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

IN MOST COUNTRIES the state has no business in most commercial secrets. The Chinese authorities have long taken a different view, considering the review by foreign regulators of accounting documents drawn up in China for Chinese companies listed outside the mainland as an infringement on sovereignty, potentially punishable by death. The government softened its stance in 2020, when some such documents were shared with a Hong Kong accounting body. Now it seems ready to open the books to American regulators, who have been keen for a peek for more than a decade, in order to ensure the soundness of Chinese securities listed in New York.On April 2nd the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) indicated that it will allow American inspections of Chinese accounting papers. The concession from the Chinese government is a breakthrough in one of the costliest regulatory spats in capital-markets history.Without the reviews, an American law from 2020 could eventually force nearly $1trn-worth of Chinese stocks off New York’s exchanges. Although this would not happen until 2023 at the earliest, the mere prospect has exacerbated a sharp sell-off in Chinese technology stocks abroad, already battered by a broad clampdown on the tech industry at home. The NASDAQ Golden Dragon China Index, which tracks Chinese firms listed in New York, is down by two-thirds from its peak in February 2021. The publication last month of a list of 11 candidates for delisting by America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shaved another $260bn from the collective value of American-listed Chinese stocks.Market sentiment was boosted by the CSRC’s decision to cut a clause in securities rules that “on-site inspections will be dominated by domestic regulators or depend on the conclusions of inspections by domestic regulators.” The Chinese stocks have recouped most of the losses sustained after the SEC’s warning. Still, investors remain wary. The shares trade far below their prices a year ago, and they have performed worse than either Chinese tech firms listed in Hong Kong or American tech stocks overall (see chart).One reason is growing concern over geopolitical friction between China and the West. This, reckons Deutsche Bank, “has permanently impaired” valuations of Chinese stocks in America. It is also unclear how China’s newfound fondness for information-sharing will work in practice. The CSRC proposes setting up a “cross-border regulatory co-operation mechanism” to conduct the inspections. This may fall short of American demands for independent reviews. The CSRC also retains the power to approve foreign inspections. Investors may distrust its assurances that it would only rarely deny such approval because of the sensitivity of the material.And doubts persist about how much protection American oversight would actually afford investors. Chinese regulators with full access to accounts have failed to spot many a fraud. Chinese executives seldom face punishment in their home country for defrauding American shareholders, says Soren Aandahl of Blue Orca Capital, a Texan short-seller which has uncovered mischief at some Chinese firms. Until that changes, an incentive to fiddle with the numbers will remain. After all, books don’t get uncooked merely by being opened. ■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 “Double-entry book-keeping” More