Tag: Approved

AMERICA’S president claims to view China as a friend. But the friendship is going through a rocky patch, to say the least. America’s trade deficit with China, “the largest deficit in the history of our world”, is “out of control”, Donald Trump groused on March 22nd. “A tremendous intellectual-property theft situation” also irks him. And so, after laying out his concerns, he announced plans for some tough love. Litigation against China at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), investment restrictions and tariffs are all on the cards.

The announcement early in March of tariffs on steel and aluminium imports to America was chaotic, even prompting the resignation of Gary Cohn, the head of Mr Trump’s National Economic Council. The latest targeting of China, by contrast, is the culmination of months of planning and commands broader support. It was masterminded by Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) and a seasoned trade lawyer. As a deputy USTR under Ronald Reagan…Continue reading

LIKE Jaume Roures and Gerard Romy, two of its founders, Mediapro is proudly Catalan. Too proud, according to the Spanish police. The television company, which launched in 1994, has been investigated for paying for a press centre for foreign journalists during an unconstitutional independence referendum in the region last October, and for producing a sympathetic documentary on the vote. Mediapro denies wrongdoing. At Madrid’s main annual contemporary art fair last month its third co-founder, Tatxo Benet, purchased a contentious set of photographs which labelled the plebiscite’s jailed Catalan organisers as political prisoners.

Pro-independence antics may be popular in Catalonia, which on March 25th again erupted in violent protest after German authorities arrested Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan president. But they could be a headache for Mediapro’s new Chinese owners. On February 15th Orient Hontai Capital, an investment firm from Beijing, bought 53.5% of Imagina, a holding firm which owns Mediapro, in a deal that valued the firm at…Continue reading

IN AMERICA Big Oil remembers BP’s attempt to go “Beyond Petroleum” in the 2000s as a toe-curling embarrassment. In Europe it is seen as being ahead of its time. Once again the oil industry is experimenting with cross-dressing. Statoil, a Norwegian oil firm, is abandoning a name given to it almost 50 years ago to become the wispier Equinor. The firm formerly known as Dong, for Danish Oil and Natural Gas, is now Ørsted, a big wind firm named after the founder of electromagnetism.

Royal Dutch Shell and Total, Europe’s biggest private producers, are (mercifully) not changing their names. But they are toying with a strategy that could be far more adventurous—moving their core businesses from hydrocarbons to electrons.

Amid pressure to limit climate change, and the growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), they expect low-carbon electricity to become a much bigger part of the world’s energy mix within the next few decades. They have already invested heavily in building global natural-gas businesses for cleaner…Continue reading

Period piece

THE disposable sanitary pad debuted in the late 19th century. It was such a taboo that a purchase involved dropping the exact sum in a box at the chemist’s counter. The pack was handed over, no words uttered. Menstrual products could not be advertised on American television until 1972. In 2015 an ad showing a runny egg yolk was questioned by New York’s subway for being too suggestive of period flow (which was the point).

Squeamishness has hampered innovation. The applicator tampon, invented in 1931, was the last big novelty in menstrual devices to go into widespread use. Its cardboard applicator, a tube within a tube, allowed women to push a tampon inside without committing another no-no (touching their bodies).

In the decades since, big manufacturers such as Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Essity have only made tweaks. Pads became thinner and acquired an adhesive strip. Plastic replaced cardboard in applicators. Compact tampons with no…Continue reading

Green is the new black

BEING a commuter in much of South-East Asia requires reserves of patience. In city after city, bar Singapore, jams confine people in taxis for hours, or force them onto the back of motorbikes that weave precariously through traffic. These qualities of perseverance are not shared by Uber, an American ride-hailing firm. This week it announced that after five years and $700m of investment in the region, it would be selling its business there to Grab, a Malaysian startup based in Singapore.

South-East Asia is not known for giving birth to Silicon Valley-beating tech companies, says Ming Maa, Grab’s president. “This acquisition shows that this is changing,” he boasts. Under the terms of the deal Uber will take a 27.5% stake in Grab, which is valued at $6bn. The deal makes Grab, which started in 2012 after its two co-founders met at Harvard Business School, the dominant ride-sharing app in a market of 634m people. It operates in 191 cities across…Continue reading

G-whizz

JAWS dropped when earlier this year a White House memo argued that the American government should build and run its own 5G mobile network. The reason given was national security. The memo cited Huawei, a Chinese maker of telecoms gear, as a strategic threat. Many assailed the idea of such massive state intervention and the idea was quickly squashed. South of the border, Mexico is experimenting with something that could be a more sensible version of the American officials’ suggested venture: a wholesale mobile network.

Red Compartida (“shared network” in Spanish) went live on March 21st. The motive behind one of the world’s most ambitious telecommunications projects is not national security. Rather, Mexico is trying to pull off a triple feat of expanding mobile coverage, lowering prices and creating a viable business environment for 5G, the next generation of wireless mobile internet.

The project is a $7.2bn public-private partnership that is part of the country’s 2014 telecommunications…Continue reading

IN BUILDING the world’s largest advertising company over the past 30 years, Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, has weathered two recessions and survived a global financial crisis. His firm nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s. Now he must make his hardest advertising pitch yet, to convince the corporate world that image-making agencies like his are not dinosaurs on the brink of extinction.

The world’s advertising giants are struggling to adapt to a landscape suddenly dominated by the duopoly of Google and Facebook. Some of their biggest clients, such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever, are also being disrupted, in their case by smaller online brands and by Amazon. They are cutting spending on advertising services, and also building more capabilities in-house. Consultancies with digital expertise such as Deloitte and Accenture are competing with agencies, arguing that they know how to connect with consumers better, and more cheaply, using data, machine learning and app…Continue reading

CHINA is the stated adversary in Donald Trump’s incipient trade war. But 30% of the value of the goods China exports to America is added elsewhere. If the row escalates, countries entwined in Chinese supply chains will suffer.

In absolute terms, Japanese suppliers will fare worst. Japan is the country that exports most to firms in China that export onwards to America. But relative to economic size, such suppliers are a bigger part of several small, open Asian economies (see chart). Between 1% and 2% of some countries’ total output is shipped first to China and then on to America. If Chinese exports to America were to fall by 10%—an extreme but not impossible scenario—it could…Continue reading

JUST how bad have the past four decades been for ordinary Americans? One much-cited figure suggests they have been pretty bad. The Census Bureau estimates that for the median household, halfway along the distribution, income has barely grown in real terms since 1979. But a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a non-partisan think-tank, gives a cheerier rise of 51% for median household income between 1979 and 2014. Which is nearer to reality?

The gap between the two is accounted for by three methodological differences (see chart). First, the CBO takes demography into account. This seems sensible: more Americans are living alone and American women are having fewer…Continue reading

TRADITIONALLY, to count as an oil power a country had to be a big producer of the black stuff. China is the world’s biggest importer but still wants to break into that exclusive club. On March 26th it launched a crude futures contract in a bid to gain more clout in the global market. Some think that, if successful, the yuan could start to displace the dollar in oil trading. For now, though, that is fanciful.

A previous attempt by China to introduce oil futures, in the early 1990s, failed because of unstable pricing. This time regulators prepared methodically. To ward off speculators, notorious in Chinese markets, they made the storage of oil very expensive. Volumes were light in the first few days of trading—less than a tenth of the averages for similar contracts in New York and London. But all went smoothly. It was a good, if modest, start.

China has two goals. The basic one is to help its companies hedge against volatility. Chinese refiners and traders have struggled to…Continue reading