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Facebook’s rumoured name-change reflects ambition—and weakness

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 wants to dominate cutting-edge chipmaking

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 should dissolve, disperse and seed China’s high-tech future

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…

Zhongwang, a Chinese aluminium giant, may withstand American pressure

But buckle under domestic power cutsLIU ZHONGTIAN has been called Asia’s “aluminium king”. His firm, Zhongwang Group, is one of the world’s largest makers of aluminium products. At one point he was the richest man in China’s north-eastern rust belt, where the company is based. In America, Mr Liu has a different reputation. Firms controlled…

All manner of industries are piling into the hydrogen rush

Including some grubby ones“WE ARE BUILDING the energy company of the future…like Tesla did,” declares Seifi Ghasemi, chairman of Air Products. Comparing yourself to the electric-car darling may seem Napoleonic for a purveyor of industrial gases. But Mr Ghasemi, who has thought about one gas in particular, hydrogen, for 30 years, insists the comparison is…