Numlock News: March 27, 2025 • Avocados, Almendro, YOASOBI

Mar 27, 2025

Dunk

Nike Dunks emerged in the 1980s and now account for 18 percent of Nike’s entire footwear sales, or about $5.85 billion worth of shoes. Generally, Nike wants to rotate its brands to keep ahead of the trend cycle. However, the sheer size of the business around this particular basketball shoe could cause serious issues if the style goes out of fashion. The company plans to dial back on the classic sneaker style by as much as 70 percent to avert that issue. Essentially, they’ve made plans to shrunk the Dunk chunk lest Nike slunk into the kind of funk that could junk the brand and sunk the stock.

Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg

Almendro

A new study found a tree in Panama’s tropical forests that seems to have evolved to be really good at getting struck by lightning. A new study published in New Phytologist finds that the almendro tree is especially resilient to lightning strikes, which can actually kill off parasitic vines and nearby trees that could compete with the almendro. From 2014 to 2019, researchers were able to pinpoint 94 lightning strikes in a patch of forest in Panama, observing that the almendro trees are great at surviving the damage. All 9 trees that were struck survived with only slight damage, while similar trees from other species took 6 times as much damage and 64 percent died within 2 years of the strike. Indeed, living near an almendro tree increased the likelihood of dying during a lightning strike by 48 percent.

Erik Stokstad, Science

270

AMC Entertainment announced it will open 65 auditoriums with ScreenX and 4DX capabilities after cutting a deal with CJ 4DPlex, the company that pioneered the tech in Korea. ScreenX emerged as a way to get bigger screens into smaller cinemas by essentially wrapping the screen around the audience on the left and right walls of the cinema, presenting a neat panoramic effect even in movie theaters too small to be upgraded to IMAX or RPX. The deal included 40 4DX auditoriums — the ones that have the moving chairs and smells and wind, the “But we have Soarin’ at home” of movie theaters — and 25 ScreenX locations, with some even in the United States. Globally, there are about 430 ScreenX installations and 780 4DXs. Given that the premium tickets are the main engine of growth in the exhibition, that’s probably only going to go up.

Carolyn Giardina, Variety

Zeal of the Convert

A new global survey from Pew Research Center sought to find out the percentage of respondents in a given country who said they have switched religions and that their current religious situation is different than the religious category in which they were raised. In the United States, that figure is 28 percent, which actually comes in around the middle of the pack, alongside Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. In Mexico, 21 percent of adults had switched religions, in Greece the figure is just 14 percent, in Kenya 7 percent, in Hungary 6 percent and in India 2 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, 34 percent of people from Australia, Japan, Germany and France are in a different religious category compared to when they were as kids. That is 38 percent in Canada, 40 percent in Spain and a remarkable 50 percent in South Korea. In most of those countries, the big winner was “religiously unaffiliated.”

Kristen Lesage, Kelsey Jo Starr and William Miner, Pew Research Center

J-Pop

After seeing the global success of K-Pop, Japan wants to make sure that its local variety of pop, J-Pop, isn’t left in the dust of the hallyu. Japan’s got a lot going for it — it’s the second-largest recorded music market in the world, behind just the United States, even if it is only around 23 percent of the size of America’s. Music that manages to be exported globally tends to be the stuff packaged with anime, and Japanese artists have generally struggled to break into the Billboard charts. In Japan’s music industry, lots of eyes are on the ongoing American concerts of YOASOBI, a duo that’s huge in Japan and is seen as a potential global contender after performances at Lollapalooza and Coachella.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Plastic

A new estimate puts the plastic waste resulting from just Coca-Cola products at 1.33 billion pounds annually by 2030. This comes after the world’s largest producer of beverages backs off pledges to improve recycling and cut plastic use. As a result, the company’s plastic use is projected to exceed 4.13 million metric tons per year, a lot of which will end up in aquatic ecosystems.

Issan Ahmed, Agence France-Presse

Avocados

Fruit and vegetable giant Fresh Del Monte just bought Avolio, a Ugandan supplier of bulk crude and edible avocado oil. If avocado oil wasn’t already the next big thing, this kind of acquisition from one of the titans of the produce aisle all but assures its position, with current estimates seeing the avocado oil market growing from $637 million last year to $1.2 billion by 2032. Fresh Del Monte is particularly exposed to the banana business — bananas were responsible for a third of sales in 2024 — and a dip in the banana biz meant the whole company’s revenue took a ding. The company already plans to scale up Avolio until it’s processing 140 metric tons of avocados per day.

Food Dive

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