That's a really good point. One thing I keep seeing with investors is that the science gets scrutinised but the date the first factory is supposed to be running is almost taken at face value. Then you look into it and find the equipment hasn't even been ordered or the grid connection is still pending. And as you said, building across borders adds another layer. Each partner has its own timeline and one delay can hold everything else up. So how do you assess manufacturing readiness when the company doesn't even own the factory?
Yes, absolutely. We have developed sophisticated frameworks to assess technological readiness, but remain surprisingly reliant on management assumptions when evaluating industrial execution. From an investor's perspective, I would distinguish between access to manufacturing capacity, actual process readiness, and the ability to reproduce acceptable economics at scale. These are three fundamentally different risks, regardless of who owns the factory.
The cross-border dimension makes this even more interesting, because execution risk becomes systemic rather than merely operational. Ultimately, I think we should underwrite industrialisation as a sequence of interdependent risks, rather than treating it as a timeline attached to an otherwise validated technology.
Perhaps the most interesting contradiction is that governments are increasingly encouraging technological sovereignty precisely when technological development requires deeper international specialisation. The economic incentives favour integration, while political incentives favour redundancy and localisation. It is difficult to see how this tension gets resolved without accepting structurally higher industrial costs.
That's a really good point. One thing I keep seeing with investors is that the science gets scrutinised but the date the first factory is supposed to be running is almost taken at face value. Then you look into it and find the equipment hasn't even been ordered or the grid connection is still pending. And as you said, building across borders adds another layer. Each partner has its own timeline and one delay can hold everything else up. So how do you assess manufacturing readiness when the company doesn't even own the factory?
Yes, absolutely. We have developed sophisticated frameworks to assess technological readiness, but remain surprisingly reliant on management assumptions when evaluating industrial execution. From an investor's perspective, I would distinguish between access to manufacturing capacity, actual process readiness, and the ability to reproduce acceptable economics at scale. These are three fundamentally different risks, regardless of who owns the factory.
The cross-border dimension makes this even more interesting, because execution risk becomes systemic rather than merely operational. Ultimately, I think we should underwrite industrialisation as a sequence of interdependent risks, rather than treating it as a timeline attached to an otherwise validated technology.
Perhaps the most interesting contradiction is that governments are increasingly encouraging technological sovereignty precisely when technological development requires deeper international specialisation. The economic incentives favour integration, while political incentives favour redundancy and localisation. It is difficult to see how this tension gets resolved without accepting structurally higher industrial costs.