The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending May 24, 2024, closed at 3,639.79 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was up 0.94% (or 15.88 basis points).

Seven RDWI members gained value last week from 0.06% (Apple) to 4.86% (Eli Lilly & Co.).  Seventeen RDWI members lost value the previous week from -0.27% (Sanofi SA) to -8.22% (Alibaba). One company was unchanged for the week 33.24 (Honda Motors).

The U.S Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren (Virginia) Division announced last week that it uses an Nvidia, Santa Clara, California, DHX H100 AI base computer platform to investigate and develop new capabilities faster than conventional computing resources. Complex system development work that took days or weeks can now be completed in less than an hour with the DHX H100 system. This computer is housed in Dahlgren’s Innovation Lab for machine learning processing. The DHX H100 system is expected to enable multi-departmental collaborations. About a month ago, Nvidia delivered the first upgraded DHX H200 Blackwell device to OpenAI, San Francisco. Dahlgren’s DHX H100 was made possible by a cooperative R&D agreement (CRADA) with Nvidia with funding from the U.S. Naval Innovation Science and Engineering group.

The U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., announced last week that it is soliciting feedback on its proposed plan to establish and sponsor three federally funded R&D centers (FFRDCs) to facilitate public-private collaboration on several efforts related to modernization and diplomacy. The new FFRDCs will be divided into three areas: operational support; emerging threats, concept exploration, experimentation and evaluation; and information technology and cyber operations. The State Department expects to post on SAM.gov a request for proposals in the summer of 2024.

RDW Index member Eli Lilly, Indianapolis, announced last week that it will spend $5.3 billion to boost the manufacturing capacity of its Zepbound anti-obesity drug and Mounjaro diabetes drug to ease shortages in these products. The company said it will significantly expand a production site on 600 acres in Lebanon, Indiana. With funding the company previously committed, Lilly will invest about $9 billion on the new site, the largest manufacturing investment in its history. Competitor Novo Nordisk, Bagsvaerd, Denmark, has also been unable to keep up with demand for its similar drugs, causing supply disruptions. Novo expects to invest more than $6 billion to expand its production capacity.

OpenAI announced last week that it had reached an agreement with Wall Street Journal owner, News Corp, New York City, in a major content licensing pact. The pact could be worth more than $250 million over five years including compensation in the form of cash and credits for using OpenAI technology. The pact lets OpenAI use content from News Corp’s consumer-facing news publications, including archives to answer users’ queries and train its technology.

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Washington, D.C., approved Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person. The FDA signed off on the company’s fixes for a problem that occurred in the first brain chip recipient.

Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker XPeng, Guangzhou, China, announced last week that its gross margin for the first quarter of 2024 was 12.9%, up from 1.7% in 2023. The results were transformed by RDW Index member Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg, Germany, which took a 5% stake in the company in July 2023 and has since signed several collaborative agreements. VW is paying XPeng for its latest technology to help the German automaker get back on top of the Chinese EV market it used to dominate. The service payments will increase in the second quarter as the scope of their work together widens.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Washington, D.C., instructed the U.S. Department of Defense (DD) to commit $2 million to a feasibility study that will partner with an “entity experienced in refining critical minerals and producing battery grade” metals. In this process, the DOD will explore the possibility of refining deep-sea minerals in the U.S. The study is seen as an attempt to secure metals not sourced from China, that are critical for energy-transition technologies and defense applications.

RDW Index member Meta Platforms, Menlo Park, California, announced last week that its Llama 3 generative AI tool will be free for many companies. Meta is giving away those tools and the technology that drives them to drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving the company more control over how people interact with their systems in the future.

Automotive parts supplier MinebeaMitsumi, Tokyo, announced last week that it had opened a new R&D center in Kosice, Slovakia. The center will help expand its production program, enhance new product development and automotive market applications, and develop electric motors for industrial uses. Up to 200 researchers and highly qualified engineers will work in the center. The new center will collaborate with the Technical University of Kosice and other universities. Specific applications will include solutions for BLDC motors, actuators, software design, and testing. The center will also include an electromagnetic compatibility test laboratory, one of the most modern in Europe.

 

R&D World’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in R&D. The top 25 industrial R&D spenders in 2020 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2020 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (10 companies), automotive (6 companies), and ICT (9 companies) which invested a cumulative total of nearly 260 billion dollars in R&D in 2019, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spending in the world by government, industries, and academia combined, according to R&D World’s 2021 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D World Index are tabulated from NASDAQ, NYSE, and OTC common stock prices for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the online publication of the R&D World Index.