Philippa Kaur

However much you might want to keep politics out of business, politics has other plans for you. Events have a habit of sucking organisations into controversy. In 2022 Disney was caught up in a very public row with the state of Florida over a bill about teaching sexuality and gender identity in public schools. Earlier this year Google fired some employees who had taken part in a sit-in to protest against the tech firm’s cloud-computing contract with Israel. University administrators have conspicuously struggled to manage the passions aroused by the war in Gaza. More

Few parts of the global economy hold more obvious promise than South-East Asia. Multinational firms hoping to move manufacturing away from China are racing to establish supply chains in the region. Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam are expected to be among the fastest-growing economies in the world during the rest of the decade. Malaysia is likely to join the ranks of the world’s high-income economies soon. Singapore’s importance as a financial hub has grown as foreigners have deserted Hong Kong. More

Among the many newcomers to the business of weight-loss drugs is Hims & Hers, an American e-pharmacy better known for hawking remedies for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Since May it has offered its own version of Wegovy, a blockbuster slimming jab, thanks to a quirk in American law that lets pharmacies replicate some brand-name drugs when there are shortages. Analysts expect that the company will pocket around $145m from its weight-loss drug this year. More

“My morale for this job is gone, gonna totally check out,” an Amazon worker recently wrote on Blind, an online forum where employees whinge about their employers. The cause of his discontent was a letter sent last month by Andy Jassy, the tech giant’s boss, that ordered staff back to the office five days a week. The mandate has caused grumbling among Amazon’s office drones, who had previously been required to show up in person only three days a week. At a meeting on October 17th Matt Garman, head of Amazon’s cloud-computing division, told a group of staff that if they did not want to adhere to the policy they could quit. More

Many investors will have greeted the start of corporate America’s latest earnings season feeling chipper. After a brief wobble in the first half of last year, the profits of big American firms in the S&P 500 index have climbed steadily higher in each subsequent quarter. This time round their profits are expected to grow by a bit more than 4%, year on year. More

Many investors will have greeted the start of corporate America’s latest earnings season feeling chipper. After a brief wobble in the first half of last year, the profits of big American firms in the S&P 500 index have climbed steadily higher in each subsequent quarter. This time around their profits are expected to grow by a bit more than 4%, year on year. More

CARS AREN’T what they used to be. This is not a petrolhead’s lament. It is a statement of technological fact. These days even automobiles powered by a growling V8 engine contain a few kilometres of electrical wires, up from a few hundred metres in the 1990s, plus a thousand semiconductor chips and millions of lines of computer code to control everything from locks and antilock brakes to infotainment. And that is before you get to the electric vehicles (EVs) that are set to one day hog the world’s roads, a recent slowdown in sales notwithstanding, let alone to Elon Musk’s self-driving Cybercabs. The battery and other electronics make up more than half the value of components in an EV, compared with a tenth in that V8. Now, 17 years after Apple gave the world the iPhone and 13 since Toyota somewhat prematurely coined the phrase “smartphone on wheels”, modern cars have a lot in common with consumer gadgets. More

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