Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.
Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.
Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.
Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.
Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.
More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.
The rear-wheel drive AE86 model generation of the humble Toyota Corolla has a dedicated following. The cars were light, had twin-cam engines, a very balanced weight split and a limited slip differential.
Back in the 1980s in Ireland they were a steady performer on the local rally scene. The AE86 because of its simplicity became very adaptable for street and motorsport tuning. The AE86 popularised car culture internationally, turning up across media formats and supported by a vibrant cottage industry of parts manufacturers who exported their parts around the world.
The car entered popular culture across Asia and beyond through the manga and anime adaptions of Initial-D, which told the tale of Takumi – a student holding down two jobs – a petrol station attendant and delivery driver for the family’s tofu business in a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno.
Takumi’s adventures in the family AE86 went on to be portrayed in an 18-year long manga series, a Hong Kong film featuring Taiwanese entertainer Jay Chou as Takumi, 27 game adaptions at the time of writing and at least 12 anime series or feature length films.
This soft culture footprint gave the AE86 an impact across Asia, hence the Malaysian meet-up that Hagerty shot in Kuala Lumpur. Will the popularity of the AE86 die off with this generation of young adults? It’s possible given that over a quarter of them in the US don’t drive.
Toyota / Hyundai motorsport collaboration
In advance of Rally Japan, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N Sport held a joint event in Korea. It’s quite rare to see rival manufacturers partner in this way.
How to read a compass
This took me back to my 12-year old self away at scout camp (which I did only once) doing the activity for my map-making activity badge. Taking bearings from multiple locations and triangulating them allowed me to plot out my map. I need to dig out my Silva compass that my Mam and Dad probably still have somewhere in their attic.
I found myself using the basics of reading a compass when living in urban Hong Kong and Shenzhen as the extremely tall buildings stopped GPS from working that well. Sharing here, partly out of nostalgia and the the life skills benefits.
Hello Kitty and an adoption mindset.
Japan popular culture commentator Matt Alt put out a video about the history of Hello Kitty and Sanrio. One of the interesting things that came out of the video was how adult women embracing the playfulness of Hello Kitty, rather than ‘adulting up’ then became on the leading edge of technology adoption. I thought the idea of a ‘playful mindset’ and adoption was very interesting – yet something that we don’t often think about. I used to think about it as curiosity, but it’s more specific and it can be fostered regardless of age.
Welcome to my November 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 16th issue. 16 is a low power of two which saw it used in weighing light objects in several cultures. For instance in the British Imperial system of weights 16 ounces were in one pound. This lived on far longer with British drug dealers who looked to sell cannabis in ‘teenths’ (16ths) or eighths of an ounce. Prior to decimal being implemented in China 16 taels or liǎng equalled one catty or jin. Chinese Taoists counted on their finger times and joints of the fingers with a the tip of the thumb, so 16 can be counted on each hand.
The highlight of November was meeting up for brunch with Calvin who I used to work with in Hong Kong and collaborate with on occasion for projects going in-or-out of China. He was passing through London on his way to Web Congress in Lisbon, supporting one of the burgeoning number of start-ups coming out of Shanghai.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Ghost Signs – how legacy signage allows us to peer back into history, camcorders having their ‘lomography’ moment and much more.
Layers of the future – or how innovation doesn’t exist in a fully-formed world, but instead exists within layers of progress over time.
Presidential election beliefs – amongst the autopsies of the campaign that have been discussed, one of the things that struck me was the role of presidential election beliefs that have wrong-footed analysis
Klad & more stuff – a Russian pioneered integration of dark web markets and concealed ‘Amazon locker’ type infrastructure to deliver a new approach to drug dealing. Other items include bottlenecks in gadget manufacturing, internet maturity and more.
Books that I have read.
Dead Calm by Charles Williams – the early 1960s crime novel packs a lot into the story. Trauma, mental illness, murder and intrigue on the high seas. Dead Calm was later made into a film and relocated from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
Jipi and the paranoid chip by Neal Stephenson. A short story that fits into the Cryptonomicon universe of Stephenson’s books – shares the story of Jipi a former flight attendant who works for Mindshare Management Associates Inc. – an agency that distracts tourists to Manila from the rapid construction work taking place during a China-like economic miracle. Because of her personality, Jipi has to track down errant AI powered car alarms fitted with plastic explosives that were designed to deter thieves, but AI happened. If you’ve ever had to write prompts, you’ll likely appreciate it.
Things I have been inspired by.
The fame game
Irish rally driver Rosemary Smith, had the skills but never did get the fame. Smith even got behind the wheel of a Renault formula 1 car to get a test drive at 79 years of age.
I am by no means a sports addict but even in my psyche I know the names and reputations of several famous sports stars across hurling, gaelic football, motorsports rugby league and even soccer. Sid Lee and Appino have raised the issue of how this fame gap is bridged in women’s sports drive into long term mainstream success. Where is the women’s sport equivalent of Stig Blomqvist, Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan who are hailed in a similar way? Want to know more, reach out to Rory Natkiel.
Yes, Christmas really is getting earlier
My local supermarket started to sell mince pies right after the August bank holiday this year. It had Christmas decorations for sale before the Halloween ones. Christmas seems to be coming earlier this year. The Guardian researched how Christmas was arriving earlier each year, from charting music to mince pies and Christmas puddings going on sale. This year lo-fi girl had their first Christmas soundtrack up on November 4th. If you want a change from the Spotify Christmas list, try this old mix from former streetwear boutique The Hideout.
WARC noted how companies like John Lewis with dedicated Christmas campaigns look to gain a first-mover advantage to aid the talkability around their campaign and gain the full benefit from their emotion driven campaign bedding in and building new memory structures.
WARC predicted that Christmas advertising spend would rise 7.8% to over £10.5 billion. Big growth for search, online display and out of home compared to last year. The biggest losers including TV, direct mail, magazine and print news media.
Things I have watched.
Famous Hong Kong cinema film director Johnnie To criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview for the BBC’s Chinese language service. With that in mind, I thought it prudent to buy up as much of his back catalogue as possible because the classics amongst them may be harder to get hold of in the future.
PTU – PTU starts in a similar way to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog with a policeman losing their duty weapon. However that’s where the parallels finish. In Stray Dog the young detective looking for his gun feel empathy at the end with the criminal who used his weapon. The moral being two-fold – crime starts with a few wrong choices, but are still human. In order to deliver law, over time the policeman needs to become less empathetic, losing a bit of their humanity. PTU on the other hand shows how police blurred the line between the law and crime with extra-legal methods to solve crime. It also highlights the complex relationships between criminal gangs and the police. To keeps the tension going with PTU throughout the film. The ambiguity between police and criminals would not be allowed in future Hong Kong films thanks to the National Security laws that have come into force.
Election – The literal Cantonese title for this film is ‘Black Society’ – which as a term covers all kinds of organised crime groups. Two members of the Wo Lin Shing are up for election become leader (aka chairman or dragonhead) of the organised crime group. It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema that these elections happen on a regular basis. Wo Lin Shing is a stand-in name of the very real Wo Shing Wo – a group that have a side hustle doing wet work for the Beijing forces at work in the city.
The film focuses on the election and immediate fallout. Lok runs a more rational campaign, whereas Big-D runs a showy campaign offering money for votes. The elders appoint Lok and Big-D tries to steal the symbol of power. To moves the tension and action on at a rate of knots. It features many of the heavyweights of Hong Kong cinema including Simon Lam, Louis Koo, ‘Big’ Tony Leung, former policeman Nick Cheung and Lam Suet.
Not a Johnnie To production, but I have been enjoying Detective Chinatown on Amazon Prime. The show is similar to the BBC show Sherlock and CSI in the way its plot devices and how its story arcs work. It has been interesting to watch for a number of reasons. The series was produced for Chinese streaming platform iQiyi – think Chinese Netflix. The series is based in Bangkok, Thailand. The senior Thai police representative is portrayed as dramatic, volatile and religious in nature – interesting stereotyping by the Chinese production team. The plot line has a very supernatural aspect to it, which is generally considered to be a no-no with Chinese censors. I am curious to see where they take the show.
Useful tools.
Mac keyboard shortcuts
Alongside David Pogue’s Missing Manual series of reference books for each version of macOS, MacMost’s videos are a great resource for the Mac user. MacMost now have a free downloadable table of Mac keyboard shortcuts.
AI-powered diagram creation
Ever sat in front of a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide and wondered how to represent something? I am across the Napkin AI which takes your written text describing something and renders it into a diagram. I don’t use these diagrams as the finished product, but as an inspiration for me then to artwork together in Keynote, OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. You can output from Napkin AI as a PNG file. At the moment it’s free to use as a beta product.
Woznim
Woznim allows you to record the names of people and where you met them to try and aid in recall of of them if you run into them again. It reminds me of Foursquare and social bookmarking. Foursquare because of its where 2.0 location based data and social bookmarking because if you develop the Woznim habit it could be life-changing, but if it doesn’t gel with you it’ll be dropped as a service in no time. At the moment it’s an iPhone-only app.
Bluesky
Bluesky has been having a moment as another tranche of social media users follow The Guardian’s lead to leave Twitter and need a micro-blogging service. Bluesky has got a good deal of attention because of its starter packs and list features. Whether Bluesky will continue to grow into a vibrant post-Twitter place isn’t certain yet. But if you are going to use Bluesky then these two tools might help:
Bluesky tools directory. There is a surprisingly rich set of tools available rather like ‘golden age’ era Twitter.
Starter packs. Starter packs are a set of curated recommended accounts to follow based around interests. This site has a large directory of them covering everything from professional interests to sports passions.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my November 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the Christmas season and the rush to complete projects before clients disappear on holiday.
I took this picture almost two decades ago on a visit to Hong Kong of ghost signs.
I was reminded of this picture when I watched the below documentary on ghost signs. Specifically it reminded me of the former industrial units I saw in Fotan, which is in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Their structure used as a giant billboard advertising their former uses making fur coats or plastic flowers. The ghost signs of Hong Kong were fast-fading evidence of an industrial golden age in Hong Kong extinguished by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at the end of 2001.
The UK ghost signs highlighted in the documentary benefit from a slower rate of building replacement and a more temperate climate that helped preserve lead paint over a century old.
Ghost signs show that history is all around us, if we care to look around us.
Volkswagen China CMO deported from China for drug use | News | Campaign Asia – Volkswagen Group China’s chief marketing officer, Jochen Sengpiehl, has been expelled from China following a positive drug test upon his return from a holiday in Thailand. This development has caught significant attention on Chinese social media, as reported by the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung. AFP reported that German officials confirmed the news on Tuesday. Sengpiehl was detained for over 10 days and instructed to leave the country immediately after Chinese officials detected traces of cannabis and cocaine in his blood, according to AFP’s coverage. He was held in custody before Volkswagen and officials from the German embassy managed to secure his release. However, he was required to leave the country instantly, as reported by Bild. Campaign Asia-Pacific reached out to Volkswagen Group for comment. A global spokesperson offered a terse response: “We ask for your understanding that we will not comment further on the content of your questions in light of our contractual and data protection confidentiality obligations.” The incident throws a harsh spotlight on the differing legal landscapes around drug use. While Germany legalised cannabis use earlier this year, and Thailand became the first Asian country to decriminalise it for medical purposes in 2022 (though recreational use is slated for prohibition by the end of the year), China maintains extremely strict anti-narcotics laws, with severe penalties for violations. – This also says a lot about how little China needs Volkswagen in the country now.
Gen Z’s joy in chaos: Why maximalism is back | Jing Daily – at odds with the sleek pared down looks currently driving Chinese fashion. Not really that much of a surprise given how young people over the years have rated thrift shops, army surplus stores and shopped while travelling in search of authenticity and a story behind their eclecticism.
54: Double 11 (Is Ralph Lauren a victim?), The fall of Will’s and ClassPass | Following the Yuan – Chinese consumers using returns policies to hit ‘boycotted’ western companies in the pocket by exploiting the elevated business costs of returns in e-commerce. Double 11 or singles day is one of the premier shopping days in China. If this movement is real, the results for targeted brands like Ralph Lauren would be exceptionally brutal.
Culture
Camcorders are now going through a ‘lomography‘ phase now – where creators love their limitations and flaws.
Welcome to my October 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 15th issue. This is the second year that I have written about Hallowe’en sharing my Mam’s recipe for barmbrack – an Irish household standard. When I lived in Hong Kong, the locals enthusiastically adopted western Hallowe’en culture with local amusement parks Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland competing to create the scariest experience for young people and dating couples. They mixed western and local horror motifs. It’s amazing how thanks to the mass media Hallowe’en has become a global cultural event. More on that later.
As for the significance of the number 15? It seems to have deep significance in modern culture with a wide range of artists including Taylor Swift and Marilyn Manson using it as the title of songs, albums or mixtapes. Additionally, the number has some significance in Judaism. The number 10 represents the hand of God and the number 5 represents to save or rescue. If we add 10 plus five, we get 15. The symbolic meaning of 15 translates to “mercy,” which means compassion and forgiveness.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
An honest review of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 – which is as much a critique of wearables as a category, as the device itself.
Cocaine Cowboys is a book on Irish crime, but the title is as interesting as the book in terms of its particular cultural resonance in Ireland and a reflection of the Irish experience.
Nike changes CEO John Donahue, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to unforced self-inflicted strategic errors.
Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. Lorenz’ telling is very US-orientated but an interesting account of how influencers and brands evolved their social presence adapting to platform changes such as the disappearance of Vine. Aspects that I found fascinating included how influencers accelerated their following through offline events rather similar to Japan’s idol industry and the career resilience of the Paul brothers
The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles.
Things I have been inspired by.
Tourism Ireland: Halloween.
Tourism Ireland
Hallowe’en was a huge part of my childhood in an Irish household, bairn brack and tea, going around and collecting apples, dried fruit and hazelnuts from neighbouring houses, carving out a turnip lantern, making a papier-mâché mask, enjoying ghost stories on RTÉ radio and strange noises that came from the worsening weather and wildlife. However, America seems to have defined a lot of the narrative and globalised behaviours around the festival.
Living in Asia, I saw revellers in Hong Kong and Japan enjoy the festival and borrow heavily from Hollywood from ET to the Halloween franchise. Like Irish-American cuisine, American Halloween is based on the European traditions brought to the new world and then reinterpreted.
So I was fascinated to see Tourism Ireland’s campaign to reclaim Halloween from internally pervasive American soft power and Hollywood; going back to the festival’s pagan origins.
Brand purpose has lost a good deal of unalloyed credibility in marketing circles (for some very good reasons). But that doesn’t mean that consumers got the memo. Havas’ The Rise of the Change Makers report looks at change through this lens. Like the Edelman Trust report, it has tracked the change in consumer zeitgeist over the past few years.
Social effectiveness
There was a couple of interesting research papers in the International Journal of Advertising. Firstly, digital detoxing by consumers seems to have a temporary inoculation against social media advertising when they return to using a social platform. Secondly, romance sells, or the psycho-romantic aspect of parasocial relationships sells – which should be taken into account when weighing up influencers that brands might want to partner with.
Things I have watched.
Series three of ITV’s Van Der Valk’s reboot is a sleeper series that I have enjoyed watching with my Dad. Season 4 has debuted in the US on PBS, but there is no sign of it being picked up in the UK yet.
Barry Foster
The series is based on a series of thrillers written in the 1960s by Nicolas Freeling; the first one was Love in Amsterdam. The original TV adaptation featured Barry Foster as Van Der Valk whose performance gave the original show a unique look-and-feel.
I watched some vintage Jack Ryan with a young Ben Affleck playing the CIA analyst in an adaption of The Sum of All Fears. This version is usually overlooked in favour of the modern TV series and the Harrison Ford films. Alan Bates played a delicious villain; an Austrian politician with far right tendencies. Bates’ character felt the most prescient of all the characters, while the thawing relationship with Russia feels further away with each passing week. Unfortunately, the franchise was left on the shelf for a while after this film was made; Ben Affleck made a good Dr Ryan and Liev Schreiber was a good foil as character John Clark – the real muscle in Tom Clancy’s books.
Amazon Prime Video has some sleeper films if you dig around. Deliver Us From Evil is a respectable Korean action film with the classic ‘tragic hero’ plot line popularised in Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. While it has been compared to The Raid, there is an Old Boy feel to the violence. Much has been made of it starring Lee Jung-jae – known to global audiences for his role in Netflix’ Squid Game. It’s just under two hours of enjoyable escapism.
I rewatched Inception for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. Since then we’ve had COVID and a generative AI-filled media sphere and the film hit different. It no longer felt exceptional in the way that films like Blade Runner and the Studio Ghibli back catalogue still do.
Il Divo was one of a couple of DVDs that I bought instead of paying the Netflix tax. Il Divo appealed to me because of my love of real-life Italian intrigue, sparked by watching The Mattei Affair for the first time several years ago. I became reacquainted with it more recently again when I rewatched it. Il Divo covers the political intrigue of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular Giulio Andreotti, an Italian prime minister and failed presidential candidate. At the time Italy suffered from far left terrorist attacks and a reactionary right-wing movement that revolved a freemason lodge known as P2. Andreotti’s leadership is directly linked to a succession of deaths of enemies and associates during his career – which the film displays in an artful tableau at the beginning.
It is a very complex time in modern Italian history and the story tries to pull different strands of the story in through different vignettes. Like The Mattei Affair before it, a certain amount is left up to the audience’s interpretation.
Not television, but my current favourite show on BBC Radio 4 is Central Intelligence, which is part of their Limelight drama content. I love it for a few reasons:
I grew up with cold war-era espionage books and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, so the security services stories owned a bit of real estate in my head. Given the way things have been going over the past decade, this kind of world has been raising its head again.
It’s a really well researched show with high production values on the history of the CIA told from the prospective of Eloise Page who joined the agency at its start and had a 40-year career.
Fantastic voice talent. Accomplished high profile film actress Kim Cattrall who has appeared in iconic film and television roles playing both comedic and meaty characters. Ed Harris is a fantastic, but less well known actor who appeared in classic movies from The Right Stuff and Walker to portraying The Man in Black in the Westworld TV series.
Useful tools.
Downloading images on a web page
Imageye is a browser extension that helps you download all pages on a given web page. It can be handy for mood boards and social research.
Getting to Heathrow
I have had to do a bit of travel. Thankfully it has been well planned. One of the things that helped my planning and saved money is the Heathrow Express’ £10 Advanced Discounted Tickets. More details on the caveats surrounding the discount here.
Buying cheaper
MoneySavingSupermarket has a search engine of products available via Amazon Warehouse. If you’re a jobbing freelancer or just looking for something for your home – it allows you to buy that item a bit cheaper.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my October 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into November, but not before you’ve charged your energy levels up on Hallowe’en treats!
Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.
Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.
A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.
For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.
On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.
By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.
A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.
When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.
I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.
I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.
The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.
Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.
That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.
Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.
Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.
Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.
