Philippa Kaur

In a miserable year for initial public offerings, Indonesia’s capital is turning heads. The Jakarta Stock Exchange enjoyed record IPO volumes in the first quarter. The $800m raised in these flotations outstripped the sums drummed up on Hong Kong’s or New York’s stock exchanges in the same period. The bulk of the money came from the listing of Pertamina Geothermal Energy, a green subsidiary of the state oil-and-gas giant. It may have been just the start of Indonesia’s clean-energy IPO boom. On April 12th Harita Nickel, a firm that processes the battery metal, pulled off the country’s biggest IPO in almost a year, raising nearly $700m at a valuation of around $5bn. Later this month Merdeka Battery Materials, another nickel firm, aims to raise more than $500m. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

The pandemic embedded video into the workplace. Workers who had never previously been on camera suddenly spent every hour of the day getting used to the sight of themselves and their colleagues on screen. Executives realised that they could send video messages to their workforces rather than having to convene town halls. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

In FEBRUARY TECK RESOUrCES finally announced its slow move into the future. The Canadian miner plans to spin off its relatively dirty steelmaking-coal operations. Under the plan, Teck would focus on mining copper and zinc, while continuing to get the majority of the severed coal company’s profits. Holders of Teck’s super-voting “class A” shares would retain control over the rump firm’s strategic moves for six years. After that its dual-shareholding structure would be scrapped.Glencore, a much bigger commodity firm based in Switzerland, has something much more radical in mind. It proposes a merger between it and Teck that would then create two giant versions of Teck’s proposed entities. The first would amalgamate Glencore’s and Teck’s metals and minerals businesses. It would be listed in London and have an enterprise value of perhaps $100bn. With copper mining expected to make up roughly half its profits, “GlenTeck” would be a red-metal giant poised to take advantage of a green commodities supercycle. The second company would combine the parent firms’ coal businesses, to be listed in New York. This “CoalCo” would shovel all cash it generates to shareholders as the world weans itself off the black stuff.Glencore publicly announced its unsolicited offer on April 3rd. Its boss, Gary Nagle, said that the deal, with an implied premium of 20% over Teck’s share price, would cut costs and unlock shareholder value. After swiftly rejecting the offer, his opposite number at Teck, Jonathan Price, called the transaction a “non-starter”, complaining that it would expose Teck’s shareholders to Glencore’s thermal-coal business, which may command less enthusiasm from investors than coking coal for steel mills. Mr Nagle fired back on April 11th, offering Teck’s shareholders their quarter of CoalCo in cash rather than shares. If later this month shareholders scupper Teck’s original restructuring plan, which requires approval from supermajorities of both share classes, the firm could be forced to the negotiating table. Even then, securing a merger will be difficult. It would be the biggest acquisition of a Canadian miner since 2007. The Keevil family, which owns many of Teck’s super-voting shares, is a hard sell. Norman Keevil, the patriarch and Teck’s chairman emeritus, has made plain his desire to keep the firm in Canadian hands. Canada’s government shares his wariness: it is tightening foreign-investment rules in its critical-minerals sectors.To placate the Keevils and the Canadian authorities, Glencore promises to keep GlenTeck’s industrial head office in Canada. In addition, it has pledged domestic employment guarantees and a secondary listing on Toronto’s stock exchange. If Glencore’s overtures to Teck fail despite all these sweeteners, the Swiss company may still want to put its coal business up for sale. Other mining bosses may be ready to start shaking hands, too. On April 10th Newmont, an American mining giant, raised its takeover offer for Newcrest, an Australian gold miner, to almost $20bn. Years of dwindling capital expenditure and a commodities boom have left miners flush with cash. With their shares often trading close to the replacement value of their assets, buying looks more attractive than building. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

FOR YEARS nutritionists have advised Americans to steer clear of grocery shops’ central aisles and instead fill their trolleys from the outlying shelves. Fresh meat, dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables often line supermarket walls; cans, boxes and other packages of less salubrious processed food are stacked in the middle. Some shoppers have heeded that advice: sales of canned soup have been lacklustre in recent times, even as those of fresher refrigerated potages have grown. Now makers of the packaged stuff are staging a comeback. This says as much about shifting economic conditions as it does about products on shelves.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

There is a good tale about Samsung’s entry into the silicon-chip business, which at the time—1983—was dominated by Japanese and American manufacturers. Lee Byung-chul, the founder of the South Korean chaebol, announced the new strategy in what he grandiloquently called the Tokyo Declaration. He said that though his country lacked raw materials such as oil, it had an educated and diligent workforce that was well equipped to turn its hand to chipmaking. As Geoffrey Cain recounts in his book, “Samsung Rising”, shortly afterwards some Samsung executives were sent on an overnight march across the mountains from Seoul to toughen them up for the challenge. They arrived at Samsung’s first semiconductor factory, built in a record six months, and signed a pledge before breakfast to make the business a success. Then, without sleeping, they put in a 16-hour work day.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

TikTok is becoming the West’s favourite time sink. Last month it said it had 150m users in America, putting it ahead of Instagram and within striking distance of Facebook, two social networks owned by Meta. For its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, it remains a money sink. ByteDance can afford to be patient with the lossmaking Western app thanks to its lucrative Chinese version, Douyin. Last year the tech group as a whole made a gross operating profit of $25bn or so, most of it at home. On that measure, it overtook China’s reigning tech titans, Alibaba and Tencent. The gap between Meta’s overall profits per user and those of ByteDance’s apps is narrowing—and will shrink further once TikTok starts making money. Unless, that is, Western politicians act on their threats to ban TikTok on national-security grounds.■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

DAVID, WHO runs a well-trafficked shoe-shine stand at a huge convention centre just outside Washington, was in a good mood as he surveyed the delegates at a recent event there. They were attending the ARPA-E summit, an annual pow-wow put on by the Department of Energy (DoE), and were tipping well. A few weeks earlier, when Donald Trump spoke at that same venue at a gathering of conservative Republicans, David was forced to shut down his stand and lost business. It is not his only grumble about Mr Trump: “When he ran for office he promised to drain the swamp, but he turned out to be the biggest crocodile of them all.”David is right. During Mr Trump’s presidency, lobbyists for every corporate interest went into high gear to try to influence the unorthodox administration of Beltway outsiders. Lots of unfamiliar swamp creatures turned up, too, when they realised that having the ear of the last person to speak to Mr Trump before he made a big decision was lobbying gold. They have since slithered away. But, with up to $800bn in clean-energy handouts now up for grabs over the coming decade, another invasive species is taking their place.The energy industry as a whole spent nearly $300m last year on lobbying, the most since 2013 (see chart 1). Big oil and electric utilities, which had been reducing their spending on influence-seeking before 2020, have ramped it up again; spending is growing in line with that of the biggest lobbyists, big pharma. Renewables firms went from spending an annual average of around $24m between 2013 and 2020, to $38m in 2021 and $47m in 2022. “We’ve now got an interesting new ecosystem of swamp creatures here,” says the government-relations man at one of the world’s biggest renewable-energy companies.The reason is the passage last year of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The misnamed law funnels at least $369bn in direct subsidies and tax credits to decarbonisation-related sectors (see chart 2). It came on the heels of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which also shovels billions in subsidies towards clean infrastructure. Some of the laws offer generous tax credits, with no caps on the amount of spending eligible for the incentives. A mad investment rush, should it materialise, could therefore lead to public expenditure of $800bn over the next decade. An official at a big utility says her firm has projects in the works across America that, if successful, will secure a staggering $2bn in funding from the two laws. The renewables firm’s government-relations man confesses, “We stopped counting…we just have a big smile on our faces all the time these days.” “There is a lot there for a lot of people,” sums up a business-chamber grandee. And, he adds, “A lot of lobbyists are interested in the spending.” The green influence brokers can be spotted in all the usual places, starting with Capitol Hill. A long-time lobbyist-watcher reckons that the IRA “is the most targeted bill of the last 20 years”. More than 2,000 groups had officially declared their interest in the congressional sausage-making that produced the gargantuan law last year. The IRA and the infrastructure law are now on the statute books, of course. But buttering up congressmen and senators may still be worth the effort. “The administration still has to present budgets and members of Congress still have their say,” explains one senior DoE official turned adviser. And, adds a lobbyist for a rising “climate-tech” investment firm, “A member of Congress can always ask a question in a hearing or send a letter of complaint to the White House.”The White House itself is another target. A partner at a top lobbying firm explains that for potentially lucrative but politically explosive issues, “we have been told these are big politically contentious issues so people in the White House want to be looped in.” These include local-content requirements for electric-vehicle manufacturing and the maximum carbon intensity for hydrogen to be considered “clean”. On such matters, the partner says, John Podesta, President Joe Biden’s wrangler for all things climate and energy, “makes the final call”. Love Mr Podesta or hate him, says one energy operative not in the loving camp, “he has a reputation for being practical, and focused on getting things done.”Two executive-branch agencies rank high on the green lobbyists’ hit list. The DoE’s experts will decide which sectors and technologies to prioritise; just its Loan Programmes Office, which aims to provide “debt financing for commercial deployment of large-scale energy projects”, now has a mind-boggling $400bn to lend out, for example. Another target is the Treasury Department, and in particular the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), whose tax experts are fleshing out the rules for green tax credits.The DoE is the more welcoming of the two. “Of course you can lobby the DoE,” says Brian McCormack, a former DoE chief of staff. “Companies go there all the time to talk about what they’re doing.” One challenge now, Mr McCormack says, is that many government employees are still not going into the office regularly. It’s harder to make your case on the phone or via video conference, he reckons.It is harder still at the IRS, which, the clean-tech-investment lobbyist says, “is immune to direct lobbying”. Getting through to the taxmen is possible but requires a more subtle approach. A law firm renowned for its tax expertise has secured a coveted meeting with officials on behalf of a client in part, says one of its partners, by submitting “really good comments” and clever technical papers on the relevant subject. Many IRS officials know their tax law in and out but have little understanding of energy. “You have to have credibility for them to see you and you have to bring them solutions,” she explains.For the lobbyists’ corporate clients, such considerations put a premium on certain sets of skills. One group in high demand is experts in finance and accounting, especially in niche areas such as tax-equity transactions (in which investors agree to fund a project in return for the right to claim a tax benefit) or the ins and outs of whether tax credits can be transferred or stacked on top of each other. One clean-energy lobbyist observes that the new climate-related laws are more complicated than anything in the past, yet the number of people working on them in industry and in government has not changed. “With so much more complexity,” he says, “it is worth paying for your service if you can parse through something in half an hour that takes someone else eight hours.” Another sought-after group are energy nerds. A long-time advocate of upgrading the power grid reports gleefully that he is suddenly very popular as electrifying industries struggle to work out how to get transmission lines and other power infrastructure built. Specialists in nascent technologies on which the new laws shower subsidies, such as carbon removal, which prevents emitted CO2 from entering the atmosphere or sucks it back once it is out, are also in demand. “We are Treasury whisperers,” boasts the top government-relations expert at a climate-tech fund. The group’s investments in things like carbon capture and hydrogen electrolysis have given it deep expertise in these areas, which it is sharing with the tax bureaucrats. It is also sweet-talking environmentalists, whose “ignorant and aggressive positions early on” were often caused by unfamiliarity with either the new technologies or the tax code.The billions of dollars going out through grants, meanwhile, has raised the stature of advisers with experience in writing grant applications. Many firms are baffled by having to write 30-page proposals and working out things like who exactly counts as a “non-federal partner”. Some of the grants now on offer “can make or break a business model”, notes Mr McCormack. Take a company going after half a dozen DoE grants worth $10m apiece, he says. “Isn’t it worth $100,000 to get a professional to help you put together a proposal, identify which offices on Capitol Hill you should visit and get a strategy together?”Specialised consultancies are stepping in to provide the corporate IRA supplicant all these newly prized skills in one place. Boundary Stone Partners, a prominent example of the trend, employs many former DoE officials. Like Mr McCormack, Boundary Stone’s co-founder, Brandon Hurlbut, served as DoE chief of staff. Jeff Navin, the other co-founder, says that the firm’s aim is to act as a translator between clean-energy policymakers, technologists and investors: “The three groups did not talk the same language.” Boundary Stone claims to have helped ease the passage of a demonstration programme for next-generation nuclear reactors (to the benefit of one of its clients, a nuclear-energy startup backed by Bill Gates called TerraPower) and to have assisted solar-panel manufacturers in securing lucrative tax credits for domestic production.How much influence these green lobbyists actually wield in Washington is open to debate. Their clients clearly think they are doing some good. More surprisingly, so do parts of officialdom. A lobbyist for an influential environmental group says that critical staff either fled government or were expelled during the Trump era, leaving agencies “struggling to get work done”. Against this backdrop, many bureaucrats see thoughtful lobbyists as helping “get things right”. Rich Powell, head of ClearPath, a climate-innovation advocacy group influential among Republicans, believes that they can help strike grand political bargains, of which the energy transition will need plenty. “Swamps may be the most vital ecosystem,” he says. ■ More

In some ways, freight rail and trucking seem to be direct competitors. Companies that need to get a container of goods from one city to another can choose between them. Rail is more cost-effective, fuel-efficient and can move greater volumes on a single trip. Trucking is usually faster and, unless the container is going from rail yard to rail yard, more direct. In America, both sectors boomed during the pandemic, as service-deprived shoppers stocked up on stuff. Now both are bracing for an economic slowdown, which may also affect them in similar ways.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More