Cambridge University suggests Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina.
2. Chinese short-video platform Kuaishou's share price continued climbing, making it the biggest stock market IPO in the tech since Uber. A rival to TikTok (known as Douyin in China), Kuaishou is the first short-video platform from China to go public. Despite its aggressive valuation, it is not even the most prominent player.
3. Heineken decided to shed 8k jobs as lockdowns cut into sales. In Britain, beer sales dropped by 56% last year, according to the industry's association. Heineken also signaled further investment in technology plus the rollout of low and no-alcohol beers and hard seltzers.
4. Vale agreed to pay $7 bn to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in compensation for the collapse of the Brumadinho dam two years ago, which killed at least 270 people. The dam had held iron-ore waste from one of the Brazilian company's mines.
5. Colombia will grant protected status for ten years to 1 mn migrants from Venezuela. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees called the decision "historic." Some 5.4 mn Venezuelans have fled their country; 1.7 mn are in Colombia. The exodus of Venezuelan nationals is currently the world's second-largest refugee crisis, exceeded only by Syria.
6. The number of Americans in the hospital with COVID-19 has dropped to the lowest number since November. Since October 22, no states are reporting over 400 COVID-19 hospitalizations per million people. NY is currently the highest, with 390 hospitalizations per million people.
7. New York will allow stadiums and large venues to open at 10 percent capacity later this month. The Barclays Center will lead the partial reopening with the NBA's Brooklyn Nets taking on the Sacramento Kings on February 23.
8. Silence is golden: Yoshiro Mori, the head of Tokyo's Olympic organizing committee, resigned after his sexist remarks prompted international outrage. Mori said last week that women's speaking time in meetings should be regulated because they talk too much.
9. A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates hit Mars' orbit, a triumph for the Arab world's first interplanetary mission. Ground controllers at the Dubai space center broke into applause when word came that the craft, called Amal, Arabic for Hope, had reached the end of its seven-month, 300-mn-mile journey and had begun circling the Red Planet.
10. The great data race to connect the 'last billion' in Africa: This year, Google is due to finish laying a subsea internet cable from Lisbon to Cape Town. Facebook is among backers of an even longer, 37,000km cable intended to encircle Africa with the capacity of 180Tb/s with completion in '23 or '24. According to Xalam Analytics, less than 1 percent of the world's data center capacity is in Africa, at about 200MW as of last year.
