Summary: The economy is stable as we enter the final weeks of the summer. Affluent consumers are spending on travel and experiences. AI infrastructure demand keeps growing.
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Macro
The US economy is strong
“We still have unemployment levels at all-time highs. The economy is still growing. Wages are generally keeping up with inflation, and consumers are still spending. And to the business side, corporate profits are still strong. And there’s a lot of -- I mean, significant levels of private investment going into the economy and building. And that’s not just around AI; that’s energy, manufacturing, chips, pharmaceuticals.” - InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG 0.00%↑) CFO Michael Glover
“And so you’ve had really strong earnings growth across the S&P. There are a lot of things that are fueling the market. The economy is in very, very good shape. Is there a lot that’s coming out of this enormous opportunity set? Absolutely.” - Goldman Sachs (GS 0.00%↑) CEO David Solomon
But it has shown signs of being K-shaped
“What we’ve seen so far is what we’ve seen all year long, and that is we’re operating in what we would describe as a K-shape economy, where the higher income consumer spends and they’re spending on innovation and they’re spending on things to modernize their home and the lower income consumer is a little bit more cautious and a little bit more uncertain based on all of the macro factors that we all know so well. And we haven’t seen anything different in the start of this quarter that we saw in the first quarter.” - Lowe’s Companies (LOW 0.00%↑) CEO Marvin Ellison
International
China’s consumer backdrop remains subdued
“Basically, as I said earlier, that the macro is still bad, sloppy, and people are cautious in spending.” - Sohu.Com (SOHU 0.00%↑) CEO Charles Zhang
“...the China consumer and therefore, advertising market remains choppy, and there are some economic or consumption headwinds that may have an impact on advertising trends” - Tencent (TCEHY) CSO James Mitchell
Travel demand in China is growing though
“And importantly, while not every sector of the economy is doing very well, like the residential sector is still in a slow but certain turnaround, but it’s slow. In the residential sector, travel is strong. Domestic trips are up; international inbound now to China is a growing segment.” - InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG 0.00%↑) CEO Elie Maalouf
Is China a lower cost producer of tokens?
“It is true that domestic token prices are low, but the domestic token manufacturing costs are also extremely low, much lower than widely perceived or externally estimated. So the token business, it can be positive gross margin at these low token prices because the cost is low.” - Tencent (TCEHY) CSO James Mitchell
Middle East hotel occupancy is recovering
“So since the conflict peak has subsided, we’ve seen a recovery, not a V-shaped recovery; we’ve seen a recovery on a rolling monthly basis. And if things kind of stay where they are today, where there’s tension, but no hot, hot conflict as of March and April as it was then, I think you’re going to continue to see that gradual recovery in occupancy.” - InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG 0.00%↑) CEO Elie Maalouf
Financials
The current housing market is the worst since the financial crisis
“I think overall, this has been the most difficult housing market that I have faced in this business since the financial crisis. And as Brandon mentioned, it’s almost exclusively or disproportionately on the DIY customer. That’s the majority of where our revenue comes from.” - Lowe’s Companies (LOW 0.00%↑) CEO Marvin Ellison
Consumer
Costco reported strong July numbers
“As reported in our release, net sales for the month came in at $23.12 billion, an increase of 10.7% from $20.89 billion last year. Reported comparable sales for the month were as follows: U.S., 10.3%; Canada, 4.2%; Other International, 6.0%; total company, 8.9%; digitally-enabled, 17.7%...Our comp traffic or frequency for the month was up 3.6% worldwide and 3.3% in the U.S.” - Costco Wholesale (COST 0.00%↑) Director of Financial Planning Andrew Yoon
U.S. travel demand remains strong
“In the U.S., our largest market, economic growth and our industry are being driven by high levels of employment, rising household wealth, resilient consumer spending, strong corporate profits and huge amounts of investment going into technology, energy, manufacturing and other areas of the economy. With this economic momentum expected to continue, we are confident in the underlying factors driving our U.S. RevPAR growth.” - InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG 0.00%↑) CEO Elie Maalouf
Consumers are favoring experiences
“...the experience economy is sort of like what is it at the highest level, it’s really touching on this overarching concept that consumers are favoring experiences and that the allocation of especially affluent and aspirational consumers towards experiences is something that has an above-average discretionary growth rate tied to it.” - Shift4 Payments (FOUR 0.00%↑) CFO Christopher Cruz
Malls aren’t going away
“We think there’s a really big opportunity here clearly; malls, retail centers at large are having a cultural moment. People realize that they’re not going away. Young people want to hang out here. And there’s an opportunity to, I think, really take advantage of that because we can provide to people who are looking to advertise something that really nobody else can.” - Simon Property Group (SPG 0.00%↑) CEO Eli Simon
QSR traffic remains challenged
“Industry conditions remain challenging, particularly with traffic at the QSR segment, and customers are being more selective on their capital plans for the back half of the year. Within that, we are seeing replacement spend stable relative to our prior thoughts, with unit growth being pushed out modestly by some larger chains.” - The Middleby (MIDD 0.00%↑) CEO Timothy FitzGerald
Consumers are shying away from purchasing big-ticket items
“But I would say continued, and this has been a trend now for multiple years. The categories that are related to big-ticket discretionary are those categories and merchant divisions that sort of continue to lag. And that’s what we’re dealing with, that’s what we’re managing through, and that’s where we’re trying to lean in and provide additional value where we can.” - Lowe’s Companies (LOW 0.00%↑) CFO Brandon Sink
Technology
Companies are focused on controlling AI costs
“As these customers look to scale AI economically, there is increasing focus on managing token consumption, selecting the right model in the right location for each workload.” - Cisco Systems (CSCO 0.00%↑) CEO Charles Robbins
“On the token-maxing, I think the -- we’ve gone up so like just in terms of costs, we’ve gone up maybe 3x or so since January, it’s certainly going to continue to go up by the end of the year.” - Roper Technologies (ROP 0.00%↑) CFO Jason Conley
AI taking a larger share of overall corporate IT spending
“We’re seeing an actual increasing of overall budgets. And within budgets, we’re seeing an increased mix for AI within those IT budgets.” - Lenovo Group Limited (LNVGY) ISG President Ashley Gorakhpurwalla
“Now as it relates to budgets, what I think is going on, what we’re hearing from our customers is they’re currently reprioritizing within their existing budgets. But I would also say that you’re beginning to see a trend where our customers are looking at AI readiness, Mythos readiness, quantum readiness in a similar vein to how they’ve looked at cybersecurity spend over the last 3 to 4 to 5 years. It’s just not optional. And we have to make sure we’re ready. We have to make sure that we’re secure, we’re prepared. We’re doing the best we can not to have vulnerabilities exposed. And I think from that perspective, that’s creating a shift of dollars from other areas in the organizations to IT to actually do that work.” - Cisco Systems (CSCO 0.00%↑) CEO Charles Robbins
Faster AI development has yet to translate into sales
“...we’re seeing our development process is getting much better. They’re moving faster through backlog. So we’re seeing a productivity increase, I think, across the group, not everywhere, but it’s starting to adopt because we spend a lot of time working on training up all of our resources on how to use AI tools better for development. And right now, they’re working to talk to customers about potential add-ons or additions to their products that are using some of this functionality to develop the software, but we still haven’t seen a real pickup in organic growth from it. I think that’s a ways out. What I always say is, you can build products fast, but selling them is a whole other thing. A customer has a budget for them and see -- and you have to be solving a need that they’re willing to put some money on the table for before it’s going to impact our organic growth.” - Constellation Software (CNSWF) President Mark Miller
Not every AI task requires a frontier model
“...based on the nature of the things that we do for our customers, I can’t imagine us having to use a frontier model for some basic day-to-day tasks. I just don’t -- I can’t picture that. And I do think at the lower end, as you know, the model costs are getting -- like the older generations are getting much cheaper. So -- and I’d say even things like how you the types of prompts you do like caching or batching, you can get your cost down there, too. So it’s not just the types of models, but then the types of prompts you do. So a lot of that goes into it.” - Roper Technologies (ROP 0.00%↑) CFO Jason Conley
People are willing to pay whatever it takes to secure compute
“...many of our clients are monetizing their products. And so they are more aggressive about coming in and willing to pay us higher margins because they need access to the compute that will allow them to be successful. This is a phenomenon that’s occurring across the infrastructure space, but it’s particularly occurring within our ecosystem.” - CoreWeave (CRWV 0.00%↑) CEO Michael Intrator
“As a matter of fact, for the prepayment and for some of the compute orders that we have made just a couple of months ago, today, we can actually sell it at more than 30% profit compared to the price that we paid just a few months ago.” - Tencent (TCEHY) President Chi Ping Lau
AI capacity is measured in GW
“In total, over the last 7 months, we have secured more than 600 megawatts of data center capacity that is either live now or will be delivered by the end of 2027. And while this isn’t nearly enough to meet our demand, our data center pipeline of new opportunities for expansion continues to grow and is now measured in gigawatts. To put it in perspective, as we continue to build out our first-party cloud, it will be among the largest non-hyperscale AI clouds.” - Cerebras Systems (CBRS 0.00%↑) CEO Andrew Feldman
Datacenters are being built at incredible scale
“If you think about the buildout of the internet over 15 years, a couple of gigawatts of power was effectively consumed in a centralized fashion. The cloud is the next evolution – 10, 15 years, maybe 3x that. Today, we’re adding that much capacity on a quarterly basis, which is just incredible to think about it.” - KKR (KKR 0.00%↑) Global Head of Digital Infrastructure Waldemar Szlezak
The forecasts for demand keep increasing
“So we’re doing our absolute best to continue to upside on supply in for the second half of the year. But I think we feel as we look into 2027 and into ‘28 that the industry, including ourselves and our partners, have had much more time to adjust supply higher to support the growth. The nearer term has been where we’ve been having to work hard to get additional supply....The early view of 2027 server revenue for our company is roughly 20% larger than the whole server market was in 2025.” - AMD (AMD 0.00%↑) VP of Financial Strategy Matthew Ramsay
“So at the beginning of the year, I think everybody in the industry was looking at industry expectations, from about 15 million units for total servers, something about a 20% AI mix, and then it grew up to 16 million. And now, like the last 3 weeks, we’ve seen the estimate for overall servers about 20 million units and with a more -- higher AI mix to them.” - Lattice Semiconductor (LSCC 0.00%↑) CFO Lorenzo A. Flores
Inference is becoming the majority of AI compute spend
“What we’ve seen over the last 6 or 9 months is, I think many of this audience and many in the industry have been waiting to see when the dominance of AI spend around AI training of large models was eventually going to shift towards being much more heavily on inference. And I think we, at our Advancing AI event a few weeks ago, put out some models that we’ve done internally where the shift is happening right now towards inference being the majority of the AI computing spend. What’s happened on top of that shift, and that shift is happening right now is -- and this is maybe my terminology versus the company’s terminology. But at the same time, the shift of spend is going from training to inference” - AMD (AMD 0.00%↑) VP of Financial Strategy Matthew Ramsay
Semiconductor demand materially exceeds current capacity
“As AI computing drives unprecedented demand for semiconductors, there is a large gap between demand and supply for advanced chips. To ensure our supply chain and field teams can support their ramps, our largest customers are giving us longer-term commitments and rolling 8-quarter forecasts. This increased demand visibility gives us high confidence that 2027 will be another strong growth year for Applied Materials.” - Applied Materials (AMAT 0.00%↑) CEO Gary Dickerson
The rush to secure memory supply is like a war
“If you want to expand capacity, we need a lot of lead time, at least four to five years. So next year will probably be the hardest year because none of the memory companies has prepared to expand capacity yet. But demand is still growing. I think demand will be twice as high as this year. Almost all my customers are asking to double their orders next year, but the supply is not there. It is like a war, with everybody competing for memory chips. Without them, companies cannot produce their AI computing systems and AI chips.” - SK Hynix (SKHY 0.00%↑) Chairman Chey Tae-won
Customers don’t care that the prices are high
“I mean the aggregate demand across all of the segments is at much higher levels than it has been. Our customers are telling us that despite the fact that the prices are at very high levels, they’re eager to get more supply because they are not able to meet their own business case requirements from driving their own units and volumes and revenue and so on based on the opportunity that they see in their end markets.” - Micron Technology (MU 0.00%↑) CBO Sumit Sadana
Memory supply is expected to remain constrained through at least end-2027
“Now we have said that we do expect these very tight industry conditions to continue beyond calendar year 2027. Based on these increased signals of demand from our customers, we now expect that the 2027 calendar year will be even tighter than 2026 because the growth in demand that is taking shape is faster than the growth in supply for calendar 2027 on an industry basis.” - Micron Technology (MU 0.00%↑) CBO Sumit Sadana
“...we believe demand for memory will continue to rise for a considerable period ahead, so at least by the end of next year. So that means that the supply will still be constrained.” - Lenovo Group Limited (LNVGY) CEO Yang Yuanqing
Data-center customers receive less than roughly half the DRAM they currently want
“They are signing up in these agreements, but they feel like they’re leaving considerable opportunity on the table, like I said, across market segments. Of course, it’s most acute in the data center where quite often, we are not able to meet any more than half of the demand our customers have. And so I think when we look at all of that, it’s not just for 2026. I mean, these are like multiyear signals that we’re getting from customers.” - Micron Technology (MU 0.00%↑) CBO Sumit Sadana
Capacity will expand by 2x between now and 2028
“Based on the longer-term demand signals from our customers, we are now taking this further, hiring and training new manufacturing and customer support teams so that we have the capacity to double our quarterly system output from current levels by 2028. In fact, we add more than 1,500 people this quarter in worldwide manufacturing and AGS customer support. We are also planning our next manufacturing capacity expansion, ensuring we have the option to support further increases in demand by 2030.” - Applied Materials (AMAT 0.00%↑) CFO Brice Hill
Chip inflation is flowing through to consumer prices
“One of the bad things is that prices went up too fast, so I think PC manufacturers, smartphone manufacturers, consumer electronics companies and even automakers are having difficulty finding chips. And even when chips are available, they are too expensive...“What we call chiplation. The price of chips is too high, and even a player like Apple has to raise its prices. That increases prices across society, which is not good. I don’t want that, but it is happening, and I don’t have a solution in the short run.” - SK Hynix (SKHY 0.00%↑) Chairman Chey Tae-won
PC and smartphone demand expected to weaken as a result
“Now looking forward, we expect that in the second half of our fiscal year, the market will contract double-digit in units, probably around 15%, maybe a little bit more, a little bit less depending on the region, depending on the segment. We also believe that the commercial segment will be relatively more resilient than the consumer one....Looking at the smartphone market, the picture is not very different from PC. The inflationary cost environment will impact demand. We estimate demand or shipments overall in the market to decline around 20%” - Lenovo Group Limited (LNVGY) IDG President Luca Rossi
Will memory experience a classic cycle?
“I don’t want to say that the world there is no cycle, but I wanna say that the, it actually, the cycle movement has to change. So it’s a much longer, uh, cycle… I feel that, well, this is not a normal, uh, thing, and what we used to be the, in the, the memory business. So this is a kind of turning point for us as, uh, what I see that, I see that some structural change.” - SK Hynix (SKHY 0.00%↑) Chairman Chey Tae-won
AI CEOs laid out visions for our AI future
“We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they’re using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable. This will ensure the benefits of superintelligence are distributed widely.” - Meta (META 0.00%↑) CEO Mark Zuckerberg
AI hasn’t yet delivered on its promises to benefit the world
“I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.” - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Anthropic is ramping up efforts to advance in biology and medicine
“We are, however, doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible; you have my word on that. But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them.” - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Humans will have a place
“The demand for human taste, judgment, and quality assessment is increasingly commanding a premium. We’re building these capabilities that let clients reach directly into our marketplace from inside the AI tools where they’re already working to find the human expert they need the moment they need them...Requests like ‘turn my vibe-coded concept into a production website’ or ‘humanize the translation output from this AI’ are growing, among many others..Requests like ‘turn my vibe-coded concept into a production website’ or ‘humanize the translation output from this AI’ are growing, among many others” - Upwork (UPWK 0.00%↑) CEO Hayden Brown
Many companies will get displaced
“So you have to kind of think through how Agentic workflow will change that for better or worse and then like how you assess if that’s going to be a good long-term investment for you. So yes, certainly, we’ve -- and it’s been part of the build-out of the AI team.” - Roper Technologies (ROP 0.00%↑) CFO Jason Conley
Older GPUs retain substantial economic value as GPU pricing remains strong
“...as we remain largely sold out of prior generations of NVIDIA GPUs in addition to the current SKUs. So as our earlier generation fleets roll off their original contract, they offer the potential to deliver strong returns in the subsequent years. We are seeing this across our Ampere and Hopper fleet. As an example, we recently signed an A100 contract that extends into 2029 at an attractive price. As a reminder, this SKU was introduced in 2020...Pricing and margins for our Blackwell and Vera Rubin SKUs are setting new highs, while pricing for prior generation SKUs is at or above where it was years ago. Our near-term capacity remains effectively sold out.” - CoreWeave (CRWV 0.00%↑) CFO Nitin Agrawal
“At scale, and that means time to market and innovate. What’s really interesting is that AI — A100s, right? So you think about it that six years into it, maybe six or seven years into it, there is still a market for it. You still actually are revenue generating, to Jensen’s point, that the utilization of those chips is very high, the price per chip is very high, and so you actually are getting revenue on that, and in that way, you can think about it as a revenue stream, and you can securitize it or effectively divide that risk and sell it – sell it to investors who want to participate anywhere in that stack.” - KKR (KKR 0.00%↑) Global Head of Digital Infrastructure Waldemar Szlezak
Mobile data consumption continues rising sharply
“...the capacity demand continues to increase dramatically year-over-year in mobile networks. And depending on what you look at, I mean there are predictions that will double by the end of the decade, maybe sooner, so we’re seeing the carriers aggressively respond to that type of demand.” - American Tower (AMT 0.00%↑) Executive VP Richard Rossi
Industrials and Transport
Manufacturing indicators have improved
“I think as we moved into the fourth quarter, there were a couple of anecdotes about forecasts being revised higher. And so I think we, at least internally, directionally, we’re like, okay, we definitely see supply correction continuing, but we do think that there’s some positive elements of demand. Obviously, we’ve had ISM above 50 now for 5 or 6 consecutive months.” - J.B. Hunt Transport Services (JBHT 0.00%↑) CFO Brad Delco
“If we look at PMIs, we are now about 6 months into PMI being in an expansion territory. And they are around 55%. So that means, like, if you think 6 months just in, if you look at past cycles, you would have seen PMIs peaking somewhere in the low 60s, maybe in the mid-60s. So in that regard, we feel like, in general, on the cycle, there’s still quite some way to go, right? We still feel like we are in the early stages of the upcycle.” - Cognex (CGNX 0.00%↑) CFO Dennis Fehr
Freight conditions are finally improving after a 3–4 year recession
“So we’re finally starting to see improvement after a 3- to 4-year freight recession. So what you’re seeing is carriers are -- or freight -- spot freight rates are better. Carriers are now coming into the market. So we’re steadily seeing truckers come back into the market. And of course, there are subscribers entering our network. So that’s been good.” - Roper Technologies (ROP 0.00%↑) CFO Jason Conley
“I think that we are still very much in the early innings of a supply correction. But also, I think there’s opportunities for demand to get stronger....And so here we are now 3-plus years of really consistent rail service. Yes, I think we’re coming off of one of the worst freight recessions we’ve ever seen” - J.B. Hunt Transport Services (JBHT 0.00%↑) CFO Brad Delco
Freight-market tightening remains primarily supply-driven
“...if you just look at the fundamentals of the market, I would say we’re in the early innings... you’re absolutely right that this has been a supply-driven kind of inflection on overall cost. On demand, I would say this: it’s a mixed bag. We certainly see some green shoots that are out there, but we’re also cautiously optimistic because you have to break it down.” - C.H. Robinson Worldwide (CHRW 0.00%↑) CFO Damon Lee
Container demand remains unusually resilient
“Container market demand has been extremely resilient, this growth being driven by exports from Asia. This has continued relentlessly despite various events such as the war in the Middle East or a new round of tariffs.” - A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S (AMKBY) CEO Vincent Clerc
Datacenters are being blamed for higher construction costs in all industries
“What’s happened is this: I think post 2025 impact on immigration and maybe the infrastructure demand and construction for data centers. The cost of building new is really inflated, and I’ve seen that maybe just in the last two years. I’m a stickler over my capital investment budget, and we really, really do pretty aggressive bids. Either in my prior experience or here, I’m still seeing capital infrastructure projects, particularly in the US, that have gone up quite a bit in cost. That may always give pause to a CFO when they’re looking at what’s the ROI, what’s my payback, how quickly” - Lamb Weston (LW 0.00%↑) CFO Jim Gray
Skilled-trade shortages are driving electrician wages to ~$150/hour
“What I would say is that in these highly competitive and highly -- locations where there’s a lot of build going on, we’re definitely seeing some inflation. So cost is going up to some degree. We haven’t seen it as much, and it’s definitely moderated on the manufacturing side of the equation. But I would say, back to whenever you have a supply-demand imbalance, electricians are making $150 an hour these days. I’m not kidding you. It’s like doctor wages now. And so that’s driving some inflation on the cost, which is, at the same time, forcing people to think through what work do you do on-site? How much do you prefabricate, how much do you do off-site so that you minimize on-site labor to offset that a little bit. But that’s the continuous challenge that all of us have been dealing with for a decade plus, but it’s at its heightened sort of peak right now.” - Equinix (EQIX 0.00%↑) Executive VP Global Operations Raouf Abdel
AI data center and automotive demand compete for the same fab capacity
“...at a product level, it is not fungible. And what I would call a product is when the product is fully assembled because then it’s a footprint and has to go on a certain board, a certain physical form. But from a fab perspective, not just from a fab all the way to technology, it is fungible.” - ON Semiconductor (ON 0.00%↑) CEO Hassane El-Khoury
Hyperscaler data-center construction is driving timber demand too
“Today, our mass timber backlog of projects sits at about $151 million, and we continue to see a steady volume of incoming project inquiries, including large data center projects sponsored by hyperscalers, which make up roughly 70% of the backlog.” - Mercer International (MERC 0.00%↑) CEO Juan Bueno
Automotive semiconductor inventories are low
“Overall, auto really started to turn the corner for us exiting Q3 of last year and into Q4... In this most recent quarter, all geographies were up, all product categories were up. We’re feeling very good about product categories. I would say the challenge we still face is some of the large Tier 1s are still holding very low levels of NXP inventory. Our ideals for them to hold somewhere between 10 and 12 weeks, and there are a few who do that, and that’s fine. We have a great relationship with them, but there are quite a few of large Tier 1s who are still between 3 and 6 weeks” - NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NXPI 0.00%↑) Advisor Jeff Palmer
The Chinese have won the EV battle
“...we see the Chinese clearly have won the EV battle from our perspective. Domestic China sales are a bit weaker, but some of the bigger guys are offsetting that with exports. So the market in China has not been that bad in totality, right? The Europeans, I think are trying to figure out the next phase for themselves. It’s challenging, but I think they’re doing well. I think the big brands, the luxury brands will continue to sell on brand loyalty.” - NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NXPI 0.00%↑) Advisor Jeff Palmer
“Chinese competition throughout the world is real. It’s very, very real. And I think in various pockets, we’re holding up pretty well against that backdrop. We don’t have as a result of some of the structural changes that Mary did a decade ago” - General Motors (GM 0.00%↑) CFO Paul Jacobson
Materials & Energy
U.S. AI power requirements could exceed 70 GW
“We have some capital now, but we’re going to be raising quite a bit more capital. As Jensen said, each gigawatt costs $50 to $60 billion to build out, and we’re talking about in the United States alone, we’re going to need over 70 gigawatts of power to fuel this. And then you add up everything else around the world, it’s going to be an enormous financial opportunity.” - BlackRock (BLK 0.00%↑) CEO Larry Fink
Higher oil prices are driving more refinery maintenance and catalyst replacement
“As people realize that oil prices are going to stay higher for longer, people are taking down their facilities and then reloading, if you will, to run them efficiently for longer. So we’re seeing an inflection in the catalyst demand. And our catalyst demand, if you look at the second half versus first half, it’s going to be up double digits. It’s still about flat for the year, but the second half year-over-year will be up high single digits.” - Honeywell International (HON 0.00%↑) CFO Mike Stepniak
Nuggets of Wisdom
You can’t be world-class if you have a fear of failure
“A lot of early founders have a fear of failure. But what that does is, it creates blockage around progress, about making progress, ‘cause you’re, you’re just, you’re bogged down. The psyche around fear of failure fucks with your ability to, to get there... The fear of failure could either stand in your way, or it could push you from behind, right?... It could push you from behind, but ultimately you will never be truly world-class if you have a fear of failure.” - Uber (UBER 0.00%↑) Co-Founder Travis Kalanick
Excellence is about being able to push through pain
“The lifestyle of entrepreneuring is the, uh, this sort of pride in, ‘I can take more pain than the other guy.’ You go, ‘Why?’ Well, the best example is, like, a world-class marathoner on mile twenty-one... What is the difference between feeling pain and not feeling pain is that extra push. That extra push means he loses if he’s not getting into that pain, and that’s what excellence is. Excellence is about pushing into the extent, the, the, the, the... What is a human capable of? The full potential. Because if you don’t, somebody else does.” - Uber (UBER 0.00%↑) Co-Founder Travis Kalanick