Tag: Approved

CONTROVERSY over the relationship between BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defence company, and one of its main customers, Saudi Arabia, was raging when Ian King, its chief executive, started his job in 2008. BAE’s link to Saudi Arabia was forged 30 years ago with the first “al-Yamamah” arms deal. It saved the firm amid a difficult business environment, but embroiled it in a long-running corruption scandal that even led to Mr King’s immediate predecessor, Mike Turner, being briefly detained by America’s Department of Justice just before he stepped down.

The new boss’s mandate eight years ago was to banish BAE’s old, buccaneering ways and make it the acme of squeaky-clean corporate governance. Now, as Mr King prepares to leave and hand over to a successor, the firm is once again under fire for its ties to the house of Saud, this time for supplying its wares to support the kingdom’s war in neighbouring Yemen. A rising chorus accuses the Saudi-led coalition of using its Western-supplied and maintained air power indiscriminately in its campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

Human-rights activists are trying to use…Continue reading

ALTHOUGH he styles himself as a chief executive who can turn the country around, Donald Trump is an outsider in the world of American business. His commercial operation is tiny by the standards of the country’s mega-firms and few of their bosses have ever viewed the president-elect as an equal or ally. He has “no friends” among the business elite, sniffed a private-equity baron a few weeks ago, who will doubtless now join a queue of executives waiting at Trump Tower to curry favour and to assess the new man’s priorities before he assumes office.

Those supplicants will soon discover that Mr Trump’s attitude towards business has three contradictory strands. He is passionate about unleashing the might of the private sector in order to revive growth. There is certainly plenty of scope: last year listed American companies invested a mediocre 46% of their total cashflow. Yet he is also a populist who thinks the economy is rigged in favour of big business and crony capitalists, and he is a protectionist. In the coming months these three different strands will respectively excite, worry and scare the business world.

Start, first, with the…Continue reading

THOUGH many outside America are dismayed at the prospect of Donald Trump as president, not everyone is despondent. When the news of Mr Trump’s victory reached the floor of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the assembled politicians burst into applause. Such enthusiasm in Russia is in part a reflection of the bromance between Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. But it is also because Russia may be one of the few economies that might benefit from—or at least, be indifferent to—a Trump presidency.  

It helps that Russia’s economy has endured a rough time recently and that some kind of rebound is probably due. Its GDP fell by 3.7% last year and will shrink again this year, according to the IMF. Russia has one of the cheapest currencies in The Economist’s Big Mac Index, which compares the relative cost of burgers across the globe. By this measure, the rouble is around 60% undervalued against the dollar. Inflation, which rose to over 16% in early 2015 after a big fall in the rouble, has fallen to around 6%. That has allowed Russia’s central bank gradually to reduce interest rates from a peak of 17% to…Continue reading

FOR the second time this year, investors have been hit by a political shock: first, the Brexit referendum; now, Donald Trump’s election victory. And the reaction has been very similar; a knee-jerk sell-off followed by a pause to consider whether there might be some profitable opportunities after all.

As election night unfolded, markets moved pretty much as they had during the campaign when Mr Trump surged in the polls. Equities fell, Treasury bonds rose in price (causing yields to fall) and the Mexican peso took a battering. The futures contract on the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 800 points at one stage. Asia followed suit with widespread declines: the Japanese stockmarket dropped by 4.6%. The Mexican peso dived to a new low of nearly 20.8 to the dollar. Gold gained ground, as if often does when investors are nervous.

But the nature of the financial markets is that sharp moves bring out the bargain-hunters. In this respect, the optimists were helped by a fairly emollient acceptance speech from Mr Trump and the very vagueness of his policy proposals. As Fathom Consulting, an economic research group, put it,…Continue reading

GOLD is Donald Trump’s favourite metal. The taps on his private jet are 24-karat gold-plated. His $100 vodka is adorned with a golden “T”. He even hankers after the gold standard. He must have found it gratifying, therefore, that gold soared to its highest price since Brexit after his overnight victory in America’s presidential election. But copper and industrial metals also rallied. They tell a similar story: prepare for reflation.

Gold is both a haven and a hedge against inflation. Initially, its rally appeared to be a rush for safety. The dollar and stockmarkets plunged as Mr Trump headed closer to victory, pushing panic-driven flows into the yellow metal. It pared gains from a high above $1,330 an ounce to below $1,300 as other markets took heart when the president-elect, in his victory speech, promised to double American growth and rebuild the country’s infrastructure. But gold bugs remain bullish because Mr Trump is likely to expand the fiscal deficit, and the uncertainty over the implications of his election may make it harder for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Fiscal expansion and continued monetary looseness are both…Continue reading

I think we need to make it bigger

STEALTH fighter jets are designed to be as furtive as possible and sneak through radar without being noticed. China’s new J-20 stealth fighter demanded plenty of attention as it roared over the heads of spectators during its public debut at the Zhuhai air show this week. The message was clear: China is aiming high in the aerospace business. That ambition, though, is as much about commercial aircraft as it is about fighter jets, and in particular one model was noticeably absent from the show: the C919, a single-aisle short-haul passenger jet which China is developing to take on Airbus and Boeing.

\Over the next 20 years both the European and the American aerospace giants forecast that China will become their biggest single market due to demand for new aircraft by Chinese airlines keen to meet the rising middle classes’ desire for air travel. Boeing estimates that…Continue reading

ONLINE advertising is booming. Digital-ad revenues in America in the first half of the year reached a record $32.7bn, according to the latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group. For marketing folk, digital ads have great appeal because consumers’ online data can be used to direct what they think are the right advertisements to the right shoppers. But tracking has become increasingly contentious in both America and Europe.

On October 27th America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new rule to protect personal privacy online. Internet-service providers, such as AT&T and Comcast, must now ask consumers for permission if they want to gather and share data deemed to be sensitive, including financial information and users’ browsing history.

However, the FCC’s rule is notable not for settling a debate, but stirring it. Marketers and digital-ad firms insist that they already police themselves well. They consider data on browsing and apps, in particular, to be essential for targeted advertising. Under the FCC’s rule consumers can “opt in” to share this information, but firms fear that many will not.

There is a limit to the FCC’s order, which perversely makes it only more controversial. It will restrict data collection by internet providers, but have little impact on broader online tracking….Continue reading

Naka does it her way

WANTEDLY, a LinkedIn for Japan’s millennials, would not be out of place in California. The thriving firm’s offices feature trendy furniture and a ping-pong table. Akiko Naka, the 32-year-old chief executive leads a young team that forgoes the usual black-and-white attire of Japanese business to pad around in jeans and socks. Meeting rooms are named after characters from a famous manga comic.

Yet Wantedly is a rarity. Since the fertile years of the 1980s, and a brief dotcom boom that began in the late 1990s, Japan has fared badly in encouraging similar startups. Just 31% of Japanese think being an entrepreneur is a good career choice, beating only Puerto Rico at the bottom of a study carried out in 2014 by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a report compiled by a group of universities worldwide. By comparison, America scored 65%, China 66% and the Netherlands 79%. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has tried to encourage people to start new businesses to help revive the economy. Startups create more jobs, and more productive ones—something Japan desperately needs. (Its…Continue reading

LARGE technology firms used to hold on to their high-flying employees by agreeing not to poach them from each other. “If you hire a single one of these people, that means war,” Steve Jobs, Apple’s then boss, warned Sergey Brin, a founder of Google, in 2005. That was an illegal arrangement, and in 2015 Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel paid a $415m settlement to engineers whose pay had been held down as a result.

Today wage suppression in Silicon Valley is even more of a distant memory than dial-up internet and mainframe computers. Last year technology companies in America recorded expenses of more than $40bn in stock-based compensation. Exact comparisons are difficult, but to put that sum in perspective it is roughly 60% more than the bonus pool paid to the New York employees of Wall Street banks.

The money tech firms throw at employees has ballooned as competition to hire and hang on to top talent in engineering, data science, artificial intelligence and digital marketing has soared. Even entry-level engineers can easily earn $120,000 a year, more than most people their age can make on Wall Street; mid-career executives with technical…Continue reading

You’ll have to speak up, I’m on my niche phone

ON JANUARY 9th 2007 Steve Jobs stood before an audience of some 45,000 people in San Francisco and announced a “revolutionary and magical product”: a slight slab of expansive black touchscreen with just a single button. Compared with the ugly, cluttered devices of the day, the iPhone was revolutionary. It was also hugely influential. A technicolour pageant of rival designs—the clamshell, the slide, the banana, the candybar and the BlackBerry—resolved into a uniform black mirror. And nearly every smartphone on the planet still looks like the device which Jobs revealed that day.

Nor is that similarity to be found just in hardware design. Nearly a fifth of smartphones sold last year operate on Apple’s iOS software. The rest run variations of Android, an open-source operating system provided by Google. Just two companies—Apple and Samsung—accounted for over 40% of smartphones sold in 2015, according to CCS Insight, a research firm. Huawei came in a distant third with 8%.

In this bland and uniform market some producers spy an opportunity. One of those is…Continue reading