Philippa Kaur

Volatile weather is a peril of the high seas. Volatile markets are similarly treacherous for the container-ship industry, which carries 80% of the volume of internationally traded goods. A global pandemic, which kept people at home with little else to do but buy, buy, buy, sent container rates sky-high. In 2022 shipping lines’ return on capital exceeded 40%; the biggest earned profits that were three times the total for the previous two decades combined. Rates and returns tumbled as demand waned and shipping companies started to receive the new vessels ordered during the boom. Then attacks by Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea all but closed the Suez Canal. The disruption has sent rates back to records surpassed only during the pandemic. How long will the good times last this time?On the surface, the answer should be: not long at all. Historically, value destruction has been the industry norm. Bernstein, a broker, reckons that between 2002 and 2019 shipping firms’ average return on capital of 4.7% trailed in the wake of its cost of capital, which averaged 10% or so. New ships take a couple of years to build. According to bimco, an industry association, in 2023 the global fleet added capacity of around 2.3m 20-foot equivalent units (the standard measure of container size), surpassing the previous annual record by 37%. Another 1m arrived in the first four months of 2024. In February worries about overcapacity led A.P Moller-Maersk, the world’s second-largest shipping line, to warn it could lose up to $5bn this year. More

THE ROLE of Kweichow Moutai in Chinese society is complex. The state-owned company’s fiery, translucent baijiu is by far China’s favourite booze. It is one of the country’s oldest brands—a rare corporate survivor of the worst days of Maoism. Vintage cases fetch tens of thousands of dollars. In 2021 it was briefly worth a throat-scorching $500bn and in 2022 it eclipsed Tencent, a digital giant, to become for a time the most valuable Chinese listed company.Today its market capitalisation is half that. Some of the decline has to do with President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on graft, before which prized bottles of the sorghum-based firewater would often change hands in place of cash. When in 2020 state TV accused Moutai of benefiting from bribery, $25bn instantly evaporated from its market capitalisation. More

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

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

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

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

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