China’s private enterprises under President Xi Jinping appear to be holding the short end of the stick. The government’s earnest deleveraging campaign has hit the sector disproportionately hard, and a never-ending trade war with the US has hurt manufacturing, the core of China’s entrepreneurial spirit. That’s only part of the story. Private businesses aren’t merely innocent lambs waiting on Beijing’s ...

Technology companies that target fickle consumers can die in a flash. (Juicero, anyone?) The ones that sell technology to businesses tend to hang on a bit longer. That’s why old-guard technology companies that have lost relevance and stopped growing — think BMC Software, Compuware and Tibco Software — have been ripe takeover targets in recent years for the private equity ...

Christine Lagarde’s nomination as president of the European Central Bank takes Mario Draghi a step closer to the end of his term. The Italian academic will step down in October after eight momentous years, during which he made the ECB the most important institution in the monetary union. That doesn’t mean, however, that he should retire from front-line policymaking. A ...

India will need $1 trillion of infrastructure investment to nudge annual GDP growth higher by just half a percentage point in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second five-year term. Of this, at least 55 percent will have to come from public resources. Where’s the money? Those figures from an analysis by the Confederation of Indian Industry are the No. 1 challenge ...

Ever since the economist Milton Friedman claimed the sole responsibility of business was to maximise pro-fit, there’s been a lively debate about whether companies sh-ould have other, more socially beneficial aims. It’s pretty much accepted practice, though, for a firm to try to sell more of their products and services. To not do so is a good way to go ...

For weeks now, financial markets have been treating a July interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve as a sure thing. That’s a big deal because over the past quarter-century, the central bank has never failed to deliver when implied odds reach 100 percent. I’m certainly not one to fight the bond markets. But … there’s a first time for everything. ...

Bloomberg Samsung Electronics Co has completed a two-month redesign of the Galaxy Fold to fix embarrassing screen failures that forced its delay, people familiar with the matter say, allowing the Korean giant to debut its marquee smartphone in time for the crucial holiday season. The world’s largest smartphone maker is now in the final stages of producing a commercial version ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc is set to hire more than 2,000 workers in the UK, including engineers, software developers and data scientists, to develop its latest technology ventures. The Seattle-based tech giant’s UK workforce will total almost 30,000 people by the end of the year, and will include cloud and machine learning experts, corporate roles and fulfillment and delivery workers, the ...

Bloomberg BMW AG and Daimler AG will offer cars capable of navigating on highways by themselves starting in 2024, as the luxury-car rivals cooperate to speed up the development of autonomous vehicles. They plan to sell cars equipped with so-called Level 4 self-driving technology, meaning the vehicles could manage motorway driving and parking without intervention from the driver, who will ...

Bloomberg Rico Zorkendorfer, among several members of Apple Inc’s industrial design team to leave the company in recent months, has joined Bumblebee Spaces, a startup seeking to merge robotics with home furnishings. Zorkendorfer left Apple in April and is now leading design at the San Francisco-based startup that is combining smart home products and robotics, Sankarshan Murthy, the company’s co-founder ...