Business

Investing in oil and gas Mineral Rights can be a high-risk venture and demands extensive knowledge on the subject. This article is…

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 Turkey are particularly strange creatures. First, they are big. Trendyol, an e-commerce company, is valued at $16.5bn, giving it the status of a…

Purchasing GSK’s consumer-health division may be hard to swallowWHEN 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 extra $2bn to sweeten the deal. It divested 700 of its brands in the year…

EVEN FOR Microsoft, which boasts a market value of $2.3trn, $69bn is a lot of money. On January 18th the firm said it would pay that sum—in cash—for Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer. It is by far the biggest acquisition in the video-game industry’s history, and the largest ever by Microsoft, more than twice the…

Don’t ban, don’t binge and don’t badgerA RATHER GOOD black comedy called “Another Round” depicts what happens when a bunch of disenchanted Danish school teachers constantly top up the levels of alcohol in their blood. At first the experiment goes well: the students respond enthusiastically to their newly inspiring teachers. But unconsciousness, bed-wetting and worse…

AFTER A STUNNING run during the pandemic, which put a premium on all things digital, tech stocks have hit a rough patch. The NASDAQ, a technology-heavy index, has fallen by 15% from its peak in November, weighed down by a new outbreak of covid-19 in China and the Russia-Ukraine war, which are gumming up supply…

TAKE AN EVENING walk on 17th Cross Road in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout district, and you bump into tech types stepping out of their startup’s office and into one of the local microbreweries. They might work for Udaan (e-commerce), Vedantu (education technology) or another of the growing herd of private startups valued at $1bn, whose proliferation…

A consortium of technology firms is ploughing nearly $1bn into a clever market mechanismA GROUP OF rich do-gooders tried a bold experiment 15 years ago. The Gates Foundation, a charity, and five countries put $1.5bn into a pilot project aimed at encouraging research and development in a previously neglected area. The “advanced market commitment” (AMC)…

Editor’s note (April 21st 2022): After this article was published, Elon Musk said he has received funding to finance a takeover of Twitter, and that he is exploring whether to launch a tender offer to all Twitter shareholders.IDA TARBELL, author of an exposé of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, described its founder, John D.…

Sharks, dragons and angels: what are you waiting for?GREAT UPHEAVALS always spark innovation. The covid-19 pandemic is no different. The share of new patent applications in America connected to remote-working technologies more than doubled between January and September 2020. Opportunities abound to invest in a host of transformative early-stage ideas. The pitches below are from…