The spread of satellite television bolsters a once shaky businessEARTH may have been hit hard, but the recession, it turns out, has not done much damage in space. Turnover among operators of satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) grew by 7-8% last year, according to Northern Sky Research (NSR); analysts at Euroconsult, a rival research firm, put the figure even higher, at 11%. The three biggest firms in the business—SES, based in The Hague, Intelsat, based in Washington, DC, and Eutelsat, based in Paris—brought in combined revenues of over $6 billion. SES and Eutelsat boast profit margins of over 25%. NSR predicts that in the next decade the business of leasing satellite capacity will grow by an average of 4.3% a year.It was not always this way. In the late 1990s investors piled into satellites on the assumption that hordes of people would rely on them for mobile-phone coverage and broadband internet (mainly delivered using low-earth orbit, or LEO, satellites) and digital television (delivered from GEO ones). But competition from cheaper terrestrial networks undermined mass-market mobile and broadband services via satellite, vapourising tens of billions of dollars of investors’ money in the process and bringing infamy to once celebrated firms such as Globalstar and Iridium. ...

  Disenchantment with work is growing. What can be done about it?SUICIDE, proclaimed Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”, is the only serious philosophical problem. In France at the moment it is also a serious management problem. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom—many of them explicitly prompted by troubles at work—has sparked a national debate about life in the modern corporation. One man stabbed himself in the middle of a meeting (he survived). A woman leapt from a fourth-floor office window after sending a suicidal e-mail to her father: “I have decided to kill myself tonight…I can’t take the new reorganisation.” In all, 24 of the firm’s employees have taken their own lives since early 2008—and this grisly tally follows similar episodes at other pillars of French industry including Renault, Peugeot and EDF (see article). There are some parochial reasons for this melancholy trend. France Telecom is making the difficult transition from state monopoly to multinational company. It has shed 22,000 jobs since 2006, but two-thirds of the remaining workers enjoy civil-service-like job-security. This is forcing it to pursue a toxic strategy: teaching old civil servants new tricks while at the same time putting new hires on short-term contracts. Yet the problem is not confined to France. America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics calculates that work-related suicides increased by 28% between 2007 and 2008, although the rate is lower than in Europe. And suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness. ...

  A merger forged in adversity shows the obstacles foreign firms face in RussiaPEACE has unexpectedly broken out in one of Russia’s longest-running and most bitter boardroom battles. After five years, the notoriously sharp-elbowed Alfa Group has settled its differences with Telenor, a largely state-owned Norwegian firm that is its partner in mobile-phone ventures in Russia and Ukraine, called VimpelCom and Kyivstar respectively. Those will now be merged to form a company worth $24 billion; Telenor and Alfa Group’s telecoms arm, Altimo, will have stakes of about 38% each in the merged entity. Telenor’s shares jumped 15% on the news, and financial analysts hailed the deal as a boost for Russia’s reputation. In reality, it shows how limited the options of persecuted foreign investors in Russia are.The duo had been at loggerheads since 2004, when Altimo suggested that VimpelCom take over a Ukrainian rival to Kyivstar. Telenor demurred, saying the price was too high. Altimo retaliated with a string of lawsuits, to which Telenor responded in kind. ...

  Television networks want remote controls to become shopping trolleysINTERACTIVE television advertising, which allows viewers to use their remote controls to click on advertisements, has been touted for years. Nearly a decade ago it was predicted that viewers of “Friends”, a popular sitcom, would soon be able to purchase a sweater like Jennifer Aniston’s with a few taps on their remote control. “It’s been the year of interactive television advertising for the last ten or twelve years,” says Colin Dixon of Diffusion Group, a digital-media consultancy.So the news that Cablevision, an American cable company, was rolling out interactive advertisements to all its customers on October 6th was greeted with some scepticism. During commercials, an overlay will appear at the bottom of the screen, prompting viewers to press a button to request a free sample or order a coupon or a catalogue. Cablevision hopes to allow customers to buy things with their remote controls early next year. ...

  Investors may force the world’s second- largest retailer to retreat to EuropeIN CHINESE, Carrefour happens to mean “Every Happy Family”, a piece of luck which has doubtless contributed to the French firm’s success in China, where it has operated since 1995. In Brazil, too, a market which Carrefour entered in 1975,the company is treated like a local and vies for leadership with a Brazilian firm. The group’s businesses in Brazil and China are substantial, fast-growing and produce generous returns on investment. Now, however, to the dismay of executives at the firm, two big shareholders are reportedly pushing for a sale of the Asian and Latin American businesses.Colony Capital, an American private-equity firm which specialises in property, and Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, a luxury-goods group, first invested in Carrefour in 2007, and now own more than 13% of its shares and around 20% of its voting rights, mainly through a joint holding company called Blue Capital. Like many activist investors, they were caught out by the crisis: Carrefour’s share price has fallen from around €50 ($67) when they made their purchases to €30 today. Their original aim was to spin off Carrefour’s property portfolio, which would have brought a one-off gain, but plummeting property values undermined the plan. ...

  Malaysia’s national oil firm is successful but remains mired in politicsA DECADE after opening, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur are no longer the world’s tallest. But Petroliam Nasional, the company that built them, continues to grow. It exports lots of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to booming Asian neighbours and owns the world’s largest fleet of LNG tankers. It is also expanding abroad: last year operations outside Malaysia brought in 42% of its M$264 billion ($77 billion) revenue, up from 35% in 2005. Foreign oil giants are keen to team up with it in risky places like Iraq. In short, Petronas is a successful example of a national oil company, the government-owned entities that collectively hold some three-quarters of the world’s proven reserves but are prone to waste and mismanagement. Yet it still faces a peculiar set of problems tied to its state-owned status.Like oilmen everywhere, Hassan Marican, Petronas’s boss, is busy trying to pare costs in a global slump. From his perch on the 80th floor of Tower 1, he sees little sign of a sustained recovery in demand. He has asked contractors to cut costs by 30% after profits fell by 14% last year, the first drop in seven years. “Everyone knows how much we’re being squeezed,” he says. ...

  The world’s big brewers are circling Mexico’s second-largest beermakerLIKE a thirsty partygoer swigging from two different bottles, big Western brewers are simultaneously pursuing two strategies for growth. In the rich world, where beer drinking has peaked or is in decline, brewers have been acquiring rivals and slashing costs. In poorer countries the thirst for beer is rising along with incomes, so buying local brewers is a lip-smacking prospect. But opportunities for consolidation in the developed world are running out; so too are big targets in developing countries. Hence the reports that the beer business of Femsa, a Mexican brewer and retailer, is attracting attention from SABMiller, the world’s second-biggest brewer by volume, which is based in Britain, and Heineken of the Netherlands, the third-biggest. Both are thought to have held talks over the possible purchase of thebusiness, which has over 40% of the Mexican market and revenue of 39 billion pesos ($3.5 billion). ...

  Subscriptions have succoured media firms during the recession. That may not lastVIACOM, a media conglomerate based in New York, has an unusual response to the downturn: it is launching a television channel. This month Epix will begin showing films from Paramount and MGM, as well as original programmes. It may get off to a slow start, since it has not yet signed up many cable and satellite distributors. But its creation points to one of the media business’s few bright spots. Having fallen steeply after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the shares of all the big American media companies have outperformed the market since March. But recession has struck some parts of the industry much harder than others, changing its shape. As a rule, media products that are sold in shops—CDs, DVDs and magazines—have suffered. Advertising is showing only tentative signs of recovery. The kind of media for which people pay a monthly bill, in contrast, has not only held up better but has in some instances prospered through the downturn. ...

  China has cornered the market in some indispensable mineralsWHAT do smart bombs, euro banknotes and headphones have in common? They all contain “rare earths”: 17 obscure chemical elements, sales of which add up to less than $2 billion each year. But without them, industries worth trillions of dollars would grind to a halt. Their phosphorescent and magnetic properties make them indispensable for electronic displays in mobile phones, portable music players and plasma televisions. They are also used to make proliferating green goods, including wind turbines, energy-efficient lighting and batteries for electric cars.Most rare earths are not that rare, but they are difficult to find in concentrations worth mining that are untainted by uranium. About 95% of the world’s supply comes from China, where production is dominated by the state-controlled Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Company. “The Chinese realised the strategic importance of rare earths decades before the West,” says Alistair Stephens of Arafura Resources, in Perth, Australia. Deng Xiaoping, declaring rare earths to be the oil of China, encouraged the development of mines in the mid-1980s. Prices fell dramatically and existing mines in America were priced out of business. ...

  Some companies are finding opportunities in the recessionJUST after Barack Obama was elected president, his incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told a conference of American captains of industry, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Here’s hoping his audience was paying attention, because recessions—particularly gut-wrenching slumps like this one—provide as many opportunities for business people as they do for politicians. Although they are often called “slowdowns”, recessions shake things up rather than slowing them down. They reward strengths and expose weaknesses, create new opportunities and kill old habits, release pent-up energy and destroy old business models. Distressed assets can be bought for a song, talented people hired cheaply and new ideas given an airing. The most striking example of this was the Depression. Most people think of the 1930s as an economic desert littered with foreclosure signs and unemployment queues. But for the canny few it was a huge opportunity. DuPont invested heavily in research and development (R&D) and hired unemployed scientists. By the late 1930s 40% of its sales were from products that were less than a decade old—including world-changing inventions such as nylon and synthetic rubber. Procter & Gamble (P&G) invested so heavily in radio advertising that it created a new artistic form, the soap opera. The list of companies which took off during the Depression includes Revlon, Hewlett-Packard (now HP), Polaroid and Pepperidge Farms, the last of which was founded by a society lady whose husband was a victim of the Wall Street crash. ...

  A controversial appointment at France’s energy championFRENCH executives like to joke that Electricite de France (EDF) is France’s Gazprom, referring to the way in which the Russian state uses its gas monopoly as a tool in geopolitical manoeuvres. On September 27th the French government, which owns 85% of EDF, announced that the firm’s chief executive, Pierre Gadonneix, would be replaced by Henri Proglio, currently boss of Veolia Environnement, a water and waste-disposal firm. Whereas Mr Gadonneix seems to have resisted orders from the state, Mr Proglio is a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, and is expected to listen more attentively to his biggest shareholder. Mr Gadonneix badly wanted to stay on to see through EDF’s international expansion. Late last year, towards the end of his five-year mandate, the firm bought British Energy, which like EDF specialises in nuclear power, for GBP12.5 billion ($22.5 billion). It also agreed to buy half of the nuclear business of Constellation Energy, an American utility, for $4.5 billion. It plans to build new reactors in France, Britain, America, Italy and the United Arab Emirates. Mr Gadonneix is said to have ruined his chances of staying when he gave warning in July that the government would have to raise electricity prices by 20% to pay for EDF’s investments over the next several years. But executives at the firm reckon that Mr Sarkozy already had it in for him. ...

  A struggling airline poses a test for Japan’s new governmentWHEN the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power last month, it declared an end to the cosy relationship between business and government that has long prevailed in Japan. But what does that mean for Japan Airlines (JAL), the national flag-carrier, which was privatised in 1987 and has been bailed out by the state three times since 2001? JAL is asking for yet more state aid, despite having received a handout of YEN100 billion ($1.1 billion) in June. JAL is bracing for its fifth loss in seven years, after losing YEN99 billion in the most recent quarter alone (see chart). It has around YEN800 billion in debt, not including YEN300 billion in aircraft-lease obligations and YEN330 billion in pension liabilities. There is hope for an investment of YEN30 billion or so from Delta or American Airlines, which want to gain access to JAL’s coveted landing slots in China and to win the business of its international passengers (though old hands at the airline do not want to turn to foreigners, seeing it as a loss of face). The airline has proposed cutting 6,800 jobs (14% of its workforce) and dropping 50 routes over the next three years. It may also cut pension benefits, which could save as much as YEN88 billion this year. ...

  As internet-capable handsets become more popular, they are also changingIF THE recession is the cloud hanging over the mobile-phone business, “smart” phones are the silver lining. Sales of mobile phones were 10% lower in the second quarter of this year than in the same period last year, but sales of smart-phones were up by nearly 15%, according to IDC, a market-research firm. By some estimates, half of all handsets sold will be “smart” in four years and by 2015 almost all will be.The market for smart-phones is expected to grow so quickly in part because they are changing. Expensive pocket computers such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, which let users watch videos and download whatever applications they want, are giving way to new models that come with popular services built in, but are less versatile or run on open-source operating systems, and are often cheaper. All this reflects a broader trend in the industry, where value is migrating from firms that run networks and make hardware to those that make software and offer services (see article). ...

  Pharmaceutical giants may regret their stampede into the vaccine businessTHE logic in favour of purchases of vaccine firms seems irrefutable. The world is in the grip of a swine-flu pandemic, which will probably infect 40% or more of the human race. Vaccines are likely to be in demand for some time. And the vaccine business has high barriers to entry and, in recent years, attractive margins. Little wonder that three such acquisitions were announced this week. Abbott Laboratories, an American drugs firm, said it will pay €4.5 billion ($6.6 billion) to acquire vaccines and other pharmaceutical interests from Solvay, a Belgian firm. Johnson & Johnson, an American drugs giant, agreed to pay €302m for an 18% stake in Crucell, a Dutch biotech firm known for its vaccine technology. And Merck, another American drugs giant, revealed that it had bought marketing rights for a flu vaccine made by Australia’s CSL. These are the latest in a series of deals. In 2007 AstraZeneca, a British drugs firm, bought MedImmune, a vaccine-maker, for over $15 billion. Part of the justification for Pfizer’s $68 billion purchase of Wyeth earlier this year was the latter’s expertise in vaccines. ...