IN AMERICA, IF you want to dominate an industry, you channel your inner Elon Musk and shout about it. But CATL, the Chinese company that makes batteries for some of Mr Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles (EVs), is different. When your columnist first contacted it in 2017, the brush-off was swift. “We want to concentrate on…
Posts published in “Commodities”
CHENG WEI, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Didi Global, had scarcely a moment to revel in his firm’s $4.4bn New York listing. Within 48 hours of the initial public offering (IPO), which valued the Chinese ride-hailing giant at around $70bn, regulators in Beijing spoiled the party. On July 2nd the Cyberspace Administration of…
Companies can spend a fortune on their imageSOME DECADES ago Bartleby was covering the results of a company that was then in the FTSE 100 index. He was ushered into the offices of the firm’s public-relations outfit, whereupon the smooth-talking PR man (still a titan of the industry today) launched into a ten-minute monologue about…
Will this cause indigestion?WET MARKETS in China have suffered more than most businesses in the pandemic. After one in Wuhan was blamed as the source of covid-19, officials ordered others to shut. Shoppers have been reluctant to frequent bustling outdoor stalls selling fresh meat and vegetables. Many may never reopen—not least because they are being…
The plight of an industrial giant offers ammunition to both sides of the corporate-governance debate“I THINK THIS will be theatrical, and we are concerned that it will be sensational,” a senior official at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) warned an activist fund last year. The investors were pushing to put more outside…
Domestic demand for weapons is up. But American sanctions may hobble Chinese armsmakers’ tech ambitionsJIANGHANG AIRCRAFT EQUIPMENT has struggled to tantalise investors with the fuel systems and detachable petrol tanks it builds for Chinese warplanes. The company, controlled by Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the country’s biggest aerospace-and-defence conglomerate, had witnessed its share price…
ROCHE IS A strange entity. The Swiss giant is the world’s second-biggest drugmaker and one of big pharma’s most profitable firms. But its largest shareholding group, mostly descended from Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, who founded the company in 1896, is led by André Hoffmann, a nature lover and sustainability advocate who believes that the purpose of…
“SORRY” IS NOT a word you hear often in business. Japanese miscreants may bow in shame. But in the West even architects of some of the world’s most spectacular strategic blunders struggle to express remorse. It took Gerald Levin, boss of Time Warner, a decade to apologise for what he finally admitted was “the worst…
“THE STONE AGE did not end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of petroleum.” That battle cry animates critics of Big Oil, who dream of phasing out hydrocarbons in favour of cleaner fuels and technologies. Their bête noire is ExxonMobil, long the richest and mightiest…
It comes with political baggageROLF BUCH, chief executive of Vonovia, Germany’s biggest residential-property company, says he has learned a lot since he tried and failed to buy Deutsche Wohnen (DW), the second-biggest, in 2015. Back then Mr Buch’s hostile bid was an attempt to prevent DW from combining with third-ranked LEG. Neither deal came to…