Mariners know that the sea can be harsh, unpredictable and sometimes destructive. After weathering a pandemic and attacks by Houthi rebels that all but closed the vital trade route through the Suez canal, container-shipping companies may have hoped for some calm before the next storm. Alas, Donald Trump’s ever-changing tariffs and his plans to impose exorbitant port fees on Chinese vessels have led to more choppy waters. More
“ARAMCO has always been far more than just an oil producer.” So said Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Arabia’s petro-colossus, earlier this year. Mr Nasser has lofty ambitions for the world’s biggest oil company, which he views as “an important enabler” of his country’s diversification away from the commodity. That aspiration is shared by Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of ADNOC, the national oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose country also dreams of shedding its petro-state status. More
Every industry has its nobility. The “PayPal mafia” are sovereign in Silicon Valley. Many Wall Street financiers trace their genealogy back to Julian Robertson or Michael Milken. The equivalent for railroaders is E. Hunter Harrison, who died in 2017. He ran three of the six big “Class I” railways at various times and pioneered “precision railroading”, a scheduling technique that is now the industry standard. His disciples are spread far and high. More
The promise of South-East Asia has long been obvious to venture capitalists. Its young and growing population of 700m is becoming richer and more urbanised. And they are poorly served by stodgy incumbents. After a pandemic-era frenzy, however, shares of the region’s listed tech darlings plunged amid rising interest rates as investors lost patience with persistent losses. Valuations are yet to recover. More
Perhaps it is inevitable that Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence (AI) lab founded by do-gooders, attracts snark in Silicon Valley. The company, which puts its safety mission above making money, has an in-house philosopher and a chatbot with the Gallic-sounding name of Claude. Even so, the profile of some of those who have recently attacked Anthropic is striking. More
Airlines have long been champions of price discrimination. To fatten their notoriously slim profit margins, they have developed what are known as “fare fences”, based on factors such as whether or not a trip spans a weekend, to charge more to customers who are willing to pay higher prices, particularly business travellers. More
Ever since he co-founded Xiaomi in 2010, Lei Jun, the chief executive of the Chinese tech giant, has pulled off feat after feat of salesmanship. A decade ago he earned a Guinness World Record for selling 2.1m smartphones online in 24 hours. These days, though, he is not just flogging cheap phones. Last month Xiaomi sold more than 200,000 of its first electric SUV, the YU7, within three minutes of bringing it onto the market. More
Nestled among the Oquirrh Mountains in Utah is the deepest open-pit copper mine on Earth. The Bingham Canyon mine, once owned by the Guggenheims and now run by Rio Tinto, has been in operation since 1903. Even now about 275,000 tonnes of the red metal are dug from it every year, nearly a quarter of America’s annual production. Its rocks are sent down a five-mile conveyor belt to be crushed. The mineral is then separated out, smelted into liquid and refined into 99.99% pure copper plates. The vertically integrated mine is the last of its kind in America, which until the 1960s was the world’s biggest producer of copper. More
