Business

Britain’s greatest export to California

Ask most Britons to name a famous designer, and they will probably offer James Dyson or Terence Conran. Although both are distinguished, neither can lay claim to something as generation-defining as the iPod, designed by Essex boy Jonathan Ive. It’s strange, then, that Ive – Jony to his friends – isn’t better known on his home turf, although it’s a state of affairs that perfectly suits this intensely private 42- year-old British export to California.

Ive remains in the shadow of his Apple boss Steve Jobs – a chief executive like no other. Having rescued the firm since returning from...

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The green grass isn’t at home

Ross Clark

Anyone ready yet to dip a proverbial toe into the bombed-out debris of the global property market? To adapt the old investment adage ‘buy on the sound of gunfire’, surely there can’t be a better time to extract the thousands you have squirrelled away in the Bradford & Bingley and put it to work in some distant property market?

You might want to start with the handful of countries where property has actually held its value over the past year – or even increased. Perhaps, inevitably, they are countries where few wide-eyed amateur property investors, spurred on by television shows,...

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Luxury we can’t live without

Nick Kochan

Willie Harcourt-Cooze is in a panic. The drying machine is overheating his latest batch of Venezuelan chocolate at his factory in Devon. Willie dives into the hubbub of an industrial shed, where hot liquid chocolate flows, amid much clanking and scraping, through tunnels, trays and into moulds. He adjusts the temperature of one part of the machinery that turns cacao beans into chocolate bars.

The scene at the premises of the Sir Hans Sloane chocolate-making company in Surrey could not be more different. In this quiet environment, Bill McCarrick is carefully pressing cellophane transfers onto the top of little squares...

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Turning success into significance

Mike Dickson

What accounts for the recent interest in philanthropy by most private banks? It is hardly a service that can make them any money. In the current economic climate, most private bankers are working overtime to limit liabilities, while attempting to hit increasingly absurd new business targets. Why spend time in valuable and hard won client contact meetings talking about ‘saving the world’ – when you have your own to save?

The reason is surprisingly simple. The brighter private banks know that wealthier customers are genuinely motivated by the buzz of running their own businesses and protecting and growing their...

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Businesses I really admire

Geoffrey Kent

We ask successful entrepreneurs to tell us which companies they most respect. This month, Geoffrey Kent, founder of luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent

Toyota

In 1966, I bought the first Toyota Land Cruiser to come to Africa. Land Rovers were very dominant at the time but I didn’t like them because they always broke down. I went to the Westlands Motors showroom in Mombasa and took a Land Cruiser for a test drive. Abercrombie & Kent (A&K) now have three or four hundred across the world. You just know when you get into one that you’ll get to the...

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The reinvention of the brasserie

John Mitchinson

Is restaurant size an accurate indicator of economic prosperity? Put more simply, do we still, in these straitened times, want to eat in big restaurants? There is something life-affirming about a large space filled with other people’s revelry. But you have to be in the right mood. You can’t easily summon that ‘steak-frites and a crate of vin rouge’ bonhomie out of a day spent watching falling share prices: the cavernous brasserie can feel too redolent of the sins of the recent past. Who’d give you money for a stolen Quaglino’s ashtray now? Not even, one suspects, El Tel himself:...

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