Glenn
42.5K posts
@GlennLuk
Co-founder/BoD @HealthCareInc | Previously @Catalyte_io | VC/PE @Investcorp Technology Partners — Tech | Econ Development | Investing | China/APAC
As the Iran war continues, higher commodity prices will mechanically lift China's headline inflation. This will likely push the PPI out of deflation and could turn the GDP deflator positive, fulfilling a government goal to reverse price declines.
In China, a teacher and their students built a two-stage rocket using plastic bottles and water pressure:
There's a big difference between inflation because structural imbalances have been addressed (eg, consumption has recovered) and because global energy shock has mechanically lifted inflation
🚨 Breaking: Taiwan's KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun meets Xi Jinping in Beijing in an event marking the first KMT-CCP leadership meeting in nearly a decade. ★ news.tvbs.com.tw/english/3174482 ★
As for metro/regional rail, China has ~56 metro systems that serve ~34.5B passengers per year. Japan's metro/regional rail serves ~26B passengers per year. China's is larger overall, but only modestly. Given the ~12x population difference, this shows that Japan's metro/regional rail services are much more developed on a relative basis. On this basis, I would say Japan is still "best" at regional/commuter rail. But it is no longer best at high-speed intercity rail service.
Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.
Toyota CEO on Chinese competition: "Unless things change, we will not survive. I want everyone to acknowledge this sense of crisis." Honda CEO on Chinese competition after recently visiting the country: "We have no chance against this." motor1.com/news/792130/ho…
As for metro/regional rail, China has ~56 metro systems that serve ~34.5B passengers per year. Japan's metro/regional rail serves ~26B passengers per year. China's is larger overall, but only modestly. Given the ~12x population difference, this shows that Japan's metro/regional rail services are much more developed on a relative basis. On this basis, I would say Japan is still "best" at regional/commuter rail. But it is no longer best at high-speed intercity rail service.
1) I agree that Japan has a great rail system. 2) But I have a quibble with this specific quote: "Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system" It is true that JR East handles more rides per day than China Railways: ▪️ JR East ~16M rail passengers per day ▪️ China Railways avg. ~12.6M/day But this is not apples to apples. JR East includes not only Shinkansen (HSR) service but regional commuter rail (20-40 minute trips through the "Suica" zone in Tokyo). China Railway only provides long-distance (intercity) service. You can see this clearly in the average trip length: ▪️ JR East ~26 km per trip (blended mix of 15-25 km regional/commuter trips and ~250 km Shinkansen HSR trips) ▪️ China Railways avg. ~386 km per trip On a passenger-km basis, China Railways is ~12x larger than JR East. And China Railway is not China's "entire railway system". China has >50 local metro systems with rail operations that are administered independently of China Railway.
The commercial risk factor to jump straight into maglev “Ultra-HSR” without an existing lower-speed traditional HSR network will be much, much higher — likely to the point where you just would not expect it to be practical or feasible.
The other nuance in the gross ridership numbers is that because Japan's metro and regional rail systems are more fragmented, with multiple municipal and private rail operators in the city, that the "rides" metric is also inflated relative to China. In Japan, multiple rides along the same journey will be counted in the metrics if they involve a transfer between different rail operators. A very common commute is traveling on JR East from Tokyo's suburbs and then transferring to a Tokyo Metro stop to get to the final destination. This would count as 2 rides. Whereas in China, all local operations are under the jurisdiction of the municipal operator (typically, a local SOE) and rides with multiple transfers will count as a single ride. In short, Japan's metro/regional ridership figures will be modestly inflated compared to China's equivalent.
