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Wealth & Business

882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 15.

661. Asics once supplied the shoes that Nike's founders started out sellingIn 1963 a young Stanford graduate named Phil Knight flew to Japan and asked a Kobe shoemaker to let him sell its trainers in America. That distributor, Blue Ribbon Sports, later b…
662. ASML's leaky first machine gave way to the world's chipmaking gatekeeperASML's debut product moved silicon wafers with oil pressure, and it leaked. Four decades later the Dutch firm is the only company building the extreme ultraviolet machines needed …
663. AstraZeneca joined a Swedish doctors' firm with a British chemical spin-offIn May 2014 Pfizer offered 55 pounds a share for AstraZeneca, valuing it at 69.4 billion pounds, and was turned down. Had the deal gone through it would have been the largest fore…
664. Asus won Intel's trust by fixing a motherboard problem Intel couldn'tIn its earliest days, Asus designed a motherboard for Intel's 486 chip without ever holding the processor. When the Taiwanese start-up asked Intel for a sample, Intel was struggli…
665. Apple TV began as a hobby box after several failed living-room gadgetsBefore the Apple TV, Apple tried the living room and flopped. The 1993 Macintosh TV sold just 10,000 units, and the 1995 Pippin console around 42,000. The streaming box that final…
666. ArcelorMittal, forged by a 33 billion dollar merger, still ranks second in steelWhen Mittal Steel bought Arcelor for 33 billion dollars in 2007, the combined company made about a tenth of all the world's steel. It stayed the biggest producer until 2019, when …
667. Allianz grew into the world's biggest insurer by always adding another kind of riskFor thirteen years after 1911, one Berlin company was the only insurer on Earth that would cover a broken-down machine. That habit of stepping sideways into new kinds of risk, mar…
668. Alstom's TGV kept smashing rail speed records while the company nearly went brokeIn 2007 a French high-speed train touched 574.8 kilometres per hour, still the fastest any rail vehicle had gone. Its maker, Alstom, had come within reach of liquidation only four…
669. Codenamed Fiona and named for lighting a fire, the Kindle reshaped readingIn 2004 Jeff Bezos told his staff to build the best electronic reader in the world before any rival managed it. The project went by the codename Fiona. Two branding consultants la…
670. AMD began by copying Intel's chips and ended up worth more than IntelWhen IBM built its personal computer in 1981, it demanded that Intel line up a second manufacturer for its processors. That clause handed a small Sunnyvale rival licensed access t…
671. A marathon phone call from American Airlines' boss gave the world the DC-3C. R. Smith wanted a plane passengers could sleep in, and Donald Douglas was not keen. During one very long telephone call, the American Airlines chief talked him round, clinching…
672. American Express began as a freight hauler and invented travellers cheques out of frustrationAround 1890 the president of American Express came home from Europe fuming. Despite carrying proper letters of credit, J. C. Fargo had struggled to get cash outside big cities. He…
673. AOL grew out of a failed scheme to download Atari games by phoneIn 1983 a startup called Control Video sold Atari 2600 owners a 49.95 dollar modem so they could rent games over the phone line for a dollar each. The company nearly went bankrupt…
674. AliExpress sells almost nothing itself, yet it cut Russian parcel waits to daysAlibaba's consumer marketplace does not stock goods. Independent Chinese shops, plus sellers in places like Singapore, list single items for shoppers abroad, more like eBay than A…
675. Japan's biggest airline still carries the code of a 1952 helicopter startupThe letters NH on every All Nippon Airways ticket are a fossil. They come from Nippon Helicopter, a small company founded in December 1952 whose first scheduled flight carried fre…
676. Air China, carved from a single state carrier and flying to six continentsUntil the late 1980s, one government body ran all of China's civil flying. Splitting it into six airlines created Air China, handed the old long-haul jets and intercontinental rou…
677. The French gas company that built the first modern scuba regulatorAir Liquide sells oxygen, nitrogen and argon to hospitals, chip makers and steelworks around the world. Yet one of its most famous products had nothing to do with factories: in 19…
678. Air New Zealand nearly went under after buying an Australian airline outrightIn 2000 Air New Zealand spent 680 million Australian dollars to take full control of Ansett, hoping to crack Australia's market. The rival was far larger than the buyer, and withi…
679. How a European consortium's slow-selling A300 grew into the world's biggest airliner makerAirbus's first jet, the A300, sold so poorly in the 1970s that some wanted the whole programme scrapped. A rule change letting twin-engine planes fly further from airports rescued…
680. Ajinomoto turned a professor's discovery of umami into a global seasoning empireA Tokyo chemistry professor, Kikunae Ikeda, traced a savoury taste he named umami to monosodium glutamate, then patented a way to make it from wheat. The company formed to sell it…
681. Alaska Airlines began as a bush service that flew whenever someone needed a rideThe airline that now links the American West Coast to more than 100 destinations started with no timetable at all. McGee Airways flew between Anchorage and Bristol Bay only when a…
682. Before Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa was the web's popularity scoreboardLong before anyone asked a smart speaker about the weather, Alexa meant something else: a San Francisco company that ranked websites by traffic. Named after the ancient Library of…
683. Air Canada began with two passengers flying Vancouver to Seattle for 14 dollarsCanada's national carrier opened for business in September 1937 with a single Lockheed Electra carrying two passengers and some mail from Vancouver to Seattle, charging 14.20 doll…
684. In Mexican films of the 1970s, every character seemed to fly AeroméxicoFor a stretch of the 1970s, if a character in a Mexican movie needed to catch a plane, it was almost always an Aeroméxico jet on screen. That steady cameo helped turn the state-ru…
685. Ajax keeps rebuilding greatness from its own youth academy, decade after decadeAmsterdam's Ajax has a habit of losing its stars and growing new ones. Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, Dennis Bergkamp, Clarence Seedorf, Wesley Sneijder and Matthijs de Ligt all …
686. AIESEC started swapping business students to help heal postwar EuropeIn 1948, with European factories short of managers and neighbouring countries still wary of one another, a Stockholm official and two students from Czechoslovakia and Belgium set …
687. Air Berlin began as an American charter firm owned by an Oregon farm businessDuring the Cold War, West German airlines could not fly into West Berlin at all. Only British, French and American carriers were allowed along the air corridors. So in 1978 an Ore…
688. Airbnb's founders kept afloat by selling novelty election breakfast cerealTwo San Francisco roommates short on rent in October 2007 blew up an air mattress, offered it to visitors at a sold-out design conference, and threw in breakfast. The following ye…
689. Adobe takes its name from a muddy creek behind its founder's houseBefore Photoshop or PDFs, Adobe was two former Xerox researchers in a garage in Los Altos, named after the creek that ran past John Warnock's back yard. Steve Jobs offered 5 milli…
690. Brussels blocked Aegean's takeover of Olympic, then approved it two years laterIn 2011 European regulators stopped Aegean Airlines from merging with Olympic Air, warning the pair would control more than 90 percent of Greek domestic flying. Two years on, with…
691. Aer Lingus began with one six-seat biplane called Iolar, the EagleIreland's national airline took off on 27 May 1936 with a single six-seat de Havilland Dragon biplane named Iolar, the Irish for eagle, flying from Baldonnel near Dublin to Bristo…
692. Avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko designed Aeroflot's winged hammer and sickleThe winged hammer and sickle still found on Aeroflot planes started life as branding for a 1920s start-up. Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko drew it for Dobrolyot, an earl…
693. ABB bought an American boilermaker and inherited its asbestos billIn its first two years, the newly merged Swedish-Swiss engineering group ABB snapped up dozens of companies, among them Combustion Engineering of Connecticut. That purchase quietl…
694. Absolut Vodka got its missing letter from an American trademark ruleSweden's state liquor company wanted to call its export vodka Absolute Pure Vodka. But in the United States a common English adjective could not be registered as a trademark, so t…
695. Sparta Prague wears red because its president watched Arsenal in 1906On a trip to England in 1906, Sparta Prague's club president, Dr Petrik, saw Woolwich Arsenal play in red and brought a set of those shirts home. He had no idea he was founding a …
696. Accenture's divorce from Arthur Andersen kept it clear of the Enron wreckIn 2000 Andersen Consulting paid 1.2 billion dollars to walk away from its parent accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, and renamed itself with a deliberately meaningless word. Within…
697. Acer stopped making its own computers and grew bigger for itAround the turn of the millennium, Taiwan's Acer did something counterintuitive for a hardware company: it spun off and sold its own factories. Customers had grumbled that it comp…
698. Activision merged with Vivendi's games arm mainly to get World of WarcraftBy the mid-2000s, Activision had hit franchises but was missing the most lucrative kind of game: an online world that players pay for month after month. Rather than build one, its…
699. 7 Up began life as a lemon soda that claimed to contain lithiumFor its first years, the soft drink now called 7 Up was sold as a lithiated lemon soda, advertising lithium citrate, a mood-stabilising drug, among its contents. It launched in 19…
700. How a medieval Leuven brewery grew into the world's biggest beer companyThe world's largest brewer traces one of its roots to the Den Hoorn brewery, operating in Belgium by 1366. The rest came through a remarkable run of takeovers across four decades,…
701. From one variety store in Arkansas to the world's largest private employerIn 1945 a former J. C. Penney employee named Sam Walton bought a single Ben Franklin variety store. He hunted down cheaper suppliers, undercut local rivals and raised sales 45 per…
702. Whaling fuelled industry for centuries, and the oceans still carry its carbon debtCarvings on the Bangudae rocks in Korea, possibly from 6000 BC, appear to show people hunting small whales. The first records of a true commercial trade come much later, from the …
703. Whether something counts as work often depends on who is doing it and whyPlaying football is a job for a professional athlete and a pastime for someone kicking a ball around the park on Sunday. The effort may look identical. What usually separates work…
704. China and India led global output until the Industrial Revolution tipped the balanceFor most of recorded history, the biggest shares of the world's production came from China and India. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did successive waves of industri…
705. Economists sort joblessness into kinds, and each kind needs a different cureIn 2018 about 172 million people around the world, some 5 percent of the reported workforce, were looking for work without finding it. That single figure hides very different situ…
706. The American dollar began life as a copy of a Spanish silver coinWhen Congress created the dollar in 1792, it simply matched the value of the Spanish milled dollar, the silver piece of eight minted in Mexico City, Potosí and Lima and spent acro…
707. The tax most of the world uses was first tested in a French colonyValue-added tax now raises about a fifth of all tax revenue worldwide, and by January 2025 it was used in 175 of the 193 UN member states. Every OECD country applies one except th…
708. Rivals dismissed the Volkswagen factory as worthless before the Beetle conquered the worldIn March 1948 the British offered the whole Volkswagen company to Ford for nothing. Ford's chairman, Ernest Breech, told Henry Ford II it was not worth a damn, and Ford walked awa…
709. Hammurabi's laws set wages for shipbuilders nearly four thousand years agoPaying people for their time feels modern, but a Babylonian law code from around 1750 BC already fixed a shipbuilder's fee at 2 shekels per vessel of a given size. Behind every pa…
710. Long before coins, people carried volcanic glass hundreds of kilometres to swap itObsidian, a glossy volcanic glass that flakes into razor edges, was scarce around the Mediterranean, so Stone Age people moved it as far as 900 kilometres. It became a status mate…
711. How Rockefeller's Standard Oil grew so dominant that the Supreme Court split it apartBy 1904 a single American group refined 91 percent of the country's oil and controlled 85 percent of final sales. Customers loved its falling prices, rivals hated its secret railr…
712. Shares were changing hands in Roman Rome and medieval Toulouse long before Wall StreetA share sounds like a modern invention, yet Roman contractors sold small stakes that almost anyone could buy, and Cicero grumbled about prices running high. Medieval French miller…
713. Two of the world's big stock exchanges began as brokers huddled under treesIn 1792, 24 New York brokers signed a pact beneath a buttonwood tree to trade five securities. Half a world away in the 1850s, five Bombay dealers gathered under a banyan outside …
714. Subsidies quietly swallow over half of what many rich governments spendCheaper bus fares, discounted first units of electricity, tax breaks for clean energy: governments constantly nudge prices with public money. Across OECD countries in 2020, subsid…
715. The famous supply and demand graph has been drawn sideways since 1890Every economics student meets the crossing lines of supply and demand, yet the picture breaks a basic habit of mathematics. Price, the thing that drives everything else, sits on t…
716. From pharaohs' tours to the Rosetta Stone, taxes are as old as statesThe stone that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs was, at heart, a decree about tax relief. That fits: the first known tax system appeared in Egypt around 3000 BC, when a pharaoh toure…
717. A penguin messenger that lost money for three years grew into gaming's biggest investorTencent began in 1998 with a chat program so close to an American rival that its name had to change. It lost money for its first three years. Two decades later the Shenzhen firm c…
718. Your cotton shirt was beaten, combed, flamed and twisted before anyone wove itA cotton T-shirt begins as fluff clinging to seeds inside a pod, each fibre about 2.5 centimetres long. Turning that fuzz into smooth fabric takes a surprisingly violent sequence:…
719. Losing a rabbit gave Disney its mouse, and the mouse earned more on watches than filmsIn 1928 Walt Disney discovered that his hit cartoon star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, legally belonged to Universal. Stripped of his character, he sketched a replacement mouse his wi…
720. An empty airline seat is revenue that vanishes forever at takeoffOnce a plane leaves the gate, any empty seat on it is gone for good; nobody can sell it tomorrow. That is the awkward economics of services. A haircut or a taxi ride is produced a…

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