Lily White

Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.Your browser does not support the element.2021 HAS brought mixed blessings for business. American tech giants thrived while Chinese ones suffered (chart 1). Chip firms couldn’t keep up with soaring demand (chart 2), helping snarl up supply chains. Wall Street rainmakers have been…

Will it work better than it did a decade ago?IN 2013 THE EU launched an ambitious project. The aim was to double the share of microchips made in Europe to 20% of the global total by 2020. Nearly a decade later it remains stubbornly stuck at 10%. If that were not bad enough, Europe no…

Complex labour laws, organised labour, pricey workers and stingy consumers all play a partDELIVERY HERO has had a good run in the past couple of years. In August 2020 it ascended to the DAX, the stockmarket index of Germany’s most valuable listed firms. It is present in 50 countries on four continents. Revenue for the…

THE RUSH from Russia was unlike anything in recent memory. Within days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, American companies from Apple to Exxon Mobil suspended their business in Russia or said they would abandon it. Companies with factories and other assets in the country are now mulling ways to fend off possible expropriation. American…

CALLS FOR the oil business to decarbonise are growing louder just about everywhere, and not merely from governments and environmentalists. Moody’s, a rating agency, reckons that half of the $1.8trn of global energy debt that it evaluates is held by asset managers and insurers that face increasing pressure on environmental, social and governance (ESG) fronts,…

In this fast-moving world, the use of applications is increasing at a very fast rate and with the ease of internet access,…

YOU HAVE to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. When the founder of Facebook announced in October that he was changing the name of the social-media network’s parent company to Meta Platforms in order to help create an alternative digital reality known as the metaverse, he was mercilessly mocked. To some, he was generating a smokescreen…

HOW MUCH have you spent on the cloud today? It takes Robert Hodges only a few clicks to find out. He pulls up a dashboard on a computer in his home office in Berkeley, California, which shows cloud spending at his database firm, Altinity, in real time. The cloud represents half of Altinity’s total costs.Listen…

FATHER CHRISTMAS and the global container-shipping industry have similar objectives, though the timescales differ. Santa’s world-spanning logistics operation aims to deliver presents all in one night. Shipping firms step theirs up around September to ensure that gifts and other seasonal goods join a vast global supply chain. But a system that usually operates unnoticed (and…

ASKED WHAT labour wanted, Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labour in the late 1800s, is often quoted as responding: “more”. His actual answer was surprisingly lyrical. “More schoolhouses and less jails…more learning and less vice…more leisure and less greed…more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.” His ability to tie…