Germany has a raw material problem: not only oil and gas, but also lithium, cobalt, rare earths and nickel often come from autocratic states.
This lack of raw materials also offers local companies opportunities:
Horst Kreuter
, for example, head of the medium- sized company
Vulcan Energie
, wants to mine German lithium in the southern Palatinate.
The company obtains this valuable raw material for battery production from thermal water that is stored underground in the Upper Rhine Valley between Frankfurt and Basel.
Vulcan currently extracts about one gram of the coveted liquid from one liter of thermal water.
The rest is pumped back down together with the cooled liquid from the energy production.
"We produce lithium, heat and electricity completely without CO2," Kreuter praises his pilot plant.
From 2025 he wants to be able to use his technology to supply 40,000 tons of the coveted battery material "lithium hydroxide monohydrate" - enough for the batteries of one million electric cars.
It remains to be seen whether the lithium pioneer Vulcan Energie, which was founded four years ago, will make the breakthrough.
However, the report by my colleague Eva Müller already shows that the lack of raw materials and the climate crisis are presenting German engineers with new challenges - and these can open the doors to brilliant business.
The business news of the day:
Elon Musk is haggling over the price of Twitter:
Elon Musk
originally
wanted to pay around 44 billion dollars for the short message service.
But now the Tesla boss
is trying
to push the price down.
Musk had already sent Twitter shares plummeting last week by announcing that the planned acquisition was "temporarily on hold".
Now Musk added in an interview that a Twitter deal was "not out of the question" - albeit at a lower price.
"The more questions I ask, the more concerned I become," Musk said.
Twitter
shares
then came under further pressure.
Goldman Sachs bosses get unlimited vacation:
The major US bank
Goldman Sachs
in New York allows its partners and managing directors to take as many days of vacation as they want.
The major US bank is thus trying to retain executives.
According to an internal memo, partners and directors are given flexible vacation times so they can take time off when needed without being entitled to a fixed number of vacation days.
Russians are increasingly buying Turkish real estate:
buyers from
Russia bought houses and
condominiums in Turkey
on a large scale in April
.
The number of real estate sales rose by almost 40 percent to 133,058 units, reported the Turkish statistical office.
Business with foreign customers grew by almost 60 percent.
Most foreign buyers come from Russia, followed by buyers from Iran and Iraq.
The personalities of the day:
Thomas Echelmeyer becomes CFO at Adler
: The real estate investor
Adler Group
has been in crisis for months.
At the end of April, the auditors
KPMG
had refused the attestation of the Adler Group.
Now the head of the board of directors,
Stefan Kirsten
, is trying to get the balance sheets under control with the help of a new chief financial officer: the auditor
Thomas Echelmeyer
will join Adler as chief financial officer in June.
Kirsten and Echelmeyer know each other - they started their careers at the consulting firm
Arthur Andersen
.
Jeff Bezos bickers with Joe Biden on Twitter:
The second richest man in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the most powerful man in the world, US President Joe Biden, continue their public exchange of blows on Twitter.
Topic of the dispute: The high inflation in the USA - as well as taxation of large corporations and particularly rich people.
Bezos accuses Biden of "disinformation": Mixing the topics of taxation and inflation is misleading.
What else kept us busy:
Our childhood also determines our career:
How far we get at work, what roles we take on and how we deal with conflicts has more to do with our childhood than we think.
Lunia Hara
, manager at the agency and VW subsidiary
Diconium
, grew up in a village with 13 siblings – an experience that still shapes her today.
In the "Team A" podcast, she talks to Antonia Götsch and Astrid Maier about their experiences.
Have a listen!
My recommendation for the evening:
Why the crash on the Nasdaq is not comparable to the bursting of the dot-com bubble:
The rapid fall in the price of technology stocks in the USA is reminiscent of the dot-com crash of 2000, when growth stocks on the Nasdaq and the German Neuer Markt plummeted fell.
But where there was still a lot of hot air 22 years ago, there are now billions in profits: many tech giants such as
Apple, Meta or Amazon
are highly profitable today.
Although there is now no cheap money from the central banks as a price driver, many profitable tech stocks are still worth a second look.
My colleague Christoph Rottwilm shows in a large overview how the ratings of the tech stars have changed.
Cordially, your Kai Lange