GLG News by Mining Experts

The most recent uncoerced, by government, attempt to build and market an all-electric battery powered car was GM's EV1 in the mid to late 1990s. GM decided that the EV1 was a failure due to limited range  and performance, for its size, and withdrew it. Before GM could, if it even wanted to,...

There is today, in 2007, simply not enough producing capacity for iron ore, globally, to allow the Chinese steel industry leverage in resisting price increases.

A late writer for London's Economist, Fred Hirsch, coined the term "positional goods" to define the buying habits of those we now call the ultrarich, the inhabitants of Richistan. The most important attribute of a positional good is that only a very few, ultimately, hopefully, just one, can...

Lithium carbonate is not expensive; it costs today when its supply exceeds the demand only about USD$7 per kilogram. It will take about 2 kg of lithium for the proposed battery pack of a Prius size, or Saturn Aura size, car. The cost problem is not therefore for the fundamental raw material but for...

The rise in the prices of exchange and non-exchange traded metals has been unprecedented in the last five years. At the same time the US production of most metals has been slashed not due to the exhaustion of resources but to the triumph of environmental activism. Therefore in the event that exchanges...

Ford has lost billions of dollars through poor management decisions in its global purchasing group since 2000. Ford's Global VP for Purchasing since the sudden departure of the unlamented David Thursfield in the early 2000s, has been Anthony Brown, whose sole idea of risk management is cost-cutting...

The American business press is convinced that Chrysler and Ford are "poaching" good people from Toyota to try and obtain, thereby, Toyota's magic touch in marketing. Yet no Japanese people who actually implement Toyota marketing and planning have been hired or, indeed m have quit. Who is being...

The National Academies has just reported to Congress that the US civilian and military manufacturing industries are at risk of being crippled by shortages brought on by their growing dependence for raw materials on foreign sources that are, at best, politically risky, and at worst under the control...

Toyota, like every other car maker in the world, wants minimal non-market interference in its plans to make and sell cars that its customers want. Toyota also wants as level a playing field as possible when it comes to costly government intervention in the design, manufacturing of, or marketing of cars...

Did the Ford Motor Company, which had, until the current CEO's tenure, a succession of CEOs who were not born, raised, or educated in the United States, gain any international savvy thereby? Apparently not.