Philippa Kaur

In the 1990s Macy’s, a chain of department stores based in New York, began gobbling up rivals across America. By the late 2000s that strategy had turned it into the biggest fish in a steadily evaporating pond. Sales across American department stores fell from $232bn in 2000 to $133bn last year as consumers switched to buying their frocks and fridges online. Many of Macy’s rivals have collapsed along the way. Sears, once America’s largest retailer, went bankrupt in 2018. JCPenney followed in 2020, as revenues dried up amid lockdowns. Recent years have brought little relief. The surge in the cost of living has led shoppers to seek cheaper alternatives to department stores.The future of Macy’s has been in question since December, when Arkhouse Management and Brigade Capital Management, two buy-out firms, were reported to be circling the retailer. After their takeover offer valuing it at $5.8bn was rejected in January, the duo began to agitate for a shake-up of its board. Macy’s then agreed to talks on a sweetened proposal and handed two seats on its board to the interlopers. On July 15th, however, it called off discussions, blaming uncertainty over how the deal would be financed. Its share price plummeted by 12%, lowering its market value to $4.7bn. More

Deciding to CAlL it quits is a relatively simple judgment early on in a career. If you find the prospect of going to work on Monday morning more depressing than a Lars von Trier film, it is time to leave. If you have nothing left to learn in your current organisation, you should probably grab more stimulating opportunities elsewhere. But knowing when to quit is less easy when you are in a role that already confers lots of status, novelty and purpose. And moving on is particularly difficult when it might be the last big job you have.What is true of American presidents is also true of chief executives. Bob Iger has made not leaving Disney into an art form. The surest way to know you will not succeed Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase is to be anointed his successor. Both bosses are stars, and their firms have reasons to hang on to them. The same cannot be said of Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, who will lead the company until the end of the year despite the enormous reputational damage it has sustained on his watch. (Mr Calhoun was supposed to have departed years ago; instead the firm raised the mandatory retirement age to allow him to stay.) More

IN LATE 2022 Wiz, a cyber-security startup, boasted that it was “the fastest-growing software company ever”. A stretch, maybe, but not a big one. At that point, 18 months after it was founded, annualised sales hit $100m. By 2023 they were $350m. In May Wiz raised $1bn at a $12bn valuation. On July 14th it emerged that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was in talks to acquire Wiz for $23bn. It would be the biggest purchase of a cyber-security firm in history and Alphabet’s biggest takeover ever (see chart 1). More

CHINA IS, FAMOUSLY, the world’s factory and a giant market for the world’s companies. More unremarked is its growing role as the world’s research-and-development laboratory. Between 2012 and 2021 foreign firms increased their collective Chinese research personnel by a fifth, to 716,000. Their annual R&D spending in the country almost doubled, to 338bn yuan ($52bn). Add investments by local firms and China now matches Europe’s R&D tally (see chart). Only America splurges more.In 2022, despite harsh covid-19 lockdowns, 25 new foreign R&D centres opened in Shanghai. Last year, when overall foreign direct investments in China shrivelled by 80%, those in R&D rose by 4%. In the process, Western R&D centres in China have been re-engineered, from places to learn about the domestic market into hotbeds of innovation whose fruits can be found in products sold everywhere. More

J.D. Vance’s life is full of twists and turns. His memoir from 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy”, chronicles how a boy from a drug-afflicted home in the Ohio rustbelt, who almost flunked high school, made it to Yale Law School. As a bestselling author, celebrated by liberals for his unflinching portrayal of left-behind people and places, he turned staunchly anti-establishment, attacking what he saw as business elites benefiting from moving factories abroad and paying low wages at home. As a venture capitalist, he was mentored in Silicon Valley by Peter Thiel, a conservative contrarian who then backed him for the Senate. Now he crusades against the very tech giants that, like Meta, owner of Facebook, made Mr Thiel billions as an early investor. He was once a “never-Trumper”. Now he is Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running-mate. More

WHEN BEYONCÉ performed at a pre-wedding party for Isha Ambani in 2018, India was agog. Merely receiving an invitation conferred bragging rights on status-obsessed business leaders and politicians. The cost of the nuptials, with countless ancillary events, was said to be in excess of $100m. That is a staggering sum for almost anyone—but not the Ambani family, which owns a controlling interest in Reliance Industries, the country’s most valuable company, dominating everything from telecoms to oil refining. Despite some anti-rich finger-wagging, many Indians appear to have viewed the event, which even the maharajas of yore would envy, as evidence that India—and Indian business—could once again glitter. More

Boom-and-bust cycles all tend to look the same. A consumer fad or industrial urgency fuels demand for a product. Prices rise. Producers invest in capacity. By the time new supply materialises it outstrips already sated demand. Prices crash. Then, at some point, things get so cheap as to set off another demand upswing. And so on.The inevitability is comforting for bosses in industries from mining to chipmaking. Not, though, in battery manufacturing. Anticipating booming demand for electric vehicles (EVs), since 2018 companies around the world have ploughed more than $520bn into battery-making, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. Sure enough, the investments (plus improvements in technology) have pushed down the prices of batteries and, since these make up a third of the cost of an EV, of battery-powered cars. But not sufficiently to entice motorists to go electric. And so the industry is facing a bust without ever having had much of a boom. More

GERMAN POLITICS is followed closely in Paris. So is French politics in Berlin. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said on July 8th that he was “relieved” that the far right failed to win the French parliamentary election on July 7th. What Mr Scholz did not mention were worries in German companies about what the New Popular Front (NFP), the leftist alliance which won the most votes and includes a hard-left element led by a former Trotskyist, have in store for business.What happens to French business matters to Germans because ties between Deutschland AG and France SA are closer than ever. Germany is France’s biggest export market and its biggest trading partner. France is likewise among the largest recipients of German goods and services. Businesses in each country invest a lot across the Rhine. Airbus, a Franco-German planemaking Goliath worth over €100bn ($108bn), is among Europe’s most valuable companies. Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate, and Alstom, a French one, were blocked by EU trustbusters from creating an Airbus for trains but still plan to build locomotives together. More