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DESALINATION, FUSION & THE FUTURE OF THIRST By Berit Anderson
Why Read: From today's bottled water magnates to tomorrow's desal technologies, this week's report examines the current state of global drought, groundwater availability, and the technologies that will quench tomorrow's thirst. _____ Dig the well before you are thirsty. - Chinese proverb When the well is dry, we know the worth of water. - Benjamin Franklin About 10 years ago, a friend asked me what I would recommend investing in. At the time, Meta and Google were still basking under their "greater good" umbrellas. Amazon was on a meteoric rise, and Microsoft was regaining stature. Recommending any one of the FAANG stocks would have made my friend a lot of money in the intervening years. But that's not what was on my mind. "Water," I said. "Figure out how to maintain access to a water source. Invest in companies that have or create that access. In the future, water will be more lucrative than oil." One person who did not need my advice was Zhong Shanshan, founder of Chinese bottled-water company Nongfu Spring. Zhong got a head start on the water business, launching Nongfu, which relies on the questionable extraction of pristine water sources, in 1996. Today he is "China's richest man" - a rather unenviable position in the current political climate. This week his stock became the target of Chinese national misinformation efforts, with a rash of nationalist social-media profiles suggesting Nongfu's packaging is inspired by Japanese imagery and sharing videos of Nongfu water being poured down the toilet. |
