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TO UNDERSTAND WHY it was a shock last month when Berkshire Hathaway invested $6.5bn in five Japanese trading houses that have been around for far longer even than its 90-year-old chairman, go back to a talk Warren Buffett gave to business students in Florida in 1998. As a sprightly sexagenarian with his sleeves rolled up,…

LARRY WHO? A few weeks ago asking a young tech worker in Silicon Valley about Larry Ellison, co-founder, former boss and now chief technology officer of Oracle, might have elicited blank stares. More surprising, given that his company is still the world’s second-largest software-maker, a follow-up question might have been: “Remind me what Oracle sells?”Being…

IN 1996 CIVIL war erupted in what was then Zaire and is now the conflict-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Karasira Mboniga managed to escape, eventually settling in the Kiziba refugee camp in Rwanda, and working as a secondary-school teacher. But he says that his life changed for ever when he started his own business…

Electric utilities are becoming power players in the energy industryINVESTOR WEBINARS are not generally mass entertainment. But some 25,000 people tuned in this month when BP outlined plans to transform its business. Top on the British oil-and-gas giant’s to-do list is raising its wind, solar and biopower capacity from 2.5 gigawatts (GW) last year to…

As the race to control TikTok enters the final stretch, a White House-friendly tech giant seems to have carried the dayPRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S demand in August that ByteDance sell TikTok to an American firm set off a race for the Chinese firm’s trophy asset. Jockeying for the popular short-video app’s American business, with 100m users,…

If Hollywood keeps postponing big releases, many theatre chains will struggle to surviveIT IS TURNING out to be a long intermission. Cinemas across the West closed in March and, despite attempts to reopen in the summer, the box office has not recovered. From October 9th Cineworld, the world’s second-largest chain, will temporarily shut its 536…

MANY COMMENTATORS paint a bleak picture of the future of work. Automation will spread from manufacturing to services, eliminating well-paid white-collar jobs. The workforce will be divided into a narrow technocratic elite and a mass of low-skilled, insecure jobs in the “precariat”.But it does not need to be this way, according to Gary Hamel and…

SICKNESS AND shipping have a long shared history. The word quarantine is derived from the 14th-century Venetian practice of isolating ships at anchor for 40 days if plague was suspected on board. The latest ailment is a global pandemic that has killed at least 1m people and put the world economy, and global commerce, full…

“THE APPRENTICE makes me $3m a day. Ker-ching. That’s the music it makes. It sure beats bricks and mortar, hey?” So a British businessman, imitating Donald Trump’s distinctive drawl, recalls a conversation the two men had by telephone years before Mr Trump became president. It was a high point of their relationship that the Brit…