The world is changing fast and to keep up you need local knowledge with global context.
All the latest product and investment news about the world’s biggest companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Vodafone, Barclays, Deutshe Bank, Goldman Sachs, Tesla, and Netflix.
Cuba remains a gift to economic theorists. A living monument to the folly of a closed economic system built on the socialist fallacy that the State knows best. With a regulated average wage of under $40 a month, Cubans no possess no financial incentive to produce anything more than the minimum. So the country is … Read more
From the SA Press Association: Apple CEO Tim Cook was paid $4.25m (R43m) in 2013, the company reported Friday in a regulatory filing. The compensation was more or less the same as the $4.2m Cook earned in 2012. But it represented a dramatic drop from the $510m (R5.2bn) worth of stock options that Cook was … Read more
Tim Cook has achieved something his company’s founder Steve Jobs couldn’t get right. The company has tied up a deal with China Mobile which with 740m subscribers is comfortably the biggest cell phone business on earth. The new relationship has the potential to add more than 25% to Apple’s iPhone sales. It sells around 34m … Read more
There is a lot of pessimism in the air around emerging markets (EMs). With Fed tapering widely anticipated to begin early next year, observers worry that EMs will take a big hit as the flow of easy money dries up. Further, there are worries about deeper structural problems in EMs. In particular, observers are worried … Read more
Having spent my career and most of my life in the City of Gold, it’s no wonder the yellow metal has retained its fascination for me. This was almost ordained. In January 1980, my first month as a trainee financial reporter at Johannesburg newspaper The Citizen, the gold price hit a record $850 – a … Read more
The face of retail is changing fast, and perhaps fastest of all in the United States, the birthplace of the internet and of e-tailing. Amazon has so far dominated the online retailing game, but low-cast retailer Walmart has decided that the time has come to get serious about online, and the stage is set for … Read more
The newly listed Twitter has had an exciting first day out on the market. The Twitter IPO was priced at $26 a share, but opened at over $45 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. After a volatile day of trading, the share closed at $44.90 – an impressive performance overall. But what is … Read more
Who are these people who invest with the herd, buying shares when it is time to sell and selling when it is the best time to buy? It is people who are politically and socially correct when it comes to their investment portfolio and who are hypnotised by economic growth. That certainly seems to have … Read more