Finanzas

Innovator at work

BIG Tobacco is about to get even bigger. On October 21st British American Tobacco (BAT) announced that it had bid $47bn for the 58% of Reynolds American that it does not already own. Though Brexit has weighed on some British companies, BAT is unencumbered, with most of its revenue earned overseas. Many investors expect the deal to go ahead, although BAT might need to puff up its offer. BAT would then become the world’s largest tobacco company by sales and profits.

As in other volume businesses, like beer, some of the merger logic is simply to cut costs. With consolidation, BAT reckons its deal would generate $400m of annual savings. However, it also underscores two big, long-term changes for cigarette-makers.

The first is that America has become an attractive market for tobacco firms and buying Reynolds, whose brands include Camel and Newport, is the easiest way for BAT to grow there. This is a reversal from the recent past. Not long ago America seemed stale and overrun by lawsuits, particularly compared with fast-growing economies. Cigarette firms quarantined their American businesses. In 2004…Continue reading

ONE thing right-wing populists and left-wing progressives can agree on is that society is too soft on white-collar crime. Conservatives abandon their admiration for business when it comes to “crooked bankers”. Left-wingers forget their qualms if locking up “corporate evil-doers”. Hillary Clinton’s line that “there should be no bank too big to fail but no individual too big to jail” would go down equally well at a Donald Trump rally.

But is society really soft on corporate wrongdoing? And would locking up bankers and businessmen and throwing away the key really solve any problems? Two new books try to inject reason and evidence into a discussion more commonly driven by emotion and hearsay: “Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal” by Eugene Soltes, of Harvard Business School, and “Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age” by Samuel Buell, the lead prosecutor in the Enron case, who now teaches at Duke University.

Messrs Soltes and Buell both demonstrate that America is getting tougher on business crime. Between 2002 and 2007 federal prosecutors convicted more than 200…Continue reading

THOSE of us who fly regularly have grown thoroughly accustomed to the usual interactions with flight attendants. Yet because most cabin crew are so courteous and professional, few of us probably have a good sense of how they would like us to behave so that they can go about their jobs as efficiently and pleasantly as possible. Do they, for example, get annoyed when they have to respond to the hellos of each arriving passenger, or do they feel snubbed if someone doesn’t greet them? Does it bother them when absolutely no one is watching as they perform the safety announcements? How about those who stretch in the aisles?

Business Insider interviewed more than 60 flight attendants to compile a list of the behaviours that annoy. There are 21 common complaints, it seems. They can be broken into three categories.

The first might be described as the kind of behaviour that would be an affront to anyone with a modicum of decency. This includes passengers hogging the overhead bins. This is equivalent to putting a…Continue reading

La operadora obtiene un beneficio de 2.225 millones hasta septiembre y mejora su resultado un 38,5% en el tercer trimestre

El beneficio ordinario crece un 15% sin las operaciones corporativas y el efecto de las divisas

La propia Comisión Europea calcula que podría rebajar los ingresos públicos en 12.000 millones en la UE, y unos 2.200 millones en España

THERE have only been six chairmen of the Tata Group since it was founded in 1868. There will soon be a seventh after Cyrus Mistry, the first boss of the conglomerate not connected to the founding family, was ousted after less than four years in charge. Even though he undertook few of the reforms needed to bring vast swathes of the Tata empire to profitability, he will prove a difficult act to follow. That the ousted man has now embarked on an extraordinary rampage against his old employer will scarcely help.

Mr Mistry might reasonably have expected to serve for a couple of decades at the helm of India’s biggest group, with interests from IT to cars, hotels, salt, steel and much else besides. His departure on October 24th was a surprise. For a company with a culture of consensus, the abruptness of his sacking—the board did not even give him the option of stepping down, and the purging of many of the top executives he had hired—is about as brutal as it comes. Ratan Tata, his predecessor, will take over while a new boss is found.

The catalyst for the defenestration was the lack of performance at some of the group’s big companies….Continue reading

CHAMPAGNE corks must have been popping yesterday at London Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, as the British government finally gave it the green light to build a third runway. The decision has been a long time coming. The airport, has been operating at 99% of its capacity for a decade.

No new full-scale runways have been built in south-east England since the second world war because of government dithering. More than a dozen commissions, policy documents and white papers investigating how to expand capacity around the capital have come and gone since the first proposal to build a third runway at Heathrow in 1946. Those plans were defeated by NIMBYs, tight budgets and legal challenges. But just like the thick fog that enveloped Heathrow this morning, the path to expansion is still murky.

The first obstacle is political. Although members of the British government’s aviation sub-committee were unanimous in their support for expansion at Heathrow rather than Gatwick, its arch competitor to the south of London, not everyone in the cabinet is convinced. Many west London MPs vociferously oppose expansion, including Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, who once…Continue reading

FINDING a reliable way of timing the market is something that has eluded the greatest investment minds in history. That is why many people are tempted by the “magazine cover indicator” as a contrarian signal. One of the most famous was Business Week’s “Death of Equities” cover in 1979 (which actually came three years before the great bull market got going).

Two analysts from Citigroup, Greg Marks and Brent Donnelly, write that:

The premise behind the indicator is that when a journalist or editor finally devotes a cover to a market trend, company, country or person, the story or theme has been in vogue for some time and is likely past its peak. Positioning and sentiment should already fully reflect the story on the cover of the publication and the story should be fully priced in. In other words, by the time a journalist writes about the trend, a majority of the move has already happened.

The analysts—the cheeky devils—decided to apply the test to The Economist’s covers. They…Continue reading

Sin el efecto de los gastos extraordinarios y de las divisas, el resultado hubiera crecido un 8,4%