Plus: Robots are sidling up to human lives through pizza.
| | In NBA parlance, this would be referred to as a "super team." | On Tuesday, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox announced a joint streaming service to launch this fall that will be home to all three media company's sports broadcasting assets. That means ESPN, FS1, and WBD's sports programming from TNT, TBS, and TruTV will all be available on a single app for a single subscription price. In other words, after years and years and billions of dollars spent to win the Streaming Wars, Hollywood is walking its way back to the cable bundle. | | | | |
| AUTOS | Toyota Dines Out on Excess Hybrid Demand | In the race to electrify the automobile industry, Toyota won by not winning. | The Japanese automaker announced record profits Tuesday, thanks to incredibly strong sales of gas-electric hybrid vehicles. Now, Toyota is hoping the timing is finally right to drive full-steam into an all-EV future. | Rules of the Hybrid Road | Unlike rivals General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen, Toyota has been relatively hesitant to jumpstart the transition to EVs. Instead, the company has leaned into what most of its rivals are just now realizing: many consumers aren't ready to make the full EV transition yet, but they're willing — and excited — to embrace a hybrid car. In October, for instance, Ford said that it expects its hybrid sales to quadruple over the next half-decade, after its third quarter saw a nearly 42% year-over-year increase in hybrid sales, far surpassing the growth of its EVs. In the US overall last year, hybrid sales eclipsed EVs, 1.4 million to 1.1 million, according to data from car-shopping website Edmunds, with hybrids seeing sales growth of about 64% compared to EVs' 51% bump. | But Toyota was already in on the pivot to hybrids, which US dealers tend to say they can't keep on their lots. It's led to one of the best quarters in company history — with executives saying they're likely to maintain their position as leaders of the hybrid pack: | - Hybrid sales increased 46% in Toyota's year-end quarter, fueling 11% growth in overall vehicle sales. Hybrids also accounted for over one-third of the 11.2 million cars Toyota sold in 2023, the company said.
- That led the company to forecast an overall record $30.3 billion profit for the fiscal year ending in March. Investors responded by sparking a nearly 5% boost to its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, nearing a record high for the company.
| Toyota executive Yoichi Miyazaki says he expects hybrid sales to reach around 8 million vehicles by 2025. And Toyota has been able to achieve profit-margin parity with combustion engine vehicles, something competitors have struggled with. |  Need a Jolt: While Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda predicted last year that EVs could soon attain a 30% market share, electric cars made up just 1% of the company's total sales last year. This may explain why the company also announced it is boosting its investment in a Kentucky EV plant by $1.3 billion — bringing its total investment to about $10 billion — as it prepares to start production on a new three-row all-electric SUV in 2025. Better late than never.
| Written by Brian Boyle | | | | |
| INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS | Japan Has Plenty of Jobs to Go Around, But Not a Lot of Workers | They're hanging a giant "Help Wanted" sign over the entire Japanese archipelago. | With an aging and shrinking population, Japan is struggling to find skilled workers, especially in its tech sector, where three-fourths of employers had a difficult time recruiting last year. | Inquire Within | Software engineers are particularly hard to come by right now. New research from Morgan McKinley found that 76% of hiring managers in the country's tech sector said recruitment was "very" or "quite" competitive in 2023. | While software engineers are needed to move Japan more fully into the digital era — a goal the government declared just in the past few years — nearly every sector is being impacted by labor shortages: | - To fill the gaps in industries like manufacturing, construction, retail, and services, Japan has been relying heavily on foreign workers. As of October, more than 2 million foreigners were working in Japan, a roughly 12.5% increase from 2022 and the most ever on record.
- Sectors like trucking and freight logistics are about to face a surge of retirements coupled with a government-mandated ban on unlimited overtime. Driver Mayumi Watanabe told The Observer that the traditionally male-dominated trucking space has a larger pool of female workers than it did two decades ago, but companies will need to hire even more to keep up with demand.
| More Eyes for the Skies: The country's transport union is also pushing for more air traffic controllers in the wake of a deadly accident at Tokyo's Haneda Airport last month, where two planes collided on the runway, leaving five people dead. Additionally, union president Masato Yamasaki said all airport office staff should be subjected to stress tests and third-party groups should investigate the cause of accidents. | Written by Griffin Kelly | | | | |
| CONSUMER | Robodelivery Startup Starship Technologies Raises $90 Million to Grow Beyond Pizza | | | | It looks like people are fine with autonomous vehicles so long as they come bearing pizza. | Starship Technologies, an Estonian startup founded by two of the brains behind Skype, has slowly but surely been rolling out its fleet of sidewalk-bound robots and it's not only turning a profit, it just got a fresh capital injection of $90 million. | Slow But Steady | Starship's robots kind of look like a cross between Eve from Wall-E and a turtle. The robots trundle along sidewalks via autonomous-driving technology, equipped with 360-degree cameras and a siren in case any ne'er-do-wells try to bust them open to get the goodies inside. Each robot has a remote human operator somewhere, looking at the world through the robot's cameras, just in case they get into trouble. | According to Starship, its robots, which operate at select locations in the US, UK, Finland, and Estonia, have traversed 11 million miles to make 6 million deliveries since the company's founding a decade ago. Its US expansion has been primarily focused on college campuses, but in an interview with TechCrunch CEO Ahti Heinla (who recently returned to the post, quietly replacing US-based CEO Alastair Westgarth) made it sound like Europe will be where the company focuses next: | - "We are not focusing exclusively on the US at the moment," Heinla told TechCrunch. Hungry US college students craving pizza can likely get you only so far.
- Heinla attributed some of the company's success to a greater cultural acceptance of its robots than, say, autonomous vehicles. "In contrast with self-driving cars, I think our robots always have been accepted in communities," he told TechCrunch, adding: "People really love them. You know, they try to feed bananas to them."
| Not Everyone Loves a Robot: That's not to say Starship's robots are universally adored. Last November, UK retail publication The Grocer reported that a Starship robot got into something of an altercation with a pedestrian, ramming into him. Starship told The Grocer it would be giving the employee who was in charge of piloting the robot "additional training." | Written by Isobel Asher Hamilton | | | | |
- Make deposits: JPMorgan Chase is set to open more than 500 new branches.
- It's a fake: Meta says it will monitor and label AI-generated images to curb misinformation in the run-up to this year's election.
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