It has been one of Europe’s dirtiest companies for more than a century; now rwe is aiming to be among the cleanest. Germany’s largest power generator has recently taken two big steps towards this goal. On October 1st it agreed to buy the renewable-energy business of Consolidated Edison (ConEd), an American utility, for $6.8bn. Three…
Posts published in “Commodities”
The dividing line between firm and sect is often thin. How to tell them apartHERE ARE some common characteristics of cults. They have hierarchical structures. They prize charismatic leaders and expect loyalty. They see the world as a hostile place. They have their own jargon, rituals and beliefs. They have a sense of mission. They…
Busts follow booms in the chip business. Governments could make things worseAMID A CHIP shortage that has hobbled producers of everything from toys to wind turbines, chipmakers are on a spending spree. On January 13th Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s biggest contract manufacturer, said it would spend up to $44bn on new capacity…
THANKS TO A venture-capital (VC) boom, it is no longer unusual to find tech unicorns, as unlisted startups valued above $1bn are known, springing up in middle-income countries. However, two coming from Turkey are particularly strange creatures. First, they are big. Trendyol, an e-commerce company, is valued at $16.5bn, giving it the status of a…
AS VIOLINS PLAY mournfully, Jon Stewart, an American comic, makes a mock-emotional appeal to viewers. “Every year thousands of hours of high-quality content go unwatched,” he says seriously. “Because good, hard-working people… don’t know how to find Apple TV+.”Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or…
“WE ARE A different company now. We are no longer focused just on mobile. And we have the numbers to back it up.” Cristiano Amon, the boss of Qualcomm, which makes chips mostly for smartphones, is emphatic when he describes what he will tell Wall Street at the firm’s investor day on November 16th. He…
THE TECH industry recently appeared to be sitting on cloud nine. One record after another fell when quarterly results were reported three months ago. Revenues had grown by 40% on average compared with the same period a year ago and profits by 90% for the five Western technology titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Facebook, Apple…
The company is more than a social network. It also has a reputation problemWORTH NEARLY $1TRN, Facebook is the world’s sixth-most-valuable company. Its revenues have grown by 56% in the past year, and its share price by more than a quarter. Nearly 3bn people use its products every month. Why would such a glittering success…
SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS (SE) is a behemoth. The South Korean tech company is the crown jewel of the mighty Samsung chaebol, as the country’s conglomerates are known. It makes more smartphones than any other company in the world, as well as home-entertainment systems and appliances. It dominates the manufacturing of memory chips, which are used to…
HUAWEI, A CHINESE firm emblematic of the breakdown in Sino-American relations, makes for a perfect business-school case study. Less than two years ago the company, based in the southern boom town of Shenzhen, had not only surpassed Nokia and Ericsson, its Nordic rivals, to become the world’s leading supplier of telecoms infrastructure. It had also…