Philippa Kaur

THE IDEA of a Europe hostile to entrepreneurs would once have seemed laughable. At its 17th-century peak the Dutch East India Company’s appetite for capital to fuel its growth was so voracious that it demanded the invention of the public stockmarket. Investors then did not balk at its violent treatment of native peoples. The turn of the 20th century saw the founding of giants like L’Oréal, today’s highest-earning beauty empire, and Denmark’s AP Moller Maersk, the largest container-shipping line. Most of Germany’s Mittelstand firms, employers of more than half of all the country’s workers, were born at the same time.That a continent shattered by two world wars produced far fewer businesses destined for high growth in the second half of the 20th century is perhaps unsurprising. But Europe never recovered its appetite for high-growth business creation. In the past three decades, America has spawned four behemoths—Google, Amazon, Tesla and Facebook, now known as Meta—whose valuations have topped $1trn. (Meta’s has since fallen back below this threshold.) Not one of Europe’s corporate youths, meanwhile, has risen as high as $100bn. One champion of the 2000s, Skype, was in 2011 bought for $8.5bn by Microsoft. The other, Spotify, is today worth only $48bn. SAP, the closest thing the continent has to a tech giant, was founded three years before Microsoft and is worth less than a fifteenth of it.Yet change is in the air. The European firms founded in the decade after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 are coming of age much more impressively than their older cousins. Venture capitalists, who want to sniff out the next Google while it is still being run from the founders’ kitchen tables, are homing in on European startups. There are many more to choose from. European entrepreneurs who would once have gone west to start a business are now likely to start up at home rather than in Silicon Valley.A new influx of capital is proof of an altered mood. Ten years ago, European firms grabbed less than a tenth of all venture capital (VC) money invested globally, though the European Union’s share of global GDP was a little over a fifth. This year has seen dealmaking volumes soar in many regions, but particularly in Europe, which now attracts around 18% of global VC funding, according to Dealroom, a data provider (see chart 1). All the cash has pumped up the value of European startups. The continent now boasts 65 “unicorn cities”, or those which have produced a privately-held startup worth more than $1bn. That is more than any other region.The continent’s previous paucity of funding was not for lack of returns. Measured by total value (cash returned to investors plus current portfolio value) as a multiple of capital risked, the average European VC fund founded in the past two decades has not fared materially worse than the average American one (see chart 2). Nevertheless, American venture capitalists have long thought of Europe as “a place to take their families on summer holiday not somewhere to start a business,” says Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, a VC firm headquartered in San Francisco and London.Now they are voting with their feet. Sequoia, an American firm that was an early backer of Apple, Google, WhatsApp and YouTube, announced last year that it would open their first European office in London, and started recruiting local partners. Among native investment houses, the muttering is about when, not if, other American VC outfits will follow.Venture capitalists are chasing a generation of startups that has benefited from the trail blazed by their predecessors. The likes of Skype and Spotify may not have reached the dizzying valuations of their American peers, but they showed would-be entrepreneurs that it was possible to start a successful tech company in Europe and scale it at speed, explains Michael Moritz of Sequoia. Now, says Mr Moritz, “it’s no longer frowned upon if you’re young and bright to leave university and join a tech company, or to drop out and found one.” They also provided startups with a pool of potential employees and board members with prior experience of working for fast-growing, innovative companies.The combination of seasoned executives and access to experienced talent has fuelled the growth of a cluster of European firms founded after the ructions of the financial crisis that are now reaching maturity. More importantly, notes Hussein Kanji of Hoxton Ventures, another VC firm, they include companies starting to dominate their respective niches. The huge new category of social media was won by Facebook, he notes. “Now Spotify is the winner in music streaming, Klarna is the winner in buy-now-pay-later and UiPath is the winner in robotic process automation—they’re all European,” he says. With returns in the world of tech flowing disproportionately to the firms in first place, that makes Europe too attractive a prospect for global investors to ignore.The boom extends far beyond a few of the largest firms. For Xavier Niel, a billionaire French tech founder-turned-investor, repeat founders in Europe are the key. They are launching new waves of companies, he says, meaning “more entrepreneurs, more talent, more capital, more success, it’s a flywheel in progress”. Rachel Delacour sold her first business, BIME Analytics, a business analytics platform, in 2015 for $45m, six years after co-founding it in Montpellier. She started Sweep, which helps companies track carbon emissions, last year. “Now that I’m starting this second business, I know right from the off that it can be a global story”, says Ms Delacour.It also helps that Europeans working for early-stage companies are becoming owners. A recent analysis by Index Ventures of 350 European startups found that 15-17% of firms on average is owned by its employees. That is up from 10% five years ago, although it is still below the comparable figure of 20-23% for American startups. Workers’ increased willingness to be part-remunerated with stock options makes it easier for startups to compete with deeper-pocketed firms for talent, says Mr Rimer.Technological trends have also been driving costs down and enabling would-be founders to get their firms off the ground at home in Europe rather leaving for California. Starting an internet business used to involve buying banks of servers and the space to store them. The advent of cloud computing means firms can instead rent processing power from hyperscale clouds like Amazon Web Services and smaller offices. The pandemic has forced fund managers to accept doing due diligence and deals over Zoom. That lowers the importance of geographical proximity.Two big questions hover over Europe’s entrepreneurial renaissance. The first is the extent to which the capital being poured into it is simply spillover from the liquidity that has flooded markets since the onset of the pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, the world’s four largest central banks have collectively pumped more than $9trn-worth of cash into the global financial system, driving down bond yields. That has sent investors into ever-riskier asset classes in pursuit of returns. Early-stage equity investment in a previously calcified continent is a prime candidate. As central banks dial back their asset-purchase programmes, the yields on safer assets will start to look less anaemic, putting Europe’s ample VC funding at risk.Another important question is whether the boom results in Europe building its own, American-style tech behemoths, or simply a cluster of middling firms that are gobbled up by larger, possibly non-European acquirers. That, in turn, will determine whether the continent’s entrepreneurial moment flares out or ignites something bigger. Governments have devised schemes to catalyse business creation for decades, but the answer turns out to be simple. “There is nothing that beats examples of success to inspire confidence in people,” says Mr Moritz. It is up to today’s European giants-in-waiting to decide how much inspiration to provide. More

PITY BEN VAN BEURDEN. The boss of Royal Dutch Shell is an affable man steering a Scylla-and-Charybdis course between oil-loving shareholders on one extreme and carbon-hating ones on the other. His latest task is to convince investors that Shell’s strategy of doubling down on oil and gas production while bulking up on renewables is viable, even as Third Point, a hedge fund, demands it breaks itself up. And for seven years he has run a company with one foot in the Netherlands and the other in Britain—with Brexit in between.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

REED HASTINGS HAS built the culture at Netflix around it. Ray Dalio made it a founding principle at Bridgewater, a successful investment fund. “Radical candour” is the idea that bracing honesty is the best way to run a business: no one dances around the truth, and swifter feedback improves performance.Most firms rely on a messier doctrine. People rarely say what they mean, but hope that their meaning is nonetheless clear. Think Britain, but with paycheques. To navigate this kind of workplace, you need a phrasebook.“I hear you”Ostensible meaning: You’re making a legitimate pointActual meaning: Be quiet“Let’s discuss this offline”Ostensible meaning: We shouldn’t waste other people’s valuable timeActual meaning: Let’s never speak of this again (see also: “Let’s put a pin in it”)“We should all learn to walk in each other’s shoes”Ostensible meaning: Shared understanding results in better outcomesActual meaning: I need you to know that my job is a living hell“I’m just curious…”Ostensible meaning: I’d like to know why you think that…Actual meaning: …because it makes no sense to anyone else“It’s great to have started this conversation”Ostensible meaning: We’ve raised an important issue here Actual meaning: We’ve made absolutely no progress“I wanted to keep you in the loop”Ostensible meaning: I am informing you of something minor Actual meaning: I should have told you this weeks ago“Do you have five minutes?”Ostensible meaning: I have something trivial to say Actual meaning: You are in deep, deep trouble“Let’s handle this asynchronously”Ostensible meaning: We’ll each work on this task in our own timeActual meaning: I have to go to my Pilates class now“It’s on the product roadmap”Ostensible meaning: It’ll be done soonActual meaning: It won’t be done soon“We’re moving to an agile framework”Ostensible meaning: We will work iteratively in response to user feedback Actual meaning: We’re literally planning to go round in circles“It’s a legacy tech stack”Ostensible meaning: It’s a rat’s nest of old and incompatible systemsActual meaning: None of this is our fault“We are a platform business”Ostensible meaning: We provide an ecosystem in which others can interactActual meaning: Let’s pretend we are a tech firm and see what happens to our valuation (see also: “as a service”, “network effects” and “flywheels”)“We are planning for the metaverse”Ostensible meaning: We are ready for a shared, immersive digital worldActual meaning: Ooh, look! A bandwagon! (see also: “Web3”)“Bring your whole selves to work”Ostensible meaning: Be authentic and don’t be afraid to show vulnerabilityActual meaning: But not those bits of your whole self, obviouslyIn a world of radical candour, there would be less need for translating. Most managers and colleagues could indeed be better at giving unvarnished feedback. Some words and phrases are so opaque they absorb all visible meaning.But there is an awful lot to be said for coded communication. Work is where people learn to manage social interactions, not define them out of existence. Transparency doesn’t necessarily travel well across borders. And perpetual bluntness is draining; humans constantly finesse and massage the messages they send in order to avoid open conflict. Radical candour is associated with firms that pay very well. That may be because this approach leads to greater success. It may be because otherwise most people wouldn’t put up with it.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 “The business phrasebook” More

PITY BEN VAN BEURDEN. The boss of Royal Dutch Shell is an affable man steering a Scylla-and-Charybdis course between oil-loving shareholders on one extreme and carbon-hating ones on the other. His latest task is to convince investors that Shell’s strategy of doubling down on oil and gas production while bulking up on renewables is viable, even as Third Point, a hedge fund, demands it breaks itself up. And for seven years he has run a company with one foot in the Netherlands and the other in Britain—with Brexit in between.On November 15th Shell offered shareholders some badly needed simplification. It asked them to vote next month for a proposal to ditch a dual Anglo-Dutch share structure, haul the headquarters back to Britain, and scrap the Royal Dutch name. It marks a homecoming of sorts. The original moniker dates back to the 19th century, when the company’s forebear, Marcus Samuel, dealt in sea shells along the Thames. But the reaction in parts of the Netherlands has been apoplectic. Some politicians want to impose an exit tax to dissuade Shell from leaving.Simplification looks like the handiwork of Andrew Mackenzie, Shell’s new chairman, who oversaw a restructuring of BHP, the Anglo-Australian miner that he previously ran. But it has a financial logic, too. Under the dual-share structure, Shell’s Dutch A shares were subject to a withholding tax, which meant that only British B shares could be bought back economically. That capped buy-backs at $2.5bn a quarter. Oswald Clint of Bernstein, an investment firm, says the maximum could now rise to $5bn. More buy-backs are a way of increasing cash returns to shareholders while they see how Shell’s energy-transition strategy plays out. They may not guarantee the company wins the argument against Third Point. But they will buy it some time.There are other potential side-effects. The Netherlands has dealt some harsh blows to Shell recently. They include a court judgment in The Hague ordering Shell to reduce its worldwide emissions—part of which the company is appealing against (and which it says the planned move won’t affect). A Dutch pension fund, ABP, stunned Shell last month by saying it would sell its shares in the firm as part of efforts to divest from fossil fuels.The British government cheered the relocation announcement. Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, called it “a clear vote of confidence in the British economy”. But the boon to global Britain could come at a cost to global warming. In the coming months the government is expected to decide whether to allow drilling of an oilfield called Cambo off the coast of Scotland—a litmus test for the future of North Sea oil. Cambo is part-owned by Shell.■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 “A simple solution” More

FEW INDUSTRIES are more vulnerable to events that depress revenues and increase expenses than America’s railways. The basic business model is to lug lots of stuff to offset the high fixed costs of owning fleets of locomotives and maintaining thousands of miles of track. That has been hard as America’s supply chain has come unglued, first because of covid-19 and then as it has waned. Ports are gridlocked, warehouses over-stuffed and labour unavailable. It has unquestionably been a tough time to be a rail company and, it turns out, a remarkably good time to be one.Volumes and profits at the listed companies that run America’s tracks and trains used to be tied as closely as a locomotive to its cargo. No longer. Traffic has yet to recover from pre-pandemic peaks, according to the Association of American Railroads, a trade group. But the financial equivalent of a train crash that such a slump would once have presaged has not arrived. On the contrary, America’s major freight carriers are on their way to record annual profits. Their share prices in recent weeks have helped stockmarkets there chug to new highs.Train dispatchers have earned their crust in recent months: vital rails underlying many trans-continental supply chains are not exempt from disruptions of their own. At Union Pacific (UP), one of America’s two largest rail operators, fuel costs have risen by 74% over the past year and locomotive productivity has fallen by 8%. Freight car “velocity”, the number of miles travelled in a day, is 5% below the company’s standard, in part because of “terminal dwell”—rail-speak for being stuck.Wildfires across 13 western states during the summer caused widespread delays, rerouting and damage. The global microchip snafu has reduced shipments of cars, a lucrative cargo. Railways have their own shortages to contend with, from the rolling chassis used for unloading containers to large warehouses. Employees, whom rail bosses once thinned in repeated cost-cutting drives, are now in short supply too. Many who were furloughed during the early days are not keen on coming back to work, says James Foote, the chief executive of CSX, the third-largest rail company.Ordinarily all these factors would be toxic, but these are not ordinary times.The capacity to get goods from A to B has become extraordinarily valuable. Jennifer Hamann, UP’s finance chief, explains that strong demand “supports pricing actions that yield dollars exceeding inflation”. Price rises mean UP’s operating income over the past two years is up by 9% even as volumes have slipped by 4%.Other railways have made precisely the same point (the networks overlap in places, though largely cover their own patch of America). All have limited capacity and similar obstacles. Better yet, for railway shareholders, the shortage of labour has been even more acute in the trucking industry, blunting outside competition.Inevitably, the environment will shift as bottlenecks are resolved and workers return. Pushy business customers will not have forgotten how to negotiate. The railways themselves are not sitting still. UP, for example, is stretching its seemingly endless trains from 9,500 to 10,000 feet. CSX is introducing autonomous locomotives. Norfolk Southern is shifting ever more traffic from jammed west-coast ports to smoother operations on the east coast. This unusual moment, in short, will pass. But for now, the industry remains on something of a roll.■This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Chugging along” More

WHEN SOTHEBY’S raised the gavel on the season’s biggest art auction on November 15th the sellers, Harry and Linda Macklowe, did not arrive as one to watch the proceedings from the discreet skybox above the auction floor, as those disposing of a collection often do. The couple can hardly stand to be in the same room together. Their divorce, after nearly six decades of marriage, was so contentious that in 2018 a judge ordered them to sell 65 of their magnificent 20th-century artworks and split the proceeds.Death, debt and divorce are the auction market’s traditional catalysts. Sotheby’s won this particular deal by guaranteeing the Macklowes at least $600m from the sale. At the time it was agreed such a fulsome promise, the biggest ever offered to a client by an auction house, seemed to hark back to a bullish age before covid-19 roiled the art market. But Sotheby’s panache was well judged: the evening brought in $676m including fees, to which the proceeds of a second auction in May will be added. For beyond the Macklowe sale, the art market is changing, in three important ways.It started even before the pandemic. The takeover of Sotheby’s by Patrick Drahi, a French telecoms and cable entrepreneur, for $3.7bn in the summer of 2019 looked with hindsight like an error when covid struck nine months later. Lockdowns shuttered auctioneers and galleries the world over. Art collectors quickly decided that 2020 was a bad time to sell. The best-connected auction houses moved swiftly into trying to broker private deals; the more entrepreneurial bolstered online sales with digital auctions.Mr Drahi’s commercial nous has brought new meaning to the famous art-market quip that Sotheby’s are “auctioneers trying to be gentlemen”, in contrast to Christie’s, a firm of “gentlemen trying to be auctioneers”. The tycoon, who took on well over $1bn of debt to finance the deal, now has access to details of the 300,000 or so richest people in the world. The new Sotheby’s is bent on selling them not just art, but handbags and history too.His timing may prove prescient. Contemporary art, which accounts for the single biggest share of the art market, saw a record-breaking $2.7bn change hands during the year to June, according to Artprice, which tracks sales. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s say they expect their sales in 2021 to match the $4.8bn and $5.8bn they respectively made in 2019.In part that is because both the main auction houses are expanding beyond their conventional offering of art, watches and wine—the market’s first big shift. In 2020 Christie’s sold a dinosaur fossil named Stan for $31.8m. Earlier this year Sotheby’s auctioned Kanye West’s Yeezy trainers for $1.8m. Both firms have jumped into crypto-art, selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to techies. All of these have brought in new buyers, especially from Asia, the fastest-growing market. Of the top 20 lots auctioned by Sotheby’s last year, Asian clients bid on ten and bought nine.A second new development is that the two houses are wooing new customers by making buying at auction more fun. Last month Sotheby’s organised a weekend jamboree in Las Vegas for 40 clients. The main business was the auction of $100m-worth of artworks by Picasso. But in an effort to turn the affair into more of an experience, Sotheby’s also laid on wine-tasting, a session on how to game an auction and a talk by Jay Leno about vintage cars. At the party after the sale, the DJ was Picasso’s great-grandson.Going, going, goneThe most far-reaching shift, though, may be the auction houses’ new cosy relationship with commercial galleries and private dealers. Historically these were their great rivals. Galleries know where the art is and what their clients might be prepared to sell, but lack the access to buyers who flock to auction houses. Now the two work more closely together, to find the right buyer for a piece and vice versa.When a Düsseldorf gallerist recently wanted to sell a Gerhard Richter from the 1970s, an under-appreciated period, he turned to Sotheby’s. The private sale to one of its clients was at a far better price than he would have got at auction or selling to one of his own collectors, he says. In April 2020, a month after the pandemic hit, Rafael Valls, an dealer in Old Masters in London, was able to sell nearly 100 pictures in an online Sotheby’s auction; in a normal year the gallery would sell around 200.In a move that highlights this rapprochement between auction houses and dealers, Sotheby’s recently hired Noah Horowitz, a director of the Art Basel art fair who is known to be particularly close to galleries. “Sotheby’s is tearing up the traditional playbook,” says a rival. The marriage is partly one of financial convenience: galleries lack the pools of capital big auction houses deploy to offer guarantees and thus lure potential sellers. Teaming up with dealers helps auctioneers find works to sell, which is almost as hard for them as identifying the next generation of buyers.Sotheby’s and Christie’s hope their new approach will help both sides of the trade. When Christie’s sold its first piece of crypto-art earlier this year, its boss Guillaume Cerutti points out, almost all of the 33 bidders were new to the firm. A few days later one of those who had been outbid, a 31-year-old Chinese-American tech entrepreneur named Justin Sun, went on to buy a $20m Picasso—and, in the Macklowe sale, a Giacometti sculpture for $78m. ■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 “Monet, Manet, Money” More

IN THEORY THIS should be a good time to be Walmart, the doyen of American retailers that came of age in the stagflationary era of the 1970s. Inflation is back, yet no one knows better than the Beast of Bentonville how to use the power of the growl to convince suppliers to lower prices. Supply chains are buckling, yet such is Walmart’s heft that it has chartered ships and bypassed rail services to deliver Halloween and Christmas goods early this year. Workers are in short supply, but it managed to add 200,000 jobs to its 2.3m global payroll in the three months to September. “There’s a level of excitement in the air, you can feel it,” enthused Doug McMillon, its chief executive, as Walmart raised its year-end sales and profit targets after solid third-quarter earnings on November 16th.There’s a puzzle, though. Investors are not buying it. In the past year Walmart’s share price has lagged behind not just Amazon, the e-commerce giant, but other big-box American retailers, such as Target and Home Depot. On November 16th its shares fell a further 3%, as investors fretted over what Simeon Gutman of Morgan Stanley described as slightly “squishy” profit margins. Is the stockmarket, so enamoured of all things new, missing the turnaround story of the decade? Or is there something else to worry about, namely the hot breath of Amazon on Walmart’s neck?There are few more engaging advocates of the turnaround story than Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School, who co-hosts a weekly podcast with two of his fellow professors called “After Hours”—a “Seinfeld”-like dose of bonhomie for business enthusiasts. The trio, who interchange high-brow discussions on companies with topics ranging from Scandinavian crime drama to cocktail-making, might not be regulars in the aisles of Walmart. But they are cheerleaders. “Walmart is on fire,” Mr Oberholzer-Gee exclaimed in a recent episode. He acknowledges that investors have not yet caught on. But that might just be because their mindsets are hardened against legacy retailers, he argues.The turnaround story has two parts. First is the customer. Since lockdowns ended, shoppers have returned to Walmart’s stores, though not yet in sufficient numbers to prove that its almost-800m square feet of American retail space—more than the size of Manhattan—is worth cherishing. The company claims it is. It says having stores within ten miles of 90% of Americans is vital for an “omnichannel” strategy that encourages shoppers to buy in-store, online or a combination of the two.But with footfall still subpar, its challenge is to attract online shoppers without cannibalising the ones who visit the stores. It is having some success. Surveys suggest its new Walmart+ subscription service—a lower-cost rival to Amazon Prime—is attracting young, urban and affluent online shoppers who might not be seen dead in a Walmart store (a partnership with American Express’s platinum card reinforces the impression of upward mobility). According to Mr Oberholzer-Gee, Walmart.com has also started to display “edgy” brands such as Ray-Ban that typically shunned Walmart’s physical stores, which further appeals to this cohort. Moreover, Walmart is rolling out Uber Eats-style home delivery to 900 cities through its Spark network of gig-economy drivers. It makes for an intriguing gambit. Walmart, the emblem of suburbia, is moving tentatively into Amazon’s metropolitan heartland.The second part of the story is profit. Unlike Amazon, whose e-commerce business is not a big contributor to earnings, Walmart needs to justify returns on everything it does. That encourages it to think laterally, since online profit margins are meagre. As a result, it is seeking to defray the cost of its e-commerce distribution network by attracting third-party merchants, rather than just selling Walmart stuff. It is building a fast-growing advertising business, called Connect, which Mr Gutman reckons could generate $2bn of operating profit—8% of last year’s total—by 2025. And it is delving into fintech, specifically placing bets on customer-supporting financial services ranging from bill-paying to cryptocurrencies. All of these could bolster the bottom line without detracting from physical-store sales.The twist in the tale, though, says Marc Wulfraat of MWPVL, a logistics consultancy, is Amazon. While Walmart may be encroaching on its urban territory, Amazon is on the counterattack across the suburban hinterland. Its weapons are distribution centres, the vast warehouses from which retailers ship goods around the country. In 2018, Mr Wulfraat says, the size of Amazon’s distribution network in America overtook Walmart’s. Since then, Amazon has sought to double it again, building what Mr Wulfraat reckons will be another 140m square feet of distribution centres—as much as Walmart has built in America in its entire 59-year history.It is a daunting operation. Mr Wulfraat says that each week Amazon builds what some retailers construct in a decade. “It’s almost like a war effort,” says Ken Murphy, of abrdn, an asset manager that invests in Amazon. He reckons the logistics blitzkrieg is part of Amazon’s effort to shrink delivery times so sharply that people will have little incentive to go to stores. That makes Walmart, with its vast store network in America, vulnerable.Banana armiesDefeat is not inevitable. More than half of Walmart’s domestic sales are groceries, which people are still hesitant to buy online. That gives it some protection from the Amazonslaught. So far Amazon’s ownership of Whole Foods, an upmarket grocery chain it bought in 2017, and its Fresh supermarket formats, have been half-hearted attempts to take on its Bentonville rival.But if Amazon masters the art of cashierless shopping, as it is trying to do, it could change the buying of groceries as it has everything else, from bookselling to cloud-computing. So far Walmart can pride itself on keeping Amazon at bay while reinventing itself for an omnichannel world. And yet the grocery wars have barely begun. And the size of Amazon’s arsenal is growing. ■This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Walmart gets its bite back” More

The Economist is hiring a senior business writer to provide thematic features across geographies and sectors. Applicants need not be journalists but should be stylish writers and financially literate. Please send a cover letter and CV to [email protected] by December 20th.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Wanted: a new senior business writer” More