Tag: Business and finance

WERE it not for the graffiti on abandoned buildings, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, two towns north of Leipzig joined as one in 2007, would seem devoid of young people. Pharmacies, physiotherapy surgeries and shops selling garden gnomes line the sleepy streets. In its heyday the place had a booming chemical industry. Today “the air is much cleaner and we can finally hang out laundry,” says an elderly local out on a morning stroll. “But many jobs were lost and so few children are left.” He points out a building that was once a school; today it is one of many care homes.

Despite an influx of 1.2m refugees over the past two years, Germany’s population faces near-irreversible decline. According to predictions from the UN in 2015, two in five Germans will be over 60 by 2050 and Europe’s oldest country will have shrunk to 75m from 82m. Since the 1970s, more Germans have been dying than are born. Fewer births and longer lives are a problem for most rich countries. But the consequences are more acute for Germany, where birth rates are lower than in Britain and France.

If Germany is a warning for others, its eastern part is a warning for its west. If it were still a country,…Continue reading

MANY airlines habitually overbook flights, working on the assumption that a few passengers will always cancel at the last minute. By selling more tickets than seats, they can ensure their flights are full even when there are no-shows.

Sometimes that calculation misfires and airlines have to bump passengers. There is a right and a wrong way to do this. The option United Airlines plumped for on April 9th would strike most as the wrong way. 

According to the Courier-Journal, after passengers had boarded a service from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky, the airline discovered that it needed to fly some stand-by employees to Louisville for a flight the following day. When no passengers accepted an offer of $400 to be placed on a later flight, it upped the ante to $800 (plus a night in a hotel).

That was enough to tempt two passengers to leave. At that point, rather than raising the price further, the crew randomly selected a pair of travellers, apparently using a computer. The unlucky  flyers were…Continue reading

THE launch of the world’s first cannabis-focused exchange-traded fund (ETF), on the Toronto Stock Exchange on April 5th, is welcome news to aficionados of marijuana. As with any ETF, the fund spares would-be investors the need to pick out their own favourite stocks, or indeed weed out dodgy ones, as it will simply replicate and track an index, in this case the North American Medical Marijuana Index.

The fund’s home in Canada is no accident. Medical marijuana has been legal there since 2001, with growing and selling outsourced to licensed firms since 2013. (Justin Trudeau’s administration has also announced plans to legalise recreational use by 2018.) In America, despite state-level legalisation, marijuana is still illegal under federal law, making it nigh-impossible for pot firms to even access the banking system, let alone seek a proper public listing.

As a result, the index itself ends up having a strong Canadian bent. Eleven of its 16 companies are based there, and all but three are licensed suppliers of medical marijuana in Canada, though a few also have American operations. Three of the others are American, though none of them deal directly with…Continue reading

THERE is a hawk in Central Park that sometimes dismembers its prey on the balcony outside Jeff Bewkes’s office. Guts are splattered around in the kind of Darwinian spectacle that any self-respecting media baron should appreciate as he plots plans for future world domination. Mr Bewkes, however, only manages a laconic shrug when he mentions the feathered predator.

The boss of Time Warner is an anti-mogul in more ways than one. In an industry long-dominated by imperious tycoons intent on amassing power—think of Rupert Murdoch, or Viacom’s Sumner Redstone in his heyday—Mr Bewkes has shrunk a content empire, not expanded it. He is about to sell it to AT&T for $109bn in the fifth-biggest takeover of all time. If the deal goes through shareholders will have made a 341% return during his tenure (including spin-offs and dividends), making Time Warner one of the best-performing big firms in America during that time.

Beneath his laid-back surfer persona, Mr Bewkes has been ruthless but in the rational pursuit of his owners’ interests, not his own vanity. His tenure can be split into three parts—culling, defending and preparing to exit on a high.

Back in…Continue reading

“YOU are either part of the solution or part of the problem,” it says in painted letters on a wall. “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” says the wall opposite. An old rickshaw sits among beanbags and a vase of flowers rests on an ancient oil barrel in the corner. “We wanted the space to feel like Google,” says Eleni Gabre-Madhin, the founder of blueMoon, a new agribusiness incubator that opened in Addis Ababa in February, without a trace of irony.

Incubators and their cousins, accelerators, provide hands-on training and mentoring, and often a physical space, to help early-stage business ideas develop. In Silicon Valley they find capital for startups and take a slice of equity in return for their services. Ms Gabre-Madhin says that blueMoon draws inspiration from Y Combinator, an American accelerator founded in 2005 whose investees include Dropbox and Airbnb. The new firm’s first cohort of startups will train at the office for four months, and it will give each a small cash injection in exchange for a 10% stake.

That is a rarity in Africa’s startup scene. A simpler and more common model is for “tech hubs” to provide office space, some networking…Continue reading

THOMAS DE LA RUE set up shop more than 200 years ago, printing newspapers, then playing cards and stamps. In 1860 a contract to print banknotes for Mauritius started a transformation. Today De La Rue is the largest commercial banknote and passport printer, involved in aspects of the production of currencies for 140 countries, and passports for over 40.

The British firm’s chief executive, Martin Sutherland, is relatively relaxed about the much-heralded death of cash. Despite advances in payments technology, and a shift to cards in Europe, the total demand for cash has proven remarkably resilient. Transaction values are rising rapidly in emerging economies, where hard currency is still the norm. De La Rue expects world demand for banknotes to grow by 3-4% a year for the foreseeable future.

But there are problems nonetheless. Even at the best of times, note production, which accounts for over 70% of the company’s revenues, is a volatile business. Contracts are lumpy. State-owned printers often call in commercial printers at short notice to manage spikes in demand, which are unpredictable. On top of that, national authorities are demanding better value. They are…Continue reading

Why on Earth did you park here?

ELON MUSK, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has had two bits of good news recently about his various bets on new technology. SpaceX, his privately-held launch company, last month became the first successfully to reuse a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. And this week Tesla, his electric-car manufacturer, at last hit its production targets.

Some analysts doubted Tesla would meet its goals after a series of production difficulties. But the carmaker said first-quarter deliveries were just over 25,000 vehicles, a record for the firm and a 69% increase over the same period in 2016. Some 13,450 were its sleek Model S saloons and about 11,550 were the firm’s new SUV, the Model X. This puts Tesla on track to produce the 50,000 vehicles it has promised to make in the first half of this year. That is good progress. But Tesla is going to have to crank production up by an awful lot more to make the 500,000 cars a year which Mr Musk wants to see pouring off the production line by 2018, let alone the 1m intended for just two years later.

To reach those volumes, Tesla is counting on its forthcoming Model 3. Priced at…Continue reading

Off to new platforms

IT SOUNDS like a spectacular feat of engineering. Employees of Royal Dutch Shell located in Calgary, Canada, recently drilled a well 6,200 miles (10,000km) away in Vaca Muerta, Argentina. In fact, the engineers of the Anglo-Dutch oil major were using computers to perform what they call “virtual drilling”, based on their knowledge of Fox Creek, a shale bed in Alberta, which has similar geological features to Argentina’s biggest shale deposit. They used real-time data sent from a rig in Vaca Muerta to design the well and control the speed and pressure of the drilling. On their second try, they completed the well for $5.4m, down from $15m a few years ago. “It’s the cheapest well we’ve drilled in Argentina,” says Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive.

Shell is not alone in deploying computer wizards alongside geologists in an attempt to lower costs in an era of moderate oil prices. The industry as a whole is waking up to the fact that digitisation and automation have transformed other industries, such as commerce and manufacturing, and that they have been left behind. Technology firms and consultancies are knocking on…Continue reading

BETWEEN 1999 and 2014 sales of prescription opioid drugs almost quadrupled in America, an increase that came not simply in response to patient suffering but because more of the population are addicted to these powerful drugs. Such is the demand for them, Americans now consume four-fifths of the global supply.

Growth on this scale has been profitable for some: OxyContin, a popular opioid made by Purdue Pharma, a drug company in Stamford, Connecticut, has made its manufacturer tens of billions of dollars (see chart). But more broadly it has spelled tragedy. Deaths from opioid use in America quadrupled over the same period. About 90 people die every day, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

That dissonance between corporate success and private pain has become a matter of public interest. On March 28th Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said that she would investigate the role that pharma firms played in creating the opioid…Continue reading