Tag: Business and finance

Glad rags to sad rags

IN A market in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, a cacophonous auction is under way. Sellers hold crumpled T-shirts and faded jeans aloft; traders shout and jostle for the best picks. Everything is second-hand. A Tommy Hilfiger shirt goes for 5,000 Rwandan francs ($5.82); a plain one for a tenth of that. Afterwards, a trader sorts through the purchases he will resell in his home village. The logos hint at their previous lives: Kent State University, a rotary club in Pennsylvania, Number One Dad.

These auctions were once twice as busy, says Félicité Mukarurangwa, a trader. But in 2016 Rwanda’s government hiked import duties on a kilo of used clothes from $0.20 to $2.50. Now she struggles to break even. The traders are not the only ones who are unhappy. Exporters in America claim the tariffs are costing jobs there. In March President Donald Trump warned that he would suspend Rwanda’s duty-free access to American markets for its apparel after 60 days if…Continue reading

A YEAR ago, investors in 21st Century Fox, Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire, could have been forgiven a bout of the blues. Shares were down by 30% from their peak in December 2014. Viewership of most of the company’s American networks was in decline, and millions had dropped expensive pay-TV packages, including its own, in favour of cheaper web-delivered video.

On May 25th Fox’s shares reached a new all-time high, rising above $39 a share. The business has not turned around, but Fox’s value has, as a prize for other media titans seeking global scale. Comcast, a cable giant, is preparing to top Disney’s $52bn all-stock offer for much of Fox (plus almost $15bn in debt) with an all-cash offer of at least $60bn. Disney is reportedly readying cash to sweeten its offer, which Fox’s board had approved in December. The final sale price could exceed $70bn. The winner will take on Netflix and Amazon in the competition for customers globally. The loser will be at risk of falling…Continue reading

“IT’S just not going to happen,” said Troy Taylor, the boss of a Coca Cola bottling company, when asked at a recent Federal Reserve event whether he foresaw broad-based wage gains. His remarks (unlike the fizzy drinks he sells) were unsweetened. But experience suggests he may have a point. In most rich countries, real pay has grown by at most 1% per year, on average, since 2000. For low-wage workers the stagnation has been more severe and prolonged: between 1979 and 2016, pay adjusted for inflation for the bottom fifth of American earners barely rose at all. Politicians are scrambling for scapegoats and solutions. But addressing stagnant wages requires a better understanding of the relationship between pay, productivity and power.

In the simplest economic models, productivity is almost all that matters. Workers are paid exactly and precisely in accordance with their contribution to a firm’s output. Were they paid less, rival employers could profit by luring them away with higher pay, and wages…Continue reading

TIPPED, not stirred, is how hip young things in China now take their tea. To be exact, at a 45-degree tilt. So advise the tea-ristas of HEYTEA, a budding, pricey tea chain, the better to blend the bitter tang of freshly brewed leaves with a salty cream-cheese “cap”. Naigai cha, or cheese-tea, has taken China’s rich eastern cities by storm. For months after HEYTEA shops appeared in Shanghai in February 2017, security guards had to manage queues with waiting times of up to three hours. Impatient customers hired queuers from personal-services apps to stand in line for them. Cups were limited to two purchases a person to ward off scalpers (the limit is still in place in Beijing).

To many in the beverage industry this smacked of “thirst marketing”, purposely keeping supply scarce. HEYTEA denies this, as well as accusations of padding out its own queues. Though everything from fancy eateries to convenience stores is on China’s main food-delivery apps, HEYTEA stayed off…Continue reading

JUST a few hundred metres from Budapest airport’s runways, the wails of scorched airline passengers echo around an industrial estate. But no real people are being harmed. Here Wizz Air, a rapidly growing Hungarian carrier, trains cabin crew and pilots in evacuating its planes safely. Last year the airline recruited 1,000 new staff, twice as many as the year before. In February construction work started on a bigger training centre to teach an extra 1,400 cabin crew it will need next year.

If anyone will be burned by this expansion it will be Europe’s cheapest airline, Ryanair. Over the past two decades its chief executive, Michael O’Leary, turned the Irish minnow into Europe’s biggest carrier by copying the low-cost model of Southwest, an American budget airline. It has long had no-frills rivals such as easyJet and Norwegian. But these two have never been able to match Ryanair’s low cost base. Yet after Wizz’s full-year results on May 24th, in which it reported record profits,…Continue reading

White heat of change

FEW industrial scenes offer the drama of a steelworks in full flow. Perched high in a cabin, a technician guides a bucket the size of a house to send 250 tons of lava-like molten metal into a vast crucible. As a roar echoes across a gargantuan hall, a pile of scrap slides into the mixture. Plumes of illuminated smoke rise. Sparks like giant fireflies tumble down. ThyssenKrupp’s steelmaking plant in Duisburg makes 30,000 tons of the metal daily.

The firm itself is going through an industrial drama, after years of ailing. Its boss, Heinrich Hiesinger, was seen as its saviour after arriving from Siemens late in 2010. But swiftness is not his forte: a colleague says he talks of “diligence before speed”. He did rid the firm of loss-making steel plants, such as assets in the Americas that cost €8bn ($9.3bn) in write-downs. Yet he has not reformed a top-heavy company.

Several bits of the group—a hotch-potch that includes submarine-,…Continue reading

THE last time a corporate-finance concept went mainstream was during the financial crisis, when banks’ capital became a subject you could raise in yoga studios or biker bars without being hushed or hospitalised. Now there is a new candidate: share buy-backs, which reached $189bn in the three months to March for firms in the S&P 500 index, a record high. They may rise even further when a wave of cash comes home in response to America’s new tax rules, which encourage firms to repatriate the $1trn of funds they have parked in foreign subsidiaries. Apple plans to spend $100bn on buy-backs, for example.

As the sums rise, so does the controversy. In a buy-back a firm acquires its own stock to return cash to its shareholders. To critics they are a financial voodoo that exacerbates inequality and depresses investment. Elizabeth Warren, a left-leaning senator, wants them partially banned. But among investors such hostility is seen as a “derangement syndrome”, to quote Cliff Asness, the boss of AQR,…Continue reading

AFTER 99 peaceful days of protests, the 100th brought carnage. On May 22nd in Tuticorin, a coastal town near the southern tip of India, police indiscriminately fired live rounds into a crowd of several thousand demonstrators who were opposing the planned expansion of a copper-smelting facility. Thirteen people died and scores more were injured. The fallout threatens to be a chronic headache both for the Indian authorities and Vedanta, the mining giant which owns the facility.

Corporate public-relations consultants in London, where Vedanta’s main holding company is based, have depressingly ample experience in helping commodities firms whose reputations risk being sullied by such police violence. Royal Dutch Shell, an oil group, still faces ire for the way Nigerian authorities arrested then executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, an activist, in 1995. Lonmin, a platinum-miner also listed in London, had to rebuff claims by South African police that it should carry some blame for cops shooting its striking workers…Continue reading

HERE we go again. Financial markets don’t much like uncertainty. Thanks to Italy’s politicians, in recent days they have had plenty. By May 30th some calm had returned: it seemed possible that a pair of populist parties, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, would form a government after all (see article). Markets had been in turmoil for two days, unsettled by a farcical back-and-forth between the populists and the country’s president, who had rejected the parties’ choice of a Eurosceptic economist as finance minister. The politicians may have done the markets a service, by shaking them out of complacency. Investors may have returned the favour, by shaking some sense into the politicians—at least for now.

Italy is perennially slow-growing and groans under public debt of around €2.3trn ($2.7trn), or 132% of GDP. The drama…Continue reading

ARE you on America’s newest airport-security watch list? You could be, but you would never know. That is because the list is secret, and no one quite understands what it takes to land on it. News of the list emerged earlier this month, when the New York Times obtained a five-page internal directive from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the government agency that oversees airport security in America. It revealed that the TSA could place flyers on the watch list, which it created in February, if they engaged in behaviour that the agency found problematic. That includes violent altercations with TSA agents. But, more problematically, it appears to extend well beyond physical assaults.

“An intent to injure or cause physical pain is not required, nor is an actual physical injury,” the memo states. People can be…Continue reading