Philippa Kaur

Most news on China’s manufacturers is bad news for rivals around the world. Foreign governments fear their domestic champions will be pummelled by low-cost Chinese rivals. But on August 5th the world got a small reminder that China’s producers face big problems of their own. Hengchi, an electric-vehicle (EV) maker owned by Evergrande, a failed property developer, told investors that two of its subsidiaries had been forced into bankruptcy. The group originally aimed to sell 1m EVs a year by 2025; amid feverish competition it sold just 1,389 last year. More

When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. More

Last month China’s government implemented the most sweeping reform to company law in the country since the changes that were made following its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The new rules are creating yet another headache for Chinese companies grappling with overcapacity and a slowing domestic economy. For their part, China’s leaders are betting that the new law will make business in the country less volatile—and easier for the Communist Party to control. More

Amid the 286-page judgment, issued after nearly four years of trial proceedings and petabytes of evidence, four words stand out. “Google is a monopolist,” wrote Amit Mehta, the judge of a district court in America, adding that “it has acted as one.” His ruling, handed down on August 5th, could lead to big changes for the multi-billion-dollar search market—and for the wider tech industry. More

Andrew Odlyzko, a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota, has a side hustle: he has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of speculative bubbles. Part of his time is spent at the Bank of England, where he photographs pages from thousands of handwritten ledgers which he later scours for clues about earlier episodes of excess. He hopes that generative artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take the drudgery out of the task. It is not lost on him that the latest speculative mania revolves around the technology itself. More

THE MARKET reaction was brutal. On August 1st Intel released a dismal set of results. The semiconductor giant’s sales were down by 1%, year on year, and the company declared a net loss of $1.6bn, compared with a profit of $1.5bn in the same period in 2023. “Our costs are too high, our margins are too low,” wrote Pat Gelsinger, its chief executive, in a note to employees. As a consequence, Intel plans to slash 15,000 jobs and to suspend dividends, which it has paid since 1992. Since the results were published its share price has plunged by nearly 30%. More

Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s most valuable company, is the archetype of vertical integration. The smartphones and other consumer electronics it is best known for accounted for about half of its revenue and a quarter of its operating profit in the period from April to June. The rest came from the components that go into such devices—including the semiconductors that run them. More

It is hard to imagine life without a smartphone these days. Leave yours at home and you may find yourself lost, moneyless and severed from social contact. Nine in ten American adults own one, according to Pew Research Centre. They spend 3 hours and 45 minutes on them a day, on average, reckons GWI, a firm of analysts. New versions souped up with artificial intelligence may be even harder to put down. More