In “Sexual harassment: Nasty, but rarer” (November 12th) we said that the number of cases tracked by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has risen. In fact the number of cases has fallen considerably and preliminary figures for 2011 show that the number continues to drop. Sorry.

AT FIRST blush, Chow Tai Fook (CTF) may seem to be in a spot of bother. The secretive Hong Kong-based chain of jewellery stores, which on some measures is the world’s largest, has long wanted to float shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Alas, this week it was forced to scale back both the valuation and the size of its planned offering. Market rumours now suggest it will float about $3 billion-$4 billion-worth of shares next month.That may be less lucrative than it hoped for, but do not shed any tears for Cheng Yu-tung, the firm’s billionaire boss. The weakness of this deal (which would still rank as one of the bigger placements this year) has more to do with market turmoil than any specific snags confronting CTF. Though almost unknown in the West, the firm is a goliath, with a reported $4.5 billion in sales last year, leaping ahead at a rate of over 50% a year. It is already more than twice the size of Tiffany & Co, a posh American jeweller. A recent analysis by George Washington University and L2, a think-tank, found the brand is better known in China than Rolex, Bulgari or Tiffany.Considering…

LIKE many airline promoters, Vijay Mallya of Kingfisher (pictured above) has long cultivated a flamboyant image, from his Branson-esque facial hair, sponsorship of sports teams and collection of flash cars to his promotion of a swimwear calendar and innuendo-laden promise, replayed on in-flight videos during take-off, that he has personally selected each of the Indian airline’s routinely gorgeous cabin crew.On November 15th, though, he struck a more sober and articulate note as he faced a press pack in Mumbai hungry to know if his airline, India’s second-biggest, is going bust. Mr Mallya insisted that “to write the epitaph of Kingfisher constantly is not fair,” adding, “We realise our responsibility to our customers and our country.”Despite his goatee, Mr Mallya deserves a hearing. From a customer’s perspective his airline is excellent. And over the decades since he inherited the family firm he has also built up a bigger operation in beer and spirits (the Kingfisher logo graces bottles of lager as well as Airbus A320s) which has delivered strong shareholder returns.Yet the financial facts speak for themselves….

“BREAK Ya Neck” is the title of one of the many ditties to have tripped off the tongue of Busta Rhymes over the years. On November 16th the rapper and a number of other well-known musicians were on hand to help mark the launch of Google’s new online music service. Although the internet giant is not planning to snap any necks, it would dearly like to break the vice-like grip that Apple has on the $6.3 billion a year digital-music business thanks to the success of its iTunes online store and devices such as the iPod. But doing so will not be easy.Google’s decision to launch its own music store is the latest salvo in a wider conflict being waged by the titans of the tech world. Like spiders spinning vast webs, Apple, Amazon and Google are doing their best to create huge “ecosystems” of tightly linked electronic devices and online services that snare consumers and discourage them from switching to rivals’ offerings. Digital music has a special place in these systems because of its popularity and because Apple has shown that it can be a money-spinner too.Hence Google’s determination to take on Apple and Amazon, which is also developing an online-music business of its own. Earlier this year, Google launched Music Beta, a service limited to the American market that lets consumers upload songs to a digital “locker” on its servers and then listen to them on any PC with a web…

THANKSGIVING DAY, which this year falls on Thursday November 24th, is fast approaching and retailers in America are getting ready to lay out their wares in the hope that the annual stampede by shoppers will be bigger and better than ever before. But for some, it will not be. Normally the big day is “Black Friday”, so named because the day after the holiday is when retailers supposedly move into the black and become profitable. Some stores, it seems, cannot wait that long and are going nocturnal. They are rolling out their special offers at midnight on the Thursday or earlier in the evening.An online petition organised by a disgruntled employee has been raised against the midnight opening by Target, a big retailing chain. It has been signed by over 100,000 people asking Target to reverse its decision. But that is unlikely.Target is not alone among the large retailers in moving the big shopping day forward. Macy’s, Best Buy and Kohl’s plan to be open at midnight on Thanksgiving. As for the biggest of all, Walmart, most of its stores are open 24 hours. It will, though, make special offers available on toys, home…

Someone spilled hypocrisy on aisle five

AS HE applied sunscreen to his young daughter’s face, Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labour policy at the University of California, Berkeley, found himself wondering if the lotion was safe. He realised there was no readily available answer. The result—two years, a team of chemists, lots of testing and a chunk of venture capital later—is GoodGuide.com. Launched in 2008, this is a website and smartphone app that rates 140,000 consumer products (currently only in America) according to their safety, environmental sustainability and the ethics of the firms that make them. Now GoodGuide has created a new “purchase analyser” app designed to inform consumers not just about the values embedded in products, but also about whether they are the virtuous shoppers they say they want to be.Using the new app requires selecting a series of characteristics, which can range from whether the user favours organic products to buying only from firms with a good human-rights record. (It also rates how competitively things are priced, via a…

EVERY year, Sophie de Menthon, a French entrepreneur, holds an event called J’aime ma boîte (I love my firm) in Paris. The idea is to counter the notion that the French don’t like work. Employees are enticed to make lip dubs (a video of them lip-synching to music, if you need to ask), massage each other, vote for the nicest colleague, arrange for the accountant to swap jobs with the secretary and other stunts to celebrate their firm.The much-mocked campaign has not had much luck. In 2007 a national strike interrupted the festivities, and in 2009 a series of suicides at France Télécom spoilt the atmosphere. This year employees showed less love for their boîte than ever before. Only 64% of those polled liked their company, down from 79% in 2005.A truer reflection of work attitudes came this summer when French workers covered office windows with huge pictures made up of Post-it notes. Employees at GDF-Suez, a utility, stuck thousands of them to the windows of its HQ near Paris to represent Tintin, a comic-strip hero. Société Générale’s bankers responded with a picture…

WHEN China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001, many people hoped that this would curb the power of its state-owned enterprises. Ten years on, they seem stronger than ever. President Hu Jintao can expect to hear about this at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit this weekend. Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, has warned stridently of the dangers of state capitalism. A Congressional report released on October 26th railed against the unfair advantages enjoyed by state-owned firms and lamented that China is giving them “a more prominent role”.Indeed it is. In a new book called “China’s Regulatory State”, Roselyn Hsueh of Temple University documents how, in sectors ranging from telecommunications to textiles, the government has quietly obstructed market forces. It steers cheap credit to local champions. It enforces rules selectively, to keep private-sector rivals in their place. State firms such as China Telecom can dominate local markets without running afoul of antitrust authorities; but when foreigners such as Coca-Cola try to acquire local firms, they can be blocked (…

Spot the journalist

ABOARD one of the world’s largest container ships, moving almost imperceptibly through the seas off Vietnam, it’s easy to appreciate the economies of scale that allow a T-shirt made in China to be sent to the Netherlands for just 2.5 cents.The Eleonora Maersk and the other seven ships in her class are among the biggest ever built: almost 400m long, or the length of four football pitches, and another half-pitch across. The ship can carry 7,500 or so 40-foot containers, each of which can hold 70,000 T-shirts. On the voyage your correspondent took, the Eleonora was carrying Europe’s New Year celebrations: 1,850 tonnes of fireworks, including 30 tonnes of gunpowder.To move all this cargo from China to Europe in just over three weeks, the Eleonora boasts the largest internal-combustion engine ever built, as powerful as 1,000 family cars. This engine turns the longest propeller shaft (130m) ever made, at the end of which is the largest propeller, at 130 tonnes. Yet the ship is so automated that it…

A bad day at the office

THREE women complained of unwanted advances from their boss at the National Restaurant Association. Two received financial settlements. Because the boss in question was Herman Cain, now a Republican presidential hopeful, this news has revived a long-running debate about sexual harassment in the workplace.The details of the complaints made in the settlements have remained private. A fourth woman who has alleged that Mr Cain groped her was not an employee at the time and did not receive any settlement. Mr Cain denies that he did anything inappropriate.“The fact that there has been a settlement does not by itself tell you there was any truth to the allegations,” says Richard Simmons, an employment lawyer at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton. Firms often pay off disgruntled accusers rather than go to court, since juries are unpredictable, damages can be steep and the publicity of a trial is always unwelcome. Conservatives think the deck is stacked against employers. Liberals disagree.Mr Simmons thinks sexual harassment is much less widespread in the…

IT TOOK a while. But this week Olympus attempted to answer a question that has been making investors jumpier than a man with a scorpion in his trousers. Why did the Japanese camera maker shell out $1.3 billion in deals that had little to do with its core business and seemed unlikely ever to make a decent return?Olympus paid a $687m advisory fee relating to its purchase of Gyrus, a British medical-devices firm, in 2008. The fee was more than 30% of the purchase price, when 1% would have been more normal. It went to a firm in the Cayman Islands and another in New York; both are now defunct. Olympus also paid $773m for three unprofitable firms (a cosmetics company, a maker of plastic containers and a waste-disposal business). It wrote off 76% of their value within a year.Why did Olympus’s managers approve such unusual payments? On November 8th the company confessed that the deals were designed to hide losses on securities dating back to the 1990s. Olympus’s new president, Shuichi Takayama, said that three Olympus executives were implicated. Yet only one, Hisashi Mori, a vice-president, was dismissed by the board. (He chose to remain as a director.) As for the other two, Olympus said that the corporate auditor, Hideo Yamada, “expressed his intention to offer his resignation”, whatever that means. The other, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, resigned as chairman after the scandal broke. But he…

WHEN a firm declares bankruptcy, shareholders are typically wiped out and creditors seize control. On November 7th Dynegy, an energy firm, announced a more unorthodox kind of bankruptcy. Its bondholders and other lenders are likely to take a 10% haircut while shareholders, including Carl Icahn, a maverick billionaire, will retain full control of the firm.This is the latest twist in a remarkable saga. Dynegy, a Houston-based firm, has fallen on hard times since it almost bought Enron, its local rival, in 2001. After Enron imploded, Dynegy’s shares plunged, soared and then plunged again after 2007, as the economic downturn and a boom in natural gas depressed energy prices. Facing a liquidity crisis, management sought a buyer. Late last year, a campaign by Mr Icahn blocked the sale of the company to Blackstone, a private-equity firm, which was willing to pay $5 a share. Mr Icahn, who now owns 15% of the shares, offered to pay $5.50. After this week’s strange bankruptcy announcement, Dynegy’s share price is trading around $3.40.Under the deal to exit bankruptcy, which enough creditors are expected to approve (despite the risk of a legal challenge), bondholders will take a loss to reflect the firm’s current difficulties, but a smaller one than Dynegy’s management had wanted. In return, management and shareholders will get one more chance to turn things around thanks to a new (…

FOR businesspeople who spend much of their time in the air, the three global airline clubs—Star Alliance, oneworld and SkyTeam—are all about such goodies as frequent-flyer points and access to comfy lounges. For the airlines that belong to them, the main benefit is that the other members hook them up with lots of passengers seeking connecting flights, helping them to fill their planes.Since the alliances started in the late 1990s, they have steadily signed up new members. Until recently SkyTeam, which includes Air France, KLM and Delta, was the laggard. But it has gained altitude by signing, among others, China Eastern and China Southern, two of China’s big three carriers. Star Alliance, which includes Lufthansa, United-Continental and Singapore Airlines, remains the biggest, having signed up Air China, the third of the mainland’s big three. Oneworld, which includes British Airways, American Airlines, Iberia and Cathay Pacific, will soon welcome aboard India’s Kingfisher.Now there are few big network airlines left to be nabbed. The juiciest prize still on offer is LATAM, a giant to be formed next year…

THE rewards for digging carbon out of the ground differ wildly. A tonne of coal fetches around $120. A diamond for the same price would be so small you’d probably never find it in the first place. Anglo American, a big mining firm, struck a deal on November 4th at the loftier end of the market. It agreed to pay the Oppenheimer family (see article) $5.1 billion for their 40% stake in De Beers, the world’s leading diamond miner, to add to the 45% that Anglo already owns. It looks a fair price; the diamond industry’s prospects are sparkly.For a start, supply is tight. All the world’s big deposits are thought to have been discovered already. Old mines are growing tired. Total annual output will probably fall. At the same time, demand is roaring in China, India and the Gulf, where the new rich love ostentatious adornment. By 2015 these countries could be buying as many diamonds as America, which currently accounts for two-fifths of global demand. To add to the cheer, demand is growing rapidly in America, too. Diamond prices have…

MOST people would be overjoyed to pocket $5.1 billion. But Nicky Oppenheimer, the chairman of De Beers, said that it was with a heavy heart that his family had decided to sell its remaining 40% stake in the world’s biggest diamond miner to Anglo American, a mining behemoth. The deal marks the end of an era for South Africa’s foremost mining dynasty.The Oppenheimers have been in the diamond business for more than a century, including over 80 years with De Beers. Nicky’s grandfather Ernest settled in South Africa in 1902, having been posted to the diamond-boom town of Kimberley at the age of 22 as an agent for a London-based firm of gem traders. By 1917 he had set up his own mining company, Anglo American. A few years later he won control of De Beers, a diamond miner that had been founded in 1880 by Cecil Rhodes, a British-born colonialist. By the time Rhodes died in 1902, De Beers controlled 90% of the world’s diamond production. Rhodes’s immense fortune still pays for people like Bill Clinton to study at Oxford.Since 1929, when Sir Ernest (knighted for war services in 1921) took over as chairman, the Oppenheimers have led De Beers almost without interruption, massaging the price of diamonds by hoarding them and occasionally selling part of the firm’s stockpile. The family has wielded political influence, too, mostly bankrolling liberal causes. Both Ernest and his son Harry…

SHORTLY before the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, many companies got into green. The summit was expected to lead to new regulations restricting greenhouse-gas emissions. Dozens of chief executives came to see history being made and to be seen on the right side of it. But Copenhagen was a flop. Most firms turned their thoughts elsewhere. Only four bosses showed up at the next annual climate meet, in Cancún. Few are expected at this year’s bash, which begins in Durban on November 28th.Alas, that represents a realistic assessment of the Durban summit’s chances of delivering anything like the long-term certainty that businesses crave. Of 300 bosses of big global firms recently quizzed by Ernst & Young, 83% said they wanted to see a legally binding multilateral deal struck in Durban to update the ailing Kyoto protocol and help to put a price on carbon emissions. But only 18% expect this to happen. The absence of a clear climate policy helps explain why, for example, investment in British clean technology fell from around $11 billion in 2009 to $3 billion last year. It would also suggest that any firm…

NO ONE likes getting a gas bill. But Europe’s biggest utilities are especially upset over the sums they must pay gas producers, in particular Russia’s state-backed giant, Gazprom. Some are trying to cut those costs; but with little in the way of leverage over producers their chances of success look slender.Gas prices in continental Europe are mainly set by a decades-old system of long-term contracts, linked to the price of oil. But in relatively liberalised Britain gas is largely traded at spot prices set by current supply and demand. This handed an advantage to some smaller European utilities with interconnections to the British spot market when, in 2008, gas prices suddenly fell. Their bigger rivals meanwhile suffered. They were saddled with “take or pay” contracts that obliged them to buy fixed quantities of gas far above what they could sell and at prices way above those on the spot market.The gap between spot and contract prices has not gone away. German firms, which are especially hostage to Russian pipelines, are at a big disadvantage. Yet both Russia and Norway, which supply almost half of Europe’s gas, have shown some flexibility towards their complaining customers. By the end of 2009 European gas buyers were begging for relief, with oil-indexed gas then 50% pricier than spot gas. In response, Norway’s Statoil allowed an element of spot pricing (around 25% of oil-…

THE Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) was the cockpit for the country’s post-war economic miracle. But these days it is a stodgy place. The decor barely brightens even when you enter the offices of “The Cool Japan Promotion Strategy Programme”. There is not an Apple MacBook in sight, and demure “office ladies” still serve the tea.But METI wants to let its hair down. With the former bastions of Japan’s economy, such as cars and electronics, facing stiff competition from South Korea, China and elsewhere, it is looking for alternative sources of growth in so-called creative industries, such as fashion, music, food and anime (cartoons).The search has become more intense since March 11th when a nuclear accident battered Japan’s image abroad. (So blanket was the repudiation, according to Interbrand, a consultancy, that it hurt even Hyundai, a South Korean car firm sometimes mistakenly thought to be Japanese.) “We have to rebrand Japan,” says METI’s Tetsuya Watanabe. He describes March 11th as a “boiling-frog” moment—when Japan suddenly woke up to its industrial decline.The aim is to spur a nearly fivefold increase in cultural exports by 2020, to ¥11 trillion ($140 billion)—almost as much as Japan earns from car exports. In the hands of civil servants, the plans for this are not exactly zinging. One milestone in…

DO YOU remember back in old LA, when everybody drove a Chevrolet? The opening line of “Beach Baby”, a 1974 hit, is one of hundreds of gratuitous plugs that writers of pop songs have given to General Motors’ mass-market brand down the decades. Snoop Dogg’s “Ridin’ in my Chevy” is a recent, less family-friendly example. Chevrolet, which celebrates its centenary on November 3rd, is as woven into the fabric of American culture as Coca-Cola. Not all of its birthdays have been happy, but as it reaches its 100th its prospects are on the up. In the July to September quarter, a record 1.2m cars and pickups with the Chevy “bow-tie” badge on their bonnets were sold worldwide.In 1911, when William Durant, GM’s founder, was turfed out by the company’s bankers, he joined forces with Louis Chevrolet, a Swiss-born racing driver, to set up a new carmaker (later folded into GM, when Durant briefly regained control). At $2,150, their first car, the Classic Six, looked pricey next to Henry Ford’s $490 Model T. So in 1915 Durant met his rival head on with a model called the 490 and costing the same. Then Chevrolet really…

GOING global, that vaunted activity, is not necessarily the most profitable. While releasing the latest annual revenue and profit figures for the world’s 100 biggest law firms, The American Lawyer, arranged the firms in five groups. These were “homebodies”, “adventurers”, “colonisers”, “conquistadors” and “citizens of the world”. Each group contains both highly and modestly profitable firms. For example, of London’s five elite “magic circle” firms, four (Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Linklaters) are in the worldly camp, and earn more than $1.5m a year in profits per partner. But the fifth, a relentless homebody, Slaughter & May, pulled in $2.6m per partner. It is hard, the magazine says, to see a clear connection between globalisation and increased profits.

When the equivalent 1998 numbers were published, they described only a “Global 50”. Since then, firms have grown and merged. Some have changed beyond recognition. But by tracking those that still bear more than a passing resemblance to…