Analysis

Protestors demonstrate nothing but their limitations

“Why has your factory been so neglected? They’ve turned it into a rubbish dump. Why was everyone running around like cockroaches before my arrival? Why was no one capable of taking decisions?” demanded Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Prime Minister, of Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska is a multibillionaire oligarch, and the owner of an alumina factory in the town of Pikalevo where labour unrest threatened to destabilise Putin’s carefully orchestrated political monopoly.  Putin went on to fine Deripaska $1.3 million and threatened to expropriate his businesses if he didn’t reopen the plant and re-employ the 800 workers he had laid off.

The trouble with exports

The South African rand trades at about R 7.70 to the US dollar.  This rate implies that, if you travel to another country, whatever you buy there should cost the same as you buy locally, when you account for that exchange rate.  Anyone who has travelled overseas knows that this isn’t so.

An exchange rate is not the whole story. 

To consumers go the spoils of competition

A lack of competition makes dominant companies lazy and arrogant.  Nowhere is that more blatant than in the fast-moving world of technology and computing.

In late 2006, Microsoft released Vista, their operating system upgrade from their flagship XP.  They bungled the release.  The initial versions were buggy, and a failure to collaborate closely enough with the vendors who design software and hardware to run on the operating system resulted in frustration for consumers.

At the same time, the dramatic rise in popularity of netbook computing – low-cost, low-power mobile devices – meant that the resource-hungry Vista was unwelcome.

The day the pop-star died

AEG, which owns the O2 Arena in London, thought they had won the lottery when they secured Michael Jackson to perform 50 concerts there.  The “This is it” come-back tour was expected to earn revenues of $ 300 million for its investors.

However, his death has resulted in a precipitous cascade of losses.  $ 85 million of ticket sales to be refunded, $ 30 million already spent on the production, not to mention 50 nights of one of the most expensive venues in the world now standing empty.