Tag: Business

There goes $242m

EVEN by the standards of Hollywood, it sounds an unlikely pitch—an app that offers almost unlimited access to cinemas for $10 a month. The service, called MoviePass, pays cinemas full price for nearly every ticket that filmgoers use. By design, it loses more money the more people use it. The ending seems to be predictable. But might it have a twist?

MoviePass has burned far more cash even than its executives anticipated since introducing the unlimited plan in August last year. It has attracted more than 3m subscribers and will lose “at least” $45m this month, according to a filing to the Securities & Exchange Commission on July 10th by Helios & Matheson, a data firm which bought a majority stake in MoviePass last year and now owns 92% of it. Helios & Matheson reported it had lost $242m in the nine months to June 30th and that its monthly losses would increase as the service becomes more popular. The firm wants to issue more shares and…Continue reading

THE Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in South Yorkshire, England, looks like the very model of a modern industrial site—bright, shiny, airy and clean. In June 1984 it was the site of a traumatic moment in British history—the Battle of Orgreave, when picketing miners clashed with police as they tried to stop lorries collecting supplies from a coking plant. The incident symbolised Britain’s post-war record of industrial decline and bitter strikes.

The old coking plant is long gone. In its place is a promising attempt to create jobs for a new generation of workers, and to tackle an ancient and ridiculous British class divide. An important part of this divide is that universities have long been seen as a place for academic subjects, calling for essays and equations. People who got their hands dirty making stuff did not go to college. But as of last autumn apprentices at the AMRC have been able to study for degree courses. When they graduate they will have an engineering degree from…Continue reading

DEAR chief executive. First, congratulations. You have decided to float your firm’s shares on the stockmarket. After years of toil behind the scenes, it’s time for the big stage. You probably feel pretty good right now, especially after those insightful bankers from Goldman Sachs said that your firm is one of the most impressive that they have ever seen in their careers and that they are generously going to give you a discount on their normal fee and charge you only 4% of the IPO proceeds. Unfortunately, though, things will now get much worse before they get better. An IPO is like having children: months of waiting, an agonising delivery and afterwards your world is never the same again.

At least you are not alone. American IPO volumes are at their highest level for three years. In New York Dropbox and Spotify recently listed. Even Michael Dell, who took his computer firm private in 2013 and grumbles about the myopia of stockmarkets, is taking his firm public again, through a merger. In China a…Continue reading

FOR years, online retailers in America have enjoyed an unfair advantage over their bricks-and-mortar competitors. Unless they were physically located in the same state as a shopper, they were not obliged to collect state and local sales taxes. Shoppers were still legally required to pay taxes on their online purchases, but not everyone did in practice. Many instead to chose to treat the internet as a place to find discounts. Given that state and local taxes can add up to as much as 12% of a product’s prices, the potential savings were substantial. This practice is now coming to an end. On June 21st America’s Supreme Court ruled that online retailers would finally have to start collecting sales tax themselves.

The company that has benefited most from this loophole is probably Amazon, America’s biggest online retailer. When it started out, it collected sales taxes only from customers who lived in its home state of Washington. In recent years, however, Amazon has built distribution…Continue reading

Jeff dispenses more disruption

FOR roughly a year speculation has been feverish: would Amazon, an online retail giant, muscle into America’s prescription-drugs market? On June 28th that uncertainty ended when it bought a small online pharmacy, PillPack, based in Manchester, New Hampshire, for about $1bn. When the deal is completed later this year, Amazon will be able to sell prescription drugs to customers in the 50 states where PillPack has licenses.

The news of Amazon’s entry had a predictable effect on incumbent firms. Shares of three large bricks-and-mortar pharmacy chains, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Rite Aid and CVS Health, lost $11bn in value. Drug distributors such as Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen were also hit. Amazon gained $19.8bn. Michael Rea, boss of Rx Savings Solutions, a health-technology firm, says the purchase increased the speed with which Amazon can get into the prescription-drug market, making slimmer profit margins…Continue reading

IT IS rare to see the words “Canada” and “world domination” in the same sentence. The country’s cannabis producers want to change that. With an eye on October 17th, the date on which recreational marijuana will become legal, medical-cannabis firms have been expanding at home and talking up their global ambitions in a most un-Canadian way. Lots of joint ventures—in the legal sense—are being signed abroad. The hope is that having a base in the first large country to make pot legal for adults (Uruguay legalised cannabis in 2017) will give them an unbeatable lead.

To date firms have financed their expansion plans largely by selling shares, supplemented by funding from smaller investment banks and credit unions. Enthusiastic investors have pushed share prices to stratospheric levels (see chart)—many warn of a bubble. But the biggest banks, without whom nothing substantial is financed in Canada, have been wary. That changed on June 26th when the Bank of Montreal agreed to loan Aurora Cannabis up…Continue reading

Straight outta South Carolina

THE menace to Americans from immigration of the wrong sort is immense, according to President Donald Trump. The list of items he wants to deter from crossing the border includes objects as well as people, and one in particular holds his attention. In trade terms, he told Fox News on July 1st, “the cars are the big one.” With good reason, he views auto tariffs as a far deadlier weapon than the duties already imposed on steel and aluminium when it comes to extracting trade concessions from other countries.

That is dire news for all carmakers, which are among the world’s most globalised firms. But Germany’s are the most dependent on exports. Most well-off Americans long ago traded in Lincolns and Cadillacs for the refinement of Teutonic marques. A tweet from Mr Trump on June 22nd reaffirming his tariff plans sent the shares of Daimler, which makes Mercedes, and of BMW into a nosedive.

Mr Trump fumes that American cars exported…Continue reading

Here’s to carbon capture

IN THEORY, the world has too much carbon dioxide. In 2015 the Paris climate agreement set limits on emissions of the gas to prevent global temperatures rising by more than two degrees Celsius above those of pre-industrial times. But in practice, makers of food and drink in Europe have found that they cannot find enough of the gas. And this unlikely shortage is likely to get worse in future.

Food-grade CO₂ is a vital ingredient: it puts the fizz in carbonated drinks and beer, knocks out animals before slaughter and, as one of the gases inside packaging, delays meat and salad from going off. A shortage of the stuff has therefore created havoc in foodmakers’ supply chains. Heineken, a Dutch brewer, and Coca-Cola, an American drinks giant, have been forced to close some of their European plants. JD Wetherspoon, a British pub chain, ran out of some beers. Scotland’s largest pig slaughterhouse was forced to shut. On June 29th Warburtons,…Continue reading

IT EMERGED on July 2nd that Hollywood may make “The King of Oil”, a film about Marc Rich, an American-Swiss commodities trader who became a fabulously rich fugitive from American justice. On July 3rd Glencore, the firm founded by Mr Rich, said America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) had requested documents regarding its compliance with corruption and money-laundering laws. Depending on the outcome, the film may have a good sequel.

It has been a year of pain for Glencore, a mining and trading giant. News that the DoJ wanted over ten years of documents related to activities in three countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria and Venezuela, knocked its market value by 8.5%, or $4.3bn (on July 5th it announced a $1bn share buyback). Its shares had already lagged its peers this year because of its exposure to the DRC and Russia, where it has suffered collateral damage from American sanctions.

Glencore, whose boss, Ivan Glasenberg, is its second-biggest…Continue reading

THE story of China Merchants Group began in the 1870s. After its defeats in the Opium wars, the Qing government tried to learn from the West by adopting foreign technology and encouraging new commercial ventures, including China Merchants. The banking-to-shipping conglomerate, based in Hong Kong, has since evolved into one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises, with $1.1trn in assets.

Fittingly, its latest endeavour again involves looking westward for new technologies. On July 1st it announced that its investment arm and other China-based investors would put 40bn yuan ($6bn) into a 100bn yuan venture-capital (VC) fund, the China New Era Technology Fund.

That total pot is a nod to the much larger project that it aims to replicate: the $100bn Vision Fund, formed by Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, a Japanese telecoms and internet firm, to invest in flashy startups. It borrows a little of its aura by partnering with Centricus, a British investment company that helped Mr…Continue reading