Category: Business
UPS buys TNT Express: Strong deliverer
THE “conveyor belt” for global commerce is how Scott Davis, the boss of UPS, describes his company, the world’s biggest express-parcel shipper. On March 19th UPS announced that it would buy TNT Express, a Dutch competitor, for €5.16 billion ($6…
Patenting biology: Prometheus unsound
PATENTS are supposed to encourage innovation, not stifle it. On March 20th America’s Supreme Court threw out two medical patents for doing the latter. The ruling in Mayo v Prometheus was unequivocal. So was the horrified reaction from the biotechnolo…
Beer in Africa: From lumps to lager
STATISTICS seldom do justice to Africa. Take beer consumption. The average African sips a mere 8 litres of commercially produced beer a year. Compared with the 70 litres or so quaffed by the average American, it sounds like Africans…
Online video in China: Watch this space
THE deal’s “strategic and valuation rationale”, declared Victor Koo to analysts on March 12th, is to “establish a clear and dominant leadership in the online video sector in China”. It appears to do just that: his company, Youku, the country
Miners in Zimbabwe: Zimplats happens
WHEN, a year ago, Zimbabwe confirmed plans to make all white- and foreign-owned companies cede a 51% stake of their local operations to black Zimbabweans, it was taken as a bit of a joke—another populist ploy by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF pa…
Schumpeter: The view from Liverpool
ON MARCH 13th 3,000 people gathered for the annual Global Entrepreneurship Congress. They listened to Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group, on the subject of “screw it, let’s do it”. They heard Sir Terence Leahy, a former boss …
Independent film-making: Nazis in space
Invading a cinema near you, soon
IN 1945, as everyone knows, an elite group of Nazi officers abandoned the collapsing Third Reich and blasted off to the moon to establish the Fourth. In 2018, surprised when an American astronaut stum…
Online newspapers: News of the world
IN JANUARY the New York Times lost its top spot in comScore’s ranking of the world’s biggest newspaper websites to Britain’s Daily Mail. The Times sniffed at the accuracy of comScore’s figures, which exaggerate the Mail’s …
Cola wars, continued: Good for you, not for shareholders
IN OCTOBER 1996 the cover of Fortune magazine showed Roger Enrico, then the chief executive of PepsiCo, trapped in a Coke bottle under the headline “How Coke is kicking Pepsi’s can”. Ten years later, just after Pepsi had surpa…
Gambling in Spain: Place your bets on Euro Vegas
A quarter of a million jobs at stake
IT MAY just be the single largest contrarian bet in the euro zone. Sheldon Adelson, a casino tycoon, is expected soon to choose between Madrid and Barcelona for a €16 billion ($21 billion) gambl…
