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Beautiful minds, wasted

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Peabody Energy

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Marching on

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The world’s biggest coal miner goes bust

Marching on

“MAKE No Mistake: The Age of Coal Marches On”. So reads a headline on the website of “Advanced Energy for Life”, an advertising campaign led by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, whose flair for public-relations guff looks boundless. No amount of image-scrubbing could help it on April 13th, though. The American firm, with debts of billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Its boss, Glenn Kellow, blamed a “historically challenged industry backdrop”.
The industry is indeed in a hole, beset by pricing and pollution problems, plus NGO pressure on creditors and investors to pull out their money. But Peabody’s problems are also of its own making. It raised big debts to buy an Australian firm, Macarthur Coal, for .2 billion in 2011, aiming to bolster sales of metallurgical coal to China …
Source: Utilities
Peabody Energy: The pits

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Imperial ambitions

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Alibaba

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How Jack Ma conquered China’s internet

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. By Duncan Clark. Ecco; 287 pages; .99 and £18.99.
NOT since John Rockefeller has a businessman defined a country’s transformation as well as Jack Ma does. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil capitalised on the rise of petroleum and the internal-combustion engine, a combination that powered a century of American greatness. He became America’s first billionaire and its richest man by far. Through both ruthless dealing and visionary philanthropy, he came to personify American capitalism.

Alibaba, which Mr Ma and a handful of collaborators started in a cramped apartment in Hangzhou in 1999, is now one of the world’s biggest internet companies. It utterly dominates e-commerce in China, and has also made inroads into internet finance, cloud computing and logistics. Its flotation in New York in 2014 was the …
Source: Retailing
Alibaba: Crocodile of the Yangzi