Philippa Kaur

In recent years Paris has undergone an astonishing revival. Global businessmen, financiers and techies casually drop into conversation that they are spending more time in the City of Light. Wall Street banks have expanded their offices there; venture capitalists are signing more cheques for French startups. An annual investment summit, held in May at the Palace of Versailles, has become a fixture in chief executives’ calendars. This year, as they sipped champagne with President Emmanuel Macron, company bosses pledged investment projects worth €15bn ($16bn).The renaissance is part of Mr Macron’s ambition to make France more innovative and business-friendly. But the project is now in danger. After his centrist party suffered a drubbing in the elections to the European Parliament, Mr Macron called a snap national parliamentary election, the first round of which is due to be held on June 30th. Hard-right and hard-left parties are polling well ahead of Mr Macron’s group. Both have unsustainable spending plans that are spooking investors and are far from friendly to global business. Only a few weeks ago Paris, which is also due to host the 2024 Summer Olympics in July, was basking in the limelight. Now a cloud of uncertainty hangs over its great commercial revival. More

When ChatGPT took everyone by storm in November 2022, it was OpenAI, the startup behind it, that seized the business world’s attention. But, as usual, big tech is back on the front foot. Nvidia, maker of accelerator chips that are at the core of generative artificial intelligence (AI), is now duelling with Microsoft, a tech giant of longer standing, to be the world’s most valuable company. Like Microsoft, it is investing in a diverse ecosystem of startups that it hopes will strengthen its lead. Predictably, given the “techlash” mindset of the regulatory authorities, both firms are high on the watch list of antitrust agencies.Don’t roll your eyes. The trustbusters may have infamously overreached in recent years in their attempts to cut big firms down to size. Yet for years big-tech incumbents in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have shown just as infamous a tendency to strut imperiously across their digital domains. What is intriguing is the speed at which the antitrust authorities are operating. Historically, such investigations have tended to be labyrinthine. It took 40 years for the Supreme Court to order E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, a large American chemical firm, to divest its anticompetitive stake in General Motors, which it first started to acquire in 1917 when GM was a fledgling carmaker. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an American antitrust agency, is still embroiled in a battle with Meta, a social-media giant, to unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, done 12 and ten years ago, respectively. More

Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy Fong Foods. Asian eateries were the first to snap up Mr Tran’s hot sauce, but before long the green-nozzled bottle, with its distinctive rooster logo, had become a staple in restaurants and pantries alike. Within just a few years Mr Tran went from hawking his wares out of a Chevy van in Los Angeles to walking the floor of a 20,000-square-metre factory. By 2020 his business was worth $1bn.Since then, however, it has suffered a meltdown. First came grumblings by fans that the condiment had lost its vibrant crimson colour and peppery punch. Next came the shortages. Enthusiasts soon panicked and began to hoard the stuff. At one point last year resale prices for Huy Fong’s sauce on eBay, an e-commerce site, reached as high as $150 per bottle. To cap it off, last month the company announced it was halting production until at least September. More

Some corporate tie-ups delight investors. Others make them groan. The purchase of a 41% stake in ITA, Italy’s national airline, by Lufthansa, a German carrier, for €325m ($350m) is an example of the latter. Rumours that the EU is close to blessing the deal have contributed to a slump in Lufthansa’s share price.ITA, once called Alitalia, is hardly a crown jewel. Since its founding in 1946 it has turned an annual profit only three times. The Italian government privatised the company in 2009—then renationalised it in 2020, rebranding it as ITA in the hope of a fresh start. Air France-KLM and Etihad, two airline businesses that had taken minority stakes in the carrier, wrote off their investments. The Italian government spent around €3.5bn during the covid-19 pandemic to keep the company aloft, equivalent to roughly €300,000 per employee. More

Chart: The EconomistOn June 18th Nvidia overtook Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company. Its market capitalisation of $3.3trn is more than 20 times what it was in January 2020. Investors are buying its shares as greedily as tech giants are buying its artificial-intelligence chips. Nvidia’s revenue in the quarter ending in April rose by 262%, year on year. Its net income rose by 628%.■ More

If there is one thing politicians agree on these days, it is that manufacturing jobs are “good” jobs. Joe Biden is betting that huge subsidies for new factories will transform the outlook for America’s workers—and November’s election. His acting labour secretary recently embarked on a jolly-sounding “Good Jobs Summer Tour” to trumpet the president’s plans. Donald Trump, Mr Biden’s rival, is just as eager to get more wrenches into the hands of American workers, mostly by slapping tariffs on foreign goods. Politicians across the rich world believe that reversing the decades-long decline in manufacturing employment would leave workers better off.Your guest Bartleby is not convinced. He has, admittedly, never worked in a factory, and thus feels no nostalgia for hard hats and high-vis vests. Still, the idea that deindustrialisation has made work worse is hard to square with the fact that data on worker satisfaction have been steadily improving for years. More

Drive a few hours from Lisbon towards Spain, past the olive farms, and you will arrive at Europe’s largest artificial lake, at the Portuguese town of Alqueva. The first thing that catches the eye is the large hydroelectric dam. But look closer and you will also spot a bright patch of floating glass. It is the floating solar-power plant built by EDP, a Portuguese utility that is one of the world’s biggest developers of renewable energy. Critics have long dismissed such projects as a costly and trouble-prone experiment. The technology, however, is now ready to shine.In this first phase of the project at Alqueva, engineers have stationed some 12,000 photovoltaic (PV) modules on floating pontoons made from partially recycled plastic and locally sourced cork. These are connected to an energy-storage system incorporating lithium-ion batteries and integrated with the hydroelectric dam’s power station. More

To witness India’s growing role as a manufacturing hub, dodge Bangalore’s notorious traffic and head north. Around 45km outside the city, amid the dust and debris of construction, Foxconn, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, is turning 120 hectares of farmland into a factory that will produce around 20m iPhones a year. Foxconn’s plant will be the third facility near Bangalore dedicated to churning out phones for Apple, an American tech giant. The other two are run by Tata, India’s largest conglomerate.Bangalore, home to many of India’s IT giants, is better known for its software than its hardware. However, the new factories suggest that, in one industry at least, India’s efforts to transform itself into a manufacturing powerhouse are bearing fruit. Electronics manufacturing—the business of building mobile phones, televisions and other gadgets—is thriving in India. The value of electronics it produced rose from $37bn to $105bn (3% of GDP) between the fiscal years ending in March 2016 and March 2023 (see chart). The government wants to triple this again by fiscal 2026. Although India’s production of electronics accounts for just 3% of the global total, its share is growing faster than any other country’s. More