Philippa Kaur

IF YOU FANCY a look into the razzmatazz-filled future of e-commerce, type #Sheinhaul into TikTok, suspend your ethical scruples, and watch young influencers tear open boxes of garments, yell things like “My Shein order is here…holy shit!”, and then pour hundreds of dollars-worth of cheap garments over their heads. It’s hype, for sure, but not entirely frivolous. Shein, a Chinese online retailer, is the TikTok of the $1.5trn apparel industry. It is one of two Chinese firms (ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, is the other) to be privately valued at $100bn or more. Like TikTok, it is an obsession of Gen Z-ers in their teens to late 20s. And yet it is so opaque that even the American investment funds that back it, such as Tiger Global and General Atlantic, won’t divulge a thing about it. Could it be that it wants to keep its Chinese heritage under wraps?Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

IT WAS ONCE thought that investment bankers, like sharks, needed to keep on the move to survive. Then pandemic lockdowns put paid to their perpetual motion between headquarters, airports and meetings. Greasing the wheels of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) took a backseat to corporate concerns about survival. Deals were scrapped or put on hold and bankers focused on clients that they knew already. Virtual dealmaking became the norm. As in-person interaction returns, will the new ways of working persist?Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

“REGARDS”. “BEST WISHES”. “Warmly”. “Cheers”. “Take care”. The words at the end of a professional email may seem banal. Still, the sign-off matters. Even the ubiquitous “Sent from my iPhone” can act as a justification for brevity and typos or as a virtue-signal that the sender has taken the time to reply although clearly not at their desk. It is therefore worth considering how your missive’s ending will be perceived on the other end, not least because it is likely to be archived away in perpetuity.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

ANDRIJ MELNYK, the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, did not hold back. Mocking Ritter Sport’s advertising slogan, he tweeted on March 29th “Quadratisch, Praktisch, Blut” (square, practical, blood), replacing gut (good) in the firm’s slogan. A couple of days later Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, called for a boycott of the maker of chocolate snacks tweeting: “Ritter Sport refuses to pull out of Russia citing possible ‘serious effects’ for the company. However, remaining in Russia brings worse effects, such as a fatal damage to reputation.”Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

TAKE AN EVENING walk on 17th Cross Road in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout district, and you bump into tech types stepping out of their startup’s office and into one of the local microbreweries. They might work for Udaan (e-commerce), Vedantu (education technology) or another of the growing herd of private startups valued at $1bn, whose proliferation in the area has prompted locals to dub it “Unicorn Street”. That name might be outdated, says Mohit Yadav, co-founder Bolt.Earth, a unicorn wannabe housed in the MyGate building. “Unicorn neighbourhood” would be more apt, he chuckles.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

AS TWEETS GO “I made an offer” seems relatively unexciting. But when the offer in question is from Elon Musk to buy Twitter, the social-media platform itself, that is a different matter. On April 13th the boss of Tesla and SpaceX made a cash offer of $54.20 a share, valuing the firm at $43.4bn. The bid is a third higher than Twitter’s price when Mr Musk first revealed that he had built up a stake in the company. His plaintive tweet raises another barrage of questions about the future of Twitter and the world’s richest man.Mr Musk set out his reasoning in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial regulator. He believes that Twitter has “potential to be the platform for free speech” which he sees as a “societal imperative”. Achieving this and letting the company thrive requires it to be taken private, he reckons. Mr Musk signed off the filing by saying: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” He later said that he was not in it for profit but the public interest in maintaining a “de facto town square”.The bid is the latest twist in weeks of drama. On April 4th, Mr Musk announced that he had built up a 9% stake in the company to become its largest shareholder. This excited investors. Twitter’s share price jumped by 27% the same day. He was then invited to join the board. He rejected the offer but has tweeted a list of improvements the platform could make. Why then have investors reacted with little enthusiasm to the bid? So far Twitter’s shares have barely shifted. Perhaps it is hard to take the offer and Mr Musk’s stated motivation seriously. After all, he has a history of clownish antics. The offer price of $54.20, for example, may be a thinly veiled reference to 420, a number that potheads hold dear and one that Mr Musk has joked about before.Yet Mr Musk has hired Morgan Stanley, a bank, as a financial adviser to execute the offer. He has the means to pay for it. His personal wealth exceeds $200bn, though he would have to sell shares in Tesla, a publicly traded carmaker or SpaceX, his privately held rocket company, or bring together a consortium of other buyers. Mr Musk’s belief that Twitter can thrive as a free-speech haven should not be sniffed at either. Strongly held convictions have been a driving force when building his other companies. For Tesla it was his faith that decarbonisation is vital; for SpaceX his obsession with space flight.A takeover would be a welcome shake up for Twitter. Take the company’s content-moderation rules. Like all social-media platforms, they are impossible to enforce without hiring human moderators in such huge numbers as to bankrupt the company. As a result enforcement is arbitrary, inviting criticism from left- and right-wing commentators alike. User numbers is another weakness. In America, Twitter’s biggest market by revenue, the firm’s daily active users number 40m, around half that of Snapchat or TikTok, two social-media rivals. Twitter has been trying to lure creators (and their fans) from other platforms with new features, such as subscription tweets and virtual events. But these ventures have yet to pay off. One risk, which may explain investors’ tepid response, is that Mr Musk takes on too much. He is a hands-on manager and even for a workaholic, running Twitter on top of Tesla, SpaceX and smaller ventures such as Boring Company, a tunnelling firm, and Neuralink, a brain-computer interface firm, could stretch him beyond his limits.Twitter’s board must now review the offer. Rumours are rife that they intend to fight off Mr Musk perhaps using a “poison pill”. The offer may also flush out other bidders, such as asset managers, private-equity firms or tech giants. Vanguard Group, a huge investment fund, has overtaken Mr Musk by increasing its stake in Twitter to 10.3%. In Mr Musk’s filing he said: “I am not playing the back-and-forth game…I have moved straight to the end”. But the end may not yet be in sight. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

TOSHIBA WAS once synonymous with Japan’s industrial might. Of late the conglomerate, which has made everything from memory cards to nuclear reactors, has become a byword for drama. Japan’s business press writes of “Toshiba Theatre”, which began with accounting fraud a decade ago and has continued to the present day in a series of “slapstick” struggles between management and shareholders. Toshiba’s share price has underperformed domestic and foreign rivals, as well as the broader Japanese stockmarket (see chart).Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

TOSHIBA WAS once synonymous with Japan’s industrial might. Of late the conglomerate, which has made everything from memory cards to nuclear reactors, has become a byword for drama. Japan’s business press writes of “Toshiba Theatre”, which began with accounting fraud a decade ago and has continued to the present day in a series of “slapstick” struggles between management and shareholders. Toshiba’s share price has underperformed domestic and foreign rivals, as well as the broader Japanese stockmarket (see chart).The latest plot twist comes amid talk of a buy-out led by Bain Capital, an American private-equity group. This raised hopes among investors for some sort of resolution to the saga. Toshiba’s market value has risen by a quarter in the past month.The opening act in the Toshiba spectacle was tragic. The firm cooked its books to inflate profits by $1.2bn between 2007 and 2014. Implicated executives bowed deeply in apology. A new crop of leaders had to apologise again two years later when a big bet on Westinghouse, an American nuclear-power company, went sour. To remain solvent, Toshiba sold its prized memory-chip unit to a Bain-led consortium and issued a block of new shares. Foreign activist investors spied opportunity. Effissimo Capital Management (ECM), a Singaporean asset manager, amassed a stake of nearly 10%, making it the single largest shareholder in the company.That set the stage for a protracted second act of tragicomedy. As shareholders pushed for better returns and more transparency, Toshiba executives squirmed. Some colluded with the Japanese government to stop the activists from getting seats on the board in 2020, according to an independent inquiry. A year ago a surprise bid to take the company private collapsed, bringing the CEO, Kurumatani Nobuaki, down with it. Tsunakawa Satoshi, a former boss who returned to the job after Mr Kurumatani’s ousting, argued instead that the group should be split up.This plan, too, faltered, and on March 1st Mr Tsunakawa fell on his sword. At an extraordinary general meeting three weeks later, shareholders killed the management’s proposal for a split into two businesses, one focused on electronics, the other on infrastructure. At the same time, they also rebuffed calls from Toshiba’s second-largest investor for the group to court buy-out offers.The impasse set the stage for act three. On March 31st ECM announced it had signed an agreement to sell its stake to Bain if regulators gave the nod to the American firm’s bid. A deal would be hefty. Toshiba’s market value is $17.5bn; a premium could add a few billion, putting it in striking distance of the top ten leveraged buy-outs in history. Given Toshiba’s history (which stretches back to 1875) and prominence (it employs nearly 120,000 people), the transaction would also mark a big advance for both foreign investors and private equity in Japan, which has not historically been welcoming to either.Hurdles remain. Japanese laws regulating foreign investment were amended in 2020 to increase oversight of industries important to national security. Toshiba has interests in several, including nuclear power, defence, chips and quantum computing. Regulators helped scuttle earlier buy-out bids. Bain appears to have learned from those experiences, and is said to be in discussions with Japanese funds and companies to form a consortium that would be palatable to the government. But “many issues” must still be resolved, Bain acknowledged. The curtain is far from closed. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “In search of an ending” More