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    ‘A Perfect Positive Storm’: Bonkers Dollars for Big Tech

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    The dictionary doesn’t have enough superlatives to describe what’s happening to the five biggest technology companies, raising uncomfortable questions for their C.E.O.s.In the Great Recession more than a decade ago, big tech companies hit a rough patch just like everyone else. Now they have become unquestioned winners of the pandemic economy.The combined yearly revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook is about $1.2 trillion, according to earnings reported this week, more than 25 percent higher than the figure just as the pandemic started to bite in 2020. In less than a week, those five giants make more in sales than McDonald’s does in a year.The U.S. economy is cranking back from 2020, when it contracted for the first time since the financial crisis. But for the tech giants, the pandemic hit was barely a blip. It’s a fantastic time to be a titan of U.S. technology — as long as you ignore the screaming politicians, the daily headlines about killing free speech or dodging taxes, the gripes from competitors and workers, and the too-many-to-count legal investigations and lawsuits.America’s technology superpowers aren’t making bonkers dollars in spite of the deadly coronavirus and its ripple effects through the global economy. They have grown even stronger because of the pandemic. It’s both logical and slightly nuts.The wildly successful last year also raises uncomfortable questions for tech company bosses, the public and elected officials already peeved about the industry: Is what’s good for Big Tech good for America? Or are the tech superstars winning while the rest of us are losing?Americans have more money in their pockets thanks to government stimulus checks and pandemic savings, and the tech giants are getting a significant share. Their combined revenue is equivalent to roughly 5 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States.Big Tech’s pandemic big bucks have an understandable root cause: We needed its services.People gravitated to Facebook’s apps to stay in touch and entertained, and businesses wanted to pay Facebook and Google, which Alphabet owns, to help them find customers who were stuck at home. People preferred to buy diapers and deck chairs from Amazon rather than risk their health shopping in stores. Companies loaded up on software from Microsoft as their businesses and work forces went virtual. Apple’s laptops and iPads become lifelines for office workers and schoolchildren.Before the pandemic, America’s technology superpowers were already influential in how we communicated, worked, stayed entertained and shopped. Now they are practically unavoidable. Investors have scooped up Big Tech shares in a bet that these companies are nearly invincible.“They were already on the way up and had been for the best part of a decade, and the pandemic was unique,” said Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University. “For them it was a perfect positive storm.”Times weren’t so good for these companies in the last economic rough patch. In the downturn from 2007 to 2009, Microsoft’s sales dropped slightly, and its stock price fell 60 percent from the fall of 2008 to March 2009, a low point for U.S. stocks. Google and Amazon each lost as much as two-thirds of their market value.One sign of how this time is different: Amazon’s revenue is growing much faster in 2021 than it did in 2009, when the company was one-fifteenth its current size. Sales in the first quarter rose 44 percent from a year earlier, and Amazon’s profits before taxes — which have never been exactly robust — more than doubled to $8.9 billion. Businesses are addicted to Amazon’s cloud computer services, where sales rose 32 percent, and shoppers can’t live without Amazon’s delivery. Investors love Amazon, too. The company’s stock market value has nearly doubled since the beginning of 2020 to $1.8 trillion.For the other tech giants, it’s as if their brief pandemic nosedive never happened. Advertising sales typically rise and fall with the economy. But as other types of ad spending shrank when the U.S. economy contracted last year, ad sales rose for Google and Facebook. The growth was even better for them in the first three months of this year.A year ago, analysts worried that Apple would be crippled as the pandemic gripped China, which is the hub of the company’s manufacturing operations and its most important consumer market. The fears didn’t last long. In the first three months of 2021, Apple’s revenue from selling iPhones increased at the fastest rate since 2012. Sales in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong nearly doubled from a year earlier.Apple’s revenue from iPhone sales in the first three months of the year rose at the fastest pace since 2012.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe tech giants are not the only companies rallying in dark times. America’s big banks have also been on a tear. So have some younger technology companies, such as Snap and Zoom, the maker of the pandemic-favorite videoconferencing app. The crisis forced all sorts of businesses to go digital fast in ways that could help them thrive. Restaurants invested in online sales and delivery, and doctors went full bore into telemedicine.But the dictionary doesn’t have enough superlatives to describe what’s happening to the five biggest technology companies. It’s all a bit awkward, really. It’s rocket fuel for critics, including some regulators and lawmakers in Europe and the United States, who say the tech giants crowd out newcomers and leave everyone worse off.Big Tech companies say they face stiff competition that leads to better products and lower prices, but their bank statements might suggest otherwise. Facebook’s profit margins are higher now than they were before the pandemic.Some of their success is explained by the peculiarities of the pandemic economy. Some people and sectors are doing awesome, while other families are lining up at food banks and while companies like airlines are begging for cash. Unlike the stock market clobbering in the Great Recession, stock indexes in the United States have reached new highs.The tech superstars have also capitalized on this moment. Alphabet and Facebook have used the pandemic to cut back in places that matter less, such as promotional costs and travel and entertainment budgets. And the tech giants have generally increased spending in areas that extend their advantages.Alphabet is now spending more on big-ticket projects, like building computer complexes, than Exxon Mobil spends to dig oil and gas out of the ground. Amazon’s work force has expanded by more than 470,000 people since the end of 2019. That deepens the moat separating the tech superstars from everyone else.Big Tech is emerging from the pandemic lean, mean and ready for a U.S. economy expected to roar back to life in 2021. Meanwhile, there are still long lines at food banks. Some American workers who lost their jobs last year may never get them back. Housing advocates are worried that millions of people will be evicted from their homes. And being Big Tech is an invitation for everyone to hate you — but you do have towering piles of money. More

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    Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill

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    WASHINGTON — Nike and Coca-Cola are among the major companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to congressional staff members and other people familiar with the matter, as well as lobbying records that show vast spending on the legislation.The bill, which would prohibit broad categories of certain goods made by persecuted Muslim minorities in an effort to crack down on human rights abuses, has gained bipartisan support, passing the House in September by a margin of 406 to 3. Congressional aides say it has the backing to pass the Senate, and could be signed into law by either the Trump administration or the incoming Biden administration.But the legislation, called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, has become the target of multinational companies including Apple whose supply chains touch the far western Xinjiang region, as well as of business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China.Xinjiang produces vast amounts of raw materials like cotton, coal, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, and supplies workers for China’s apparel and footwear factories. Human rights groups and news reports have linked many multinational companies to suppliers there, including tying Coca-Cola to sugar sourced from Xinjiang, and documenting Uighur workers in a factory in Qingdao that makes Nike shoes.In a report issued in March, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, listed Nike and Coca-Cola as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang, alongside Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, Tommy Hilfiger and others.In a statement, Coca-Cola said that it “strictly prohibits any type of forced labor in our supply chain” and uses third-party auditors to closely monitor its suppliers. It also said that the COFCO Tunhe facility in Xinjiang, which supplies sugar to a local bottling facility and had been linked to allegations of forced labor by The Wall Street Journal and Chinese-language news media, “successfully completed an audit in 2019.”Greg Rossiter, the director of global communications at Nike, said the company “did not lobby against” the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act but instead had “constructive discussions” with congressional staff aides aimed at eliminating forced labor and protecting human rights.Asked about the allegations of forced labor, Nike referred to a statement in March in which it said that it did not source products from Xinjiang and that it had confirmed that its suppliers were not using textiles or yarn from the region.Nike said that the Qingdao factory had stopped hiring new workers from Xinjiang in 2019, and that an independent audit confirmed there were no longer employees from there at the facility. (According to a report published in March by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that cited state media, the factory employed around 800 Uighur workers at the end of 2019 and produced more than seven million pairs of shoes for Nike each year.)China’s vast campaign of suppressing and forcibly assimilating Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has attracted the scorn of politicians and consumers around the world.But for many companies, fully investigating and eliminating any potential ties to forced labor there has been difficult, given the opacity of Chinese supply chains and the limited access of auditors to a region where the Chinese government tightly restricts people’s movements.The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would require companies sending goods to the United States to scrutinize those supply chains, or perhaps abandon Chinese suppliers altogether. It would impose high standards, barring imports of goods made “in whole or in part” in Xinjiang unless companies prove to customs officials that their products were not made with forced labor.The bill also targets so-called poverty alleviation and pairing programs that ship Muslims from impoverished areas to work in factories elsewhere, which human rights groups say are often coercive. Companies would be required to disclose information on their ties to Xinjiang to the Securities and Exchange Commission.Richard A. Mojica, a lawyer at Miller & Chevalier, said that for many companies, convincing the authorities that they have no involvement with forced labor could take months. Firms were already responding by trying to find sources for products outside Xinjiang, he said.“Rebutting a presumption of forced labor is going to be a very challenging endeavor,” he said.Companies and groups lobbying on the bill have been pushing for various revisions, including easing disclosure requirements, people familiar with the conversations said.Apple, which has extensive business ties to China, has also lobbied to limit some provisions of the bill, said two congressional staff members and another person familiar with the matter.Disclosure forms show that Apple paid Fierce Government Relations, a firm led by former staff aides to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and President George W. Bush, $90,000 to lobby on issues including Xinjiang-related legislation in the third quarter. Apple’s lobbying was previously reported by The Washington Post.Apple also paid outside firms this year to lobby on another bill, the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act of 2020.Apple disputed the claim that it had tried to weaken the legislation, saying it supported efforts to strengthen American regulations and believes the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act should become law.According to a document viewed by The New York Times, Apple’s suggested edits to the bill included extending some deadlines for compliance, releasing certain information about supply chains to congressional committees rather than to the public, and requiring Chinese entities to be “designated by the United States government” as helping to surveil or detain Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.In its March report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute identified Apple and Nike among 82 companies that potentially benefited, directly or indirectly, from abusive labor transfer programs tied to Xinjiang.That report said that O-Film Technology, a contractor for Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies, received at least 700 Uighur workers in a program that was expected to “gradually alter their ideology.” It tied other Apple suppliers, including Foxconn Technology, to similar employment programs.Apple said in a statement that it had the strongest supplier code of conduct in its industry and that it regularly assessed suppliers, including with surprise audits.“Looking for the presence of forced labor is part of every supplier assessment we conduct and any violations of our policies carry immediate consequences, including business termination,” the statement said. “Earlier this year, we conducted a detailed investigation with our suppliers in China and found no evidence of forced labor on Apple production lines and we are continuing to monitor this closely.”Lobbying disclosures show that companies have spent heavily to sway Congress on Xinjiang-related legislation, though they reveal nothing about their specific requests.In the first three quarters of 2020, Nike spent $920,000 on in-house lobbying of Congress and other federal agencies. Disclosures do not break down expenditures by topic, but show Nike lobbied on matters including physical education grants, taxes and climate change, as well as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.Nike also paid outside firms like Cornerstone Government Affairs, Ogilvy, Capitol Counsel, GrayRobinson, American Continental Group, DiNino Associates and Empire Consulting Group more than $400,000 this year to lobby on issues including the act.Mr. Rossiter said that Nike had these firms on retainer long before the Xinjiang legislation was introduced, and that the company actively worked with lobbying firms to engage Congress on a variety of subjects it cares about.Coca-Cola has also invested heavily, spending $4.68 million in the first three quarters of 2020 on in-house lobbying and hiring Empire Consulting Group and Sidley Austin to lobby on issues including the act.Coca-Cola said in a statement that it complies with all laws associated with its political activities and has “adopted best-in-class disclosures practices.”The U.S. Chamber of Commerce declined to comment on lobbying, instead providing a letter it sent to Congress in November with seven other industry groups. The letter said the groups had long been working to combat forced labor, and urged the government to take a comprehensive approach that would mobilize the administration, Congress and foreign governments to address the problem, in addition to industry. More