Philippa Kaur

Dear SIR/MADAM—You asked for a short cover letter to accompany my application to work in your sales department. I could spend time telling you that your company is the one place I have always wanted to work. My mother tells me that my very first words were Dassault Systèmes/Sequoia Capital/change as needed. I have a tattoo of your logo/founder’s face on my lower back. I have named all of my pets after your various product lines. I am grateful just to be given the opportunity to be rejected by you. But if you do hire me, you won’t just be getting an employee, you’ll be getting a brand evangelist. More

There are worse ways to spend a lazy Saturday than to take a trip to one of IKEA’s giant furniture stores. Young children can be swiftly deposited at Småland, the supervised play area, leaving you to navigate the maze of flat-pack furniture and bric-a-brac at your leisure; you might even stop at the restaurant for a plate of Swedish meatballs. 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

Oil has long lubricated the Gulf’s relationships abroad. That is especially so in Asia, which takes in almost three-quarters of its exports of oil and gas. Cheap energy from the Gulf has helped fuel Asia’s rise as the global centre of manufacturing, and filled the sheikhs’ coffers in return. More

“Costs, costs, costs” are what Oliver Blume, the boss of Volkswagen (vw), recently said the car giant must address most urgently. His diagnosis of vw’s longstanding problem is nothing new, but his approach to dealing with it undoubtedly is. On September 3rd Mr Blume announced that, for the first time, vw was considering closing factories in Germany to tackle the “demanding and serious situation” confronting Europe’s carmakers. Even if he succeeds in doing so, however, shutting factories will not be sufficient to reverse VW’s dwindling sales and stay ahead of the looming onslaught of cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs). More

Warren buffett’s birthday present arrived early this year. On August 28th, two days before America Inc’s favourite great grandpa turned 94, his bricks-to-motor-insurance conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, reached a market value of $1trn. It became only the eighth American company to claim that title and, as a child of the Nebraskan heartland, the first not to emerge from the west-coast tech scene. Its class-A shares now change hands for $715,000, 55,000 times what they were worth when Mr Buffett took control of a struggling textile mill in 1965. In that period the total return, including dividends, of the S&P 500 index of America’s biggest firms has risen just 400-fold. When Berkshire’s longtime shareholders wish Mr Buffett many happy returns, his customarily folksy response might be: right back at ya. More

Decarbonising the world’s electricity supply will take more than solar panels and wind turbines, which rely on sunshine and a steady breeze to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it about. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an official forecaster, reckons that the global installed capacity of battery storage will need to rise from less than 200 gigawatts (GW) last year to more than a terawatt (TW) by the end of the decade, and nearly 5TW by 2050, if the world is to stay on course for net-zero emissions (see chart 1). Fortunately, though, the business of storing energy on the grid is at last being turbocharged. More

Parked outside the front doors of a handsome 1920s brick building in a Parisian suburb is a bright yellow Renault 5, a new electric vehicle (ev) unveiled by the French carmaker in February. It is permitted this enviable spot because it belongs to Luca de Meo, the boss of the company, whose top brass occupy the building. Mr de Meo has brought a renewed confidence to Renault since taking over as its chief executive four years ago. He has turned the business around—and readied it to take on the Chinese carmakers that are looking to expand in the European market. More