Tag: Business

AS THEY slid down the streets of Davos this week, many executives will have felt a question gnawing in their guts. Who matters most: shareholders or the people? Around the world a revolt seems under way. A growing cohort—perhaps a majority—of citizens want corporations to be cuddlier, invest more at home, pay higher taxes and wages and employ more people, and are voting for politicians who say they will make all that happen. Yet according to law and convention in most rich countries, firms are run in the interest of shareholders, who usually want companies to use every legal means to maximise their profits.

Naive executives fear that they cannot reconcile these two impulses. Should they fire staff, trim costs and expand abroad—and face the wrath of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, the disgust of their children and the risk that they’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes? Or do they bend to popular opinion and allow profits to fall, inviting the danger that, in the run up to their 2018 annual general meeting, a fund manager from, say, Fidelity or Capital will topple them for underperformance?

Wiser executives…Continue reading

GIANT, cross-border mergers in Europe have been rare in recent years. Deals fail to happen even when mid-sized companies—such as family-owned and run specialist manufacturers in northern Italy or the Mittelstand in Germany—have the chance to gain global heft. For that blame founding owner-managers, many of whom are reluctant to lose control of treasured companies. Blame too an artisanal culture, particularly in southern Europe, in which firms’ owners say they are content to remain small and relatively obscure. Occasionally, too, nationalist politicians block efforts by perfidious foreigners to snaffle prized local brands.

Now, though, one of the largest-ever mergers in Europe actually looks set to go ahead. Luxottica, an Italian maker of fancy specs that was founded in 1961—it owns brands such as Ray Ban and Oakley—is to merge with Essilor, a spiffy French producer of lenses. The joint entity is set to combine Italian style with deft French engineering. The deal is supposed to be completed by the end of the year, creating a new entity with a market value of €46bn ($49bn), 140,000 staff and annual revenues of €15bn. It will be…Continue reading

An eye-catching opportunity

IT MAY be an exaggeration to talk of French firms “colonising” corporate Italy. Some Italian business leaders nonetheless fret about expansionists from across the northern border plucking control of some of their most celebrated local firms. Family-run companies, especially, can make tempting prospects: ones that make excellent products but struggle to grow, or that face agonising succession problems, are notably juicy targets.

The latest example, announced this week, is the merger between Luxottica, an Italian maker of fancy specs, and Essilor, a spiffy French producer of lenses. Together they will produce an entity with a market value of at least €46bn ($49bn), 140,000 staff and annual revenues of €15bn. The deal, one of the largest cross-border tie-ups attempted by European firms, had long been expected by industry watchers. The idea is to produce an entity that combines Italian style and skills in marketing with deft French engineering.

The new firm will be listed on the Paris bourse (as probably its eighth-largest firm) later this year. That will mark the culmination of…Continue reading

FOR each of the past three years, Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s (FCA) 3 litre V6 turbodiesel has made it to a list of the industry’s top ten engines compiled by Ward’s, a distinguished American car-industry trade publication. Its place on the shortlist for 2017 must now be in doubt. On January 12th America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused FCA (whose chairman, John Elkann, sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) of using illegal software in conjunction with the engines. This, it says, allowed 104,000 vehicles—mostly Dodge pickups and some Jeeps, fitted with the 3 litre V6 turbodiesel—to exceed legal limits of toxic emissions.

The news sent the firm’s shares plummeting by 17%, before recovering somewhat. Nervous investors feared a repeat of the huge penalty imposed on Germany’s Volkswagen (VW) for cheating American emissions laws. A day earlier VW had agreed to pay a criminal fine of $4.3bn for selling around 500,000 cars fitted with so-called “defeat devices” that are designed to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) under test conditions. With the latest sum included, its final bill…Continue reading

ON JANUARY 17th shareholders of Liberty Media Corporation, an American firm controlled by John Malone, a billionaire, are expected to approve a transaction that many hail as the sports deal of the decade. In September 2016 Liberty agreed to buy the Formula One (F1) motor-racing franchise from CVC, a private-equity group, for $8bn. F1, which generates annual revenue of $1.8bn, is now central to Liberty’s global plans: in a sign of the importance he attaches to the deal, Mr Malone has installed Chase Carey, a former president of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, as F1 chairman. The main Liberty subsidiary is to be renamed Formula One Group.

The deal has lots of attractions. For F1 it offers a potential solution to the problem of who will take over from Bernie Ecclestone, its 86-year-old impresario. There was no credible succession plan for the man whose wheeling and dealing has long held together the sport and its fractious collection of racing teams. With Mr Carey leading the search, there could be.

As for Liberty, F1 offers the sort of live, exclusive content it needs to lock in audiences that are peeling off to on-demand streaming…Continue reading

FOR fans of bitcoin, a digital currency, the year got off to a volatile start. On January 5th one bitcoin changed hands for nearly $1,150—almost as much as the record set three years ago. It has since dropped by 33%. Elsewhere in the land of monetary bits, things move more slowly but trouble is brewing: a potential patent war looms over the blockchain, a distributed ledger that authenticates and records every bitcoin transaction.

Heated fights over intellectual property are nothing new in promising technology markets. But given that the blockchain is expected to shake up everything from the way precious diamonds are safeguarded to the way shares are traded, the legal fights could be especially fierce.

On the face of it, the blockchain does not lend itself easily to staking out intellectual-property claims. Bitcoin’s creator, known only by his pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, published a paper about his invention, coded the first implementation and then disappeared—meaning that the core of the technology is now part of the public domain and only important additions and variations could be patented. And the blockchain’s components are widely known. In America court decisions as well as a new law on the granting of patents make it difficult to claim ownership for such financial innovations.

This hasn’t stopped firms from trying to get patent…Continue reading

“HELICOPTER parent” may sound like an insult, but given the chance, most parents would probably opt for the help of a chopper to zoom little ones between school, football practice and piano lessons. Getting children where they need to go is a huge hassle and expense, especially in homes where both parents work. Hailing rides through firms like Uber and Lyft has made life more convenient for adults. But drivers are not supposed to pick up unaccompanied minors (although some are known to bend the rules).

Youngsters represent a fresh-faced opportunity. Ride-hailing for kids could be a market worth at least $50bn in America, hopes Ritu Narayan, the founder of Zum, one of the startups pursuing the prize. These services are similar to Uber’s, except they allow parents to schedule rides for their children in advance. Children are given a code word to ensure they find the right driver, and parents receive alerts about the pick-up and ride, including the car’s speed. These services promise more rigorous background checks, fingerprinting and training than typical ride-hailing companies.

Annette Yolas, who works in sales at AT&T, a wireless…Continue reading

Now everyone sees red

ON THE flanks of the Simandou mountains in south-eastern Guinea live remote colonies of West African chimpanzees. They alone should be grinning over the fate of those who have sought to turn their tropical habitat into Africa’s biggest iron-ore mine. No one else is laughing. Rarely has such a group of billionaires, hedge-fund barons, mining firms, government officials and go-betweens been snagged in such a woeful saga.

In theory, the prospect of digging up 2bn tonnes of ore from a country that is among the poorest on Earth should be encouraging, if corruption is kept in check. The government of Alpha Condé promised to do so upon taking office in 2010. But in reality the line between paying go-betweens to help win concessions and lining officials’ pockets is so blurry that it can cause mining firms endless trouble.

In recent months the plotline has shifted. During the past half-decade the businessman painted as the saga’s pantomime villain has been Beny Steinmetz, a globe-trotting Israeli diamond merchant, worth billions, whose lurid battles over Simandou with Rio Tinto, one of the…Continue reading

Impossible is nothing

BEHIND closed doors in the Bavarian town of Ansbach a new factory is taking shape. That it will use robots and novel production techniques such as additive manufacturing (known as 3D printing) is not surprising for Germany, which has maintained its manufacturing base through innovative engineering. What is unique about this factory is that it will not be making cars, aircraft or electronics but trainers and other sports shoes—an $80bn-a-year industry that has been offshored largely to China, Indonesia and Vietnam. By bringing production home, this factory is out to reinvent an industry.

The Speedfactory, as the Ansbach plant is called, belongs to Adidas, a giant German sports-goods firm, and is being built with Oechsler Motion, a local firm that makes manufacturing equipment. Production is due to begin in mid-2017, slowly at first and then ramping up to 500,000 pairs of trainers a year. Adidas is constructing a second Speedfactory near Atlanta for the American market. If all goes well, they will spring up elsewhere, too.

The numbers are tiny for a company that makes some 300m pairs of sports shoes each year. Yet…Continue reading

IT WAS in the spring of 2016 that Donald Trump singled out Ford Motors, calling its plans to build a plant in Mexico an “absolute disgrace” and promising it would not happen on his watch. Back then, it seemed remarkable that the candidate thought he could boss around a firm of Ford’s stature. On January 3rd Ford cancelled its $1.6bn project in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí and said it would instead invest $700m into an existing plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, to build electric and autonomous cars.

Ford’s manoeuvre seems more wheel-spin than U-turn. Mr Trump’s strong-arming of corporate America is real enough, and the carmaker will have gained much favour with the president-elect. But its decision can be explained largely in operational terms. The original plan was for the new Mexican plant to build chiefly Focus cars—small passenger vehicles for which demand has fallen, thanks to America’s love affair with SUVs, crossovers and pick-up trucks and to low petrol prices. The decision to scrap the new plant looks far more like Ford reducing its exposure to the small-car game in North America than reducing its footprint in Mexico, says George…Continue reading