🎯 Trendline Charts #65

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Welcome back to Trendline where I share 5 top charts on investing & business trends. Let’s dive into today’s post.

1) Battery costs continue to fall: Since 2010, battery costs have fallen by more than 90% — offering opportunities to cut emissions in road transport & electricity. This is what I call a “secular trend” - a lasting market shift that goes beyond short term ups and downs.

Declining battery costs fuel different industries, esp. electric vehicles - In 2023, electric car sales rose to almost 14 million worldwide.

2) World’s top economies are aging rapidly: Elders (65+ years old) are expected to be 60% of working age population by 2064 in OECD countries. Rapid population ageing across many OECD countries will have major consequences for social policy and economies of these countries. Pay special attention to South Korea and Japan.

3) Made in China: China dominates global car production now. In 1998, China accounted for 1.4% of global car production. In 2023, China accounted for 38.4% of global car production. China has also recently overtaken Japan and Germany in worldwide car exports.

Popular chinese car brands like BYD, MG, NIO will soon be more recognizable in the west just like the Japanese brands like Honda and Toyota.

4) OpenAI is losing early mover advantage: Latest reports from Menlo park suggests that in enterprise companies, OpenAI’s market share has declined from 50% in 2023 to 34% in 2024, primarily losing to Anthropic (Claude) and Google.

With DeepSeek also entering the industry, the LLM market is getting extremely competitive and any lead in market share is not guaranteed.

Note that this market share is based on a survey of 600 US enterprises, on their Generative AI spending which “includes dollars that went to foundation models, model training + deployment, AI-specific data infrastructure, and new generative AI applications from both startups and incumbents (e.g., Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, Adobe Firefly). Note that this market sizing does not include revenue for chips (e.g., Nvidia), compute (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure), or AI features (e.g., Intuit Assist)”

5) Panama canal rakes in billions every year: If you ever wondered how much the Panama canal earns every year - its massive ($3.38 Billion in 2024). Due to toll increase by the Panama Canal Authority in January this year, a vessel can pay over $1 million per transit!

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