The Economist

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Purpose and the employee

WHAT IS THE meaning of mayonnaise? For Unilever, a consumer-goods giant whose products are all meant to stand for something, the purpose of its Hellmann’s brand is to reduce food waste by...

When will the semiconductor cycle peak?

AMID A CHIP shortage that has hobbled producers of everything from toys to wind turbines, chipmakers are on a spending spree. On January 13th Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s biggest...

Lakshmi Mittal transformed steelmaking. Can his son do it again?

LAKSHMI MITTAL has two passions: the steel industry and his family. His embrace of the first turned a poor boy from Rajasthan into the “Carnegie from Calcutta”, a man who built the...

Will web3 reinvent the internet business?

LIKE SEEMINGLY everyone these days, Moxie Marlinspike has created a non-fungible token (NFT). These digital chits use clever cryptography to prove, without the need for a central authenticator, that a buyer owns...

Unilever’s £50bn health cheque

WHEN UNILEVER bought Bestfoods for $20.3bn at the turn of the millennium, it was one of the largest cash acquisitions ever. After two failed bids, the British consumer-goods giant dug up an...

Can China create a world-beating AI industry?

“SOUTH OF THE Huai river few geese can be seen through the rain and snow.” In classical Chinese this verse is a breakthrough—not in literature but in computing power. The line, composed...

Making sense of the East-West divide in tech

THANKS TO A venture-capital (VC) boom, it is no longer unusual to find tech unicorns, as unlisted startups valued above $1bn are known, springing up in middle-income countries. However, two coming from...

Where next for air travel?

WORK AND shopping have, for better or worse, been permanently altered by the pandemic. The airline industry hopes that its own covid-19 disruption proves temporary. Luckily for those deprived of holidays, visits...

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