Cutting workforces
US public companies have reduced their white-collar workforces by a collective 3.5pc over the past three years, according to employment data provider Live Data Technologies. Over the past decade, one in five companies in the S&P 500 have shrunk. The cuts go beyond typical cost-trimming and speak to a broader shift in philosophy. Adding talent, once a sign of surging sales and confidence in the future, now means leaders must be doing something wrong. New technologies like generative AI are allowing companies to do more with less. All of the shrinking turns on its head the usual cycle of hiring and firing. Companies often let go of workers in recessions, then staff up when the economy picks up. Yet the workforce cuts in recent years coincide with a surge in sales and profits, heralding a more fundamental shift in the way leaders evaluate their workforces.
(Adapted from 鈥淭he Biggest Companies Across America Are Cutting Their Workforces,鈥 by Chip Cutter and Lauren Weber, published on June 18, 2025, by the Wall Street Journal)
Tesla鈥檚 Chinese investment
Tesla has signed its first deal to build a grid-scale battery power plant in China amid a strained trading relationship between Beijing and Washington. The US company posted on the Chinese social media service Weibo that the project would be the largest of its kind in China when completed. Utility-scale battery energy storage systems help electricity grids keep supply and demand in balance. They are increasingly needed to bridge the supply-demand mismatch caused by intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind. Tesla said its battery factory in Shanghai had produced more than 100 Megapacks 鈥 the battery designed for utility-scale deployment 鈥 in the first quarter of this year. One Megapack can provide up to 1 megawatt of power for four hours.鈥淭he grid-side energy storage power station is a 鈥榮mart regulator鈥 for urban electricity, which can flexibly adjust grid resources,鈥 Tesla said on Weibo, according to a Google translation.
(Adapted from 鈥淭esla Inks First Deal To Build China鈥檚 Largest Grid-Scale Battery Power Plant,鈥 published on June 26, 2025, by The Economist)
Playing catch up
The smartest AI researchers and engineers have spent the past few months getting hit up by one of the richest men in the world. Mark Zuckerberg is spending his days firing off emails and WhatsApp messages to the sharpest minds in artificial intelligence in a frenzied effort to play catch-up. He has personally reached out to hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars and entrepreneurs to try to get them to join a new Superintelligence lab he鈥檚 putting together. Mr Zuckerberg is also offering hundreds of millions of dollars, sums of money that would make them some of the most expensive hires the tech industry has ever seen. Some potential candidates have been hesitant to join Meta Platforms鈥 efforts because of the challenges that its AI efforts have faced this year, as well as a series of restructures that have left prospects uncertain about who is in charge of what.
(Adapted from 鈥淶uckerberg Leads AI Recruitment Blitz Armed With $100 Million Pay Packages,鈥 by Meghan Bobrowsky, Berber Jin and Ben Cohen, published on June 22, 2025, by the Wall Street Journal)
Defence bonanza
For the first time in decades, the rich world is embarking on mass rearmament. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the threat of conflict over Taiwan and President Donald Trump鈥檚 impulsive approach to alliances have all made bolstering national defence an urgent priority. On June 25, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) agreed to raise their target for military spending to 3.5pc of GDP and allocated an extra 1.5pc to security-related items (Spain insisted on a loophole). If they achieve that target in 2035, they will be spending $800bn more every year, in real terms, than they did before Russia invaded Ukraine. The boom goes wider than Nato. By one estimate, Israel splurged more than 8pc of its GDP on defence last year. Even doveish Japan plans to stump up. As politicians sell the benefits of rearmament to voters, many will claim that military spending will bring economic gains as well as security.
(Adapted from 鈥淗ow The Defence Bonanza Will Reshape The Global Economy,鈥 published on June 26, 2025, by The Economist)
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, June 30th, 2025