Belén Garijo takes over as chief executive in MayFEW COMPANIES have a history as long and interesting as Merck. Founded in 1668 by Friedrich Jacob Merck as a pharmacy in Darmstadt, the world’s oldest apothecary has survived several European wars, two world wars and the Nazi regime. In 1917 America’s government confiscated its American subsidiary…
Posts published in “Commodities”
A Romanian startup rides a wave of automation to a blockbuster stockmarket listingTHE PANDEMIC will fade, but its effects will linger. With workers confined to their homes, many of the processes they would once have carried out in the office had to be automated. This has given a boost to “robotic process automation” (RPA), a…
IN THE DECADES after the second world war carmakers were the undisputed champions of the personal-transport economy. Competition and economies of scale made cars affordable to millions of motorists in industrialised countries. In the 1980s and 1990s the likes of General Motors (GM) and Toyota boasted some of the world’s richest market capitalisations. When it…
What will beauty habits look like after the pandemic?ACCORDING TO INDUSTRY lore, lipstick sales increase in recessions as women opt for affordable indulgences. This time it has been firms peddling masks and video-conferencing software that have prospered. But as face-to-face life slowly resumes in much of the world, purveyors of shampoo, skin creams, perfumes and…
WHEN UBER came to South-East Asia, the Silicon Valley ride-hailing giant coaxed customers into cabs with free ice cream, a tactic it had deployed in Western markets. Grab, a local rival based in Singapore, plied riders with durian, a pungent tropical fruit that repels many Westerners but is beloved of people in places like Indonesia,…
IF YOU ARE an emblem of American harmony like Coca-Cola, you play your politics carefully, especially on issues as divisive as race and voting. The soft-drinks company did so brilliantly in 1964 when the elite of Atlanta—home to both Coca-Cola and Martin Luther King—threatened to snub the civil-rights leader on his return from winning the…
A Scottish firm threatens to seize overseas assets of state-controlled Indian firmsFACED WITH recalcitrant sovereign counterparties, foreign investors and companies occasionally take drastic action. A picaresque example of the genre occurred in 2012, when Elliott Management, a buccaneering American hedge fund which held distressed Argentine bonds, seized a handsome tall ship belonging to Argentina’s navy.…
Will investors be taken for a ride?THE HISTORY of the flying car is almost as old as that of powered flight itself. It started with the Curtiss Autoplane of 1917, an awkward-looking contraption with detachable wings. It never left the ground. Later machines made it into the skies but failed to take off commercially. Money…
A bidding war is under way to wrest control of the media group from a hedge fundGARY MARX and David Jackson, two veteran investigative reporters at the Chicago Tribune, spent most of last year seeking potential buyers who might save their newspaper from Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund. “We need a civic-minded…
The refurbished flexible-office firm once again eyes a stockmarket listingIT IS HARD to imagine such shockingly different financial documents. Two years ago a startup in New York that boosters claimed was worth $47bn issued a flowery prospectus in advance of its initial public offering (IPO). The firm’s mission, it declared, was to “elevate the world’s…