the times | Thursday May 26 2022 2GM 45
Business
A Silicon Valley venture capital giant
has raised $4.5 billion to invest in block-
chain technology via the largest
cryptocurrency fund to date.
Andreessen Horowitz hailed a gold-
en era for “Web3” technology — prod-
ucts underpinned by blockchains, the
shared ledger systems used by crypto-
currencies — as it announced its fourth
crypto fund. The firm said it had decid-
ed to “go big” and place an unprece-
dented bet on the sector’s role in the
future of the internet, which it believes
will be powered by blockchain-based
platforms and tools.
Its fund was unveiled in the wake of a
sharp fall in the value of cryptocurren-
cies during a wider sell-off that caused
investors to reconsider riskier market
The multi-year slump in UK car pro-
duction has yet to reach the bottom, as
new figures revealed that factory out-
put fell by a further 11 per cent in April.
Assembly lines around England, as
well as Aston Martin’s plant in south
Wales, produced only 60,500 cars last
month. That is also a 60 per cent drop
on the 149,000 cars produced in April
2016 in the months leading up to the
referendum on EU membership.
Prior to the Brexit decision, the in-
dustry had been talking about hitting
record annual production of two mil-
‘Golden era’ for crypto as venture
capital giant bets big on blockchain
Callum Jones
US Business Correspondent
bets. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest digital
asset, has more than halved in value
since its record high last November.
Andreessen, based in Menlo Park,
California, was an early backer of
Airbnb, Facebook and Skype. Known
as a16z, it has about $28 billion in assets
under management across multiple
funds.
Chris Dixon, a general partner at An-
dreessen, said it believes blockchain
technology will “power the next major
computing cycle”, which it defines as
crypto and Web3. He likened the com-
ing years to the advent of personal com-
puting in the 1980s, the internet in the
1990s and mobiles in the 2000s.
Certificates of digital ownership,
known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs),
are perhaps the best-known applica-
tion of blockchain technology beyond
cryptocurrencies to date. However,proponents expect far wider innova-
tion in this area to transform and de-
centralise the internet, empowering
users by giving them greater control.
Andreessen, which has now raised
more than $7.6 billion in total for its
crypto and Web3 funds, said its new
Crypto Fund 4 would spend $1.5 billion
on seed investments in start-ups and
$3 billion on venture investments.
“Most computing cycles have ‘golden
eras’ when the right mix — including
new talent, viable infrastructure and
community knowledge — comes to-
gether,” Dixon wrote in a blog post.
“For example, with mobile comput-
ing, the golden era was 2009-11, when
companies like Uber, Venmo, Snap and
Instagram were started. Golden eras
are when legendary teams are formed,
big ideas are hatched, and great prod-
ucts get built.“We think we are now entering the
golden era of Web3. Programmable
blockchains are sufficiently advanced,
and a diverse range of apps have
reached tens of millions of users. More
importantly, a massive wave of world-
class talent has entered Web3 over the
last year. They are brilliant and passion-
ate and want to build a better internet.”
Andreessen shrugged off questions
about the recent pressure in global
markets. It suggested innovation can
thrive under such conditions and
stressed that its investments were fo-
cused on the future. “Bear markets are
often when the best opportunities come
about,” Arianna Simpson, a general
partner at the firm, told the CNBC fi-
nancial news network, “when people
are actually able to focus on building
technology rather than getting dis-
tracted by short-term price activity.”British car production still stuck in the slow lane
Robert Lea Industrial Editor
T
he recovery of
the hospitality
industry could
be threatened if
a national rail
strike were to go ahead,
a trade body has warned
(Poppy Koronka writes).
UKHospitality, which
represents more than
730 companies, said that
the strike would reduce
the number of people
heading into towns and
cities, where recovery
for venues has already
been slower.
It is also concerned
that the strikes would
have knock-on effects
for the wider economy.
On Tuesday night, the
Rail, Maritime and
Transport workers
Union voted for what
could be the largeststrike action in history.
They backed industrial
action at Network
Rail, the state-owned
body that manages
infrastructure and
13 train operators.
There are no dates for
the strikes, but as few as
a fifth of trains could
run their usual schedule.
Kate Nicholls, the
chief executive of
UKHospitality, said: “A
lack of trains bringing
people into towns and
cities will further set
back the recovery of our
high streets and will also
deter people from going
out in the evening —
especially women and
vulnerable people who
may rely on trains to get
them home and feel safe
late at night.”Strike could derail
high street recovery
St ik
ANDREW HASSON/ALAMYT
Enterprise
Network
Couch CEO
Organisational psychologist
Andrew Tailby moved from
confidante to being the boss
when Freedom Services
Group founder Sam White
asked him to take over.Sign up now for
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insight from Britain’s
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thetimes.co.uk/tenlion vehicles. The current run rate sug-
gests a figure nearer 750,000.
More than 70 per cent of UK produc-
tion is centred on the factories of Jaguar
Land Rover in the West Midlands and
Merseyside, Nissan in Sunderland, and
BMW Mini at Cowley in Oxford.
Each of those manufacturers is going
through big and lengthy transitions to
produce electric variants of their mod-
els as the UK and Europe eye a ban
from the end of this decade on petrol
and diesel-only vehicles.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers
and Traders (SMMT), which collates
the figures, said that the microchipshortages bedevilling the industry are
to blame for the latest factory-gate fall.
The 11 per cent drop in April means
that, at 268,000 units, factories have
produced 28 per cent fewer cars so far
this year.
The carmaking industry is a tale of
two halves. Among the other volume
producers of recent years, Honda at
Swindon has closed and taken its elec-
tric car production plans back to Japan;
the Vauxhall Astra plant at Ellesmere
Port is in rundown, to be replaced by a
reconfigured low-volume producer of
electric vans; and Toyota near Derby is
at historically low production rates.Meanwhile, in the luxury sector,
Bentley at Crewe, Rolls-Royce at Good-
wood, and Aston Martin have been at
or near full production or are growing
assembly rates.
The industry’s supply chain and
structural issues are being exacerbated
by soaring energy prices, and Mike
Hawes, the SMMT’s chief executive,
said that, like households, car factories
are in need of financial help: “UK auto-
motive manufacturing needs relief
equivalent to that afforded to energy-
intensive industries and access to low-
cost and low-carbon energy compara-
ble to European competitors.”Dyson: with
our robots
we’ll really
clean up
David Byers Assistant Money EditorFor exhausted parents, nothing quite
rounds off the day like staggering about
the house retrieving toys from the liv-
ing room floor or groping around the
back of the sofa for lost puzzle pieces.
Well, not for much longer. Dyson, the
technology company founded by the
billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson,
unveiled plans to create cleaning robots
that will perform a range of mundane
domestic tasks.
The company announced yesterday
it was building the UK’s largest robotics
centre in an old Second World War
hangar at Hullavington airfield in Wilt-
shire with the aim of creating the tech-
nology to produce a robot by 2030.
In a video message posted on You-
Tube, Jake Dyson, the inventor’s eldest
son, said the company was aiming to
hire 250 robotics engineers in 2022 and
700 over five years to “help work on the
robot brain”. The robot factory, which is
being refitted, will be based near
another hangar in which Dyson is
creating visors that combine noise can-
celling and air purification.
A spokesman said the project proved
that it aimed to redefine itself in future
years as being “in the same space as
Boston Dynamics and Tesla”.
“There’s a big future in robotics: sav-
ing people time, performing chores for
people,” Dyson, the company’s chief
engineer, said in the video. “I’m a
parent, I spend half my life cleaning up
after my kids and it’s pretty tedious.”
The video was released at the Inter-
national Conference on Robotics and
Automation in Philadelphia yesterday.
Dyson made revenues of £6 billion
and profits of £1.5 billion in 2021. In
2020 it said it would spend £2.75 billion
by 2025 on research into robotics and
batteries, with £600 million of that
money being spent this year.
Sir James Dyson, 75, who is worth
£23 billion according to The Sunday
Times Rich List, moved the company’s
headquarters to Singapore in 2019
despite being a Brexit supporter.Britain’s hospitality industry fears that a national rail strike impeding travel will hit the sector hard