Amazon will soon be beaming broadband down over the actual Amazon.

On Thursday, Amazon announced a deal with South American telecom company Vrio. The deal will see Vrio use Amazon’s satellite internet business, named Project Kuiper, to provide internet to seven South American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. Kuiper has a lot of catching up to do if it’s going to pepper the night sky with satellites like its rival Starlink, but big telecom deals like the one with Vrio give it an infrastructural edge.

Starry Fight

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s big dream for competing with SpaceX, which is way ahead in actually launching satellites into orbit. There are a little over 6,000 Starlink satellites currently circling the planet, whereas Kuiper only just launched two prototype satellites at the end of last year. It plans to start launching fully functional ones sometime this year, with the goal of getting 3,236 up into low-Earth orbit to form its “constellation.”

Commercially Starlink and Kuiper are going after the same niche: providing high-speed broadband to remote places that lack it. Starlink is increasingly turning into a military contractor, though it also does direct-to-consumer sales and has struck deals with the transport industry, promising to provide internet to planes and shipping containers. Kuiper on the other hand seems to be courting telcos:

• Kuiper struck a deal with a bushel of major Japanese telecom companies in November last year. Kuiper wasn’t necessarily on the front foot with that deal, however, as a month previously Japanese telcos got permission to resell broadband from Starlink.
• In September last year, Kuiper also struck a deal with British telecom giant Vodafone to help roll out larger 4G and 5G service in Europe and Africa. Vodafone said at the time that Kuiper customers including itself expected to start beta-testing the service sometime this year.

While Kuiper and Starlink may be bitter rivals, they occasionally partner. In December, Amazon announced it had bought passage on three SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to take its satellites into space in mid-2025. Though it’s true that booking came a few months after an Amazon investor sued the company saying it had unduly favored founder Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company Blue Origin over SpaceX.

Bigger Fish: SpaceX has a lot on its plate this week without worrying about competition from Amazon. First The Wall Street Journal published an article detailing CEO Elon Musk’s questionable relationships with female staffers. In the WSJ piece, SpaceX’s COO Gwynne Shotwell denounced the reporting as “untruths, mischaracterizations, and revisionist history.” Then Bloomberg reported that a group of former employees filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. Included in the lawsuit is an allegation that a SpaceX training video “mocks and makes light of sexual misconduct and banter” including a… misjudged bit of satire that was more Benny Hill than you’d expect from an HR department.

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your lawyers on speed dial.

On Thursday, dozens of players in both the petroleum and plant-based fuel industries — typically arch-rivals — joined forces to mount a legal war against the Environmental Protection Agency over new emissions standards they say unfairly funnel consumers toward electric vehicles.

Strange Bedfellows

The Biden administration has provided billions in incentives for both EV producers and consumers via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Both sides of the incentive equation have borne some fruit. On Wednesday, the US Treasury Department announced that EV buyers have already saved $1 billion this year thanks to upfront tax credits worth as much as $7,500 per vehicle. Meanwhile, according to a Natural Resources Defense Council analysis seen by Bloomberg, producers have invested nearly $180 billion in EV and battery manufacturing plants.

That’s the carrot, here’s the stick: The EPA — tasked with slashing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030, as agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Accords — in March unveiled vastly stricter tailpipe emissions standards. Under the new rules, all cars of the model year 2032 must perform under a CO2 cap of 85 grams per mile, which some say is nearly impossible for most gas or diesel-burning cars. Alas, new regulations rarely go down easy, and this time they’ve turned enemies into friends:

• Per the EPA’s own modeling, the new emissions standards are so stringent that they could compel auto companies to reorient their efforts and have battery-electric vehicles make up over half of sales in the near future.
• Three separate complaints filed Thursday by dozens of petroleum and plant-based fuel companies, trade associations, and allied fuel marketers and auto dealers, accused the EPA of regulatory overreach.

“Congress has not authorized EPA to effectively ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars and overhaul the US economy in such a major way,” Chet Thompson, president of the refiner trade association American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, told Bloomberg.

Oversupply Chain Management: It’s no surprise that the legal knives have been drawn. According to a report published Wednesday by the International Energy Agency, the world is set to witness a massive surplus in oil by 2030. That’s due in part to a massive reinvestment in production despite an expected peak in global demand before the end of the decade. “It is time for many producers to look at their business plans, in my view,” IEA director Fatih Birol told the Financial Times. But first, they called in the lawyers.

Who can forget that satisfying snap when you ended a call? The flip comeback is getting real.

Top Chinese phone maker Honor is releasing its first vertical flip phone this week. The market for flips is still niche, but it’s a minor miracle it exists at all.

They’re Back in Flip Form

In the 2010s, Apple’s iPhone with its sleek, touchscreen-based brick design all but destroyed consumers’ desire for flip phones. Grandma and grandpa could keep their Jitterbugs; the young people wanted black mirrors so they could surf the web and play Doodle Jump. But trends are cyclical, and much like fanny packs, vinyl records, and Jerry Seinfeld’s chunky Nikes, flip phones are becoming all the rage again. 

Market researcher TrendForce expects phone makers to ship roughly 18 million foldables this year. Granted, that’s only 1.5% of the smartphone market, but the category is projected to grow to 5% by 2028. South Korea’s Samsung had emerged as the clear winner in foldables thanks to its Galaxy Z lines, controlling 80% of the market share in 2022. But its piece of the pie has since fallen to about 50%, and Honor is looking to pounce:

• The brand, which spun off from Huawei in 2020 to avoid US sanctions, already has a book-style foldable called the Magic V2, and, on Thursday, it released its Magic V Flip clamshell-style phone in China.
• Honor accounts for only about 4% of the global foldable market, but it does have the advantage of controlling the largest share of the Chinese smartphone market — the biggest in the world — at just over 17%, according to the International Data Corporation.

The Flip Side: But what about Apple? The Cupertino company has had a mixed year so far — as mixed a year as the world’s most valuable company can have. Revenue generated from its services reached a record $24 billion in the second quarter, but iPhone sales slipped 10.5% year-over-year, the steepest decline since the start of the pandemic. The rumor mill has been churning that Apple will announce a foldable iPhone as a new, trendy means of delivering all its Siri and AI goodness. But at its Worldwide Developers Convention this week, there was no sign of the device. You can probably chalk that up to Tim Cook’s wait-and-see approach instead of jumping at fads.