Business

What makes them tick?

21 November 2009

Luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent annually moves nearly a quarter of a million people around the globe. So for president and chief operating officer Joss Kent, being organised is a given.

With 62 offices in 33 countries, A&K is unique in having such a global on-the-ground network. ‘We are the only global company that is still in control of your experience, right down to the nitty-gritty of the detail,’ says Kent. ‘If I walked into a restaurant like Le Caprice in London and saw that, instead of a kitchen, there was a line of motorbikes that were going out...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

After Katrina: houses are still empty, but the Big Easy weathers the latest storm

21 November 2009
Edie Lush

Tourists in New Orleans’ French Quarter and Garden District would be hard pressed to see Hurricane Katrina damage if they didn’t go looking for it. On a recent visit to attend a wedding between a Glaswegian brewer and a Louisiana law professor, I ate gumbo, swayed to jazz and paraded behind a brass band between the ceremony and the reception. Not so different from a wedding I attended eight years ago in the same town. But you don’t have to venture far to see the lasting impact of the storm.

Four years after Katrina flooded most of New Orleans,...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

Will Kraft’s plastic cheese smother Cadbury’s heritage?

21 November 2009
Elliot Wilson

When consumer goods giant Kraft tabled a £10.2 billion bid for Cadbury two weeks ago, the outcry was immediate and heartfelt. Here was an American monster buying an iconic British household name, one of our very last independent, home-grown, corporate crown jewels.

Some of the resentment was understandable. Cadbury’s heritage is part of our national psyche. Founded 185 years ago by John Cadbury, a Quaker tea-and-coffee trader, the firm’s aims were as much to do with social improvement as with profit. Moreover, Cadbury seemed to be a great survivor. Britain has long shed the last of its major indigenous...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

The time is ripe to launch Spectator Bank

21 November 2009
Martin Vander Weyer

Bankers are often accused of having such short memories that they are condemned to repeat the errors of their immediate predecessors, only more so. They would certainly need elephantine memories to remember a time when new banks, each with a distinctive mission and marketplace, were coming to life and flourishing everywhere. Indeed it was, in a corporate sense, Britain’s oldest banker — Alexander Hoare, 11th-generation head of C. Hoare & Co of Fleet Street, though himself still only in his forties — who pointed this out to me long before the credit crunch started knocking over high-street lenders like wonky...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alternatives to poppy-farming and gun-slinging

14 November 2009
Katrina Manson

I finally get to ask my question of the man who says he knows every statistic in a notoriously data-less country. ‘OK, mister-chief-statistics-officer-for-the-province,’ I say in my best Pashtu, with a little help from my ever-smiling interpreter. ‘Do you know how many businesses there are in Helmand?’ He gives a multi-syllabic answer. I wait keenly for the translation. ‘Yes. None.’

It’s not the best news for Afghanistan’s most conservative and dangerous province. But it might help form part of the answer to why it’s proving so tough to dislodge the Taleban. There’s little other than poppy-growing and gun-slinging in the...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

Santander: the bank that escaped the credit crunch

14 November 2009
Matthew Lynn

If ever a banking deal came with the curse of the black spot, it was the takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro at the height of the last boom in 2007. Three European banks teamed up to launch a hostile £49 billion raid, the largest financial takeover in European history. Two of them went to a horrible fate: our own Royal Bank of Scotland, which dreamed up the deal, had to be rescued by Gordon Brown, while the Belgium-Dutch group Fortis was itself nationalised soon afterwards. But the third partner, Banco Santander of Spain, not only survived the ABN deal...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)