RARE EARTH OPERATIONS

The public and private sectors are working to build out the U.S. rare earth minerals supply chain domestically.

NEWS DIGEST

Pfizer in Singapore; Infineon in Malaysia; green hydrogen in Germany; STULZ in Dubai; data center in Portugal; top 10 countries for startups.

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Canada’s Lassonde juices up its New Jersey plant; Jaguar Land Rover races toward an electric future in the UK; a new partnership aims to deliver a new data center campus in Greater Richmond.

Thirty years after its launch, The Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey’s latest edition examines the costs of operating a business in 216 cities in Southern California and nine other western states. The study developed by economic development consulting firm Kosmont Companies and the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College compares local taxes, fees, business property rents and other costs that businesses face. Santa Monica is deemed most costly while Boise, Idaho, is least costly. The least costly California city is Fontana.

Site Selection has checked in with Kosmont’s cost measurements many times over the years, including in July 2002 and in November 2010, when Kosmont documented the increasingly competitive position of such states as Arizona, Nevada and Texas.

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Mercedes-Benz made a splash at Auto China 2024 in April by announcing an expansion of its Shanghai R&D center and unveiling to the world its electric Mercedes-Benz G-Class and an all-electric Concept CLA Class, among other models.

Photo courtesy of Mercedes-Benz

A recent report from Dezan Shira and Associates “decodes” China’s inward foreign direct investment performance for the first half of 2024, noting that total investment is down by 29% to just under US$70 billion but total number of new foreign-invested enterprises is up by 14.2%. The biggest growth in FDI came from Germany, whose total amount in the year’s first half grew by 18.1% over the same period last year to US$8.15 billion, driven largely by the automotive sector.

The second half of 2024 show that particular trend continuing: Mercedes-Benz Group announced in September it plans to invest more than $2 billion in the Chinese market.

Photo by Kim Shiflett courtesy of NASA

NASA’s 380-foot-tall mobile launcher 1 atop the spaceport’s crawler is transported inside the agency’s Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, October 4, ahead of integration of the Artemis II Moon rocket. “The mobile launcher will be used to assemble, process, and launch NASA’s SLS (Space Launch Systems) and Orion spacecraft to the Moon and beyond,” said NASA. The four-astronaut Artemis II lunar flyby mission, scheduled for launch no sooner than September 2025, will “pave the way to land the first woman on the Moon on Artemis III.” Meanwhile, back on Earth, the crawler transporter recently reached 2,500 miles traveling to and from the launch pad since its construction in 1965. That’s a bit over 1% of the distance to the moon.