Philippa Kaur

SINCE ITS founding in 1968 Intel has been synonymous with shrinkage. In its first four decades this was high praise. Every two years or so the American chip pioneer came out with new transistors half the size of earlier ones, a regularity that came to be known as Moore’s law, after one of the company’s founders. Twice as many chips thus fit onto roughly the same silicon wafer—and could be sold profitably for roughly the same price. That allowed Intel to corner the market for memory chips and then, when “memories” became commoditised in the 1980s, for the microprocessors which powered the subsequent PC revolution. More

On September 9th Mario Draghi, a former prime minister of Italy and former president of the European Central Bank, published his long-awaited report on European competitiveness. The continent’s productivity lags behind America’s, and it lacks world-beating corporate giants. Rising geopolitical tensions have made this problem more acute for European policymakers. They are right to worry. Listed American firms are, on average, bigger and more profitable than European ones. The difference is particularly striking among tech firms, which are twice as profitable and more than ten times the size in America. ■ More

For many years the hottest event in Indian capitalism was the annual general meeting of Reliance Industries. Thousands of attendees, from rickshaw drivers to day labourers, would pile into the Cooperage Football Stadium in Mumbai for a glimpse of Dhirubhai Ambani, the company’s charismatic founder. More

Bling is in the air. On September 9th Apple released its latest iPhone 16 series at an event called “It’s Glowtime”. The name referred to the sheen around Siri, its souped-up voice assistant. But it was just as appropriate for the new colour of its snazziest iPhone 16 Pro model: “desert titanium”—in other words, gold. More

REACTING to a takeover offer is a delicate moment for any company board. For the leadership of Seven & i, the Japanese owner of 7-Eleven, a convenience-store chain, the burden of responsibility is even greater. Its response to what could become the largest ever foreign acquisition of a Japanese firm represents a pivotal moment in the country’s corporate-governance revolution. More

The most important takeover battle in years has reached a crescendo. While campaigning in Pittsburgh at the start of the month Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said that US Steel should be owned and run by Americans, echoing a sentiment expressed earlier in the year by both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, her Republican rival. The speech provoked the steelmaker—which had agreed to a takeover by Nippon Steel, a Japanese rival, for $15bn—to shoot back. Not only were workers rallying in support of the deal, it said, but the firm would consider lay-offs and moving its headquarters from the city should the takeover fall apart. Mr Biden is expected to block the deal imminently, and US Steel’s share price has plunged (see chart 1). His intervention could mark the end of a pantomime that has busied lawyers, bankers and lobbyists all year. More

BRIAN NICCOL, the square-jawed, blue-eyed boss of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of fast-food restaurants, presents himself as an everyday, all-American family man. His daily routine begins with a 6am wake-up and work-out. He takes his daughter to school. And then he drives ten minutes from his home in Newport Beach, California, to the office. He claims he finishes work by 6pm to walk the dog, make dinner with his wife and turn in early. More

Few companies have gained as much value with as little fanfare as Broadcom has in recent years. Since the end of 2022 the American chipmaker’s market capitalisation has rocketed from around $230bn to more than $700bn. It is now the world’s 11th-most valuable company and its third-most valuable chipmaker, behind only Nvidia, the leader in artificial-intelligence (AI) semiconductors, and TSMC, the biggest manufacturer of them. More