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…
Posts published in “Commodities”
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…
“WE ARE A community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.” The opening lines of WeWork’s prospectus for its planned initial public offering in 2019 seem to confirm the worst about mission statements. People sit in a room earnestly discussing the differences between their purpose, their vision and…
BY SILICON VALLEY standards, Adobe is a dull company. Nudging 40 it is middle-aged. It does not make headlines with mega-mergers or have a swashbuckling chief executive. “I feel very comfortable not being out there pounding my chest,” confesses its boss, Shantanu Narayen, in a rare interview. All the while, Adobe has quietly managed to…
Vonovia’s takeover of Deutsche Wohnen is complete. The struggle against expropriation is notROLF BUCH has no time to rest on his laurels. On October 4th the chief executive of Vonovia, Germany’s biggest residential-property firm, managed after a long ordeal to seal the creation of Europe’s biggest such company through a merger with Deutsche Wohnen (DW),…
“A FLOTATION IS like your own funeral. You usually do it only once,” deadpans the chief financial officer of a software company that recently staged a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). Some compare a listing to a wedding, requiring much frantic preparation and ending with a big celebration and bell-ringing. Others liken it to an…
Talk of the importance of stakeholders is just thatFOR MOST people, coming into work is about more than picking up a pay slip. Not everyone aims to change the fate of humankind at the office. But even a sense that one’s employer is making a useful product helps escape the lure of the duvet in…
Investors rush to sample the streaming boomA ROCKSTAR’S WELCOME greeted Universal Music Group when it launched on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange on September 21st in Europe’s largest listing of the year. Giddy investors all but threw their knickers at the newly public company, whose share price finished the day up by 36%, valuing the world’s biggest…
It accuses online darlings like Coupang and Naver of picking up the old conglomerates’ bad habitsA FEW MONTHS ago Kim Beom-su looked like the face of responsible capitalism in South Korea. In March the billionaire founder of Kakao, which runs the country’s most successful messaging app and a slew of other digital services, promised to…
E-merchants also put profitability ahead of growth at all costFEW FIRMS have spawned an industry. Warby Parker, a millennial-chic spectacles firm, has a decent claim to be one of them. A decade ago the startup pioneered selling products directly to shoppers online, using the internet to avoid the costs of bricks-and-mortar shops and chip away…