Philippa Kaur

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

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

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