What's the trends telling us?

Yeah, I mean, well, interesting when you look at the figures that they hold about in Ireland, Chinese, you put all the Chinese kind of car makers together, they hold about 8% of sales so far this year across Europe, including the UK and kind of the European free trade, the whole region.

you're looking at maybe just shy of 10%.

So that's all Chinese manufacturers.

So by no means dominant, certainly kind of staking a claim.

What is interesting, though, is kind of the trend.

You know, in Ireland last year, the same period last year, Chinese manufacturers were about 5%, they're now over 8%.

Why is that the case, Adam? Is it price or is it just that they're building really good cars?

Mm

... recently struck a deal with unions that would see it cut 50,000 jobs across its operation on top of 50,000 job cuts that were already announced, so that's about 15% of its total workforce.

Uh, it's gonna, uh, planning to cut costs by 20% in the coming years 'cause it sees that's the cost disadvantage it has against Chinese rivals.

Um, some of that is in administration, some of it is in simplifying the business group, 'cause obviously it's Volkswagen, but it's also Audi, Skoda, Seat, Porsche, uh, each of which make countless makes and models and variations.

They're gonna cut that down dramatically and kinda simplify the business a bit.

Uh, potentially, uh, also shutting down or repurposing some factories, but that's kind of politically fraught in, in Germany, so it's kinda gonna be kicked down the road a little bit.

As part of its restructuring, the, the luxury arm, Porsche, also recently said it was going to cut its, its sales targets for where it would make a profit, so it thinks now it can sell 200,000 cars a year and make a profit after that, compared to about 280,000 this year.

Okay, so that's a problem for the car manufacturers, but it's something that is very much [chuckles] on the radar and causing a lot of concern to the European Union.

Just how big is this business?

It, it's, it's huge and, and growing rapidly as well.

So back in 2016, globally, protein was thought to be worth somewhere around $15 billion.

This year, there's estimates that it's anything above $50 billion.

So grown rapidly in the decade, and expectations that it's gonna grow further again, maybe in the next 10 years it'll double in size to be worth more than $100 billion, uh, globally.

So huge, huge money in this.

And as you say, Ireland and Irish companies really at the center of that.

... you've talked about there for Glanbia, just as one example, prove that it's probably not a fad.

Why are they raising the interest rate? What effect do they hope it will have? Because it's kind of normally in response to huge consumer spending, take the heat out of the market, right?

Yeah, well, I mean, essentially this is about energy prices.

And if you look, it's a year to the day actually since the ECB last cut rates.

It was the 11th of June last year when they last cut rates.

And at the time, and really until the end of last year, all the talk was around when will they make their next cut and how low are they going to go? Are they going to go to 1.75%? Are they going to go to 1.5%? But then the tide started to turn kind of late last year, early into this year, that they might hold steady.

And then, of course, the US began attacking Iran in February.

We had the Strait of Hormuz close, global oil prices spike and so on.

the big investor firm, 5 billion ready to go on it.