Many investors will have greeted the start of corporate America’s latest earnings season feeling chipper. After a brief wobble in the first half of last year, the profits of big American firms in the S&P 500 index have climbed steadily higher in each subsequent quarter. This time round their profits are expected to grow by a bit more than 4%, year on year. More
Many investors will have greeted the start of corporate America’s latest earnings season feeling chipper. After a brief wobble in the first half of last year, the profits of big American firms in the S&P 500 index have climbed steadily higher in each subsequent quarter. This time around their profits are expected to grow by a bit more than 4%, year on year. More
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CARS AREN’T what they used to be. This is not a petrolhead’s lament. It is a statement of technological fact. These days even automobiles powered by a growling V8 engine contain a few kilometres of electrical wires, up from a few hundred metres in the 1990s, plus a thousand semiconductor chips and millions of lines of computer code to control everything from locks and antilock brakes to infotainment. And that is before you get to the electric vehicles (EVs) that are set to one day hog the world’s roads, a recent slowdown in sales notwithstanding, let alone to Elon Musk’s self-driving Cybercabs. The battery and other electronics make up more than half the value of components in an EV, compared with a tenth in that V8. Now, 17 years after Apple gave the world the iPhone and 13 since Toyota somewhat prematurely coined the phrase “smartphone on wheels”, modern cars have a lot in common with consumer gadgets. More
For years BHP and Rio Tinto, the world’s two most valuable miners, moved in lockstep. During the 2000s the twin Anglo-Australian giants rose on the back of China’s demand for commodities, particularly iron ore. In 2007 they even explored a merger (regulators rebuffed the idea). Then, when the commodity supercycle crashed in 2015, both landed in investors’ bad books, and were forced to shed assets and pay down their debts. Now, as the pair look to make the most of the energy transition, they are placing diverging bets on the future. More
IF A POLE runs out of milk on a Sunday morning, they will probably head to Zabka, a convenience store. It is rarely a long walk. Roughly 17m people, nearly half of Poland’s population, live within 500 metres of one of its more than 10,500 outlets. Some may now buy a slice of the retailer itself: on October 17th its owner, CVC, a European private-equity firm, listed a third of Zabka’s shares on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) at a valuation of 21.5bn zlotys ($5.5bn). The deal has brought a boost to Poland’s beleaguered bourse. More
A giant BIRDCAGE held models wearing Chanel’s latest clothes at its show for Paris fashion week on October 1st. The exhibit in the Grand Palais had all the hallmarks of the 114-year-old fashion house: sophistication, skirt suits and even a little black dress. Yet at the end there was no designer to take the applause. In June Virginie Viard, Chanel’s creative director since 2019, stepped down. Ms Viard was only the third person to hold the role. She took over from Karl Lagerfeld, a sharp-tongued German who held the role for 36 years and once called sweatpants “a sign of defeat”. Mr Lagerfeld’s predecessor was Coco Chanel. The front rows of runway shows are now rife with gossip about who will bag fashion’s most prestigious job. An announcement is expected this month. More
It’s not easy being a customer-service agent—particularly when those customers are so angry with a product that they want to yell at you down the phone. That’s the sort of rage that Sonos, a maker of home-audio systems, encountered in May when it released an app update so full of glitches it caused its share price to plunge. More
