Business

In one corner is Mark Zuckerberg: 39 years old, five foot seven inches and, if his selfies are to be believed, a wizard at jiu-jitsu. In the other corner stands Elon Musk: 13 years older, six inches taller and considerably heavier, with a special move known as the walrus (“I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing”). The two billionaires have agreed to a cage fight, with Mr Musk saying on June 29th that it might take place at the Roman Colosseum.The bout may never happen. Neither the Italian government nor Mr Musk’s mother seems keen. But the new-media moguls are simultaneously limbering up for a more consequential fight. On July 6th Meta, Mr Zuckerberg’s firm, will add a new app to its suite of social-media platforms. Threads, a new text-based network, bears a remarkable resemblance to Twitter, the app that Mr Musk bought last October for $44bn. The rumble in Rome may be all talk. But an almighty social-media smackdown is about to begin.Mr Musk’s eight months in charge of Twitter have been bruising for many parties. About 80% of the nearly 8,000 employees he inherited have been laid off, to cut costs. Amid a glitchy service, users have started to drift away, believes eMarketer, a research company (see chart). The introduction on July 1st of a paywall, limiting the number of tweets that can be seen by those who do not cough up $8 a month, may repel more. Advertisers have fled in even greater numbers: Twitter’s ad revenue this year will be 28% lower than last, forecasts eMarketer. All this has hurt investors. In May Fidelity, a financial-services firm, estimated that the company had lost about two-thirds of its value since Mr Musk agreed to buy it.From this chaos, the clearest winner has been Mr Zuckerberg. By 2021 his business had become synonymous with privacy invasion, misinformation and bile—so much so that he changed its name from Facebook to Meta. He then irked investors by using his all-powerful position at the firm to pour billions into the metaverse, an unproven passion project that still looks years away from making money. On July 4th two years ago he attracted ridicule after posting a video of himself vaingloriously surfing a hydrofoil while holding an American flag. It was hard to find anyone in Silicon Valley more polarising.Now it is not so difficult. Mr Musk’s erratic management of Twitter makes Mr Zuckerberg’s stewardship of Meta look like a model of good governance. And although Twitter’s new freewheeling approach to content moderation has delighted some conservatives—including Ron DeSantis, who launched his presidential bid in a glitch-filled live audio session on the app, and Tucker Carlson, who started broadcasting on Twitter in June after parting ways with Fox News—liberals find it increasingly hard to stomach. Mr Musk remains more popular than Mr Zuckerberg among Americans (who also fancy him to win the cage match), according to polls from YouGov. But as the controversies at Twitter have rumbled on, and as politicians have turned their fire on another social app, the Chinese-owned TikTok, Mr Zuckerberg’s approval rating has quietly risen to its highest level in over three years.Meta now sees an opportunity for another, commercial victory. Various startups have tried to capitalise on Twitter’s travails, with little success. Mastodon, a decentralised social network with a single employee, said that by November it had added more than 2m members since the Twitter deal closed. But people found it fiddly and by last month it had 61% fewer users than at its November peak, estimates Sensor Tower, another data company. Truth Social, Donald Trump’s conservative social network, has failed to gain traction, especially since Mr Musk steered Twitter rightwards. The latest pretender, Bluesky, faces the same struggle to achieve critical mass.Meta’s effort, Threads, has a better chance. For one thing, cloning rivals is what Meta does best. In 2016, as Snapchat’s disappearing posts known as “stories” became popular, Mr Zuckerberg unveiled Instagram Stories, an eerily similar product which helped to keep Instagram on top. Last year, as TikTok’s short videos became a threat, Meta rolled out Reels, a near-identical video format that lives within Instagram and Facebook. It too has been a hit: in April Mr Zuckerberg said Reels had helped to increase the time spent on Instagram by nearly a quarter.Threads also has a head start in achieving scale. Unlike Reels, it will be an app in its own right. But it will let those with an Instagram account use their existing login details and follow all the same people with a single click. Some 87% of Twitter users already use Instagram, according to DataReportal, a research firm, so most now have a near-frictionless alternative to Twitter. Will they bother to switch? For some, it may be enough simply to have a network that is “sanely run”, as Meta’s chief product officer put it recently. Others will need a shove. By announcing a paywall just days before Threads’ launch, Mr Musk may have provided one.Twitter’s business is tiny by Meta’s standards, with barely an eighth as many users as Facebook, the world’s largest social network. In 2021, the last year before Mr Musk took it private, Twitter’s revenue was $5.1bn, against Meta’s $116bn. And with those meagre earnings come big problems. Few platforms attract as many angry oddballs as Twitter. In recent years Meta has shied away from promoting news, which brings political controversy and seems not to delight users; in Canada it has said it will stop showing news altogether, in response to a law that would force it to pay publishers. News is a big part of what Twitter does. There are two reasons why Mr Zuckerberg may think Threads is nevertheless worth the headache. One is advertising. Twitter has never made much money out of its users because it knows little about them. Between half and two-thirds of those who read tweets are not even logged in, estimates Simon Kemp of DataReportal. Many registered users are “lurkers”, who view others’ feeds but seldom engage. Meta, by contrast, already knows a lot about its users from its other apps, so can hit them with well-targeted ads in Threads from day one. And the brand-focused advertising that works best on Twitter would complement the direct-response ads that Facebook and Instagram specialise in. Threads “feels very complementary” to Meta’s current portfolio, says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker.Meta’s other possible motive relates to large language models, which ingest text from the internet to produce human-like responses in artificial-intelligence (AI) apps like ChatGPT. This technology places More

IN THE TECH war between America and China, the Western power has been more aggressive of late. Last year President Joe Biden’s administration laid out harsh restrictions limiting Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) firms’ access to American technology. America has also been coaxing allies to follow its lead. On June 30th the Netherlands, under pressure from the White House, said it would restrict the sales of some chipmaking kit to China: ASML, a Dutch maker of the world’s most advanced lithography machines, will from now on sell Chinese customers only low-yield devices for etching cutting-edge chips. On July 4th the Wall Street Journal reported that the American government may be preparing to curb Chinese use of American cloud-computing services, which allow Chinese AI firms to circumvent America’s earlier bans by taking advantage of the cloud provider’s high-end processors without owning chips of their own. China’s communist authorities had so far responded to this barrage of tats with a single, relatively meagre tit: in May it barred some Chinese companies from using memory chips made by Micron, a company from Idaho. But on July 3rd it brought out a bigger gun, saying that it would impose export controls on gallium and germanium, two metals used in high-end semiconductors. The new export controls will come into effect on August 1st. Unlike the Micron ban, which has little impact beyond one American chipmaker’s top line, restrictions on the sale of chip metals could reverberate across the global chip industry. China supplies about 80% of the world’s gallium and germanium. America may source as much as 50% of its germanium supply from China, according to Jefferies, an investment bank. An all-out ban could disrupt the production of a wide range of existing products, including chips, screens, fibre-optic gear and solar panels. It may also stymie the development of next-generation technologies. Chipmakers hope gradually to replace the silicon used in most processors with gallium nitride or silicon carbide, both of which can handle higher voltages. Gallium and germanium may also be useful in electric vehicles, nuclear energy and other devices, including weapons. The Chinese move comes at a delicate moment in Sino-American relations. Despite their respective tech manoeuvres, in recent months both sides have also been talking of stabilising relations. Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, is expected to arrive in Beijing for talks in the coming days. That visit would follow a meeting in Washington in May between China’s and America’s commerce secretaries, and a trip to China in late June by Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, in which he briefly met Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and other senior officials. China hawks in Washington may argue that China’s bite is weaker than its bark. Like some of the American restrictions, China’s new rules would require exporters to seek government approval and export licences and the Chinese government may well grant these quite freely: after all, a total ban would hurt Chinese exporters, who sell a lot of germanium and gallium to American customers. But Mr Biden should make no mistake. China is showing that it will not roll over—and that it can strike back. Expect an increasingly evenly balanced tit-for-tat. ■ More

While the domestic box office has tallied $4.46 billion in movie ticket sales through June 30, a nearly 20% increase over the same period in 2022, it still lags behind pre-pandemic 2019.
Ticket sales are down 21%, but that’s not the only thing that’s down. So, too, is the number of wide releases.
Box office experts noted that 2023 has several big releases still to come in the second half, including “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” “The Exorcist: Believer” and “Dune: Part Two.”

Skynesher | E+ | Getty Images

LOS ANGELES — The 2023 box office is inching closer to pre-pandemic levels, but inconsistent performances from blockbuster features in the first six months of the year will put a lot of pressure on second-half releases.
While the domestic box office has tallied $4.46 billion in ticket sales through June 30, a nearly 20% increase over the same period in 2022, it still lags behind 2019, the benchmark of a time before the pandemic, according to data from Comscore.

Ticket sales are down 21% from four years ago, but that’s not the only thing that’s down. So, too, is the number of wide releases.
From January to June 30 in 2019, 57 films were released in 2,000 theaters or more. In 2023, there have been only 45 releases during that same period.
“It really isn’t a fair comparison just going dollars to dollars,” said Mike Polydoros, CEO at PaperAirplane Media.
And quantity matters. While blockbusters and franchise films can draw big crowds, a steady stream of low- to mid-tier budget movies is also critical to the overall success of the industry. Diversity of content is also key, with audiences clamoring for a wider array of genre films, from horror and drama to romance and comedy.
The more opportunities audiences have to head to cinemas, the better, industry experts told CNBC.

Hit and miss

Of course, quality is a big factor in a film’s box office success, too. It’s not enough to simply fill the annual slate with product; the product needs to be good.
So far this year, the box office has seen a number of blockbusters fall short of expectations after they were projected to lure in moviegoers and bolster the domestic haul.
Warner Bros.’ “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “The Flash” dramatically underperformed, as did Disney’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Elemental.”
Meanwhile, Universal’s “Super Mario Bros. Movie,” Disney’s “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3” and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” have managed to capture audience attention, alongside a slew of horror movie titles including Paramount’s “Scream VI” and Universal’s “M3gan.”

Still from Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”

“Even though a few releases haven’t lived up to bullish expectations on their own individual terms, 2023’s box office to date is generally about as healthy as could be expected,” said Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com.
Robbins said the main takeaways from the first half of the year are that comic book and nostalgia-driven films are “not the novelties they once were.” While older millennial audiences have been the driving force behind much of the last two years in box office recovery, studios would do well to begin catering to younger generations going forward, he said.
“Moviegoers are going to be more selective with the content they choose to spend money on, especially as the broader economy and stagnant wage growth continue to be an issue for most average Americans,” Robbins said.

Summer sizzle or fizzle?

That pullback has already begun with the 2023 summer movie season.
Starting the first Friday in May and running until Labor Day weekend, the summer movie season typically represents 40% of all movie ticket sales for the year.
So far through July 2, the summer box office has tallied $1.88 billion. That’s 1.7% lower than 2022 levels across the same period, according to Comscore data.
In summer 2022, the box office got a boost from Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” a Paramount and Skydance feature. Between its May 27 release and July 2 of last year the film tallied $555.4 million, making it the highest-grossing film during that time at the box office, according to Comscore.
For comparison, this summer’s highest-grossing film so far is “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3,” which was released May 5 and has generated $354.9 million through July 2.
“While the year is running well ahead of 2022, summer numbers are at this point struggling to surpass last year’s,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. He noted that 2022 also offered “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
So far this summer, there has not been a runaway hit at the box office. While the third Guardians film and Sony’s animated Spider-Man sequel have performed well, it remains to be seen if other recently released films, such as Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” Universal’s “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” or Paramount’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” will add significantly to the domestic box office haul. 

“More movies on the slate have boosted the year-to-date bottom line, while some underperforming summer films have placed intense pressure on the releases awaiting their turn at the multiplex to deliver on the promise of their pedigree and marketing,” he said.
Those releases include the much-anticipated Warner Bros. feature “Barbie,” Universal’s “Oppenheimer,” Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” and Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” which all release before Labor Day.
“It’s important to keep in mind that the compressed ecosystem of the 18-week summer movie season has much more pronounced ups and downs than any given full year, and it’s much too early to make any big pronouncements about the ultimate success or failure of the period,” Dergarabedian said. “The good news is that some of the biggest films of the summer are still to come this month, and as a secret weapon, August is loaded with high-profile films that could give summer a back-end turbo boost.”

The second half

Among the expected back-half blockbusters: Sony is set to bring Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter to the big screen in October; Universal has “The Exorcist: Believer” and “Trolls Band Together”; and Warner Bros. has “Dune: Part Two,” “Wonka” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.”
Disney is set to release “The Marvels” and “Wish,” and Lionsgate has “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

“The second half of summer looks very strong, much better than last year,” said Polydoros. “I wouldn’t be surprised if 2023 comes close to $10 billion total box office.”
That would put the 2023 box office around 12% down from 2019 for the full year. Of course, Polydoros warned, the current Writers Guild of America strike could affect the box office this year and next, if film production shutdowns continue and release dates get pushed.
BoxOffice.com’s Robbins also addressed Hollywood’s labor concerns, noting that the ongoing writers strike and the threat of an actors strike could derail the progress gained at the domestic box office over the last two years.
For Robbins, reaching 2019 levels in 2023 was “never a realistic goal.” What matters is continued growth year over year, he said; the target for the domestic box office this year should be to top last year’s results of $7.5 billion.
“With all of that in mind, I think there’s still plenty of reason to be optimistic about where the industry stands in the long term, but there are always hurdles to overcome,” he said. “Audiences have declared their willingness to visit movie theaters on a regular basis when the movies are both appealing in nature and generating positive buzz among peer circles.”
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. More

HYDROGEN IS THE most abundant element in the universe and a vast source of clean fuel. For investors, it is an equally rich source of hype. As parts of the world get a bit more serious about tackling climate change, hydrogen has emerged as an important part of global decarbonisation efforts. Over 1,000 hydrogen projects are under way worldwide, more than 350 of which have been announced in the past year. They are expected to result in some $320bn-worth of investments by 2030. Venture capitalists and buy-out barons poured $8bn into hydrogen ventures last year, up from just over $2bn in 2020 (see chart 1). On July 7th Thyssenkrupp Nucera, a pioneering manufacturer of electrolysers, giant machines used to make hydrogen by stripping it from oxygen in water, is expected to list in an initial public offering that could value the firm at nearly $3bn. The IPO is backed by a Saudi sovereign-wealth fund and BNP Paribas, a French bank. All this frenetic activity is prompting worries of an H2 bubble akin to an earlier one in the 2000s, which ended in tears for the investors who had ploughed money into such projects. Signs of excess are certainly there. An index of listed hydrogen firms has underperformed America’s S&P 500 blue-chip benchmark over the past year, while displaying a volatility worthy of the gas (see chart 2). ITM Power, a long-standing British electrolyser-maker, ousted its boss last September after repeatedly failing to meet promises for expansion. In October the founder of Nikola, an American startup developing hydrogen-powered lorries, was convicted for misleading investors. Even prominent hydrogen boosters acknowledge that things have become frothy. Olivier Mussat, boss of Atome, a British firm planning to make fertiliser from hydrogen produced using excess hydroelectric power in Paraguay, worries that “a lot of people have been selling ‘hopium’.”In fact, the problem with today’s boom may be not that there is too much money chasing hydrogen but too little. Deep decarbonisation requires much bigger investments. The International Energy Agency, an official forecaster, reckons that clean hydrogen should comprise roughly a tenth of final energy use by 2050, up from a thimbleful today. To achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, another $380bn will need to be invested in hydrogen by the end of this decade, on top of the $320bn announced so far. Happily for the planet, there are reasons to think that the latest investment cycle may be different, even if some investors get their fingers burned. Unlike 20 years ago, when the hype was whipped up by enthusiasm for cars fuelled by hydrogen, this time the focus is on emissions-intensive industries such as steelmaking, cement and long-haul transport, which cannot be decarbonised by electrification alone. Governments, especially those elected by increasingly climate-conscious Western societies, are trying to help bootstrap the industry into existence with generous subsidies. And market forces are blowing away some of the hydrogen froth without snuffing out the business as a whole. David Giordano of BlackRock, a giant asset manager with big hydrogen bets, says that the hydrogen business is ripe for “a useful correction”. The reason a clean-hydrogen industry is taking so long to get off the ground has to do with another aspect of the element’s chemistry. Because it is highly reactive, it scarcely exists on Earth in its free state and is instead bound up in molecules with other elements, chiefly carbon (in natural gas and other hydrocarbons) and oxygen (in water). Extracting the stuff from those molecules requires energy and can itself emit carbon—either because stripping hydrogen from hydrocarbons leaves carbon behind or because hydrocarbons are burned to power the splitting process. Today huge quantities of dirty hydrogen are produced from natural gas, primarily for use in making ammonia, a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen that is the main ingredient in artificial fertilisers.To clean things up, any carbon released in making hydrogen from hydrocarbons would need to be mopped up and stored. If done with tight emissions controls, this “blue” hydrogen, as energy nerds call it, would dramatically reduce CO2 emissions (though not eliminate them completely). The environmentally superior alternative is to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity that is completely carbon free, from either renewable sources (“green” hydrogen, in the sector’s colour-coded lingo) or nuclear power (“pink” hydrogen).Cleaning things up is, however, expensive—and getting more so as rising interest rates raise capital-intensive hydrogen projects’ costs. The difficulties in sourcing critical minerals and other vital components have led many firms to fall behind on expanding capacity. Getting enough renewable power is another bottleneck. Benoît Potier, chairman of Air Liquide, a French industrial-gas giant, says his firm’s planned 200 megawatt (MW) mega-project for making green hydrogen in Normandy is all set to go but cannot secure a large-enough power-purchase agreement for renewables (though a pink version may go ahead by tapping into France’s plentiful nuclear power). Bernd Heid, a hydrogen consultant at McKinsey, reckons that “optimism bias” had led promoters to issue over-enthusiastic production targets based on a cost of capital of 8-10%, which now looks rosy. Rising capital costs have prompted Mr Heid to revise the unsubsidised production costs for making hydrogen from renewables up by $2 since last year, to between $4.50 and $7 per kilogram.Still, if the industry is encouraged to grow rapidly, Mr Heid’s fresh forecast predicts that a kilogram of blue or green hydrogen can be made for between $2.50 and $3.50 without subsidy by 2030. That is beginning to look competitive with the stuff derived from natural gas, which is today made profitably at a cost of less than $2 per kilogram—especially if governments get more serious about pricing carbon properly.H to growAnd rapid growth is a distinct possibility. Esben Hegnsholt of BCG, another consultancy, expects the manufacture of electrolysers, fuel cells (which combine the inputs of hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and water vapour) and other hydrogen-economy gear to mature quickly. Companies are finding ways around supply bottlenecks. America’s Plug Power, an integrated firm that makes clean hydrogen, electrolysers and fuel cells, has entered a partnership with Johnson Matthey, a British chemicals and green-tech firm with access to the rare metals required for hydrogen production in electrolysers and for electricity production using fuel cells.This is helping viable clean-hydrogen projects come on line. In Port Arthur, Texas, Air Products, another industrial-gas firm, is turning the previously dirty hydrogen used at a big refinery run by Valero into blue hydrogen, with the captured CO2 fed into a pipeline for sale to industrial customers. In Puertollano, an hour by train from Madrid, Iberdrola, a Spanish energy giant, runs a 20MW electrolyser, one of the world’s biggest machines of its kind, using power from its local solar farm. A fertiliser plant next door pays for the clean hydrogen, which replaces the dirtier kind it previously used to make ammonia. Accelera, the clean-energy division of America’s Cummins, a maker of conventional engines, operates a 20MW renewables-powered hydrogen facility in Quebec. Amy Davis, Accelera’s boss, reports that customers with net-zero commitments are willing to pay more for clean hydrogen. Valero and Iberdrola are illustrative of the industry’s newfound level-headedness. It is increasingly clear that hydrogen makes much more sense in some areas than others. RMI, an American think-tank, calculates the emission-reduction potential of low-carbon hydrogen in a variety of sectors and finds that electrification is a much better choice in passenger cars, which fuelled a brief hydrogen boom 20 years ago, or home heating. A review of 32 studies published in the journal Joule also found that heating homes with hydrogen is less efficient and more resource-intensive than using electrical heat pumps.Instead, argues Martin Tengler of BloombergNEF, a research firm, the right place to start is by supplying clean hydrogen to sectors that already use dirty hydrogen today, such as in ammonia for fertiliser, methanol for the chemicals industry and oil refining. Perhaps 100m tonnes a year of it is made today from fossil fuels for this purpose. Next, it makes sense to promote hydrogen in areas where few decarbonisation alternatives exist, like steelmaking, shipping and long-term energy storage (where batteries’ tendency to lose charge makes them less useful)—not least because deep-pocketed incumbents in those industries also bring talent, money and business skills that the hydrogen economy needs. In May Felipe Arbelaez of BP, an oil giant pushing into hydrogen, told the World Hydrogen Summit in Rotterdam that the sector’s efforts should first go after industrial applications, which he said were “much easier than, say, using hydrogen for heating homes”. This fresh realism comes against the backdrop of another positive trend. Hydrogen is receiving strong policy support in rich countries. Europe took an early lead in kick-starting the industry. The EU’s latest climate package promotes the use of hydrogen in hard-to-decarbonise industries. Its plans to more than halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 include ambitious targets for hydrogen produced using renewable energy. America, for its part, is showering billions of dollars in subsidies. President Joe Biden’s administration is drawing up the final eligibility criteria for a handout of $3 per kilogram for clean hydrogen. Combined with America’s bountiful reserves of renewable energy and cheap natural gas, that means the country could become a low-carbon hydrogen production and export powerhouse. A handful of other countries with similar competitive advantages, from Australia and Norway to Chile and Saudi Arabia, are also promoting the industry. In March Air Products and ACWA Power, a Saudi utility, finalised a $8.5bn deal for a mega-project in Saudi Arabia to make hydrogen-related fuels. A lot of things still have to go right for the hydrogen business to live up to its perennial potential. European industry bosses already grumble that the new EU rules are too cumbersome and too hung up on green hydrogen. If written too strictly, the upcoming American eligibility criteria could throttle investment and, worries Andy Marsh, Plug Power’s chief executive, hinder the hydrogen industry for years. If handed out too freely, meanwhile, for example by allowing unlimited amounts of fossil-intensive grid electricity to power electrolysers, subsidies could do more harm than good. Analysis from Princeton University suggests that hydrogen made from water with dirty power could generate more greenhouse gases than hydrogen made directly from fossil fuels. If the policymakers and investors are not careful, billions of dollars may yet end up in dead-end applications. Despite a recent turn to electric vehicles, Toyota has not pulled the plug on passenger cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, which look unlikely to be competitive with battery-powered wheels. Siemens Energy, a German engineering giant, plans to start making electrolysers at a big new factory in Berlin soon but for now workers are still mostly assembling conventional turbines capable of being modified to burn hydrogen instead of natural gas. The domestic gas industry has persuaded the British government to encourage trials of hydrogen for home heating, prompting one lobbyist to crow, “Christmas has arrived early, hydrogen friends!” Money spent on dubious applications leaves less for the vital ones in genuine need of support. A leading hydrogen advocate in Washington whispers: “It really makes me nervous that business models that don’t serve a greater purpose may get funding and win out.”Karim Amin of Siemens Energy defends his firm’s strategy of selling hydrogen-burning turbines as a useful step in the transition to cleaner energy. But he accepts that “of course there are better ways of using hydrogen than burning it in a gas turbine”. Policymakers, too, are displaying a welcome dose of realism. After a recent U-turn, for instance, the German government will now allow imports by pipeline of blue hydrogen made from natural gas in Norway. “This is a real dawn for hydrogen,” sums up Mr Hegnsholt of BCG, hopefully—even if, “like the sunrise, it will take longer than people think.” ■ More

Shares of Rivian jumped more than 17% on Monday after the electric vehicle maker beat Wall Street expectations for quarterly deliveries.
Rivian on Monday reported 12,640 vehicle deliveries during the second quarter, topping analyst expectations of 11,000 vehicles.

People walk by electric truck maker Rivian’s newly opened storefront in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan on June 23, 2023 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Shares of Rivian Automotive jumped 17.4% on Monday after the electric vehicle maker beat Wall Street expectations for quarterly deliveries.
Rivian on Monday reported 12,640 vehicle deliveries during the second quarter, up 59% from the previous quarter and topping analyst expectations of 11,000 vehicles, according to estimates compiled by FactSet.

The automaker, which makes electric R1T pickups and R1S SUVs for consumers, also reiterated its annual production target of 50,000 units. Rivian produced roughly 23,400 vehicles through the second quarter, including electric delivery vans and consumer models.
The increase in the share price Monday pushes Rivian’s stock into the green for the first time since late February. The stock is up about 5% in 2023. Rivian closed Monday at $19.56 per share – the highest closing price since February.
The company has taken longer than expected to build its EVs. It has also worked to reduce its spending to conserve cash.
Rivian’s results come a day after EV leader Tesla said it delivered 466,140 vehicles globally during the second quarter, also topping analyst expectations.
The better-than-expected deliveries for both automakers are good signs for investors who are bullish on EV stocks and the adoption of the emerging vehicles.
Shares of embattled EV startups such as Lucid, Canoo and others rose after Tesla and Rivian reported delivery numbers. More

Increased sales of the Chrysler Pacifica minivan and Jeep Compass and Dodge Durango SUVs pushed Stellantis’ second-quarter U.S. new vehicle sales up 6.4% from a year earlier.
Stellantis’ sales increase is expected to be among the lowest of the second quarter, according to auto industry forecasters who project industry sales to have increased 16% to 18%.
The uptick is another sign of demand for new vehicles continuing strong, as inventories improve from historically low levels during the coronavirus pandemic and supply chain problems.

2021 Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat
Fiat Chrysler

DETROIT – Higher sales of the Chrysler Pacifica minivan and Jeep Compass and Dodge Durango SUVs pushed Stellantis’ second-quarter U.S. new vehicle sales up 6.4% from a year earlier.
The uptick is another sign of demand for new vehicles rebounding, as inventories of cars and trucks improve from historically low levels during the coronavirus pandemic and supply chain problems.

Stellantis’ sales increase is expected to be among the lowest of the second quarter, according to auto industry forecasters who project industry sales to have increased 16% to 18% during that time compared with a year earlier.
“We saw increased demand this quarter as market conditions continue to improve and our dealer network makes the necessary adjustments to drive sales growth across our brand portfolios,” Stellantis’ U.S. head of sales, Jeff Kommor, said in a release Monday.
Shares of Stellantis gained about 1.5% after the news.
Sales of the Durango more than tripled compared with subdued results during the second quarter of 2022. Other vehicles that performed well included the Pacifica minivan jumping 40% and sales of the Jeep Compass increasing 28%. Most of the company’s other vehicles experienced sales declines compared with a year earlier.
Stellantis reported second-quarter sales of 434,648 vehicles, up from 408,521 cars and trucks a year earlier.

Cox Automotive recently increased its full-year new vehicle sales forecast to 15 million for the broader industry, a gain of nearly 8% from 2022, when sales finished at 13.9 million due to low inventory levels and inflated transaction prices.
Stellantis’ results come after other legacy automakers reported second-quarter sales increases, and electric vehicle makers Tesla and Rivian reported deliveries that topped analyst quarterly expectations.
Honda Motor and Nissan Motor on Monday both reported double-digit second-quarter sales increases of roughly 45% and 33%, respectively, compared with a year earlier. Hyundai Motor said Saturday its sales from April through June were up about 14% compared with a year earlier.
Other automakers such as General Motors and Ford Motor are expected to report second-quarter sales later this week. More

United said it was giving travelers affected by the mass flight disruptions 30,000 MileagePlus points.
The airline had outsized flight delays over the past week that kicked off with bad weather.
United’s CEO, Scott Kirby, apologized for taking a private jet out of New Jersey during the disruptions.

Planes are seen on the tarmac as people wait for their flight reschedule inside of the Newark International Airport on June 27, 2023 in Newark, New Jersey. 
Kena Betancur | Getty Images News | Getty Images

United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby said that without more gates the airline will have to reduce or change schedules to handle frequent gridlock at its Newark, New Jersey, hub, a message that came after mass flight delays marred July Fourth holiday weekend travel. The carrier gave 30,000 frequent flyer miles to customers who were most affected by the chaos.
“This has been one of the most operationally challenging weeks I’ve experienced in my entire career,” Kirby said in a note to staff Saturday.

He said that the airline needs more gates at Newark Liberty International Airport because of frequent aircraft backups there. “We are going to have to further change/reduce our schedule to give ourselves even more spare gates and buffer — especially during thunderstorm season,” he added. United didn’t provide more detail on the schedule reductions.
A day earlier, Kirby apologized for taking a private jet out of New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport while thousands of passengers were stranded, CNBC first reported Friday.
Problems began with a series of thunderstorms in some of the country’s most congested airspace along the East Coast last weekend, cutting off routes for aircraft. While most airlines recovered, United’s problems continued during the week, angering both customers and crews. United and JetBlue Airways executives said air traffic control problems worsened the disruptions.
The difficult week was also among the busiest. The Transportation Security Administration said it screened a record of nearly 2.89 million people on July 1 alone, topping a previous high on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019.
Kirby laid out the weeklong troubles and said long-term changes were needed. He said that extensively delayed departures, which piled up at its hub at Newark since last weekend, hurt its operation. Takeoffs were reduced by as much as 75% for longer than eight hours in some cases from Sunday through Tuesday.

“Airlines, including United, simply aren’t designed to have their largest hub have its capacity severely limited for four straight days and still operate successfully,” he wrote.
Aircraft and crews were then left out of position, something that happens often during severe weather and can spark a cascade of disruptions for customers.
Unions complained about hours-long waits for crew members to get assignments and get hotels, forcing them to stay at airports longer.
Ken Diaz, president of the United chapter of the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents the company’s cabin crews, said in a note to members on Friday that the airline is short on crew schedulers. He said that problems became so severe over the past week that schedulers weren’t clear on which city some crews were in.
Kirby said that United must improve the platforms so crews can get assignments and accommodation more easily on its app, saying what happened over the past week isn’t acceptable.
Kirby called for more investment in the FAA and air traffic control to avoid delays and staffing shortages, some of which occurred after hiring and training paused early in the Covid pandemic.
United sent the 30,000 miles to customers who were delayed overnight or didn’t get to their destination at all, a spokeswoman said. She declined to say how many customers received the email.
The sum is enough to redeem for a domestic roundtrip ticket to many destinations, though the miles required vary based on demand for that flight or route.
More than 63,000 U.S. flights arrived late from June 24 through Sunday, and more than 9,000 were canceled — or more than 4% of airlines’ schedules — a rate nearly three times the average so far this year, according to flight-tracker FlightAware. United fared worse than competitors with 47% of its mainline schedule arriving late and 15% canceled over that period, FlightAware data show.
On Sunday, 7,650 U.S. flights were delayed and more than 630 canceled — driven in large part by thunderstorms on the East Coast. Nearly 900 United flights were delayed, or a third of its operation, while close to 1,000 American Airlines flights were delayed and more than 300 JetBlue Airways flights were late. New York City-area airports, led by Newark, were the hardest hit.
Thunderstorms are one of airlines’ biggest challenges because they can pop up suddenly and are harder to predict compared with hurricanes or winter storms, when airlines can cancel flights ahead of time to avoid stranding passengers and crews. More

Ford is souping up the technologies on its most expensive pickups to make the vehicles more manageable for owners — and their spouses.
The 2023 Ford Super Duty lineup is designed to ease difficulties with some of the vehicles’ most important functions: towing and carrying/hauling.
Ford is using technologies such as new camera features, automated assistance and smart weight taillights.

2023 Ford Super Duty F-350 Limited

DETROIT — Let’s set a scene: A pickup driver and their spouse, the truck in reverse, attempting to align the hitch ball on the pickup with a coupler on the trailer. “A little left. No, your left. No, YOUR left. OK, now a little right. Never mind. Let’s try it again.”
That familiar headache, among others, is why Ford Motor is souping up technologies on its most expensive pickups to make the vehicles more manageable for newer owners and ease major pain points for veteran truck drivers.

The Detroit automaker is adding features to its 2023 Ford Super Duty lineup to boost transaction prices of the trucks and ease difficulties with some of the vehicles’ most important functions: towing and carrying/hauling.
“This is really about making the truck safer for our customers, for equipment, for whatever you’re towing. It’s about productivity. It’s about ease. It’s about saving marriages,” said Tim Baughman, general manager of Ford’s commercial business. “With our new trailer-tow features, I’m sure we’ll be saving a couple marriages based on what it can now do.”
Many pickup owners, especially newer ones, face headaches such as determining how much weight they can safely put in their vehicles or hitching trailers to their trucks, according to Ford.
The latter challenge, specifically, can cause relationship troubles, as it can take two people and several tries to get positioning of the trucks and trailers correct for towing — like in our all-too-common but fictionalized scenario above.
“Our team is obsessed with our customers,” Baughman said. “This is about customer understanding and customer obsession. And everything in this truck is purpose-built.”

Ford says 96% of its customers tow with its F-250 to F-450 Super Duty pickups, which are larger siblings to its well-known F-150 trucks. A majority also use the vehicles to haul heavy loads in the beds of the vehicles, which start from roughly $44,000 and can run more than $103,000, depending on the model.
To assist with hitching and hauling, Ford is using technologies such as new camera features, automated assistance and smart weight taillights.

Easy hitch setup

Ford’s new “Pro Trailer Hitch Assist” takes the hassle out of the process. The truck automatically backs up and aligns the hitch ball to the trailer receiver. The feature is standard or available on several models, starting at $1,035.
“It’s to help take the pain away,” said Aaron Bresky, Ford Super Duty chief technology officer. “People have to tow for recreation and work, and the more we can take the pain out, it becomes more natural.”
The 2023 F-Series Super Duty trucks can tow between 14,000 and 40,000 pounds, depending on the truck.

Ford’s “Pro Trailer Hitch Assist” automatically backs the truck up and aligns the conventional hitch ball to the receiver of the trailer.

Onboard light scales

Beyond towing or trailering, Ford’s Super Duty pickups can themselves haul a lot, up to 8,000 pounds, depending on the model. That includes all the people, cargo and any objects that may be in the bed of the pickup.
But having to guess or calculate how much you’re hauling can be tricky, especially when you have passengers in the vehicle or you don’t know how much your cargo weighs.
Ford’s answer to this problem is something it calls “Onboard Scales with Smart Hitch,” which debuted on the 2021 F-150. The system uses scales in the vehicle to determine the total payload/weight of the vehicle.
Drivers can use the vehicle’s infotainment screen or app to determine the payload, but Ford’s also offering a more unique way of doing so. The vehicle’s taillamps light up in different levels to let an owner know how close they are to reaching the vehicle’s total payload limit.
If the vehicle is over its certified payload, the top bar will blink, alerting the owner that they may need to rethink what they’re hauling or ditch a passenger or two.
The taillights also can be used to balance a trailer with the vehicle, also known as a trailer tongue weight.
The Onboard Scales with Smart Hitch is available for $650 on Lariat models and standard on higher-end trucks.

New available “Onboard Scales” measure and display the approximate weight of the payload in the Ford trucks. Load information is displayed in the center touch screen, on the FordPass app or in the truck’s smart taillights.

Tailgate camera

The simplest new feature is a rearview camera mounted to the top of the vehicle’s tailgate. While it faces toward the sky when the gate is up, it provides a clear view of what’s behind the vehicle when the tailgate is lowered, offering an extra set of eyes when an owner is hauling something longer in the bed of the vehicle.
While all new vehicles are required to have rearview cameras, Ford is the first to implement such a camera that is useful for when the tailgate is down. Standard rearview cameras on American pickups face toward the ground when the tailgate is lowered.
The option also comes with built-in sensors that work with the camera to notify drivers when their lowered tailgate is approaching an object.
The new backup camera and sensors are standard on higher-end trims but not available on entry-level and lower-priced trucks.

Ford put a camera and sensors into the tailgate of its F-Series Super Duty pickups that can be used when the tailgate is down. More