Tag: Business

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

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

HOW much should company bosses be paid relative to their employees? It depends who you ask. Plato argued that the richest members of society should earn no more than four times the pay of the poorest. John Pierpont Morgan, a banker from America’s gilded age, reckoned that bosses should earn at most 20 times the pay of their underlings. Investors today hold chief executives in vastly higher esteem. According to new filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), America’s largest publicly listed firms (those worth at least $1bn) on average paid their chief executives 130 times more than their typical workers in 2017. The figures are being disclosed by firms in their financial filings for the first time this year.

The SEC’s new requirement to quantify the gap has its origins in the financial crisis. Facing populist outrage over the pay packages of Wall Street executives held responsible for triggering the crash, Congress added a provision to the Dodd-Frank act, a financial-reform…Continue reading

A RECENT tweet from Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, an electric-car firm, shows footage of a Model X undergoing rollover testing. The SUV is propelled rapidly sideways on a trolley before encountering a sand trap that stops it suddenly, tipping the car. The Tesla teeters between ending up on its roof or settling back on its wheels. It is an apt metaphor for a firm hovering between fulfilling its promise and succumbing to financial woes.

In April Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley, a bank, said the next three months would be the “most critical time in Tesla’s history” since launching its upmarket Model S six years ago. The move from a niche in expensive electric cars to bringing battery power to the masses has been troublesome, to say the least. The firm had once hoped to be making 10,000 of its cheaper Model 3s a week by the end of 2018. But difficulties with a highly automated production line mean that just over 2,000 are rolling out of the factory each week. Even a revised goal of 5,000…Continue reading

No ordinary fashion statement

WALK down the streets of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and at first sight the passers-by look rather uniform. The women are in tidy skirt suits and medium-high heels. The men sport variations on the theme of the jacket and wide trousers preferred by Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Government-mandated lapel pins with portraits of one or both of Mr Kim’s predecessors continue to be ubiquitous. But look closer and a wealth of individual variations can be seen, particularly among the women: some bright-coloured lace stitched onto a jacket here, a daringly cut skirt in a sparkling satin material there.

Although fashion from China and even from—Kim forbid—South Korea is increasingly making its way to the markets of Pyongyang, many of these flourishes are the work of the city’s own tailors. They may be only a small subset of North Korea’s textile industry—which accounted for around 30% of exports before being hit by sanctions…Continue reading

“PLEASE don’t leave us.” From the dozens of e-mails in people’s inboxes, begging them to give their consent to be sent further messages, you could deduce that the senders of newsletters and the like are hardest hit by the European Union’s tough new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect on May 25th. But the main loser may well be an industry that few have ever heard of but most have dealings with every day: advertising technology, or ad tech. In fact, the GDPR would probably not exist at all were it not for this collection of companies, which have an insatiable hunger for personal data.

Ad tech emerged because advertising is the internet’s default business model. Since targeted ads tend to be more efficient and targeting requires personal data (sites previously visited, searches in online stores and the like), these data became the fuel of a new industry to automate online advertising. It is so complex that even experts often resort to what is…Continue reading