Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 25 June 2026
China and the West have chosen opposite paths for the millions of electric vehicle batteries reaching end of life — and the divergence will reshape energy geopolitics for decades.
China, which controls roughly 85 percent of the world's EV battery recycling capacity, has mandated that spent packs be shredded and their critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — recovered and fed straight back into new battery production. It is an industrial loop designed to reduce China's dependence on imported raw materials while locking in its dominance of the battery supply chain. The mandate is backed by a sprawling network of recycling plants, many subsidised, that can now process volumes no other country comes close to matching.
The United States and parts of Europe are pursuing a fundamentally different logic. Rather than shredding batteries that still hold 70 to 80 percent of their original capacity, the emerging Western strategy is to repurpose them as stationary energy storage — giving used EV packs a second life stabilising electricity grids, backing up solar and wind farms, and providing emergency power to buildings. The economics are seductive: a retired car battery that costs little to acquire can store grid electricity for a fraction of the cost of a new purpose-built storage unit.
The tension between these two models is not merely technical. It reflects competing answers to one of the most consequential industrial questions of the 2020s: what is a used battery worth, and to whom? China's answer is that the minerals inside are more valuable than the remaining storage capacity. America's emerging answer is the reverse — at least for now.
Both approaches carry risks. China's recycling-first model requires enormous energy inputs (shredding and smelting are not gentle processes) and creates a dependency on a perpetual flow of dead batteries. The Western reuse model delays mineral recovery by years, potentially a decade, meaning the raw materials stay locked up precisely when new battery factories are screaming for supply. And there is a geopolitical wrinkle: if Western nations successfully extend battery lifespans through second-use programmes, they slow the flow of recyclable material — which means China's recycling infrastructure processes mostly Chinese-origin batteries, deepening a closed loop that excludes everyone else.
The strategic implications are significant. Countries that lack mining access — Japan, South Korea, most of Europe — will eventually need both pathways. But building recycling capacity takes years and billions. Today, if you are not China, you are not recycling at scale. The question is whether the reuse detour buys enough time to build domestic alternatives, or whether it simply postpones a reckoning.
Source: Rest of World · 25 June 2026
Now — Europe's record heatwave is shutting down the power plants people need most: Western Europe is enduring its most punishing heatwave in recorded history. France logged its hottest day since records began in 1947. Red alerts span Spain, the UK, and large parts of the continent. Tens of millions are turning to fans and air conditioning — and the surge in electricity demand is arriving at precisely the moment thermal power plants are being forced offline because river water used for cooling has grown too warm. The result is a grid paradox: peak demand coinciding with shrinking supply. For policymakers who assumed climate adaptation could wait, the message is immediate and expensive. The heatwave is not a future scenario. It is an infrastructure stress test happening now, exposing how deeply Europe's energy system still depends on stable weather — the one thing climate change is systematically removing.
Soon — Kioxia's US listing reveals Asia's semiconductor ambitions beyond the factory floor: Japan's Kioxia, the world's second-largest NAND flash memory maker, plans to offer US depositary shares in spring 2027 — a move designed to capture runaway American investor appetite for AI-adjacent semiconductor exposure. The listing is strategically significant: it signals that Asian chipmakers no longer view Wall Street merely as a source of capital but as a venue for establishing valuation parity with US peers. For Japan, which has spent billions subsidising domestic chip fabrication, a successful Kioxia listing would validate the thesis that industrial policy can create globally competitive firms — not just factories. For investors, it tests whether the AI hardware premium extends beyond Nvidia and Micron to the broader memory ecosystem.
Later — Two industrial civilisations with incompatible metabolisms: The deeper consequence is systemic. A world in which China recycles and the West reuses creates two distinct industrial metabolisms that cannot easily converge. Standards, chemistries, logistics chains and regulatory frameworks will diverge. Companies operating across both blocs will need dual strategies. And the countries caught in between — Indonesia, Chile, the DRC, Australia — will find their bargaining power shaped by which model their minerals ultimately feed. The battery is no longer just a component. It is becoming a fault line. Source: MIT Tech Review, Bloomberg, Rest of World · 25 June 2026 ---
Two powerful earthquakes — magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, separated by 39 seconds and 45 kilometres — struck near the coastal city of Morón on Wednesday evening. Buildings collapsed in Caracas. President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency. Both the Trump administration and Brazil's Lula offered assistance, a rare moment of diplomatic convergence on a country both claim to care about for very different reasons. The human toll remains unclear; authorities warn it will be "heavy." Source: Le Monde, Folha de São Paulo, Al Jazeera · 24-25 June 2026
Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who came to power as the stand-in for the charismatic Ousmane Sonko, has sacked his former mentor and now faces open warfare with the party that put him in the presidential palace. The rupture leaves Faye governing without a reliable parliamentary majority and without the populist base that carried the March 2024 election. Senegal — long held up as West Africa's democratic anchor — is entering uncharted institutional territory. Source: The Africa Report · 25 June 2026
President El-Sisi warned that the Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz disruptions have pushed Egypt into a "state of near-emergency," with runaway inflation threatening a population of 110 million. Egypt has not been directly struck, but the collapse of Suez Canal revenues and Gulf tourism — combined with soaring energy import costs — is squeezing an economy already under IMF supervision. Cairo's distress is a reminder that wars have concentric economic blast radii far beyond the battlefield. Source: Arab News · 25 June 2026
In a landmark constitutional amendment, Nigeria's Senate voted to allow state governors to appoint police commissioners and establish state-level police forces. The bill ends decades of centralised policing under a single federal command widely seen as ineffective against local crime and insurgency. Critics warn of governors weaponising their own forces; supporters argue federal police have been absent from communities that need them most. The bill still requires ratification by 24 of 36 state assemblies. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 25 June 2026
The AI company filed a formal complaint alleging that Alibaba used fake accounts to systematically extract Claude's capabilities — a practice known in the industry as model distillation. The accusation is significant because it suggests a major Chinese technology firm resorted to covert methods to close the capability gap with US frontier models, rather than relying solely on indigenous development. The case will test whether AI companies can enforce terms of service across jurisdictions with no mutual legal framework. Source: Financial Times · 25 June 2026
Australia's employers added jobs faster than expected in May, reversing the previous month's losses and pushing unemployment lower. The data validates the Reserve Bank of Australia's persistent hawkishness — its argument that the labour market remains too tight to justify rate cuts. For the millions of Australians holding variable-rate mortgages, the strong hiring numbers are a paradox: good news for the economy, bad news for household budgets. The result also complicates the global narrative that restrictive monetary policy is finally cooling demand; in Australia, at least, the labour market refuses to cooperate. Source: Bloomberg · 25 June 2026
Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, who seized power from the Bongo dynasty in August 2023, gave a combative interview defending his first year in office. He announced plans to restructure Gabon's debt, restore public services, and — unusually for a coup leader — actively court the IMF rather than reject it. "The IMF is not an ogre," he said, a pointed message to fellow junta leaders in the Sahel who have treated international financial institutions as neocolonial enemies. Whether Libreville's pragmatism survives contact with the Fund's conditionality remains to be seen. Source: The Africa Report · 25 June 2026
Dive operators off Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, report that the first question tourists now ask is whether the reefs are still worth visiting. A new environmental assessment documents accelerating coral degradation linked to offshore oil and gas activity, sedimentation from coastal development, and warming seas. Malaysia's government faces a stark choice between short-term hydrocarbon revenue and a marine ecosystem that underpins both fisheries and a multi-billion-ringgit tourism industry. So far, oil is winning. Source: South China Morning Post · 25 June 2026 ---
Finn, a Munich-based startup, just became Germany's newest unicorn — and it did so by attacking one of Europe's most entrenched consumer rituals: buying a car.
The model is disarmingly simple. Finn offers all-inclusive car subscriptions: pick a vehicle online, pay a flat monthly fee that covers insurance, maintenance, registration, and seasonal tyres, and return it when you are done. No dealership visit. No financing negotiation. No trade-in anxiety. The company handles fleet management, remarketing, and the entire bureaucratic apparatus that makes car ownership in Germany a particular form of administrative purgatory.
What makes Finn interesting is not the subscription concept itself — others have tried it. It is the speed and the structural bet. The company has scaled across Germany and into the United States, building proprietary software that manages thousands of vehicles from dozens of manufacturers while keeping unit economics positive. In a market dominated by legacy dealership networks protected by franchise law, regulatory inertia, and manufacturer loyalty programmes, Finn simply routed around the entire structure.
Germany's car industry is the country's sacred cow. The dealership network employs hundreds of thousands. The financing arms of BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen are profit centres in their own right. For a startup to reach a billion-dollar valuation by offering consumers a way to bypass all of that — without manufacturing a single vehicle — required a particular kind of nerve.
The bet is that ownership itself is the inefficiency. Most privately owned cars sit idle 95 percent of the time. Finn's subscription fleet turns over faster, depreciates more predictably, and feeds a secondary market the company controls. If they are right, the dealership is not disrupted — it is simply unnecessary.
Source: Sifted · 25 June 2026
The Lewis Collection sale in London brought in $392.6 million in a single evening, led by a Modigliani at $63.9 million. A subsequent modern-art session pushed the total to $520.7 million — the largest haul ever achieved in a single night of European auctioneering. The result suggests that despite geopolitical turmoil and interest rate uncertainty, top-tier art remains a haven asset for ultra-high-net-worth collectors. The question, as always, is whether the heat at the top says anything about the market below it. Source: Artnet News · 24 June 2026
The long-neglected Walser House, an early Prairie-style design by Frank Lloyd Wright, has been acquired by a nonprofit that plans to restore and steward it as a community landmark. The house, built in 1903, had deteriorated badly under successive private owners. Its rescue reflects a growing pattern: neighbourhood nonprofits stepping in where municipal preservation budgets have failed, turning architectural heritage into a civic project rather than a market transaction. Source: Artnet News · 24 June 2026
Jonathan Anderson presented his S/S 2027 Dior menswear collection inside a historic Parisian museum, with a soundtrack by Fred Again. "It's about juxtaposing the historic and the contemporary and bringing music into this typically quiet place," Anderson said. The collection explored sampling and remixing as both a fashion and a cultural method — garments that quoted archival Dior silhouettes through distorted proportions and unexpected fabric combinations. Source: Wallpaper · 24 June 2026
Monocle profiles a collector and author who argues that holiday postcards from decades past are among the most revealing historical documents we possess — unfiltered snapshots of what ordinary people found remarkable about the places they visited, before social media flattened the genre. The collection spans thousands of cards from the 1920s to the 1980s, documenting vanished streetscapes, forgotten resort towns, and the evolution of graphic design under postal constraints. Source: Monocle · 25 June 2026
New York design outfit Crosby Studios has created a pop-up exhibition space beneath the High Line for the launch of Home of Football, a new cultural platform timed to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The space — anchored by a vast bright-green carpet and curated by French art collective Air Afrique — houses football memorabilia including Pelé's 1958 World Cup jersey. The project treats football not as sport but as cultural artefact, blurring the line between museum, retail, and fan gathering. It is a bet that the beautiful game's mythology can sustain the same kind of design-forward pilgrimage sites that streetwear and contemporary art already command. Source: Dezeen · 24 June 2026
Monocle dispatches reporters to join the paseo in Spain, the passeggiata in Italy, and the volta in Greece — evening strolls that function as social infrastructure in cultures where public space is still contested and cherished. The piece argues that the ritual walk is not nostalgia but a living urban practice that outperforms most designed "community spaces" in fostering intergenerational contact and neighbourhood cohesion. Source: Monocle · 25 June 2026 ---
Three of the most influential companies in technology — payments giant Stripe and AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI — are bankrolling a new initiative to prevent respiratory infections, starting with the common cold. The effort, spearheaded by Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, reflects a growing belief among tech leaders that certain neglected problems in human health persist not because they are intractable but because no one with sufficient resources and impatience has attacked them systematically. The initiative will fund research into broad-spectrum antivirals, environmental interventions, and rapid diagnostics. It is a striking deployment of AI-economy wealth toward a problem that kills few but costs the global economy hundreds of billions annually in lost productivity — the kind of unglamorous, high-frequency burden that Silicon Valley's optimisation mindset is arguably well suited to address. Source: MIT Tech Review · 25 June 2026
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet has publicly challenged the scope of proposed US export controls under the MATCH Act, which would restrict sales of older-generation deep ultraviolet lithography tools to China — machines first shipped roughly a decade ago. Europe's semiconductor industry is caught between American strategic demands and its own commercial interests: ASML's China revenue remains substantial, and the tools in question are not at the frontier. The pushback signals that the transatlantic chip alliance, never as solid as Washington assumed, is developing visible cracks. The Netherlands, home to ASML and thus to the single most critical chokepoint in global chip manufacturing, has leverage that few small countries possess — and appears increasingly willing to use it. Source: TechCrunch · 25 June 2026
The Perseverance rover's SHERLOC instrument has identified large, complex carbon compounds on Martian rock surfaces, alongside unusual surface patterns resembling traces of microbial activity. The findings are not proof of past life — the researchers are careful to note that abiotic processes can produce similar signatures. But the combination of complex organics and suggestive morphology in the same samples is the strongest circumstantial case yet assembled from Mars's surface. If confirmed by future sample-return missions, it would be the most consequential scientific discovery in human history. If not, it will still have advanced the methodology for knowing where to look. Source: New Scientist · 25 June 2026 ---
85
85%
That is China's share of global EV battery recycling capacity. The figure, reported by Rest of World, captures a dominance so complete that it reshapes the strategic calculus for every country attempting to build an independent electric vehicle industry. Europe and the United States combined account for a small fraction of the remainder. The number matters because battery recycling is not a marginal environmental initiative — it is the mechanism by which critical minerals re-enter the manufacturing chain without new mining. Control recycling, and you control the circular economy of transportation. China understood this before anyone else and built the infrastructure while Western governments were still debating EV purchase subsidies. The 85 percent figure is likely to rise before it falls: China's recycling mandate creates a self-reinforcing loop of volume, expertise, and cost advantage that new entrants will struggle to match for years.
Source: Rest of World · 25 June 2026
In perspective
That is China's share of global EV battery recycling capacity. The figure, reported by Rest of World, captures a dominance so complete that it reshapes the strategic calculus for every country attempting to build an independent electric vehicle industry....
8 — Today's Wisdom
Finn, a startup in Munich, just became Germany's newest unicorn by selling car subscriptions. No dealership, no financing negotiation, no trade-in anxiety. Just a monthly fee that covers everything. And it's not the concept that's interesting — others have tried that. What's interesting is that it works in the heart of Germany, where the auto industry is sacred ground and dealer networks employ hundreds of thousands of people.
What's happening here is something I've seen before. Not disruption in the tired buzzword sense, but something simpler and more relentless: an entire middle layer of infrastructure turning out to be unnecessary once someone builds the right software. The car dealership solves a problem that no longer exists. The privately owned car sitting idle 95 percent of the time isn't an asset — it's capital rotting in a parking lot.
Europe's major industries have survived by being too complex to challenge. Regulation, franchise agreements, manufacturer loyalty, bureaucracy. But complexity isn't a defense — it's a cost waiting to be eliminated. And it always takes an outsider to see it, because those living inside the system mistake friction for value.
It's not the car that's changing. It's ownership. And whoever builds the infrastructure to make ownership optional rather than necessary always wins in the end.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai