Category: Business

For many, 2023 was the year of the chip. Just ask anyone holding shares in Nvidia, whose stock rose by 246%. But it was also the year of the Sloane…

Parked outside the front doors of a handsome 1920s brick building in a Parisian suburb is a bright yellow Renault 5, a new electric vehicle (ev) unveiled by the French…

Triumphs are fleeting in China’s fast-changing economy. Earlier this month Colin Huang, the founder of Pinduoduo, a Chinese e-commerce darling, became the country’s richest man. The company, founded in 2015,…

The one thing that managers reliably lack is time. They will often be doing their existing jobs as well as supervising others. They have bureaucracies to navigate—expenses to authorise, hiring…

IMAGINE A beach where for decades people have enjoyed sunbathing in the buff. Suddenly one of the world’s biggest corporations takes it over and invites anyone in, declaring that thongs…

Soon after his private jet touched down on August 24th at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris, Pavel Durov was arrested by French police. A statement later released…

IF today’s stockmarkets have their version of the great wildebeest migration, it is the stampede of the Nvidia bulls. Wall Street is no Serengeti, and Jim Cramer’s high-pitched narration no…

To become a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch an airline. Usually attributed to Richard Branson, a British entrepreneur, the line gets at the truth that the aviation…

Whatever happened to creative destruction?

Regular attendees at Burning Man, an annual week-long festival in the Nevada desert, normally scramble to buy tickets. This year they are scrambling to sell them. The gathering of hippies…

The convenience store, or konbini, is an institution of modern Japanese life. Open at all hours, it offers customers tasty food and household essentials, as well as the ability to…

The far-right party threatens the industry’s brand

TheoDORE Roosevelt’s bull terrier once chased the French ambassador up a tree. Commander, President Joe Biden’s German shepherd, had to be rusticated after repeatedly biting Secret Service officers. Sir Gavin…

As he screeches around corners at wildly unsafe speeds, one of the designers of the Jidu Robocar 07 calmly talks your correspondent through how the electric vehicle (EV) works. An…

Big food, it seems, has a sweet tooth. On August 14th Mars, a packaged-food giant best known for its chocolatey fare, announced it would gobble up Kellanova, maker of Pringles…

India has never seen a fight quite like this. Late on Saturday August 10th Hindenburg Research, a short-selling firm in New York, posted a follow-up to a report it produced…

The year 1843 was a tremendous one for humanity. The Economist was founded. Almost as importantly, the modern weekend started to take shape. A campaign was launched in Manchester to…

In a suburban car park near Seattle Bill Gates recently posed for an unusual photo shoot. Sporting a high-vis jacket and safety boots, the billionaire philanthropist shovelled asphalt from a…

Torture, for some, might be spending five nights on a Taylor Swift-themed cruise in the Bahamas. But for Aubreigh Gniotczynski, a 26-year-old from Texas, it is a dream come true.…

Tourism is back, at last. This year the number of trips abroad is expected to overtake levels reached in 2019. Spending by travellers, too, is projected to exceed what was…

Chief executives like to measure their worth in hard currency. One yardstick is their pay. Another is the market’s reaction when they move jobs. Howard Schultz has twice returned to…

It is lonely at the top. So lonely, in fact, that sometimes American presidents and titans of industry have only one individual of similar stature to turn to: each other.…

What are companies for? Five years ago the Business Roundtable, a coven of American chief executives, overturned orthodoxy on this question. For decades company bosses had agreed that their mission…

When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for…

Most news on China’s manufacturers is bad news for rivals around the world. Foreign governments fear their domestic champions will be pummelled by low-cost Chinese rivals. But on August 5th…

Last month China’s government implemented the most sweeping reform to company law in the country since the changes that were made following its accession to the World Trade Organisation in…

I want to be successful. That person is successful. So that person can teach me how to be successful. This syllogism helps explain the torrent of podcasts, books and speeches…

Amid the 286-page judgment, issued after nearly four years of trial proceedings and petabytes of evidence, four words stand out. “Google is a monopolist,” wrote Amit Mehta, the judge of…

Past technologies offer clues to what comes next

Two-wheeled vehicles are an integral part of life in India. They whizz over the country’s broken, clogged roads, carrying families and loads that would fill a small lorry. India manufactures…

The giant chipmaker has shed $40bn in market value in a day

Booze, sweat and plexiglass

They even have Snake

Its profits are surging, but its technology is lagging behind

Near Schumpeter’s home in Los Angeles are two fast-food restaurants almost kitty-corner to each other, as Americans quaintly put it. In different ways, both help explain one of the biggest…

A fast-growing supply chain is at risk of over-extending

A fast-growing supply chain is at risk of over-extending

Baidu is leaving Western carmakers in the dust

“We will drill, baby, drill!” So thundered Donald Trump in his speech on July 19th at the Republican National Convention, where he accepted his party’s nomination as its presidential candidate.…

July 19th was a day for help-desk heroes and support superstars. A routine software update by CrowdStrike, a cyber-security company, caused computer outages in offices, hospitals and airports worldwide. Most…

It hopes to succeed where others have failed

Pay close attention as the medals are draped over the victors of this year’s Olympic games in Paris and you may spot a hexagonal piece of wrought iron at their…

As alter egos go, Augustus Caesar is not a bad one for Mark Zuckerberg, pontifex maximus of Meta, owner of the Facebook family of apps. Both men started their march…

CHINA IS, FAMOUSLY, the world’s factory and a giant market for the world’s companies. More unremarked is its growing role as the world’s research-and-development laboratory. Between 2012 and 2021 foreign…

The British label’s new boss has his work cut out

IN LATE 2022 Wiz, a cyber-security startup, boasted that it was “the fastest-growing software company ever”. A stretch, maybe, but not a big one. At that point, 18 months after…

America’s biggest department store has rejected a takeover. Now what?

Deciding to CAlL it quits is a relatively simple judgment early on in a career. If you find the prospect of going to work on Monday morning more depressing than…

J.D. Vance’s life is full of twists and turns. His memoir from 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy”, chronicles how a boy from a drug-afflicted home in the Ohio rustbelt, who almost flunked…

WHEN BEYONCÉ performed at a pre-wedding party for Isha Ambani in 2018, India was agog. Merely receiving an invitation conferred bragging rights on status-obsessed business leaders and politicians. The cost…

“HE INSPIRED NEITHER love nor fear, nor even respect…He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all.” As a description of your typical middle manager, it is hard to…

Behind every on-screen loan shark is an even harder character making sure the mob’s debts are paid—make Peter pay, or Paulie might break your legs. The financial system is less…

GERMAN POLITICS is followed closely in Paris. So is French politics in Berlin. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said on July 8th that he was “relieved” that the far right…

This is not your classic boom-and-bust cycle

IN the TRADE war between the West and China, a battle over electric vehicles (evs) has begun. In May, as part of a broader volley against Chinese tech, America slapped…

At the turn of the century Boeing launched an advertising blitz to show what a marvel of American manufacturing it was. Called “Forever New Frontiers”, it highlighted its pioneering work…

Why there is little sign of a defence-industry bonanza in a post-peace world

AN EMAIL URGING you to download the “forum-networking app” to start “making new connections” ahead of next week’s “knowledge-sharing experience” reminds you of something you had pushed to the back…

KIM KARDASHIAN spotted the trend early, true to form. In 2021 the American reality-television star and her sister Khloé went bunker shopping. They tested a $200,000 facility made by a…

Few bosses worry about European politics more than its bankers. In Italy and Spain new taxes have been levied as punishment for higher profits. The populist surge in France has…

With sound-stage doors made big enough for performing elephants, the century-old Paramount Pictures lot on Melrose Avenue is a living museum of the film business. Now the studio, one of…

In the summer of 1994 a job vacancy for software engineers was posted on Usenet, an early precursor to online forums. The company in question planned to “pioneer commerce on…

THE ROLE of Kweichow Moutai in Chinese society is complex. The state-owned company’s fiery, translucent baijiu is by far China’s favourite booze. It is one of the country’s oldest brands—a…

Volatile weather is a peril of the high seas. Volatile markets are similarly treacherous for the container-ship industry, which carries 80% of the volume of internationally traded goods. A global…

BP AND SHELL, two British oil giants, have long sunk cash into solar and wind farms. Their rivals elsewhere have mostly stuck to their drilling. Investors have rewarded single-mindedness. ExxonMobil,…

LAWYERS ARE often seen as the most tedious of professionals. And the most derided (“What do you know when you find a lawyer up to his neck in concrete? Someone…

Two duelling visions of the technological future

DUBAI SELLS itself as a refuge for the footloose plutocrat. It is an easy place to do business and has convenient flight connections to just about anywhere in the world.…

In recent years Paris has undergone an astonishing revival. Global businessmen, financiers and techies casually drop into conversation that they are spending more time in the City of Light. Wall…

When ChatGPT took everyone by storm in November 2022, it was OpenAI, the startup behind it, that seized the business world’s attention. But, as usual, big tech is back on…

Palmer Luckey owns six helicopters. He would like a seventh: a Chinook, the workhorse of Western armed forces. When your guest Schumpeter, meeting Mr Luckey in London, suggests that the…

To witness India’s growing role as a manufacturing hub, dodge Bangalore’s notorious traffic and head north. Around 45km outside the city, amid the dust and debris of construction, Foxconn, a…

Drive a few hours from Lisbon towards Spain, past the olive farms, and you will arrive at Europe’s largest artificial lake, at the Portuguese town of Alqueva. The first thing…

Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy…

Lufthansa and IAG are pursuing big acquisitions

Chart: The Economist On June 18th Nvidia overtook Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company. Its market capitalisation of $3.3trn is more than 20 times what it was in January…

If there is one thing politicians agree on these days, it is that manufacturing jobs are “good” jobs. Joe Biden is betting that huge subsidies for new factories will transform…

In a factory in a smoggy corner of China’s inland Shaanxi province, the country’s world-leading solar industry is on display. Robots scoot around carrying square slices of polysilicon, a crystalline…

HOW MUCH is one-party rule worth to India Inc? Judging by the market reaction to the results of the general election, the figure is around $400bn. That is the total…

WHEN A GAGGLE of Generation-Z employees from Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo gets together in one place, the ensuing conversation will usually be conducted in decent English. The participants are…

When the Alternative for Germany (AfD, from its German initials) was launched in 2013, it was a pro-business, classically liberal party created by German intellectuals opposed to the single European…

PRICE WARS are ten a penny in China. The emergence of hundreds of lookalike companies seemingly overnight is pushing down retail prices of everything from electric vehicles to bike-sharing and…

One satisfaction of buying a new car is the distinctive aroma within. The smell that emanates from the Chinese electric vehicles (evs) that are increasingly common on Europe’s roads is,…

Tim Cook has an air of bashful reverence. In his 13 years at the helm of Apple he has created more value than just about any CEO in history, as…

THE MIDDLE EAST is something of a tech desert. One company trying to change this is G42, founded six years ago in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). More recently the…

Pity OpenAI’s HR department. Since the start of the year the maker of ChatGPT, the hit artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, has lost about a dozen top researchers. The biggest name was…

WESTERN CHAINS used to dominate casual dining and drinking in China. The arrival of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in a Chinese city was once regarded as a developmental milestone. Today…

Chart: The Economist How much is Elon Musk, the mercurial multibillionaire, worth to Tesla, the carmaker he runs? In 2018 the company’s board put in place a plan to award…

CHINA’S HUNGER for homemade chips is insatiable. In May it was revealed that the government had launched the third iteration of its “Big Fund”, an investment vehicle designed to shore…

Rare is the chief executive who extols the virtues of a lie-in. Tim Cook, boss of Apple, maker of the iPhone, wakes between 4am and 5am. So does Bob Iger,…

America is not just the land of red-blooded capitalism. It has an esoteric tradition of capitalist altruism, too. Take Trader Joe’s, an own-label grocery chain like M&S in Britain. It…

THE MANAGERS of Saudi Aramco could have the cushiest jobs in the energy business. The state-run oil colossus produces 9m barrels of oil a day, more than any other firm…

There is a wry sense of seen-it-all-before in the crucible of the world’s semiconductor industry. When your columnist took the bullet train to Hsinchu Science Park, home to Taiwan Semiconductor…

A job applicant walks into a bar

IT WAS A bitter farewell. On May 25th Luciano Benetton, the 89-year-old eponymous co-founder, with his three siblings, of the maker of colourful jumpers, told Corriere della Sera, an Italian…

FOR YEARS ExxonMobil was the top dog among the world’s private-sector oil companies. It was the biggest of the Western majors, and the best-managed. It regularly posted higher returns on…

Every day seems to bring fresh bets on artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few weeks CoreWeave, an AI cloud-computing company, and H, a French AI startup, have raised hefty…

Not since the 1980s have Japanese businesses generated so much excitement. Japanese companies’ profit margins have doubled in the past decade or so. They are forking out twice as much…

Lululemon, a CANADIAN maker of yoga outfits, does not have many things in common with Rolls-Royce, a British engine manufacturer. One thing they do share, along with scores of other…

Global gabfests tend to be gloomy affairs these days. Bigwigs bemoan the state of geopolitics, wring their hands over existential risks, urge greater global co-operation—and go home with little to…

After three days in the great outdoors, gnawing anxiety sets in. The air may be fresh but the woman in the advert is not. The backs of her knees have…

In the electronics department, every television is tuned to the same channel, showing a commercial for a cosmetics brand. At the end of the aisle is a sponsored stall promoting…

Pets, drugs and schedule send: another postbag for Max Flannel

In February 1908 Joseph Asscher, a master cutter of diamonds, cleaved the Cullinan at his workshop in Amsterdam. So tough was the South African diamond, the largest ever found, that…

“HE WHO controls the GPUs, controls the universe.” This spin on a famous line from “Dune”, a science-fiction classic, is commonly heard these days. Access to GPUs, and in particular…

It is a time-honoured tradition for bosses to grumble about the supposed laziness of their underlings. Doing so publicly, however, is rarely wise. China offers no exception to this rule.…

If there is one thing anyone with a job and a pulse needs to learn, it is how to lead. That, at least, is the message from the tsunami of…

Heat pumps, a type of reverse-refrigerator used for warming homes, are not the type of tech that gets most investors hot and bothered. They were, after all, invented in 1856.…

Bestowing a name on a car, as on a child, is not to be taken lightly. By naming his newest progeny X Æ A-XII, Elon Musk has condemned the boy…

IN Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “History of England”, the bustling coffeehouses of the 17th century were “the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself”. But what…

The origins of Home Depot, a big American home-improvements store, are inauspicious. In 1978 two of its co-founders were fired from senior roles at Handy Dan’s, a similar chain in…

Since the first iPhone landed in people’s pockets in 2007, apps have steadily become the portal of choice to the digital world. The mobile devices on which they run now…

THE RISE of artificial-intelligence (AI) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, AI…

WHAT IS THE ideal job to outsource to artificial intelligence? Today’s AIs, in particular the ChatGPT-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than…

ALIBABA USED to be synonymous with the success of Chinese e-commerce. Lately the company has been synonymous with its woes. In 2021 it became the grimacing face of an official…

YOUNG JOB-SEEKERS are different from their elders. They expect employers to be cuddlier, more forgiving and more generous with perks and pay cheques. The way they go about hunting for…

Two years ago companies in America were scrambling to plug vacancies from shop floors and call centres to corporate headquarters. Workers laid off during the pandemic proved difficult to lure…

BIG TECH wants more computing power. A lot more. According to their latest quarterly reports, Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Amazon and Microsoft—the world’s cloud-computing giants—collectively invested $40bn between January and…

TALK OF TAKEOVER has long swirled around 107-year-old Anglo American, once among the biggest mining companies in the world. On April 25th speculation turned to specifics when BHP, the $140bn…

You are not important enough to turn left on a plane. But you are important enough for the company to want you to have completed a project-risk update by the…

When Aravind Srinivas was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to do a PhD, his mother was disappointed. Like many Indian parents, she wanted him to go to the…

TO GIRD YOURSELF for Auto China 2024, a nine-day motor show which ends on May 4th in Beijing, get there by car. On the opening day, navigating the human traffic…

BETWEEN 2021 and 2023 two parts of the drugmaking business were in contrasting states of health. An index of American big pharma rose by a third, outperforming the broader stockmarket…

Western businesses are learning to live with volatile electoral politics around the world

Few companies have had a worse start to the year than Boeing. In January a panel plugging an unused emergency exit blew out of a 737 MAX over Oregon. Thankfully…

Joe Biden joined TikTok only two months ago, with a video entitled “lol hey guys”. Now America’s president is poised to sign a bill that could ban the popular app.…

No firm is an island. All strike contracts and compete with others. Conversely, when bosses decide a particular relationship would be better governed by fiat, one firm may acquire another.…

Schumpeter likes to write—and receive—handwritten letters. When he got out his pen last year and wrote to Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, he explained to the passive-investing billionaire that he…

AMERICAN HEALTH-CARE costs are sky-high; as treatments get pricier and the number of patients swells owing to an ageing population, they are getting higher. Chinese biotechnology is increasingly sophisticated and,…

THE FOOTBALLERS look realistic at first sight but, on closer inspection, something is wrong. Their faces are contorted, their limbs are bending in alarming directions, the ball is slightly egg-shaped.…

IN RECENT MONTHS Tesla has had a bumpy ride. In January the electric-vehicle (EV) pioneer warned that growth would be “notably lower” this year, as motorists’ enthusiasm for battery power…

Rule 1. The fire drill must never feel useful. It may be a proven way to help save people’s lives, to say nothing of being a legal requirement in many…

WHEN BOB IGER returned to the top job at Disney in November 2022, some anticipated a fairytale ending to the entertainment giant’s troubles. In February last year Nelson Peltz, a…

One of the most chilling moments in America’s post-war relationship with Japan occurred in Detroit in 1982. Two American autoworkers clubbed a Chinese-American man to death, mistaking him for a…

The blowout of a fuselage panel from a Boeing 737 MAX over Oregon in January was a “watershed moment” for the aircraft’s maker, according to Dave Calhoun, its chief executive.…

AN ANONYMOUS MEMO briefly circled the web in March. The authors, who claimed to be former partners at McKinsey, rebuked the illustrious strategy consultancy for its pursuit in recent years…

Hardly a month goes by without antitrust regulators taking another swipe at big-tech firms. On March 21st, it was Apple’s turn. America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) along with attorneys-general from…

Jensen Huang is a man on a mission—but not so much that he does not have time to tell a good story at his own expense. Last spring, when his…

LISTEN CLOSELY and you can hear the influencers wail. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives passed a bill barring app stores and internet providers from distributing “foreign-adversary-controlled applications”. The…

YOU MAY think that if you splashed out $100,000 for a vehicle you would usually take delivery of something pretty flash—a Porsche, say. In fact, many buyers of wheels at…

Pity OpenAI’s lawyers. On February 29th Elon Musk added yet another problem to their list by suing the maker of ChatGPT, a wildly popular artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, for breach of…

If you think Tim Cook has always led a charmed life at the helm of Apple, think again. The years straight after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 were…

SOME RACES are over before they really get going. So it can seem in the contest to make the best large language models (LLMs). These algorithms power generative artificial intelligence…

Wanted: presidents for America’s top universities. Applicants must possess an unimpeachable academic record. Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of Stanford University in July 2023 after a report found serious problems…

From consumer gadgets to cars, China has time and again shown a knack for emulating cutting-edge foreign technology. Yet the semiconductors that power the digital economy have proven trickier to…

The playground rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk dates back years—and in who-is-cooler-than-whom terms, Mr Musk usually wins easily. As an innovator, Mr Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and boss…

Apple fans can’t wait for February 2nd. That is when the tech giant’s latest gadget, a new augmented-reality (AR) headset called the Vision Pro, goes on sale. Some early reviewers…

Handing over a family business to the next generation can be a dramatic process. If the company is big and progeny bountiful, the intrigue is followed with zeal by both…

Jürgen Klopp is a football manager. That means there is a limit to how much he can teach corporate bosses about how to do their jobs. Managers in firms tend…

GINA RAIMONDO seemed frustrated when she took the stage at the Reagan National Defence Forum in California in December. The Department of Commerce, which she leads, had just tightened restrictions…

One reason the world’s corporate elite jet off to Davos each year is to check in on important relationships, be they with critical suppliers or big-spending customers. This year many…

When Donald Trump left office three years ago, still huffing, puffing and plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of most of America’s biggest corporations…

ON JANUARY 13TH William Lai Ching-te was elected as Taiwan’s president. He thus secured a third term for his pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (dpp). The vote will shape relations between…

AS PUPILS AND students return to classrooms and lecture halls for the new year, it is striking to reflect on how little education has changed in recent decades. Laptops and…

It has been an inhospitable winter in Boston. Following the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University on January 2nd, her interim replacement said he could not recall…

Almost a decade ago, a price war broke out between petrostates in the Persian Gulf and the frackers in America, whose innovative drilling techniques gave rise to the shale revolution.…

The hottest technology of 2023 had a busy last few weeks of the year. On November 28th Abu Dhabi launched a new state-backed artificial-intelligence firm, AI71, that will commercialise its…

Dear friends and colleagues, Happy New Year! This time last year, for the ninth year in a row, I warned you that there had never been a more uncertain outlook…

HOW QUICKLY the mighty fall. Ever since the release of ChatGPT a year ago, Sam Altman has been the human face of the generative artificial-intelligence revolution. As recently as November…

Editor’s note (November 22nd 2023): OpenAI said it had agreed “in principle” that Sam Altman would rejoin the artificial-intelligence firm as its chief executive under a new board. “The mission…

It has been a tricky year atop the corporate ladder. Sluggish growth in many markets has set bosses scrambling to rein in costs just as inflation has spurred their workers…

China faces a problem familiar to dictatorships throughout history: how to strike a balance between growth-boosting innovation, which thrives in a free society, and the paranoia of an authoritarian state.…

A CURIOUS LETTER sent on November 6th recently surfaced in Washington, DC. On that day, nearly a dozen American senators sent a stern note to Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary,…

Until the Suez Canal opened in 1869, merchant ships in the Red Sea mostly carried coffee, spices and slaves. The waterway changed everything. So far in 2023 around 24,000 vessels…