Business

FORTO SEEMS an unlikely tech darling. It does not make gadgets, build the metaverse, forge cryptocurrencies or launch rockets. The six-year-old startup from Berlin, whose main business is arranging the transport of cargo from one place to an other, has nevertheless managed to raise nearly $600m from venture capitalists. Its backers reckon the firm can…

WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN’S tanks rolled into Ukraine in late February, crude-oil markets reacted instantly to the uncertainty and, in short order, to the sanctions imposed on Russia, the world’s second-biggest exporter of the black stuff. The war’s impact on another set of crucial oils—the edible vegetable fats such as sunflower oil, of which Ukraine and…

“WHITE HOT”, a new documentary, traces the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, an American fashion label that soared in the early 2000s before crashing just as dramatically. The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism and sexual harassment. But just…

JACK MA, CHINA’S most famous entrepreneur, has not been one to mince his words about the role of government and business. At a meeting with corporate leaders in Bali in 2018 he told the audience that it is not the government that makes business and innovation happen. That is the work of entrepreneurs, he insisted:…

LAKSHMI MITTAL has two passions: the steel industry and his family. His embrace of the first turned a poor boy from Rajasthan into the “Carnegie from Calcutta”, a man who built the world’s second-biggest steel empire from scratch, culminating in a takeover in 2006 of Arcelor, a European champion. The second sometimes sounds like tabloid…

FOR MOST of his life Carl Icahn was vilified for his abrasive personality and his activism as an investor. His mother said he had the spirit of Genghis Khan. Oliver Stone based Gordon Gekko, a fictional predator-in-chief of the junk-bond boom, in part on Mr Icahn. Bill Ackman, no softie, called him a bully who…