nitin gheedia

[Vikas Vij @TheClubJunto]

Why Reliance Cancelled Plans to Produce Lithium-Ion Battery in India

1. Hithium is a tiny Chinese battery maker (1/200th in size of RIL)

2. This tiny firm refused to license its tech to India's most powerful group.

India’s Critical Import Dependence for Strategic Technologies:

Reliance Wants to Move from Fossil Fuels to Clean Tech, But Without Risk or Effort

a. Reliance (RIL) earns nearly $10 billion in annual net profits as a group. But due to a protectionist domestic market, it has no culture of investing in innovation and no motivation to compete globally.

b. RIL has not invested in R&D capabilities for cutting-edge lithium battery production or other clean technologies that are the future of the world.

c. It has no patents, design knowledge, product formulations, or manufacturing process knowhow to create next-generation competitive cell technology in-house.

d. A small, private company like Hithium (established in 2019) has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in R&D to develop repeatable, high-yield processes that cannot be easily copied by others without deep expertise or investment.

e. It takes years of experimentation, trial production, pilot plants, safety labs, specialized R&D teams, advanced equipment, iterative optimization, and high failure rates to develop such technologies at scale.

f. RIL and other Indian companies are not interested as they have easier ways to dominate a protected domestic market. So, India remains heavily technology-dependent on the rest of the world.

g. Due to decades of R&D neglect by the Indian industry and faulty policies of successive administrations, India does not have the ecosystem required to innovate, build, scale production, and compete globally in even the most basic technologies.

h. In absence of a tech industry or ecosystem, India does not have the required elite pool of talent – research teams, battery scientists, process engineers, quality & reliability engineers, and equipment and automation specialists.

i. India does not have massively integrated supply chains like China, starting with advanced mining and refining capabilities (for critical battery raw materials), production of chemical precursors (cathode/anode), specialized manufacturing equipment, and R&D and testing infrastructure.

What is Required to Build a Vertically Integrated Materials-to-Cell Supply Chain for Lithium Battery and Other Cutting-edge Technologies in India

1. Long-horizon, patient capital in R&D.

2. Culture of innovation & failure-tolerance.

3. Celebrating technological wins instead of financial market wins (with globally incompetent promoters who are on the Forbes rich list due to a protectionist economy and an overvalued stock market.)

@arabicatrader

[Akshat Shrivastava @Akshat_World]

Reliance Industries Ltd. paused its plan to make lithium-ion battery cells in India. Why?

- Because a Small Chinese firm called Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co. refused to license its technology to Reliance.

- Technology licensing means: giving another party permission to use a technology or related intellectual property under a legal contract, in return for agreed compensation such as royalties or fees.

- The Chinese firm is 1/100th the size of Reliance. And, was started in 2019. It was able to build a piece of technology that one of India's biggest company desperately needs.

- Post the breakdown of these talks: Reliance would go back to "assembling" (not making) Lithium-ion batteries.

- The partnership (allegedly) fell because China wants to preserve its competitive advantage in EV and energy‑storage technologies.

- Role of lithium-ion in AI revolution is critical. Many data centers would operate in off-grid location. And, efficient batteries are a key to solving it.

- Even in location where data centers are built. And, operational:the High‑density AI clusters (e.g., racks full of H100‑class GPUs drawing hundreds of watts per GPU) create large, spiky power demand that stresses grids and legacy UPS systems.​

- Lithium‑ion UPS and battery‑energy‑storage systems (BESS) provide fast‑response backup. And, ride‑through during grid disturbances so that AI training workloads are not corrupted by even millisecond‑scale outages.

- Energy is a major bottleneck. And, BESS and Lithium-ion are a critical piece of this ecosystem.

*****

We spent the last 10 years building statues. With all the revenue collections. And, the massive GDP increase, maybe some money should have gone to BESS and Lithium-ion R&D spent.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@RihardJarc What’s the basis/ source behind 15 P/S?
Did the growth rate then mirror what’s projected in coming years?

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@oguzerkan Fully automate last mile delivery? What’s the source and more importantly the time horizon they plan to reach there.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

I still am unable to buy Amazon even though it surely will be a double digit grower.
SOTP = $2.7T (8% upside to current market cap/ share price).

Advertising at 33x EBIT of $35B = $1.1T
AWS at 9x revenue of $132B = $1.1T
Retail (ex advertising) at 1x revenue (aggressive IMO) of $0.5T = $0.5T

Assumed cost of capital at ~10%

What am I missing? Trainium chips and robotics leading to acceleration of AWS and Retail operating margin?

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@Mindset4Money_X It’s capex investments as a % of EBITDA is very high and market is likely underpricing the risk that those investments don’t meet Meta’s usual ROIC. That said, this should be seen as a short term issue.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@DimitryNakhla Can you please share the source/ math for the 70% FCF increase expected for Amazon? TIA!

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@riteshmjn Thanks. What’s your view on impact on Gold prices, if any due to this?

[Kunal Shah @kunalb11]

I urge all popular Indian podcasters in all languages to teach the merits/demerits of capitalism (and socialism) to our country. Capitalism has its flaws, but it’s the only proven system which can lift us out of poverty and make a nation worth reckoning.

[Balaji Krishnamurthy @_balaji_km]

Reposting this today as a refresher for no particular reason.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@qualityequities What return% are you targetting through this portfolio?

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

What’s your rationale?
India inflation >> US inflation. Market forces dictate Long term — INR should depreciate (and it has). It’s essential for retaining India’s export competitiveness. I believe RBI objective function here is to limit Fx volatility while letting market decide the rate.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@BrianFeroldi I used Gemini a few days back about this point and it said exactly the same thing. It made things clear. A picture makes it even more clear!

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@tanayj It’s not an apple to apple comparison. Zuck’s appetite for investment that shows in D&A is insane.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@F_Compounders @Sanjay__Bakshi Quite old school

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@demishassabis What an elegant way to explain this concept!

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Yann is just plain incorrect here, he’s confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence.

Brains are the most exquis​ite and complex phenomena we know of in the universe (so far), and they are in fact extremely general.

Obviously one can’t circumvent the no free lunch theorem so in a practical and finite system there always has to be some degree of specialisation around the ​target distribution that is being learnt.

But the point about generality is that in theory, in the Turing Machine sense​, the architecture of ​s​uch a general system is capable of learning anything computable given enough time and memory​ (and data), and the human brain (and AI foundation models) are approximate Turing Machines.

Finally, with ​regards to ​Yann's comments about chess players, it’s amazing that humans could have invented chess ​in the first place (and all the other ​a​spects ​o​f modern civilization ​from science to 747s!) let alone get as brilliant at it as someone like Magnus. He may not be ​strictly optimal (after all he has finite memory and limited time to make a decision) but it’s incredible what he and we can do with our brains given they were evolved for hunter gathering.

[Uber @Uber]

Exciting news for the UK: we're teaming up with @Baidu_Inc's Apollo Go to pilot autonomous vehicles in London! Testing is expected to start in the first half of 2026, under the UK’s frontier plan to begin trials for self-driving vehicles. We’re excited to accelerate Britain's leadership in the future of mobility, bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners next year.

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@fiscal_ai What’s stock price LTM?

[nitin gheedia @nitin__gh]

@signulll What will be the implication on road infrastructure, if any?