Tag: Business

THE decline of the conventional job has been much heralded in recent years. It is now nearly axiomatic that people will work for a range of employers in a variety of roles over their lifetimes, with a much more flexible schedule than in the past. Opinion is still divided over whether this change is a cause for concern or a chance for workers to be liberated from the rut of office life.

Is the shift really happening? Some figures from the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS), released on June 7th, showed that only 10.1% of American workers were in “alternative employment” last year, a lower proportion than the 10.7% recorded in 2005. In contrast, a study of the British economy by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that the self-employed sector has been growing, with the number of self-employed sole traders rising by 25% between 2007-08 and 2015-16.

These two measures are different. But getting a good statistical fix is not easy when the jobs are hard to define. The ecology of…Continue reading

AFTER a plane crash, air-safety investigators are dispatched to the wreckage site to find out what went wrong and ensure it never happens again. Their financial counterparts have a similar job to do with the Indian government’s proposed sale of Air India. Mooted for nearly a year, the first round of preliminary bids ended on May 31st having attracted not a single offer.

Bureaucrats running the divestment process had expected many suitors. Domestic aviation is booming. Air India has a modern fleet, an enviable brand and valuable landing rights in many foreign airports. No fewer than 160 queries had come in from interested parties, said to include local and foreign airlines as well as Tata, a conglomerate. Might a bidding war ensue, some wondered?

Not quite. Bidders were seemingly never as keen as government leaks to the media suggested. For one, Air India came saddled with unwanted cargo in the form of 334bn rupees ($5bn) of debt. And a potential buyer would also be expected…Continue reading

Delivering the goods

LATE on a Monday morning the village of Zhangwei is quiet. Chickens scratch and cluck at the side of the road. Workers use wooden spades to spread grain on the highway to dry, using half its width so that traffic can still pass on the other side. Yet at the community centre at the village’s heart, two objects hint at a feat of ultra-modern logistics about to unfold: a circle of green astroturf laid down in the central courtyard, and a billboard on the front of the building bearing the logo of JD.com, China’s second-largest online retailer.

A low whirr breaks the stillness as a spiky dot appears on the horizon. The drone arrives overhead with a roar, hovers for a moment, then lowers itself towards the green circle like a mantis, three sets of propellers churning the air into whorls of straw and dust. Slung beneath it is a red cardboard box branded with JD’s cheery dog mascot. Just a few feet above the ground, the drone drops the box then zips back…Continue reading

ALMOST to the day 17 years ago Steve Ballmer, then boss of Microsoft, the world’s biggest software firm, called Linux a “cancer”, meaning that the open-source operating system would spell the death of proprietary software. On June 4th, his successor, Satya Nadella, announced that the firm would take over GitHub, the main source of such tumours today, for $7.5bn. The deal is yet another sign of Microsoft’s startling recent metamorphosis.

GitHub is no household name, but among programmers it is as important as Facebook—which explains the impressive price tag for a firm that earned only an estimated $200m of revenues last year. More than 28m developers globally keep their code on the website, which offers all kinds of tools and services. Most important of these is allowing software projects, whether open-source or not, easily to pull together code from different contributors.

For Microsoft the deal is a homecoming. It used to be a kind of GitHub itself. When Windows,…Continue reading

Follow the Maany

THE glitzy Gulf states take pride in superlatives. They have the world’s tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, even (for a time) the most expensive cocktail. To that list, add a slightly less glamorous entry: what a judge has called one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. On June 1st a court in the Cayman Islands issued a verdict in the long-running saga of Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi & Brothers Company (AHAB), a conglomerate. When the Saudi company defaulted in 2009, its creditors scrambled to recoup billions in losses. The effective bankruptcy touched off lawsuits from Saudi Arabia to Switzerland. At last, after the longest trial in Cayman Islands’ history, it is one step closer to resolution.

No one emerged from court looking good. Central to the case was whether the founding Gosaibi family knew about fraud carried out by Maan al-Sanea, one of their firm’s executives. Born to a Kuwaiti family, Mr Sanea married into the family in 1980 and…Continue reading

Clothing as a service

AT ABOUT 4.30am the first of thousands of black garment bags arrive by truck at a vast warehouse less than ten miles (16km) from Lower Manhattan. The bags brim with designer dresses and other trendy clothing and accessories. Workers begin inspecting the garments. A billowy, patterned blouse smells a bit ripe. A floor-length red gown has a tear. A stain sullies the floral pattern of a silk sundress.

Turnaround is quick. The blouse is sent to washing machines, the gown goes to one of the 75 seamstresses lined up next to a wall of thread, zippers, buttons and other adornments in every imaginable colour and the silk dress makes its way to the “spotters”: experts who know how to get tough stains out of delicate fabrics. Most items are in and out in less than a day.

Such efficiency is essential for Rent the Runway (RTR), a New York-based, privately-owned startup with a value of almost $800m that rents out…Continue reading

Delivering the goods

LATE on a Monday morning the village of Zhangwei is quiet. Chickens scratch and cluck at the side of the road. Workers use wooden spades to spread grain on the highway to dry, using half its width so that traffic can still pass on the other side. Yet at the community centre at the village’s heart, two objects hint at a feat of ultra-modern logistics about to unfold: a circle of green astroturf laid down in the central courtyard, and a billboard on the front of the building bearing the logo of JD.com, China’s second-largest online retailer.

A low whirr breaks the stillness as a spiky dot appears on the horizon. The drone arrives overhead with a roar, hovers for a moment, then lowers itself towards the green circle like a mantis, three sets of propellers churning the air into whorls of straw and dust. Slung beneath it is a red cardboard box branded with JD’s cheery dog mascot. Just a few feet above the ground, the drone drops the box then zips back…Continue reading

Fan Bingbing, on location in Khorgos

IT IS hard to go a day in China without seeing Fan Bingbing. The doe-eyed starlet gazes from film posters (she has averaged four films a year for the past decade), airbrushed ads for global brands and glossy magazine covers. But in the past week she has graced articles about tax evasion. Shares in a film-production firm that she partly owns fell by 10% on fears that it might be ensnared in a scandal in which actors have allegedly concealed their salaries. Ms Fan has denied wrongdoing. On June 3rd the government began a probe into tax compliance in the entertainment industry.

The controversy began when Cui Yongyuan, a TV presenter, described two anonymous contracts on Weibo, a microblog, one for 10m yuan ($1.6m) and another, linked to the first, for 50m yuan. He said it was a case of the “yin-and-yang” payments prevalent in the film business: reporting a low salary for taxation and pocketing a larger sum. Share prices of big film…Continue reading

SUPERCOMPUTERS usually fill entire rooms. But the one on the fifth floor of an office building in the centre of Bristol fits in an average-sized drawer. Its 16 processors punch more than 1,600 teraflops, a measure of computer performance. This puts the machine among the world’s 100 fastest, at least when solving certain artificial-intelligence (AI) applications, such as recognising speech and images.

The computer’s processors, developed by Graphcore, a startup, are tangible proof that AI has made chipmaking exciting again. After decades of big firms such as America’s Intel and Britain’s ARM ruling the semiconductor industry, the insatiable demand for computing generated by AI has created an opening for newcomers. And it may even be big enough to allow some startups to establish themselves as big, independent firms.

New Street, a research firm, estimates that the market for AI chips could reach $30bn by 2022. That would exceed the $22bn of revenue that Intel is expected to earn…Continue reading

IT IS a classic startup story, but with a twist. Three 20-somethings launched a firm out of a dorm room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, with the goal of using algorithms to predict the reply to an e-mail. In May they were fundraising for their startup, EasyEmail, when Google held its annual conference for software developers and announced a tool similar to EasyEmail’s. Filip Twarowski, its boss, sees Google’s incursion as “incredible confirmation” they are working on something worthwhile. But he also admits that it came as “a little bit of a shock”. The giant has scared off at least one prospective backer of EasyEmail, because venture capitalists try to dodge spaces where the tech giants might step.

The behemoths’ annual conferences, held to announce new tools, features, and acquisitions, always “send shock waves of fear through entrepreneurs”, says Mike Driscoll, a partner at Data Collective, an investment firm. “Venture capitalists attend to see…Continue reading