$10 Billion Profits, Kiki and Bouba, and the State of the European Economy
1st of November 2024
Hello,
Here's what I have published on the blog:
Here's the best of what I have published on Medium (free to access from this email):
Here's the cool stuff I have learned:
Luxury e-commerce platforms are struggling, except for Germany’s Mytheresa which is slowly becoming the only player in the industry.
Dior increased its prices by 66% between 2020 and 2023, prompting the FT to wonder at what point expensive becomes “too expensive”.
Bloomberg made a 10-minute documentary on Zara’s success.
Europastry is a Spanish wholesale bakery supplying pastries to companies like Starbucks in 80 countries worldwide. The $1.1 billion company was supposed to have an IPO in early October but canceled last minute due to market instability.
The 500 biggest European companies look like the US 20 years ago, with car makers and fashion companies topping the list. No sight of technology companies (besides ASML).
Entrepreneurs are seeking the creation of a pan-European corporation entity to remedy the lack of innovation but it’s proving to be difficult.
Agios Efstratios, a small Greek island of 250 inhabitants, does not have more than 2 women under 30 years old, leading to questions about its future.
Jane Street is an American trading firm whose profits exceed $10 billion yearly. Its market-making activity (bridging buyers and sellers) traded over $17 trillion in 2020. It has about 2,600 employees and became famous for being the former employer of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried.
Global public debt is expected to exceed $100 trillion, or about 93 percent of global gross domestic product by the end of 2024.
The Black Mafia Family was a hip-hop business built as a front cover for a drug trafficking organization in the early 2000s in Atlanta (US).
An estimated…21,000 workers died in building Saudi Arabia’s Vision 30 program.
Prague has banned pub crawls after 22h00.
The Netherlands is decreasing its number of English-speaking university programs due to the real estate crisis and too many foreign students.
The board game “the game of life”, also known as “Life”, was created in 1860.
The kiki–bouba effect outlines the non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. This is important for marketers.
This review outlines that intervention on cognitive skills fades over time, leading to the idea that school does not make people more intelligent.
Priming "gender equality" does not reduce sex differences in mate preferences. Men still look for younger women and women still look for more resourceful men.
The happiest couples are where both partners work, or the man works and the woman works part-time. The least happy couples are those where the woman alone works, or none of them do.
Job promotions increase the probability of divorce for women, but not for men.
We’re not sure where kissing comes from and it’s only romantic in less than half of the culture surveyed.
I ran into many interesting infographics and decided to add three of them for this edition.
Europe is now approaching 20 years of zero growth in many of its major economies.
Germans have stopped getting kids and are now getting cats and dogs instead.
The fertility of immigrants in Denmark has collapsed with time to become as low as for Danish women. This phenomenon remains among the most mysterious of our time.
Take care and see you in December.
Aure :)