مشهد الاقتصاد السعودي 2025: بين مخاطر السوق وتحولات الذكاء الاصطناعي

<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMi3wFBVV95cUxNZWlWN3JneC1qQWpqWnlocnF3dGRyOFhfVjFRdDA4Sld5SHJUUjQ0Y243S19jRkxmdmtFRVJOaTNBb2VVYTZ5SzhFaDI1N3ZYM2I3TmlVdDdGSVNTY3UxZkNzcVRzNjUwMlViRlJQR19wd3JMYkJGbnZCTGRxSXQwdnBZVFpGLTJYRmNjdTg1OFFEa3hhblZTRVc1R1ZkLXY5cWtXZ2cxc01MOEhzQ19PUk8wSWdWa3lNeGE5NHZ0Q29RT1VSSDN1cnF0eEc4OGd3S2Z2OWwxcmxMTUx2ZWUw?oc=5" target="_blank">Saudi Basic Industries Corporation's (TADAWUL:2010) Share Price Could Signal Some Risk</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">simplywall.st</font>

Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of “rigid hiring processes”. “Mid-career” women – with at least five years’ experience – are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation. The governing body that runs the capital’s Square Mile found female applicants were discriminated against by rigid, and sometimes automated, screening of their CVs, which did not take into account career gaps related to caring for children or relatives, or only narrowly considered their professional experience. To reverse the trend, the corporation is calling on employers to focus on re-skilling female workers not currently in technical roles, particularly those in clerical positions most at risk of being displaced by automation. It is estimated that about 119,000 clerical roles in tech and the financial and professional service sectors, predominantly carried out by women, will be displaced by automation over the next decade. Reskilling those affected by these job losses could save companies from making redundancy payments totalling as much as £757m, the report found. Upskilling staff would allow employers to focus on candidates’ potential rather than their past technical experience, the report found. It is estimated that up to 60,000 women in tech leave their roles each year for reasons including lack of advancement, lack of recognition and inadequate pay. Dame Susan Langley, the mayor of City of London, said: “By investing in people and supporting the development of digital skills within the workforce, employers can unlock enormous potential and build stronger, more resilient teams. Focusing on talent, adaptability and opportunity will ensure the UK continues to lead on innovation and remains a global hub for digital excellence.” Recent surveys have shown that as many as a quarter of UK workers are worried that their jobs could disappear in the next five years because of AI, according to a poll by the international recruitment company Randstad. Union leaders have called on companies to commit to investing in workforce skills and training. The City of London Corporation found that women were being overlooked for roles even as difficulties in hiring talent meant more than 12,000 digital vacancies in these sectors went unfilled in 2024. Companies have tried to deal with worker shortages by increasing wages above the national average, but the report found that higher pay rates would not solve the problem. It warned that the widening digital talent gap was forecast to last until at least 2035 and that under this scenario the UK could miss out on more than £10bn of economic growth.

It looks more like the past than the future. A vast chasm scooped out of a scarred landscape, this is a Cornwall the summer holidaymakers don’t see: a former china clay pit near St Austell called Trelavour. I’m standing at the edge of the pit looking down with the man who says his plans for it will help the UK’s transition to renewable energy and bring back year-round jobs and prosperity to a part of the country that badly needs both. “And if I manage to make some money in the process, fantastic,” he says. “Though that is not what it’s about.” We’ll return to him shortly. But first to the past, when this story begins, about 275-280m years ago. “There was a continental collision at the time,” Frances Wall, professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter, explained to me before my visit. This collision caused the bottom of the Earth’s crust to melt, with the molten material rising higher in the crust and forming granite. “There are lots of different types of granite that intrude at different times, more than 10m years or so,” she says. “The rock is made of minerals and, if you’ve got the right composition in the original material and the right conditions, then within those minerals there are some called mica. Some of those micas contain lithium.” That’s what we are talking about here: lithium, the L-word. Or possibly the El Dorado word; lithium is often referred to as “white gold”, and in 2021 the then PM Boris Johnson declared that Cornwall would be the “Klondike of lithium”. View image in fullscreen A former china clay mine near St Dennis that is now Cornish Lithium’s site for hard rock lithium extraction. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian It is not breaking news that there is lithium here. Victorian miners reported finding it in the water coming from the ground. (You may know, possibly from Poldark, about Cornwall’s rich history mining tin and copper; it has been going on since the early bronze age, in about 2000BC.) Back then there was little use for lithium. Now it is a very different story. Its high electrochemical potential means lithium can hold a charge for longer than most other elements and so is ideal for use in rechargeable batteries. That’s phones, laptops and so much of the technology we use. Plus, electric cars and big battery storage projects. Lithium is now among the most important mined elements on the planet. Most of the world’s lithium is extracted in Australia and the lithium triangle in South America (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia), as well as in China, which also processes and therefore controls a majority of it for use in batteries. Cornwall doesn’t compare in scale, but it is, says Wall, “probably the largest lithium deposit in Europe”. A couple of companies – British Lithium and Cornish Lithium – are leading the way to tap into it. Jeremy Wrathall is the founder of the latter. When he graduated from Camborne School of Mines in 1988, mining in Cornwall was gasping its last breaths – with just four active mines left, down from more than 300 in the 1860s. Now there are none, though there are still some china clay (kaolin) operations. So Wrathall went to work in South African goldmines, before returning to London to work as a mining analyst and financier. Cornwall remained in his heart, though, and when electric cars began to be a thing, he remembered hearing about the lithium there. “I put lithium plus Cornwall into Google and up came four historical records of lithium being found in water. I thought: that one is an awful long way away from that one, they must be geologically connected. And then I thought: maybe I’m on to something and should start picking up mineral rights. So that’s what I did.” View image in fullscreen A derelict former mine building in the Gwennap area, Cornwall. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian Along with the mineral rights for which he did deals, Wrathall acquired a number of 19th-century mining plans, which gave him information about geological features – the granite and what was in it. He founded Cornish Lithium in 2016. Wrathall says the UK – particularly Cornwall – will be able to extract 50,000 tonnes of lithium (actually lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate equivalent, depending on how it’s extracted) a year for more than 20 years – about 50% of the UK’s annual needs by 2030. There are two methods. One is to extract lithium from water via deep boreholes, which we will get to later. Here at Trelavour is the company’s “hard rock extraction” site. Wrathall picks up a small piece of rock. “You can see the sparkly bits, that’s the mica – all of this rock, everything you can see, has lithium.” He explains that there will be some blasting, then the granite will be dug from the quarry and crushed before going on a conveyor belt to the processing plant in the valley. But, hang on; this doesn’t sound super sustainable, even if the intended destination is the UK’s transition to clean renewable energy. Lithium mining projects in Portugal and Serbia have been hampered by fierce opposition from locals and environmentalists. In Argentina, mining companies and politicians have been accused of robbing Indigenous people of their water and employing colonial-style divide-and-rule tactics in pursuit of the valuable metal. Why is that not happening here? Wall explains that it is a very different process in South America, where brine gets pumped into a series of ponds and then evaporates slowly in the sun. Cornwall has neither the geology nor climate for that. Trelavour is a traditional quarry, “so you’ve got all your normal stuff associated with quarrying: drilling, blasting and lorries.” Environmental permits are very strict, she says, and they’ll need to sort out what they’re doing with the waste. “But the granite is pretty benign, it’s not like some of the sulphides, where you have a lot of trouble with acid mine drainage [the outflow of acidic water largely from metal and coal mines].” View image in fullscreen Labelled core samples from deep boreholes at Cornish Lithium’s geothermal site near St Day. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian Some of the byproducts could be valuable: silica for cement, sulphate of potash for fertiliser, gypsum for plasterboard. Wrathall says the company’s crushers are electric and it will look into using electric trucks. “We’re trying our best to go zero carbon, or very low carbon.” The situation in Cornwall is different from the controversial projects in Europe, he says, because the quarry already exists; they will simply be repurposing it. “You can see the damage is done. In Portugal, it is a pristine area, olive groves, it would be digging up people’s farms. This is not a farm. What are you going to do with this? It’s dangerous, fenced-off to stop people getting in. And at the end of it, we will rehabilitate it.” I have found it hard to find anyone who is really against the project. Charmian Larke of the Cornwall Climate Action Network says: “Because the area is so destroyed anyway, the surrounding villages tend to be very poor, with poor health and educational outcomes.” Wrathall says the Cornish people are proud of their 4,000-year history of mining, “and it will bring back economic prosperity to an area with one of the highest levels of deprivation in the country”. On cue, we are joined by Peter Morse, general manager of the hard-rock project here. He grew up in the nearby village of Roche. His family has been here for generations, he says, mostly working in the china clay industry, and he used to ride around in a truck with his grandad, driving in and out of the plants. He thought he would go into it, too, and did a geology degree. Instead, he went to the US, where he worked in the mining industry for 30 years. View image in fullscreen Scientists analysing old core samples at Cornish Lithium’s geothermal site. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian Wrathall and Morse are what are known as “Cousin Jacks” – Cornish miners who went abroad to work. “If you go anywhere in the world and there’s a hole, there’ll be a Cousin Jack at the bottom of it,” says Morse. They took a bit of Cornwall with them: he says he could get a pasty on the shores of Lake Superior. When he came back home, it was different from when he left: fewer people were employed in the china clay business. St Dennis, the village nearest to the site, used to have three pubs and a bunch of shops. Now there is just one of each. “And St Austell is not the town it was when I went to school there. It was bustling, lively – but it doesn’t feel like that now.” Morse says lithium can help to reverse the trend. Cousin Jack is back. I also spoke to Noah Law, another local, now Labour MP for St Austell and Newquay. “Mining is part of our heritage, it’s part of what makes Cornwall great. It has made us wealthy in the past and can do the same again.” Things have changed though. “Mining is more capital intensive than it used to be, and not as labour intensive. Part of the challenge is sharing the prosperity. I’ve levelled with the industry to say we’re really invested in this and are going to work hard to make a success of the industry, if it is willing to work really hard to make sure my constituents are sharing the spoils.” View image in fullscreen A sample of lithium-bearing Cornish rock. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian Law says Cornwall can be a beautiful place and an industrial powerhouse, “because that’s what we have been for the most of the past 200-300 years. It’s only recently that Cornwall hasn’t been an industrial economy.” Cornish Lithium employs just over 100 people, and the plan is to triple that. “Every mining job provides at least four times as many knock-on jobs,” says Wrathall. And not just another shop selling wetsuits or ice cream. “They’re good, but that’s not going to make any difference to the lives of people here. What is going to make a difference is the development of an industry that is alre

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