Finanzas

WHAT sort of reception can travellers to America expect to receive? The answer is, overwhelmingly, a warm one. Americans are among the most helpful and friendly bunch on the planet. But unfortunately for this most hospitable of peoples, potential visitors must judge the country from a distance. And their impressions are coloured by reports of how its officials behave.

Hence, after watching the now-famous United Airlines video (see article), a Chinese person considering a trip to America might wonder why paying Asian passengers are dragged semi-conscious from planes to make way for off-duty airline staff. (They may also try—and fail—to imagine something similar happening on Cathay Pacific.) People of certain ethnicities will worry that travellers such as Juhel Miah, a British teacher supervising a school trip, are stopped from entering America simply because they have a foreign-sounding name or subscribe…Continue reading

Más de 555 millones de personas están empleadas en los 35 países más ricos del mundo

Los “siete enanitos” meridionales recuperan la receta para la unión económica europea

El presidente de EE UU está dispuesto a aceptar el déficit si Pekín le ayuda a neutralizar la amenaza nuclear

Las emisiones netas de este año suben en 10.000 millones hasta los 45.000 millones para financiar el préstamo a la Seguridad Social

El banco recibirá ya 500 millones, más 1.100 si Portugal cancela los créditos vigentes

A GLIMPSE into the future of retailing is available in a smallish office in Hamburg. From there, Otto, a German e-commerce merchant, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its activities. The firm is already deploying the technology to make decisions at a scale, speed and accuracy that surpass the capabilities of its human employees.

Big data and “machine learning” have been used in retailing for years, notably by Amazon, an e-commerce giant. The idea is to collect and analyse quantities of information to understand consumer tastes, recommend products to people and personalise websites for customers. Otto’s work stands out because it is already automating business decisions that go beyond customer management. The most important is trying to lower returns of products, which cost the firm millions of euros a year.

Its conventional data analysis showed that customers were less likely to return merchandise if it arrived within two days. Anything longer spelled trouble: a customer might spot the product in a shop for one euro less and buy it, forcing Otto to forgo the sale and eat the shipping costs.

But customers also dislike multiple…Continue reading

Chen keeps spending

NOW it is a conglomerate with more than $100bn-worth of assets around the world. But HNA Group started life as a small local airline. Chen Feng, the Chinese company’s founder, led a coalition including private investors and the government of Hainan, a southern province, to launch Hainan Airlines in 1993.

Despite some help from the local government, the upstart firm was an outsider then. The central government chose three big state-run airlines to receive favoured landing slots, lavish subsidies and other advantages. The scrappy Mr Chen was undeterred. With $25m in early funding from George Soros, an American billionaire, he carved out a profitable niche.

Since then, HNA has grown quickly, mainly through acquisitions. It reported revenues of 600bn yuan ($90bn) last year. In 2016 it acquired a 25% stake in America’s Hilton Worldwide for $6.5bn and paid $10bn for the aircraft-leasing division of CIT Group, a New York-based financial firm. This week it bid nearly $1bn for Singapore’s CWT, a logistics company.

Most deals have been in industries adjacent to its core business, such as travel, tourism and logistics….Continue reading

GOOGLE has made a fortune by helping people dig up whatever information they seek. But in a court hearing on April 7th, America’s Department of Labour (DoL) accused the company behind the profitable search engine of burying the fact that it pays its female employees less than their male counterparts. The accusation of lower compensation for women forms part of a lawsuit by the DoL, which has asked Google to turn over detailed information on pay. The department has not released data to back its assertion, and Google denies the allegation.

Whatever the outcome in court, the government’s recriminations risk marring Google’s image. Just three days earlier it had taken to Twitter to boast that it had “closed the gender pay gap globally”. That claim is now under suspicion. It is true that at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, several women hold high positions, including Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer, and Susan Wojcicki, who runs YouTube, an online-video business. But the important question is not only whether a few women get promoted but also how those in the middle and lower ranks fare.

What figures there are paint a depressing picture about the…Continue reading

IN THE computing clouds, startups can set up new servers or acquire data storage with only a credit card and a few clicks of a mouse. Now imagine a world in which they could as quickly weave their own wireless network, perhaps to give users of a fleet of self-driving cars more bandwidth or to connect wireless sensors.

As improbable as it sounds, this is the logical endpoint of a development that is picking up speed in the telecoms world. Networks are becoming as flexible as computing clouds: they are being turned into software and can be dialled up and down as needed. Such “cloudification”, as it is known, will probably create as much upheaval in the telecoms industry as it has done in information technology (IT).

IT and telecoms differ in important respects. One is largely unregulated, the other overseen closely by government. Computing capacity is theoretically unlimited, unlike radio spectrum, which is hard to use efficiently. And telecoms networks are more deeply linked to the physical world. “You cannot turn radio towers into software,” says Bengt Nordstrom of Northstream, a consultancy.

The data centres of big cloud-computing providers are packed…Continue reading