Philippa Kaur

Palmer Luckey owns six helicopters. He would like a seventh: a Chinook, the workhorse of Western armed forces. When your guest Schumpeter, meeting Mr Luckey in London, suggests that the British Army might sell him one, he laments that “eccentric US civilians” are low on the priority list of buyers. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, “I need to maybe hit up the Taliban.”Mr Luckey, who co-founded Anduril, a defence-technology company, in 2017, is joking. Still, coming from a mulleted 31-year-old in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, who made his fortune selling a virtual-reality company to Facebook and has now branched out into Game Boy replicas, it sounds plausible. Despite his eccentricities, Mr Luckey is not a man to be taken lightly. Anduril is now nipping at the heels of America’s biggest armsmakers. More

In a factory in a smoggy corner of China’s inland Shaanxi province, the country’s world-leading solar industry is on display. Robots scoot around carrying square slices of polysilicon, a crystalline substance usually made from quartz. The slices, each 180mm across and a hair’s breadth thick, are called wafers. They are bathed in chemicals, shot with lasers and etched with silver. All that turns them into solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity. Several dozen of these cells are then bundled together into a solar module. The factory, owned by LONGi Green Energy Technology, can churn out about 16m cells a day.China’s solar industry is dominant across every stage of the global supply chain, from the polysilicon to the finished product. Module production capacity in the country reached roughly 1,000 gigawatts (GW) last year, almost five times that of the rest of the world combined, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy. What is more, it has tripled since 2021, outgrowing the rest of the world, despite efforts by America and others to boost domestic production. China is now able to produce more than twice as many solar modules as the world installs each year. More

PRICE WARS are ten a penny in China. The emergence of hundreds of lookalike companies seemingly overnight is pushing down retail prices of everything from electric vehicles to bike-sharing and bubble tea. The latest products to enter the ruinous fray are artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbots. This may seem surprising. Until recently China’s problem was not a surfeit of large language models (LLMs), the sort that makes ChatGPT a humanlike content-creator, but their dearth. At the start of 2023 experts reckoned that the Chinese LLMs that did exist were a decade behind the American cutting edge.Chart: The Economist More

When the Alternative for Germany (AfD, from its German initials) was launched in 2013, it was a pro-business, classically liberal party created by German intellectuals opposed to the single European currency. Hans-Olaf Henkel, a free-market enthusiast and former boss of the bDI, the main German industry association, was a founding member. Then, in the space of a few years, the AfD turned into an anti-immigrant, populist party toying with Dexit—Germany’s exit from the eu. Mr Henkel quit in 2015. German bosses turned their backs. Despite being generally reluctant to voice political opinions, many came out strongly against the AfD ahead of the election to the European Parliament on June 9th. More

WHEN A GAGGLE of Generation-Z employees from Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo gets together in one place, the ensuing conversation will usually be conducted in decent English. The participants are all equally fluent in another common language—that of corporate despair.The inflexible hierarchies, long hours and culture of presenteeism that pervade Asia Inc have left many young workers deeply dissatisfied with their lot in life. In an annual global survey of employee wellbeing by Gallup, an American pollster, just 18% of under-35s in East Asia say they are engaged at work, below the already tepid 23% global average. Japan and Hong Kong skirt the bottom of the global rankings for engagement across all age groups. More

HOW MUCH is one-party rule worth to India Inc? Judging by the market reaction to the results of the general election, the figure is around $400bn. That is the total market value lost by Mumbai-listed stocks on June 4th, when it turned out that rather than securing a big majority, as exit polls had predicted, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi would need coalition partners to govern.Investors’ panic proved short-lived. By June 10th the Mumbai bourse had clawed back all its losses, after Mr Modi quickly assembled a coalition perceived to be sympathetic to his pro-business economic agenda. The previous day a “Who’s Who” of corporate India applauded in the presidential palace as Mr Modi was sworn in as prime minister for a third time. Modi 3.0, as Indians refer to the new government, is looking much like the earlier versions. More

One satisfaction of buying a new car is the distinctive aroma within. The smell that emanates from the Chinese electric vehicles (evs) that are increasingly common on Europe’s roads is, for the European Commission, that of a rat. On June 12th, after an eight-month probe, the EU’s executive arm accused China of unfairly subsidising its industry with the likes of tax breaks and cheap loans. It fears that cut-price imports pose a “clearly foreseeable and imminent injury” to European carmakers. Provisional tariffs of between 26% and 48%, compared with 10% for other imported cars, will be imposed from July on Chinese evs. The precise duty will depend on each firm’s willingness to assist the investigation.In the short term, it is hard to sniff out a winner. Car buyers hoping to inhale the intoxicating new-car odour will certainly suffer if the prices of imported cars rise and competitive pressures on European firms ease. But Europe’s carmakers are not taking a victory lap, either. They did not ask for the probe, which was launched under pressure from France’s government. German companies such as Volkswagen and BMW, which make lots of cars in China and export plenty there, have been particularly vocal opponents. Now they fear retaliation from Beijing, which looks inevitable. More

Tim Cook has an air of bashful reverence. In his 13 years at the helm of Apple he has created more value than just about any CEO in history, as the tech behemoth’s market capitalisation has climbed from less than $400bn to almost $3trn. But he still acts as if he were there thanks to the grace of Steve Jobs, or the skill of his colleagues, or divine providence. It was in character, then, that when he took to the stage at the iPhone-maker’s annual developers’ gathering on June 10th, he first greeted the cheering throng by clasping his hands together, as if in prayer. He probably would not admit this, but there was plenty to pray for.Apple is suffering one of its periodic bouts of investor angst. Call it the curse of the missing mojo. In the past 18 months Wall Street has convinced itself—as it has a few times since Jobs died in 2011—that the creative spark bequeathed by Apple’s Promethean co-founder has finally sputtered out. Behind that is a real problem: sales of the iPhone, which account for half of Apple’s revenues, are slowing. But there is a perception problem, too. Apple’s aloof response to the euphoria over generative artificial intelligence (AI) has cost it its crown as the world’s most valuable company, which it lost to its one-time nemesis, Microsoft. To make matters worse, the market value of Nvidia, maker of chips that power generative-AI tools, this month briefly overtook that of Apple. Its boss, Jensen Huang, is treated like the second coming of Jobs. More