Numlock News: April 28, 2026 • Pirates, Sewers, Microdramas

Apr 28, 2026

By Walt Hickey

PCB

The price of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has risen sharply since Iran struck the Jubail petrochemical complex in April, which halted the production of the high-purity polyphenylene ether resin — a base material of circuit boards. That facility is responsible for 70 percent of the world’s high purity PPE resin, and as a result, PCB prices are up 40 percent in April compared to March, with lead times increasing from three weeks to 15 weeks. Besides the resin, copper accounts for 60 percent of the raw material cost of a PCB, and that too may rise in costs given the 30 percent increase in the price of copper foil seen this year. Multilayer PCBs are selling for 1,394 yuan (US$204) per square meter; the higher-end kind seen in AI servers can cost 10 times that.

Che Pan, Liam Mo, and Hyunjoo Jin, Reuters

Station Wagons

The humble but efficient station wagon — an automobile style also known as estates in the U.K., Kombis in Germany and breaks in France — has been steadily going out of style as SUVs and crossovers gobble up market share for the kind of cars that can comfortably fit a family. In 2017, 2.45 million station wagons were sold globally; as of 2025, that’s down to 1.39 million rolling off the lot, a decline of around 40 percent. Germany is the biggest market for them; there, about 15.1 percent of new cars sold are station wagons.

Chris Bryant, Bloomberg

Piracy

Two pirate raids of merchant vessels off the coast of Somalia raises new concerns about the renewed threat of Somali pirates to global shipping. A cargo vessel carrying cement from Egypt to Mombasa was hijacked off the coast of Garacad, with nine pirates taking control of the vessel. This followed another attack on Wednesday, when an oil tanker was taken by pirates off the coast of Puntland. Piracy had been successfully reined in off the coast of Somalia over the past decade thanks to international naval patrols; needless to say, attentions are elsewhere at this time and the opportunistic attacks are raising worries of a possible resurgence.

Omar Faruk, The Associated Press

Premium

Last year, 17 percent of film tickets sold were for the premium large-format screens, up from 13 percent in 2021. Consumers are willing to pay more to see movies on bigger screens and with better sound, and at this point, cinemas angling to get butts in seats are trying to figure out just how big a screen they can add and how much they can charge for it. There simply aren’t enough IMAX screens to meet demand; Regal went so far as to charge $50 for opening night seats to the 70mm IMAX screening of Dune: Part Three, and they sold out in minutes.

Ben Fritz, The Wall Street Journal

Tungsten

A Vietnamese bet on tungsten mining is paying off, with the owners of the Nui Phao tungsten mine estimating that net profits will be 150 times higher than they were last year amid a spike in tungsten costs outside of China. Vietnam is a distant second when it comes to the production of Tungsten, producing about 3,000 metric tons of metal content, well behind the 67,000 metric tons produced by China, which accounted for 79 percent of global production. Tighter export controls for Chinese tungsten have sent prices for the metal spiking outside of China; the benchmark price for ammonium paratungstate in Rotterdam and Baltimore ranged from $2,800 to $3,289 this month, up from $330 to $355 in February 2025. The Nui Phao mine appears to be a big possible winner, as industrial and defense needs mean that tungsten is in high demand.

Mai Nguyen and Yuji Nitta, Nikkei Asia

Sewers

The limited amount of time that wastewater spends in sewers has made sewer networks a rounding error when it comes to greenhouse gas emission inventories, even though that which gets flushed can be a potent source of methane later on its journey. A new study suggests that practice may not be entirely right, with sewers worldwide emitting an estimated 1.18 to 1.95 million tons of methane annually based on a simulation of 3,000 different pipeline scenarios. That would add 1.7 percent to 3.3 percent to the global methane emissions.

City University of Hong Kong

Vertical

Quibi, I’m so sorry, you were right, you were just early: Omdia projects that the global vertical video market will grow 27 percent this year to $14 billion, and increasingly Americans are getting hooked on microdramas. Sure, China is the most mature market in the space, accounting for 83 percent of total revenue, but several apps are developing highly engaged audiences among Americans that rival some streaming networks. For instance, a viewer of ReelShort averaged 35.7 minutes per user per day on the app in the fourth quarter of 2025, which came in ahead of the 24.8 minutes average for a Netflix user in the same period. Microdrama apps racked up 5.78 billion hours of viewing time last year, and despite the smoking crater that was Quibi, those are the kinds of numbers that attracts attention from studios thinking that maybe the world is finally ready for this.

Stephanie Prange, Media Play News

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