afford

Intel can’t afford to fail

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Intel has chosen CES 2026 to announce the launch of Panther Lakeand it is not a minor detail. It’s not just about teaching new generation of laptop processorsbut to publicly expose the first platform that tests its most ambitious industrial promise. According to Intelthis inaugurates the arrival of the Intel 18A node to the market and converts a process that had been, above all, a declaration of intent for years into a commercial product. In this context, what Intel is at stake is to demonstrate that it can deliver on its promises when there is no longer any room for delays or explanations. Panther Lake is the code name, but Core Ultra Series 3 is the way the firm led by Lip-Bu Tan He wants the market to understand this generation. With this commercial framing, the company seeks to differentiate it from previous stages and make it clear that this is not a minor iteration. We are looking at a complete platform for laptops, with a common architecture on which different product levels are built, from performance-oriented models to those that prioritize efficiency and price. Intel’s most demanding exam in years As we say, the true anchoring point of Core Ultra Series 3 is Intel 18A, the manufacturing process on which the entire proposal is built. It is about the most advanced node ever developed and manufactured in the United States, and the first to hit the market integrated into a complete family of laptops. This detail shifts the focus from the chip design to the industrial capacity behind it and places 18A as more than just a technical leap. For consumers, the company talks about up to 60% more multi-core performance compared to the previous generation, according to internal tests in Cinebench 2024 at 25 W, improvements of up to 77% in gaming performance in an internal battery of 45 titles at 1080p High, and a NPU capable of reaching up to 50 TOPS for AI loads. To all this, it adds autonomy estimates of up to 27.1 hours streaming Netflix, always under specific conditions and configurations, figures that outline the objective that Intel puts on the table for this generation of laptops. To understand what Core Ultra Series 3 really proposes on the market, you have to look less at the range number and more at the internal segmentation of the catalog. Intel introduces here a clear distinction between the X models and those that are not, with the X9 and X7 being the ones that concentrate the most ambitious configurationsespecially on integrated Intel Arc graphics. Added to this is the H suffix, which is the most reliable indicator of real power, since it identifies chips with more cores, greater bandwidth and higher power limits. This launch is also understood from a very specific competitive key. The product is part of Intel’s attempt to regain ground against AMD in the laptop market, a segment where pressure on efficiency and sustained performance has intensified in recent years. In that context, Panther Lake competes not only for performance, but also for perception, reinforcing the idea that Intel is a solid and reliable option for manufacturers and users. Beyond the numbers and the official discourse, Panther Lake will have to demonstrate its value in very practical aspects. We will have to see how he performs on a day-to-day basis.if the promises of efficiency translate into a consistent experience and if the autonomy holds up in real uses, not just in controlled tests. When do the new Intel Core Ultra series 3 processors arrive? With Panther Lake, Intel is no longer playing in the field of open promises, but in that of specific schedules. Pre-sales of the first laptops with Core Ultra Series 3 begin immediately and their global arrival on the market from January 27. Images | Intel In Xataka | The new Qualcomm chip for PC is a declaration of intent: more intelligence than power

Funko literally produced more dolls than it could afford. And now it faces the biggest crisis in its history

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It seemed that this moment would never come, but it did: the Funko Pop They are in crisis. In popular culture everything is cycles, and if now it is an inevitable topic in the conversation the “superhero fatigue“, after having lived through years in which it seemed that there was going to be nothing but superheroes in the cinema, now it is the turn of the Funko Pop. All after an overwhelming success, which has turned these dolls cut from the same pattern into inevitable passengers in any conversation about the pop panorama. The data. The company recognized in its last quarterly report that there are “substantial doubts” about its ability to continue operating for the next twelve months. Funko carries $241 million in total debt while maintaining just $39.2 million in cash reserves, a ratio that puts the company on the brink of the financial abyss. In the second quarter of 2025, Funko lost $41 million, and although the third quarter showed an improvement with losses of less than one million, these contrast with the $8.9 million profit in the same period just a year earlier, in 2024. The reasons. Sales fell from 292.8 million to 250.9 million year-on-year, a 14% drop that originated mainly in the US market. In 2023, the company destroyed between 30 and 36 million dollars in excess inventory, literally sending millions of figures to landfills because it was cheaper to eliminate them than to pay for storage. The crisis has multiple culprits: the Trump administration’s trade tariffs have hit toys with the nature of Funko hard: cheap items made abroad. But the fundamental problem is structural: overproduction. Funko has systematically and for years produced more than the market has been able to absorb, believing that demand would be infinite. This has led to the company’s debt growing from 182.8 million at the end of 2024 to the current 241 million, an increase of 32% in less than a year. The signs told us. There were different crises that made it clear that problems could come for Funko Pop. In 2021, the pandemic led to a boom and the company achieved record sales of one billion dollars, an increase of 58% over 2020. But like the entire economy that emerged during the pandemic, it was temporary. The post-pandemic drop (losses in the fourth quarter of 2022 of $47 million) should have served as a warning. Then, in 2023, the massive destruction of inventory confirmed that Funko Pop was generating material beyond its capabilities. 40 different Grogu dollsIf nothing woke us up before, it should have been a warning to sailors. And what about collectors? The company crisis is not just a problem of corporate mirage: it is the collapse of a dangerous aspect of collectingwhich is done by mere accumulation of assets that it is believed that it is going to revalue in the future. We have seen exclusive figures for the San Diego Comic-Con that They were resold for 200 or 500% above their original price (and the same phenomenon repeated at the recent Comic-Con in Malaga). And we have seen sets reach impossible prices (especially mythical isWilly Wonka quele in 2022 which reached $100,000). Now, second-hand sales platforms show Funkos that sold for $200 languish at $10. Even discontinued figures can be found at bargain prices, all due to overproduction, which made the “exclusive” or “limited release” label lose its value. There are those who compare what is happening with the phenomenon of Beanie Babies, highly coveted a couple of decades ago by collectors in the United States, and whose bubble ended up exploding. Plastic mountains. AND eye on environmental impactwhich goes beyond a few (many) collectors with shelves full of products that have lost their value. The aforementioned between 1.4 and 3 million vinyl figures that were sent to landfill They were only the first phase of mass destruction. The material Funkos are made of, PVC, can remain in landfills for centuries because it is not biodegradable. And hundreds of millions of units are produced every year, which in the United States are deposited in landfills perfectly legally (in countries like France, companies were prohibited from destroying unsold non-food merchandise, forcing them to donate or recycle). Header | Photo of Z Graphica in Unsplash

We know that the price of housing in the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands is skyrocketing because neither the British nor the Germans can afford it.

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The price of housing in highly stressed tourist areas, such as the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands, has reached levels so high that neither the British nor the Germans, traditionally the most active foreign buyers and wealthy people on the islands, can afford to continue acquiring properties at the rate of previous years. As and how they collected in Express this trend well supported by the latest data of the General Council of Notaries, in which a very relevant change can be seen in the Spanish real estate market, especially on the islands, where international demand has always been noted as part of the problem. Fewer houses are sold. According to the log data Notaries, during the first half of 2025, the Balearic and Canary Islands have experienced a real turnaround in the home buying and selling market. The percentage of home sales by foreigners fell by 7.7% in the Canary Islands and 6.8% in the Balearic Islands during the first half of 2025. In the same period, only two territories showed a behavior similar to the islands: Valencia, which fell by 3.6% and Navarra, which reduced the number of purchase and sale operations with foreigners by 3.7%. The reason: too expensive housing. It is enough to continue reviewing the data provided by the College of Notaries to find one of the reasons that could have caused this. drop in trading volume: prices have skyrocketed. The figures show how the traditional appeal for British and German buyers is declining. The data reveal that the average price paid by foreigners in purchase and sale operations in Spain as a whole was 2,417 euros per square meter, which represents an increase of 7.6% compared to the price in 2024. Non-resident foreigners continue to pay higher amounts for their homes (€3,126/m2) than resident foreigners (€1,912/m2) and nationals (1,809 €/m2). In the Canary Islands the average price rose by 14.1%, far exceeding the national average, while in the Balearic Islands the average increase was up to 9% compared to 2024. Source: General Council of Notaries Foreigners continue buying in Spain. The data indicate that the volume of foreign sales operations in Spain has not decreased in the territory as a whole, where the total number of homes bought by foreigners increased 2% compared to last year, reaching 71,155 operations. This variation in the volume of operations on the islands, together with the increase in their price, leads us to suspect that price pressure is differentially affecting the most touristic and stressed areas, especially those that, as in the case of the islandsthe options to expand the surface area for residential housing are very limited. That is to say, it is not that foreigners are buying less, but that they are doing so in less tense and with more reasonable prices. Who buys in Spain? Despite the drop in sales from the islands, the British continue to lead the list of foreign buyers in Spain, with 5,731 registered transactions, followed by Moroccans (5,654 transactions) and Germans (4,756 purchases and sales). However, operations carried out by foreigners represented 19.3% of total sales, a slightly lower proportion than that registered in 2024 with 20.3%. This loss of prominence is felt above all in the islands, where the British and Germans clearly dominated the statistics. The end of the “Golden Visa”. Besides, the advertisement of the elimination of the so-called golden visas or “Golden Visa”“, which allowed you to obtain residency in Spain in exchange for investing a certain amount of money in real estate, has also conditioned the decline in demand. In the first six months of 2025, foreign residents accounted for 60.9% of the purchases made, which represents 6.4% more than the previous year. On the other hand, non-resident foreigners who were affected by the elimination of the ‘Golden Visa’ and had to assume new tax limits, they reduced their purchases by 4.1%. In Xataka | Hoteliers dream of hanging the sign full in 2025. The rent that their employees must pay is their worst nightmare Image | Unsplash (Boris Busorgin)

Japan cannot afford your most valuable company in the chips industry. And is mired in debts

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JSR Corporation is a company extraordinarily valuable for Japanalthough not in a strictly economic sense. And this company constitutes with Tokyo Electron, RapidusCanon and Nikon The spearhead of the Japanese chips industry. Japan needs them. It necessarily needs these companies to be competitive if you want to recover the relevance that it had decades ago in the already flourishing semiconductor industry. At the end of the 80s Japan dominated the integrated circuit industry With an overwhelming forcefulness. Nec, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Matsushita and other Japanese companies monopolized in 1988 no less than 50% of the chip industry. However, today none of these companies is positioned among the leaders of a sector dominated with iron fist by Taiwanese, American, Dutch, South Korean and German companies. Despite its world leadership JSR Corporation is spending trouble This company has something that the other companies that I have mentioned in the first paragraph of this article lack: it holds the monopoly of a crucial sector of the chips industry. This is actually what makes it so valuable to Japan beyond its economic results. And it is that JSR specializes in the production of photorers. Photolithography teams that Design and produce ASML They are responsible, very broadly, to transfer the geometric pattern described by the mask with a lot of precision to the surface of the silicon wafer. In this area we can observe the pattern as the “drawing” that delimits the distribution of transistors, connections and other elements that make up an integrated circuit. However, before reaching this important step it is necessary A process known as deposition. Equipment manufactured by Tokyo Electron either Apply materials. Its purpose is to prepare silicon wafers for the transfer of the geometric pattern by depositing a fine material of material on them. During the last two decades all companies specialized in the production of photorestoning materials have been Japanese Depending on the type of chip that is being manufactured it will be necessary to use one material or another. One of the most used deposition techniques is known as oxidation, and consists of taking advantage of the silicon’s ability to form a fine oxide layer when reacting with water. Its purpose is to protect transistors and other components of external pollution chips. However, before carrying out the transfer of the geometric pattern to the wafer using a lithography equipment it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing the light and preserving the pattern. This is the function of the photorersista fluid. During the last two decades all companies specialized in the production of photorers have been Japanese. In fact, Japan since then has the monopoly of this market, which It is currently led by JSR Corporation. This company supplies its photorestoning liquids to most semiconductor manufacturers with which we are familiar, such as TSMC, Intel, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Technology or Texas Instruments, among many others. The surprising thing is that despite the domain it exerts on the market of photorers, JSR is not going well. In 2024 the investment company Japan Investment Corp. bought it for 6,000 million dollars with the purpose of consolidating its growth, but has closed the last fiscal year in March 2025 with losses of 1,450 million dollars. This bad result has had consequences. The company’s board of directors has been completely replaced as the most responsible for an economic result that is not at all in line with the position that this company holds in the market. However, analysts say that the problem does not reside in the photorriving business; JSR’s bad economic results have been triggered by their subsidiary specialized in The development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical and medical diagnosis products. The new directive dome plans to sell a part of this division to the Japanese company Tokuyama Corp. for approximately 570 million dollars with the purpose of cleaning up its accounts. We will see what happens, but what does not admit discussion is that JSR has a leading role in Japan ambitions linked to the semiconductor industry. More information | Reuters In Xataka | Japan has taken the carrier to dominate the chips industry. Prepare a 325,000 million dollar plan

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