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- [00:00]
IBM Representative
So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions, not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business IBM when you're
- [00:31]
The Hartford Representative
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- [01:30]
Wise Representative
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- [02:01]
Maren Semoset Webb
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News hello Marion Talks Money listeners. It is that time of year. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is almost here and I will once again be recording podcast episodes in front of a live audience from Panmure House, the final home of Adam Smith. This year's shows will take place on August 27th, 28th and 29th at 2pm get your tickets before it sells out. The link is in the show Notes. Welcome to Marin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Maren Semoset Webb and this week I'm speaking with Fiona Yang, a fund manager at Invesco. She is the manager of the Invesco Asia Dragon Investment Trust. On today's show, we talk about AI. We talk about Korea, volatile market, very AI exposed. We talk about India, cheap or not cheap, and why has it lost so much popularity. And we talk for probably the first time on the show about the Australian stock market. Fiona, welcome to Mehren Talks Money.
- [03:09]
Fiona Yang
Thank you for having me here again.
- [03:11]
Maren Semoset Webb
You were in earlier this year and my goodness, a lot has happened since and at the time we talked about all sorts of things. But one of the big topics that we discussed last time, and by the way, listeners, if you haven't listened to the last one, maybe go listen to that one either before or after this one because it had lots of interesting stuff in it. I wanted to start by talking about what's happened in Korea because it was already growing great guns last time we talked. It continued to soar and soar and soar based on a couple of major AI related stocks. And then we had a little bit of a stumble. And now Korea is, I was going to say 25% off its peak in June, but on the day that we're talking, I think The Cosby went up 7, 8% even yesterday. So this is very volatile stuff. And we're also hearing about a lot of very highly leveraged ordinary Korean investors or gamblers, I guess we should say, who've lost an awful lot of money by having very high margin debt and then being hit by falling share prices. So Korea is fascinating because it's exactly as you said, that front row seat to AI, but it's also turned out to be very volatile.
- [04:16]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, exactly. That's a fantastic observation that you had there on the Korean market. I think if we take a step back, quite a few things has worked out very favorably for Korea over the past 12, 18 months. The memory cycle boosted by AI demand is just phenomenal. This is one of the biggest super cycle that we have seen for stocks like Samsung Electronics and Sak Hynix. And on top of that, I think we, we had to say the Korean government has done a fantastic job in boosting shareholder return, doing the value up initiative in Korea. It's a textbook sort of example that all the other countries should really look up to. For some of the holdings that we have in the portfolio, especially the financials, they are boosting shareholder return massively over the past few years and they start to really focus on shareholder interests, personal protecting minority shareholders interests and giving us more voices in the boardroom that's something that I think in all this data center or AI narrative that investors have forgotten. But I do see risk. There are two risks I see in the Korean market. The first one is the concentration risk as you correctly pointed out with the participation of leveraged etf. I do think some of the retail investors might thought they just bought into a product that gives them a bit more return into this investing into a great company. But reality is it's a much more complex financial product they got themselves into and that led to the capital losses. And then the other risk is really earnings risk. Now the market is having super high expectation what the memory price going to be. If you look at Samsung Electronics 2Q preliminary result, they delivered 19%, 19 times increase versus 2Q last year. But share prices actually down post that result. Exactly because of this expectation versus reality. Expectation of earnings growth is super high to the degree that even fantastic earnings cycle cannot meet that expectation. That also result in share price volatility that we have seen from the peak.
- [06:30]
Maren Semoset Webb
Interesting. I mean everything you say about the changes in the Korean market and the changes to shareholder democracy and the changes to regulation driven corporate governance, that's what we saw in Japan in a previous cycle. Right. And still think ongoing in Japan, which is interesting. So Korean regulators picked up all sorts of hints from Japan and that makes a great long term story for shareholders in the Korean market. But nonetheless, in the short term, as you say, it is all about concentration. Skate Hynix and Samsung are a huge part of the market and it's the same across the Asian market. Actually, if you think to yourself I'm buying emerging Asia or I'm buying Asia and you buy any kind of index or ETF product, you're actually just buying huge exposure to a couple of AI stocks. So that concentration is the thing that really matters. If you're buying into any kind of index product, which means that you really have to look in detail at the second risk which you bring up there, which is the super cycle in memory. And when you refer to it as a super cycle, I wonder what you mean by that and how long you think that cycle will last. Because I think for old people, old investors, people who've seen these cycles go on forever and ever. One of the first things I ever learned when I became a stockbroker in Asia was that these cycles tend to be shorter than you think.
- [07:47]
Fiona Yang
Maybe it's best just to take a step back to look at how we ended up here. Rewind the tape like two, three years ago. What happened to the Memory industry it was actually we were in a down cycle. If you look at nand, which is sort of non flash, that is in deep loss making as a result, even though the industry only have a few producers of none of them was really expanding the capacity aggressively. Similar for dram, which is the other type of memory that goes into all these AI products these days. Same they have gone through this commodity super up and down cycle in the prior sort of data center cloud build out era and the profitability has deteriorated very quickly. For a company like SK Hynix, they have to really go to the market to raise convertible bonds because their balance sheet was in deep trouble, they were super leveraged so they were not in a position to expand capex. All of this moving to where we are today is we had this period of underinvestment by the major players in the memory markets and on the other side of demand we suddenly have AI, we have agentic AI that just need a lot of memory to really recall the conversation that you had with ChatGPT, with Anthropic, with Claude so they can help you to do the dust better from this point on. So that demand surge is unexpected from what all these investors as well as memory producers perspective even 12 months back. That's why we ended up with this shortage in supply because underinvestment over the past couple of years as well as this sudden surge in demand. So what has happened is really this shortage has just driven the prices of exactly the products up phenomenally over the past few years. Then the question is about how long this cycle could last. I think it could last for a couple of years because of this supply to come up will take time. You need to build the clean room, you need to order the equipment and put equipment in there. But then does that mean the share price could last for two, three years at a very high level that might not necessarily be true because expectation is already up there. Stock market is about expectation versus reality. The expectation is already there's sort of AI demand that cannot be met and the supply will not come up in the next two, three years. If we do see any sort of vacuum in the demand side of things or supply could come up just faster than expected because suddenly all these companies have raised huge amount of money not just for the Korean ones, but also the Chinese competitor is doing an IPO in the coming days. All of that could change the supply dynamics quite a bit. Then it's about when does that price or the customers? By the end of the day you have a handful of hyperscalers paying for all these products if they do see demand weakening slightly and the supply going to come up quite massively, the bargaining chip going to go back from the memory producers to the payers and we could see prices start to fall from this point on.
- [11:02]
Maren Semoset Webb
Yeah, let's talk about demand then. The supply conversation is slightly easier in a way, isn't it? Because you can see the timeline that's required, as you say to build the clean rooms, et cetera. But when you look at demand, the assumptions for rising demand are pretty, pretty enormous, Pretty enormous. There are all sorts of things that could affect that. One of those being people changing the way that they use LLMs at the moment, people changing from using the services provided by the big American hyperscalers to using Chinese products, et cetera. So there's lots of things that could shift, shift inside the demand equation.
- [11:36]
Fiona Yang
There are quite a few moving parts in that demand equation. How I see, I think demand is here to stay, it's just a question of how fast it's going to grow. The market expectation is no one really have a crystal ball of what's going to happen in the future. But the narrative in the market is that demand is going to grow at an exceptional pace. But I do see a couple of risk in there. The first one is really the return on those hyperscalers investment. It is really given the current sort of annual run rate of the revenue produced by OpenAI Anthropic and not to mention the uncertain path towards profitability, the ROI of this hyperscaler investment is still questionable on this huge amount of capex we're going to see or we expect to see. So that's one risk. The other risk is competition. As you pointed out, the Chinese large language model built up on cheap power, cheap electricity, cheap land and cheap hardware producers because China the technology could be generations behind. But once they get to a certain technology level the cost of producing those products is just significantly cheaper as compared to the developed market. So as a result their large language model is actually priced at a fraction of the cost of the leading edge model that we have seen in the western world. I was just having lunch with one of my friend who operates one of his own software company in the Asia region. He talks about yes, we just switch between the models. Certain tasks we can just use the 90% cheaper Chinese model and certain tasks, the most advanced mask, maybe we use the Western model and that's a perfect way out for us to both save on cost and really get to the desired outcome for coding and et CETERA So that just those two risks that I have taken into consideration thinking about the demand and how quickly that demand is going to grow from this point on.
- [13:43]
Maren Semoset Webb
Yeah, see that's interesting. So a lot of the demand assumptions assume that everyone will always want to use the best model but that's not really the case, is it? People will use the good enough model depending on price, depending on task. Yeah. Okay. So if you are now investing in this region and you're looking at this concentration and you're looking at these risks that we've just talked about and I know that a lot of people will say to you that the big companies, the Samsungs and the Hynix et cetera, that they still look reasonably cheap. But of course that's the way cycles always work. That you're supposed to sell these companies when they look cheap and buy them when they look expensive because that's how the cycle works. So if you are an active investor, now is the time to diversify away from those pure plays is my guess. And start looking at companies that are not so much the picks and shovels but the companies that will benefit in other ways from using AI. If you're still going to talk about this as an AI trade, start looking at the companies that will be able to use AI to improve their productivity, their customer service, etc. So you're moving out from those pure plays.
- [14:48]
Fiona Yang
It is exactly. You know, for active bottom up fund manager. That's my job day to day. So two angles I look at this one is really outside of the AI stuff. Within Korea if you are a Samsung employee you get this huge bonus because you just negotiated to get 10% of the company's op to operating profit to be paid in bonus. What are you going to do with it? You're going to buy a house?
- [15:11]
Maren Semoset Webb
Can we just stop on that? What do we get people getting in the way of bonuses? I've read about this. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars being paid out in bonuses to ordinary employees. What's the scale here?
- [15:20]
Fiona Yang
This is going to be massive people. The sell side, the most bullish expectation is next year SK Hynix could pay could get to about 400450 trillion Korean won. If you have 10% of that paid to the employees is going to be huge as a percentage of the country's GDP of course that's expectation. I'm not saying we will get there but with that huge amount of money then people will want to spend it. They want to buy house, they want to buy handbags. Actually it's already happening. People talking about the insatiable demand for luxury handbags as well as jewelry. In Korea the department store is just packed. If you go to the VCA in the morning you have to get a queue ticket the first moment it opens. Otherwise you will not be able to visit it for the whole day.
- [16:11]
Maren Semoset Webb
You have to queue to go into
- [16:12]
Fiona Yang
Edinburgh to get a ticket to go to one of the jewelry shops. Yeah, right.
- [16:17]
Maren Semoset Webb
Everyone should come to Edinburgh. There's no queues outside our luxury shops.
- [16:22]
Fiona Yang
I think they're going to do that. Absolutely.
- [16:25]
Maren Semoset Webb
Your holidays here I think employees we're waiting.
- [16:29]
Fiona Yang
So those are the things that we expect to see. We already started to see signs of that. But once that money get into the pocket of the employees that's exactly what they're going to do. They're going to go overseas to travel as well. So we want to benefit from that. I think the banks it's going to see acceleration in loan growth. The wealth management product demand for introduced by the banks. And then also on the other side is Capex going to benefit a lot of the construction company in the country. So that's around within the career the secondary and tertiary beneficiary from the AI trend. And then outside of that is the point you raise about who going to use this AI technology to really benefit structurally for the future. So some of the winners that we identify actually the Internet space we like some of the game developers in China or in the region. If you think about online games, how you develop in the past, you spend millions of dollars trying to produce the content to make the AGI looks absolutely amazing. That comes at the expense of hiring thousands of programmers, graphic designers. But now using AI you can just make it so much simpler. It saves the cost and really enhances the gameplay. And you can even tailor make the products to every individual user have a completely different gameplay versus the guy sitting next to me. Because we just like different things. We want different experience in the virtual world that just increase time span on the platform and lower the cost past. So some of the stocks that we have held in the portfolio for the longest time is just underappreciated by this AI beneficiary. The thematic can you give us the
- [18:09]
Maren Semoset Webb
names and tell us some of the details of some of the other stocks you're holding in Korea that have exposure to these themes?
- [18:15]
Fiona Yang
Right. So in Korea we own some of the banks like KB Financial is one of the biggest bank in the region. We also own Samsung Fire Marine is one of the insurance company that has just seen shareholder return being boosted and into the CapEx spending cycle of the Samsung Group. We do own Samsung Ena. It is one of the captives sort of construction company for the Samsung Group that could continue to cater to the company's future, build out of their clean room in the country. And then for the other theme about the beneficiary of AI using AI technology, we do NetEase and Tencent in China. They are the game producers in China and because of the regulation that you need to really publish games in China, it's not something that AI can actually do for you to really negotiate with the regulator. What sort of games can be brought to the market that still needs the leadership humans and humans, yes, exactly.
- [19:23]
The Hartford Representative
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- [20:39]
Maren Semoset Webb
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- [20:52]
The Hartford Representative
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- [21:03]
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- [22:14]
Maren Semoset Webb
Much of Asia is now beginning to look relatively expensive. So we've talked about Korea and I know Japan is in your area, but that's not the pure value play it used to be. India will come into India in a little bit, but expensive. And something like Vietnam for example used to be so cheap isn't anymore. But China remains pretty inexpensive. Still a very unpopular market. Tell me about that from your point of view.
- [22:39]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, I think unfortunately China has just been used as a funding source to buying into the AI hardware space. So China just have many of the popular holdings among Asia and emerging market investors. When you think about investing in the region, you usually own stocks in China because they are perceived as the best. And now with the funding flow coming out of this popular holdings and going to Korea and Taiwan is just have depressed that market valuation.
- [23:12]
Maren Semoset Webb
So people have just been selling their holdings in Chinese markets to buy into the exciting stuff in Korea and Taiwan.
- [23:18]
Fiona Yang
Exactly. I think that's definitely play an important role in that. And if we look at the index composition of MSCI China, there are a lot of Internet names in there and many would argue for Internet companies, maybe you need to reinvest yourself, reinvent yourself to have a new business model to really survive in the new AI era. Maybe you want to increase your capex spending. You need to have the most competitive large language model so as to win really. As a result, it's not so sure whether those companies are still the leaders in the region. So they get sold off because the fund flow and the question mark of how they're going to evolve themselves in this new technology world.
- [24:06]
Maren Semoset Webb
Yeah, but valuations reflect that. This is one of the few places in the region where you can still say well I'm definitely not overpaying as a contrary investor.
- [24:16]
Fiona Yang
When other people look away, we always want to look more into it because there are a lot of gems in that market. And investors are fixated on a lot of the macro issues about weak economic growth or still underwhelming consumption data. But you know what, there are companies that can actually thrive in this macro environment.
- [24:38]
Maren Semoset Webb
And it is extraordinary, isn't it what a small part of the indices the Chinese market takes up.
- [24:44]
Fiona Yang
Definitely, definitely. I think it's more of the case of how quickly Taiwan and Korea have gone up. And then the market cap of this mega company, the concentration that they have in the Asia index is mind blowing.
- [24:58]
Maren Semoset Webb
Yeah. Back to concentration and be careful what you buy. Right. All right, let's look at India which was incredibly popular for ages. Everyone loved India and we were constantly being told you didn't need to worry about price, just buy India because of the growth and exciting companies, et cetera. And that's over. No one's interested in India anymore. Fallen out of favor. But you've recently taken a trip to India.
- [25:20]
Fiona Yang
Yes. So India is very interesting. 12 years ago it was one of the most popular country to investing for the whole region. And here we are, it's completely being put into the bottom of the jar because it doesn't really AI stocks in there. All this Internet company again similar like the Chinese ones being questioned about their survivability for the long term and the growth in the longer term. So I just thought it's an interesting time to definitely take a trip and visit our portfolio companies and identify whether there are more interesting ideas. I think the conclusion is still the market despite the underperformance versus everywhere else is still expensive. Unfortunately valuation is something that we can't get the hurdle over but doesn't mean we can't own stocks in the market because there are still selected parts of the market looks extremely valuable for us. And if you look at the growth compounding power of some of the portfolio company is definitely impressive. So one of the my favorite in India and during the trip is Sriram. This is a non bank financial company operating in India for extended period of time. They basically serve to say the truck drivers helping them to get a second give them a loan to get a second hand truck. They also help the small businesses given them some working capital, loan and et cetera. So the business has thrived over the past years because of the underpenetration of the formal banking sector in the rural area of India. They can really serve the underserved and it can grow in the market because of the income of the average people would go up. They want to take up the formal jobs, they want to open their own small businesses and Sriram will be there helping them with their vast network across the country country and their personal relationship of their loan officer with the end customer. Something the formal banking sector just cannot really address to. And what impressed me this time around where I met them, they actually have mufg, the biggest, one of the biggest Japanese financial company investing a huge chunk into Sriram. That means that the credit rating for Sriram can really improve on the back of a big parent company. And at the same time with the cheap capital support from the mufg, they can really see their funding cost to go down substantially in the years to come. So we are talking about a business can be supercharged for growth, leveraging to the growth of the Indian economy at the same time enjoying this expanding margin because of the lower funding costs and is still trading at a reasonable valuation as compared to the index as compared to their peer group. So this is exactly the kind of thing active fund manager like myself try to do. Going to market. Okay, it's expensive, but it means there are no good company to invest in.
- [28:16]
Maren Semoset Webb
Yeah. What about Indian consumer stocks? And one of the conversations that we have on this podcast a lot is about population and demographics. And of course whenever you look at China and you look at consumption, you look at construction, et cetera, you have to worry that with a falling population there's all sorts of things to take into account that you would never have thought of even a decade ago. But while India's fertility rate has fallen and actually is now below replacement rate, isn't it? But only just, it's still, the population is still growing reasonably fast. And so you would have thought that with a fastish growing population and with as you were just talking about high levels of entrepreneurial and entrepreneurialism and income growth, the consumer stocks would do very well.
- [28:56]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, exactly. So the angle that I go in with the consumer stock also looking at the Chinese consumption trend over the past decades is really which are the digital companies can cater to that. So I visited a lot of the e commerce as well as digital Internet companies in India trying cater catering to this rising middle income class. So one of the company I visited is Michou, being one of the leading e commerce company in India. But again it's a valuation. I understand the growth, I can appreciate the growth that they have, the vast amount of opportunities that they can cater into, but the valuation is still quite demanding. Then the next layer that I look at, who are the supply chain company or related company catering to that growth, this is a portfolio company that we own for a while as well. Called Delivery is one of the logistics company that deliver the parcels for Meesho. They have about 50% of the market share into Misho's parcels and they also cater to the other digital e commerce company across India. On top of that they also do food truckload services catering to the small as well as media enterprises to help them moving from their products from one place to the other place. And they are one of the biggest logistic operator in the country. If you think about India logistics, really amazing the pace of improvement that we have seen over the past year thanks to Modi. His investment in the logistics space in the country's infrastructure really helps companies like Delivery to grow to improve their services at lower cost, at higher efficiency so they can take over market share of some of their competitors as well as really enjoying this growth of consumers wanting more products. They want cheaper products, they want products at our doorstep. So this is something that we have investing for quite a while and we are really glad to see them seeing acceleration in growth for exactly these topics that we talked about. And at the same time with that growth compounding the valuation, the leverage, the operational leverage that they are seeing in the business is a beautiful small business that we hold in India.
- [31:10]
Maren Semoset Webb
I suppose the thing that will always come up in conversation when you talk about logistics and infrastructure in India is the energy problem because they are a net importer of fossil fuels and that does make for quite a difficult environment at the moment.
- [31:24]
Fiona Yang
Absolutely. This is a topic in every single meeting. When I was India people talk about. But I think the government has done a fantastic job. They have shielded a lot of that energy price volatility away from the end customers and consumers. Of course it is questionable how long they can do that, but how they've managed it, how they manage inflation and how they do coordinated monetary policies and communication with the market definitely brought a lot of reassurance to invest in the market. And I think the other angle to look at is not just about the price of oil for any of this country. In Asia, Oil India in particular is also about trying to build this energy independence. So that's another topic that you know, as a team we just really like to delve into how Asia can be more independent from global geopolitics or energy crisis for the next decade.
- [32:22]
Maren Semoset Webb
What's the answer to that?
- [32:24]
Fiona Yang
I think a lot of things have happened not just about the Iran crisis, but what has happened in Russia, what has happened during COVID time, it is five years. A lot of things have happened and all that taught all the nations around the world is maybe over the past 30 years all we care about is operational efficiency or getting the cheapest fuel. From this point on we should look at, we should look at having more of this stuff onshore. So we want to invest in companies that really cater to that theme. The services company, the infrastructure construction company, design companies that help resources infrastructure build out across the region. So some of the stocks that we look at a we talk about, that's one of the, they don't just cater to the Samsung captive Capex but they also involve a lot of of energy resources build out construction type of work. So that could definitely benefit. Another one we look at is in Australia it's called Woolly. This is a design company, EPC company to really help the global oil and the resources majors to build out new projects. So we do see that in the future there will be acceleration in this capital spending cycle in energy as well as resources space across region.
- [33:44]
Maren Semoset Webb
I suppose when we look at Asia we always think of it as being entirely an energy importing region but it isn't. There are quite a few net exporters in Asia, aren't there? Indonesia for example.
- [33:54]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, absolutely. So Indonesia, Malaysia as well as Australia they are really not so dependent on energy importing they are the net exporters. But then again when you have the resources doesn't necessarily mean you can have a great handout cards but you might not play that very well. So the stock market performance of all the three countries still varies quite a bit.
- [34:18]
Maren Semoset Webb
I didn't know that you invested in Australia actually.
- [34:22]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, so for my team we do have Asia Pacific products as well ex Japan products as well. So Australia being sitting in Singapore is a place that I love to travel to and see companies as well.
- [34:35]
Maren Semoset Webb
Okay, but you put the love to travel to bit first before the same
- [34:39]
Fiona Yang
company who doesn't like Australia.
- [34:41]
The Hartford Representative
Right.
- [34:41]
Fiona Yang
Just think about Sydney, Melbourne and Hawaii in Perth. Yeah, you're going to ask for.
- [34:47]
Maren Semoset Webb
When I worked in Asia I used to do Sydney, Melbourne quite a lot as well. Yeah technically work but nice to travel to. So what does the Australian market look like to you? I don't think that we have ever discussed the Australian stock market on this podcast before. So this is a first.
- [35:01]
Fiona Yang
Fiona, I think Australia is amazing market if you to rank kind of capital return, shareholder return, this kind of stuff, corporate governance. Australia definitely ranked the number one out of the countries that I cover. So structurally it's just a very favorable environment for active stock pickers to work with the company and really enjoying the shareholder return and then if we look at the resources which we talked about earlier, Australia being the energy as well as the resources net exporter in the region, it definitely have a critical role to play in the Asia space. So that's definitely the go to place for us. If we do want to own some iron ore producers or if we do want to have more oil and gas in the portfolio, that's a go to place we would invest. And then if we look at the short term there are a couple uncertainty in the market especially where the government is trying to address the housing market issue over there. That brought some uncertainty because household wealth is quite concentrated in housing. But the government has introduced a few sort of anti negative gearing policies to address what they perceived as unaffordability for the younger generation. That's a housing problem that they do want to address. That brought some market uncertainty because banks is banks in Australia are hugely leveraged into the housing market in the country. And then and as a result of that the other issue is consumer confidence. As I mentioned, wealth is linked to property price in Australia because of the expectation that housing price is going to be soft. So the consumer segment is not doing very well. The spending continues but the expectation is that it's set to soften from this point on. So we can see structurally there are definitely merit of of investing in Australia but it's just temporarily because of the housing crisis the country sees they want to address it for the longer term benefits of the country's healthy growth that might have set back some of the near term growth potential for Australia.
- [37:22]
Maren Semoset Webb
So for the moment the most interesting stocks there are probably commodity related.
- [37:27]
Fiona Yang
Yeah, definitely. We think if the data center going to be built out as planned they need a lot of copper. Where Australia do have quite a couple of names that have exposure in that space and then the energy security we invest in. Wally, that's in Australia. They don't just cater to Asia to do the resources and energy build out. They do have 50% of the revenue coming from the US. That's a market that just have a huge plan to expand the gas producing capability. So a lot of that just give us a lot of options to invest in Australia.
- [38:05]
Maren Semoset Webb
Fiona, thank you, that's so interesting. And as I say a first are we going to do more Australia? Thanks to you because there's always clearly a lot going on. Listen, before I let you go, let me just ask you one question. It's holiday time, right? And all of our guests and our listeners are headed to the beach and we are Wondering when you head to the beach or wherever you're going.
- [38:24]
Fiona Yang
I am already on holiday but because we go. So I fly car fly to here to London to be on the podcast. Oh my goodness.
- [38:32]
Maren Semoset Webb
I'm so sorry. Thank you so much for doing that. It's great to be good.
- [38:36]
Fiona Yang
So I was in Sweden with my family. I brought my two kids and then together with a bigger family. So we have, we rented out a beautiful house by Swedish Lake. It's just a tradition that people go to the lakes and enjoy the summer and then the kids can swim in the lake. It was absolutely beautiful. Not as hot as here, which is great.
- [38:56]
Maren Semoset Webb
Now you have kids so you probably don't have much time for this. But what are you reading when you're sitting by the lake?
- [39:00]
Fiona Yang
So one of the book that I'm reading now is the Coming Wave. That's really good talking about AI and then not just about AI, how it gonna change the world, but some of the consequences that you have to think about like ethics, what it means for job market, etc. I know I shouldn't care, shouldn't be too occupied with work while I'm away on holiday, but it's really the only time with two young kids, the only time I can really spend to do some reading. So that's something that I highly recommend for this AI era.
- [39:34]
Maren Semoset Webb
Fiona, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed talking to you as usual.
- [39:38]
Fiona Yang
Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Again,
- [39:47]
Maren Semoset Webb
Thanks for listening to this week's Maritime Money. If you like Usher rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also keep sending questions or comments to marinmoneyloomburg.net. you can also follow me and John on Twitter or x. I'm at Marin SW and John is johnstepek. This episode was hosted by me, Marin Zamizet Webb. It was produced by Semisadi and Moses Andam sound designed by Blake Maples. And special thanks of course to Fiona.
- [40:10]
Fiona Yang
Yes,
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