David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…First of all, it's just a big priority right now. I think if you look back 10 years ago, China probably didn't care that much about environmental damage or climate change, at least not the expensive economic development. But in recent years, you've really seen China take a lead on climate change. Part of it is because they realized that reliance on oil and all the devastation from climate change is actually bad for national security. It's destabilizing. Now, electric vehicles have become a huge priority in China and every brand is jumping into it. In the past month alone, we've seen Huawei announce that they're going to put in the software into EVs. We've seen Xiaomi announce that they're going to invest $10 billion over the next 10 years into EVs. We've seen DJI, the drone maker, say they're going to participate in EVs. The BAT and companies like Baidu are now effectively basically an autonomous driving company actually if you just look at them. That's really the main story now for that company. My and our own Acquired perspective on the BAT and Baidu specifically is they've just fallen off the map and just Alibaba and Tencent are big players in China now. But I at least haven't known anything about what actually happened to Baidu. Basically, investors like I talked to are like, oh, you're investing at Baidu as an autonomous driving company. You're getting the search business for free. That's what it is.…

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