UK Only Article: 
standard article

Issue: 

The brawl begins

Fly Title: 

Art auctions

Rubric: 

Online auctions are changing the art market but not yet upending it

Location: 

NEW YORK

Main image: 

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EVERYONE seems to agree that online auctions are important to the art world’s future. In 2013 Daniel Loeb, an activist investor, seethed over Sotheby’s “inability to even develop a coherent plan for an internet-sales strategy, much less implement one.” Sotheby’s has worked to remedy that, for example by joining forces with eBay and holding five online-only auctions last year. Christie’s holds its own online sales. Add a swarm of startups, and there seem to be ever more web auctioneers selling ever more art. But the ways in which online auctions are not changing art sales are as interesting as the ways in which they are.
Sales of art online reached €3.3 billion (.6 billion) in 2014, about 6% of all worldwide sales, …
Source: Retailing
Art auctions: Going once, going twice, going online

UK Only Article: 
standard article

Issue: 

Migrant men and European women

Fly Title: 

E-commerce in India

Rubric: 

Online grocers are offering small shops a lifeline in the age of smartphones

Location: 

MUMBAI

Main image: 

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AS PERSONAL service goes, few big retailers can match the tailor-made offerings of India’s 15m or so tiny, family-owned shops known as kiranas. In addition to selling all manner of goods, most are happy to cut and deliver small amounts of fresh food—1kg of onions, say—and let customers buy on credit.
The steady advance of home-grown supermarket chains has so far done little to dim the kiranas’ prospects; and successive Indian governments have been reluctant to let in foreign grocers, for fear that many households would lose their livelihoods. With more than 200m Indians now able to access the internet on their mobile devices, e-commerce might appear a bigger threat. A clutch of Indian and …
Source: Retailing
E-commerce in India: Local heroes

UK Only Article: 
standard article

Issue: 

The Saudi blueprint

Fly Title: 

Electricity in Africa

Rubric: 

Electrification plans are stalling because distributors won’t pay

Location: 

DAR ES SALAAM

AT THE edge of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s commercial capital, in a space roughly the size of a football field, stands hope for Africa’s industrial future: the Ubungo power plant. Gleaming pipes emerge from the ground; five modern generators hum quietly. This was where, in 2013, Barack Obama announced his Power Africa plan to electrify the continent.
The trouble with plants such as Ubungo is that there are not enough of them. Opposite the power plant, young men sell charcoal to burn for cooking and heat. At night in the city centre the streetlights are turned off. South of the Sahara there are only seven countries—Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa—in which more than 50% of people have access to electricity. In a typical year the whole region generates less electrical …
Source: Utilities
Electricity in Africa: Power hungry