He looks a lot like his predecessorMINING BOSSES often leave under a cloud, ousted after a profit slump, a public-relations disaster or pit-hole calamity. Not so Ivan Glasenberg. For his last set of results on February 16th the boss of Glencore offered shareholders—including himself—a reinstated dividend and an upbeat outlook. Leaving on a high after…
Posts published in “Commodities”
An old force wants to shake up a younger industryFOR DECADES America’s labour movement has been losing steam. Trade unions represent only 7% of private-sector workers. No significant piece of pro-union legislation has passed in recent years. Right-to-work laws, which undermine the clout of organised labour, have spread to 27 states. Now the union movement…
REACH A CERTAIN prominence in public life and you may be invited to become a non-executive director. The most lucrative option is to join the board of a large company. But for social prestige, there is nothing quite like joining the board of a cultural organisation. In Britain, these boards are dominated by “the great…
Unused holidays are a problem for employers and employees alikeTHE YEAR 2020 put worker morale to the test. It did not help that many employees were unable to enjoy a normal holiday, or had to change their plans. For Bartleby, two sun-drenched weeks in Spain were converted into a wet week in Cornwall, marked by…
SWITZERLAND IS KNOWN for its timepieces. But it is also home to another business that for most of its history has operated with metronomic regularity. That is Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company. Established in the 1860s in Vevey, a small town on the shores of Lake Geneva that remains its home to this day,…
BACK IN THE 1980s a young Francesco Starace was working in the Saudi desert on a wasteful fossil-fuel project. His task was to build an oil-fired power plant. It was highly inefficient. Even though the country sits on a sea of the stuff, the fuel needed to be transported by lorry hundreds of kilometres across…
Investors are once again hungry for food-delivery firmsTHE NEW “TikTok Treats” menu on Postmates in Los Angeles wins no plaudits for gastronomy. It appeals to carb-loving teens: cloud bread and pancake cereal. But the tie-up with the popular short-video app is another sign that food-delivery firms are coming of age. Among teens and millennials, ordering…
TWO AMERICAN giants, spooked by a crisis that has roiled oil markets, fall into each other’s arms. The tie-up strings back together bits of Standard Oil—broken up in 1911 in the world’s most famous trustbusting exercise. The year was 1999, and Exxon had just completed an $81bn merger with Mobil. Might history repeat itself in…
ON FEBRUARY 2ND Amazon, America’s third-most-valuable public company, announced its best-ever quarter. Propelled by the covid-19 pandemic, which has confined consumers to their homes, the firm reported that quarterly sales had risen 44% year on year, and exceeded $100bn for the first time. It was a barnstorming performance. But it was not the main story.…
ON THE HUSTINGS, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden promised to revive America’s economy from its pandemic-induced funk. Doing so will require a turnaround for corporate America, which has suffered a savage downturn. When the occupant of the White House starts his four year term in January, in what state will American business be?Listen to…