When it comes to logistics, Chinese tech giants take divergent routesIN 2019 RICHARD LIU told couriers working for JD.com that the Chinese e-commerce giant he founded would cancel their base pay after a 2.8bn yuan ($438m) loss the previous year, its 12th consecutive one in the red. Riders would make only a commission on deliveries.…
Posts published in “Commodities”
It has few other choicesF OR YEARS McDonald’s has been a prime target of the battles of labour-rights campaigners over miserly pay. The day before its annual general meeting on May 20th Fight for $15, an advocacy group, organised a strike of McDonald’s workers in 15 cities across America. The strike went ahead despite the…
IN THE EARLY days of Amazon, its founder, Jeff Bezos, insisted there was some advertising the e-commerce giant wouldn’t touch, such as guns. That extended to James Bond’s Walther PPK. When producers of “Skyfall”, a Bond film released in 2012, sought to run an ad on the site, Amazon at first informed them that it…
Women still face barriers to progress at workBETSY HOLDEN was vice-president of strategy and new products at Kraft, a giant food company, when she became pregnant for the second time. “No one has ever done the job with two children,” her male boss worried. “How many children do you have?” Ms Holden asked. “Two,” he…
Online shopping requires more warehouses. There is ever less room for themWANDER THROUGH central and east London, and you find traces of the East India Company. In its 274-year history, the rapacious colonial-era trader tore down poor houses, replacing them with sprawling depots to store tea, silk, spices and other exotic wares. Today those same…
The costs of office-less executives outweigh the benefitsIT IS A tradition of corporate architecture. A company’s top executives get offices on the top floor, often dubbed the C-suite after the “chiefs” who occupy it. The CEO resides in the “corner office”, with the biggest windows and best views. Junior staff suffer a few moments of…
Will the departure of the veteran works-council bruiser usher in a new era for the German carmaker?“THE MOST powerful man at Volkswagen.” Ferdinand Dudenhöffer of the Centre for Automotive Research, an influential think-tank, was not referring to Herbert Diess, the German company’s boss. Rather, he reserved that title for Bernd Osterloh. In his 16 years…
ONLINE SHOPPERS often feel they are being watched. Put an item in your basket but fail to buy it, and it may follow you plaintively around the internet for days. Announce your engagement on social media and you will be hit with adverts for the honeymoon. As you turn 40, expect the attention of elasticated-trouser…
YOU HAVE to hand it to the “technoking”. For all his impish self-aggrandisement, mockery of deadlines, baiting of regulators and soon-to-be sideline as a “Saturday Night Live” comedy host, Elon Musk is deadly serious about technology. So serious, in fact, that as he was discussing the nitty-gritty of neural networks on an earnings call on…
CHIPMAKERS’ CRAFT can seem magical. They use light to stamp complex patterns on a dinner-plate-sized disc of crystal silicon, forming arrays of electric circuits. Once cut out of the disc, each array is called a chip. The chip’s job is to shuttle electrons in a mathematical shimmer prescribed by computer code. They do the maths…