Philippa Kaur

After three days in the great outdoors, gnawing anxiety sets in. The air may be fresh but the woman in the advert is not. The backs of her knees have begun to emit an unusual smell. Luckily for her fellow campers, she has packed a tube of Peach and Vanilla Blossom Whole Body Deodorant Cream, a fresh product launched in January by Secret, a personal-care brand.Americans have long had a particular aversion to stench. Last year they bought $6.6bn worth of deodorant, the equivalent of nearly $20 per person—more than in any other rich country, according to Euromonitor, a research firm. Lately companies like Secret have been encouraging them to hunt out odours from their feet to their “underboobs”. Google searches for “whole-body deodorant” shot up by 1,000% in the year to March (albeit from a low base). More

Global gabfests tend to be gloomy affairs these days. Bigwigs bemoan the state of geopolitics, wring their hands over existential risks, urge greater global co-operation—and go home with little to show for it all. The Africa CEO Forum, a gathering that took place on May 16th and 17th in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, offered a welcome contrast. As bosses, politicians and financiers gathered to discuss the role of Africa’s private sector in spurring its economic development, the tone was refreshingly practical.Instead of dwelling on the grand sweep of history or the changing world order, the conference’s attendees knuckled down for discussions on how to boost cross-border commerce and strengthen local supply chains. Permeating all of this was a conviction that Africa must take control of its own economic development. As Aliko Dangote, the boss of Dangote Industries, a Nigerian conglomerate, and Africa’s richest man, summed up, “We Africans will have to do it. If we wait for foreigners, it’s not going to happen.” More

Lululemon, a CANADIAN maker of yoga outfits, does not have many things in common with Rolls-Royce, a British engine manufacturer. One thing they do share, along with scores of other foreign companies, is space in the sprawling Embassy Manyata Business Park in Bangalore. Hundreds of others, among them Maersk, a Danish shipping firm, Samsung, a South Korean electronics giant, and Wells Fargo, an American bank, have offices within a few miles. Many more of these white-collar outposts can be found in cities including Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad.Back in the 1990s global firms such as General Electric, a once-mighty conglomerate, began to rely on Indian workers to perform tedious tasks such as filling in forms and patching software for mainframe computers. Over time much of that drudgery was absorbed by Indian outsourcers such as Infosys, TCS and Wipro. Now foreign firms have begun to think bigger about the types of white-collar jobs that can be done by India’s cheap but well-educated workers. Many have set up “global capability centres” (GCCs) to offshore tasks from data analysis to research and development (R&D), helping fuel a new wave of services-led growth for India. More

In February 1908 Joseph Asscher, a master cutter of diamonds, cleaved the Cullinan at his workshop in Amsterdam. So tough was the South African diamond, the largest ever found, that Mr Asscher’s first attempt split his blade instead. The diamond industry is once again gripped by a nail-biting separation. This time, its most important company is facing the chop.After rejecting a takeover proposal from BHP, the world’s biggest miner, Anglo American announced a radical restructuring of its business on May 14th. As well as selling its coal, nickel and platinum operations, the British mining firm will shed its 85% stake in De Beers (Botswana, where its richest diamond mines are located, owns the rest). BHP has until May 29th to make a new offer for Anglo. Whatever happens, De Beers’s change of ownership marks the end of one of the company’s most enduring relationships—Ernest Oppenheimer, Anglo American’s founder, joined its board in 1926. For the industry, it signals the biggest shake-up since 2000, when De Beers abandoned its policy of controlling diamond prices by managing supply. More

“HE WHO controls the GPUs, controls the universe.” This spin on a famous line from “Dune”, a science-fiction classic, is commonly heard these days. Access to GPUs, and in particular those made by Nvidia, the leading supplier, is vital for any company that wants to be taken seriously in artificial intelligence (AI). Analysts talk of companies being “GPU-rich” or “GPU-poor”, depending on how many of the chips they have. Tech bosses boast of their giant stockpiles. Nvidia’s dominance has driven its market value to more than $2trn. In its latest results, due on May 22nd, it is expected to announce year-on-year revenue growth of more than 200%.GPUs do the computational heavy-lifting needed to train and operate large AI models. Yet, oddly, this is not what they were designed for. The acronym stands for “graphics processing unit”, because such chips were originally designed to process video-game graphics. It turned out that, fortuitously for Nvidia, they could be repurposed for AI workloads. More

IN Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “History of England”, the bustling coffeehouses of the 17th century were “the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself”. But what happens when the metropolis stays away? Laxman Narasimhan, boss of Starbucks, the world’s mightiest coffee chain, is finding out the hard way.Mr Narasimhan has been in the top job barely a year. He inherited sluggish growth in China and a unionising workforce in America. Since then, things have got much worse. During the first quarter sales in America declined by 3%, year on year, and the firm slashed its profit guidance for the rest of 2024. Long wait-times and unavailable products meant around 15% of customers using the firm’s mobile app did not bother to complete their order. Starbucks’ share price has fallen by a fifth this year. To cap it all off, on May 5th Howard Schultz, the caffeine king who grew the chain from obscurity to ubiquity, condemned the firm’s recent performance in a post on LinkedIn. More

Bestowing a name on a car, as on a child, is not to be taken lightly. By naming his newest progeny X Æ A-XII, Elon Musk has condemned the boy to a lifetime of befuddled attempts at pronunciation (“ex ash ay twelve”, for those wondering). Naming the first four models produced by Tesla, his car company, S, 3, X and Y was equally asinine.Yet model names that provoke derision or outrage are surprisingly common in the car business. The Ora Funky Cat, from a sub-brand of China’s Great Wall Motors, was recently renamed the Ora 03, ostensibly as part of a new global brand strategy but mainly because it sounded daft. Peugeot’s Bipper Tepee, now discontinued, was about as bad. (Peugeot is owned by Stellantis, whose largest shareholder, Exor, part-owns The Economist.) The Nissan Cedric, a large saloon on sale from 1960 until 2004, sounded like it belonged in the previous century. It eventually became the Datsun 200 series in many overseas markets. More

Heat pumps, a type of reverse-refrigerator used for warming homes, are not the type of tech that gets most investors hot and bothered. They were, after all, invented in 1856. Harald Mix and Carl-Erik Lagercrantz, two Swedish financiers, see things differently.The pair, whose investment group Vargas is behind Northvolt, a battery maker, and H2 Green Steel, which uses green hydrogen to produce steel, sense there are a big bucks in replacing Europe’s many oil and gas boilers with heat pumps. Earlier this year Aira, a company founded by Vargas, launched a new product that it hopes will entice more people to make the switch. It is not only profits that are at stake. More