When Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the many actions European Countries decided was not to use Russian oil and gas. This was not an easy thing to actually do, it was actually easier to say than do. The reason was Europe is beside Russia and over the years Europe was dependent on Russian oil and gas. Germany and Italy had up to 60% of their oil and gas coming from Russia and if the second pipeline which was in progress to be built went into operations the number likely would be higher. When the sanctions of Russia went agreed to, Germany and Italy were hoping for the war to end quickly. The war continues, which means Europe has moved to other sources.

In an article by Lisa Friedman of The New York Times News Service, in less than 6 months the European Union will end the last of its LNG (Liquefied natural gas) imports, a major step to keep Russia from using its resources dollars to fund the war efforts.

The alternative which has been shifted to is the US. The US producers now supply about 2/3’s of European LNG and that could rise to 80% by the end of decade.

Under normal circumstances the shift from Russia to the US is not a problem, however President Trump has isolated the US and thrown his periodic demands to control Greenland, imposing tariffs, lessening co-operation with Europe’s institutions, and becoming less of a partner and asset to Europe.

Once Russian cargoes stop flowing, much of the gap will be filled with by American LNG. The US currently supplies about 2/3’s of Europe LNG, compared with about a quarter of it in 2021. Nigeria and Qatar supply most of the rest. For natural gas delivered by pipeline, Europe relies on supplies Norway and Algeria.

However, while it is easier for LNG to flow back and forth to Europe, the European Union imposed a methane regulation which Energy Secretary Wright believes the regulations need to be relaxed or supplies could go elsewhere.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in all business there are alternatives, some alternatives need many government regulations to become viable but there are alternatives. When there are alternatives, eventually consumers will use them to some degree, particularly if the existing companies are not solving problems. Alternatives start when there is a problem. For your investments, always ask what are the alternatives and how are they doing?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

In the US, President Trump loves oil and gas and does not like solar and electric vehicles. In the US that means companies such as Ford and GM have to over emphasize their gasoline engines, However Ford and GM are both multinational corporations with operations around the globe.

In an article by Alexa St. John of the Associated Press, Ford Motor Corporation and Geely Auto announced to joint manufactured low and zero emission vehicles at Ford’s Valencia, Spain factory.

The Chinese companies are dominating auto sales across the globe, so Ford has to reignite Ford’s offerings for the European auto market.

In the US, policy all but locks Chinese firms out of the market – through American automakers still partner with companies in China for production and Chinese vehicles are making inroads in North America more broadly.

The joint venture with be 2/3’s by Ford and 1/3 by Geely. Among the brands Geely owns are Volvo, Polestar and more.

Under the partnership, Ford plans to continue production of the Ford Kuga plug-in hybrid vehicle and begin a new Bronco SUV in 2028. Geely plans to make 2 electric SUVs at the plant starting in 2028. In addition, a new multi-energy crossover model will be made in 2028.

Ford will sell about 500,000 vehicles this year, down from 1 million a decade ago.

Chinese companies have the momentum with them as they have been producing high quality and efficient hybrid and pure EVs – coined new energy vehicles with advanced technology at a low price point. Chinese companies have expanded in other countries in Asia, Latin America and parts of Europe.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, every large company balances the wishes of the government at their home country and the regulations in other countries, ideally trying to keep costs down and make a profit and for shareholders to pay a dividend. It is a tough balancing act, but one that needs to be done to meet consumer demands.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Often companies take their tone from the President of the country, and in the US, President Trump as a citizen Trump has his law firm on overdrive with lawsuits anytime he feels he has not been put in the best possible light. When acting AG Blanche was in his confirmation hearing, the law firm which he worked for was paid $9 million before he came to work for President Trump in Washington. Mr. Blanche said it was the law firm, but every partner knows exactly how much money is coming to them, it would be a very rare partner or managing partner that would not know what his compensation is.

In an article by Magie Fick and Michael Erman of Reuters, in the past few years the rise of weight loss drugs has been the most significant aspect in the drug industry. Two companies led the way because of their work on diabetes, one of the side affects of the drug was it caused weight loss. For generations, weight loss has been a billion dollar industry and it has only gotten worse as the average weight of people in the developed world increased. For years there has been clubs such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, many people belong and use gyms which includes weights. The reality is if it was possible to lose weight be taking a pill, there would be a huge demand, which company would led.

Novo Nordisk which is headquarters in Denmark has been the world leader, but Eli Lilly which is headquartered in the US was second. The first applications was injections, but Lilly came up with a pill first. The market for weight loss drugs is expected to reach $100 billion by 2030.

Novo Nordisk sued Eli Lilly accusing the drug maker of false advertising in claiming its weight loss medicines outperform Novo’s drugs.

Novo alleges Lilly compared the highest approved doses of its medicines with lower doses of Novo’s Wegovy and Ozempic which omitting newer, higher dose versions that Novo says delivered weight loss.

In the world of pharmaceutical companies, they regularly sued each other for patent infringements. There are some generic companies that have a large legal departments as a course of doing business. False advertising suits are less common, because they are harder to prove and every drug company has a history of stretching the line of truth, for sometimes placebos work because the patient believes they are taking something that will make them better.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for drug companies the important aspect is what patents do they have? how long do they have to run? how well do they work before the generic brand comes out? Try not to pay attention to the advertising but the patents.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you listen to the economists, one of the good things for the economy is the spending on AI infrastructure that translates into many companies. Big tech alone is expected to spend $700 billion to a $1 trillion dollars on AI this year and next. With all that spending how are the companies doing?

In an article by Deborah Mary Sophia and Kenrick Cai of Reuters, Alphabet reported its earnings for the quarter and they were worth waiting for.

Revenue in Google Cloud rose 82% to $24.8 billion on strong demand from AI hungry enterprises worldwide. Analysts were expecting 64% increase.

Advertising revenue was $81.6 billion compared to estimates of $81.1 billion. Total revenue for the quarter was $119.8 billion beating the estimates of $116.9 billion.

Capital expenditures or capex, Alphabet said they will spend between $195 and $205 billion next year.

Adjusted profit per share was $2.85 slightly below the estimated $2.89. The company reported negative free cash flow for the first time in history, burning $5.9 billion.

Thomas Monteiro, senior analysts at Investing.com noted the market’s most reliable cash generators are now spending more than they bring in. As long as revenue keeps accelerating, investors will tolerate it. But capital has a real cost again, and the room for error is shrinking for every quarter.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, many years ago big tech disrupted the advertising business and had great margins or cash flowed to the companies. Are margins down a bit? the company is still making money and has dominate positions but every quarter tells a story.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

For the past few years, we have surging AI race and while there are many winners, most of us in America tend to follow companies in America. However, there are other countries which means there are other companies and perhaps they will be the competition for America’s firms.

In an article by Samuel Shen and Kane Wu of Reuters, Chinese startup Moonshot AI has paused new subscriptions because demand is too high for its services. Moonshot AI has launched Kimi K3.

The company has engaged financial advisors including Goldman Sachs and China International Capital Corp (CICC) to discuss an IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The company was founded by Yang Zhilin, an AI researcher who pursed his doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg.

Moonshot AI has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Meituan, China Mobile and CPE bringing the total raised over $5.5 billion. The $2 billion raised suggests the company has a valuation of $30 billion.

The company has 2 types of membership – one for coding and more inclusive package to help match compute resources with user demand.

Kimi K3 size and focus on coding and agent style tasks make it more expensive to serve at scale, as such workflows typically require repeated model calls and heavy inference capacity.

While open-weight models allow users to download and customize the underlying system, analysts say few users are likely to host a model of Kimi K3’s scale because of the hardware costs involved.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, there is always competition in the industry, and often we focus on the local, regional or national, but companies do the same thing exist outside of the borders. With most industry price matters and cost efficiency is a diver to try out the competition. The company may come back but they begin to allocate a little less resources each year to save costs. It is difficult to be profitable on a yearly basis, but always ask the CEO who is the competition?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

For any community you live in, one of the things you like to see is companies making their headquarters or making their presence in your community. Ideally, that means people need to work in the location which means people will need to live in the area buying homes, renting places and all the activity which surrounds companies expanding. This is a good thing and can make where you live more livable.

In an article by Hyunjoo Jin of Reuters, Samsung Electronics which is headquartered in South Korea, had made its headquarters in the US in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey with other operations centered in Texas. The company has many operations and invariably one of more operations are doing very well.

All companies can locate wherever they wish to, but the odd part is Samsung Electronics America (SEA) settled into the New Jersey location less than a year ago, employing 1,200 workers. Recently SEA is downsizing 739 roles and moving operations to Plano, Texas.

Samsung’s other division is making chips and making chips has sent profits up 19 fold on strong AI-driven chip demand. Samsung in investing hundreds of billions of dollars on new chip plants.

The mobile division is expected to post its first ever loss as it grapples with competition from Apple. Chinese competition such as TCL and Hisense are challenging Samsung in TV and home appliances.

Samsung has joined other companies such as Tesla and Oracle moving to Texas known for lower taxes and business friendly environment. Samsung had 11.770 employees in the US at the end of 2025.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, while it is wonderful to get a headquarters in the area and perhaps that is one of the reasons to consider investing in the company, the reality is companies make decisions and sometimes it affects people and allocating less resources to formerly key divisions. As an investor you like the company made the tough decision, if the company was leaving the area where you are from, you have mixed feelings.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you are similar to most people, somewhere near where you lived a railroad passed. It may or may not stopped but the trains passed nearby and at some hours during the day you could hear the whistle, or the training is coming or going across a road crossing.

The US is blessed to have a long coastline on both sides of the country, and when the country was being founded people came by ship. Goods moved up and down the coast on ships and ships had a monopoly of the movement of goods and people. Eventually people started moving inland and the rivers only went so far, it was long journey to have goods such as grains moved to point to go to the river. With the invention of the industrial revolution, it also included a steam engine and rail tracks. This set up a boom in railway building because it was less expensive and faster to move goods by rail.

In America, the railway financing and building boom until railways were consolidated to larger and profitable lines. There are many stories about how the consolidation happened and understand securities laws were much looser then. The larger lines eventually emerged, and they had a monopoly on the movement of goods and people. Although cars were invented and Henry Ford made them affordable, the roads were not that good. It was not until President Eisenhower was elected and one of the things he did not like was it took military vehicles weeks to cross the US. Among the many bills he passed, the building of the interstate highways or I highways was under his leadership.

The good news was trucks that took weeks to cross the US could now do it days. The growth of the trucking industry meant that the railroads had competition. The interstates also meant people had choices and they choose to travel in cars or not on railroads. The passenger service became unprofitable, and the railway companies offloaded them to the government or Amtrak.

In terms of freight, it is less expensive to move bulk commodities on trains so they will always have a monopoly for those items. However, the companies ensure they have the lowest rates as possible. One method to see how the railroad companies are doing is examining tonnage of bulk commodities – grain, coal, oil, timber, etc. For many years, how railroads run did not change, even though the competition did. For decades, freight trains did not run on schedules. The trains departed with the customer’s load showed for shipment.

In a book called Railroader – Hunter Harrison written by Howard Green, published by Page Two Books, Vancouver, BC, 2018, changes were made to the operations of railroads with what is called Precision Scheduled Railroading.

Hunter Harrison over his railroading career rose to become CEO of 4 railroad companies Illinois Central, CN, CP (now called CPKC) and CSX. In all those companies, he improved profitability and share price of the companies.

His system evolved to Precision Scheduled Railroading and the just of it is Railroads are very capital intensive. Every $1.00 of rail revenuer requires $2.50 in net property, plant and taxes. Therefore, capital decisions must be made very carefully. In addition, capital decisions made will have a long life, if you buy a locomotive, expect to have it around for 40 years.

Few things bothered Mr. Hunter mode than underutilized assets. If an asset is not being used, it is a liability because of the costs of owning it. Railroads only make money when cars are moving. Track is a railroad’s most expensive physical asset. Track has a 40 year life, so why should we lay track just to have cars sit idle? In 2005, one mile of track was used to store about 100 cars, cost $1 million. If you moved cars instead of stored cars, you save $1 million. The more efficient the operation, the fewer assets it needed.

What if dwell times in yards or railway cares were cut to 8 or 12 hours instead of 24? What if customers unloaded faster so their cars were there for half the time? What if average velocity went from 25 to 30 miles a hour? Now we are getting more cycles from the same equipment, and a thousand little things equal a lot of money.

When Mr. Hunter came to CN. they had 200,000 O&D (originating and destination points), but 5% of those 200,000 account for 80% of the traffic volume. Optimize that 80% and the other 20% takes care of itself. This led to Operating Ratios (OR) fell from 89% to the 50’s and profits increased.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, railroads typically pay dividends because they have a monopoly on bulk commodities, however it does not mean all railroads were run well and were efficient. It takes a lot of change to drive efficiencies and new way of thinking about assets into the system. If you own stock when Mr. Hunter was CEO, your wealth went up, which is why all railroads implemented the Precision Scheduled Railroad system – how does the company look at its assets?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

When you see the President coming from a walkway of a plane, it is a Boeing aircraft. Over the past weeks, we have all learned it is not your typical Boeing aircraft because it needs to have multiple systems designed to protect the President when he is flying.

In an article from Reuters, Boeing announced it will be delivering 2 new Air Force Ones in 2028. The existing planes entered service in 1990, however the planes were supposed to been delivered. The cost of the planes has gone up from $3.9 billion in 2018 to over $5 billion in 2026.

In addition, at the Farnborough Airshow in the UK, Boeing announced multiple contracts for planes to China, Uganda Airlines, Philippine Airlines, Riyadh Air and others. Over the years, the Farnborough Airshow is where a number of contracts are signed and released to the public. (every industry has their version of the most important trade event, for your investments, it is important to know what the event is and when it happens).

Being believes global commercial fleet will top 50,000 airplanes in 20 years which is a doubling of passenger traffic. In dollar terms this is $4.9 trillion commercail aviation support.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for manufacturers the order book is important and for Boeing which along with Airbus has a duopoly in the world of air passenger manufacturing, the future looks good. As long as they are able to execute and fly safely, profits should flow into the company.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you are travelling in the summer, perhaps to a different city, instead of taking a taxi you may have used an app and called for an Uber for a ride. That company also is in the food delivery business.

In an article by Miranda Murray of Reuters, Uber Technologies launched a takeover bid to buy Delivery Hero based in Germany for $14.8 billion. If it successful, the company would create be the largest food delivery group outside of China.

Delivery Hero has operations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Dara Khosrowshahi, said the 2 companies would create a platform of 99 countries with a combined pro-forma gross merchandise value (GMV) of $236 billion. This doubles where Uber offers mobility and delivery services,

The biggest competition in China is Meituan which did $346.5 billion in business. Among the other competition is Just Eats owned by Danish group, Prosus and US rival Door Dash.

Delivery Hero has agreed to sell part of the business covering 14 markets to investment firm to SSW Partners for $2.25 billion.

Delivery Hero’s major shareholder Prosus agreed to sell its 17% stake, along with management agreed to sell their shares or do not expect a competing bids.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, every industry has competition but there are always major players and to be a major player means some companies need to become large to attempt to control prices and margins. Once they can do that, it means shareholders should be rewarded for a long time.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.