On 12 March 2026, Honda Motor Company did something its shareholders had not seen since the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1957: it announced the likelihood of its first-ever annual net loss, the result of a single strategic bet that unravelled in several directions simultaneously. Honda cancelled
On 18 March 2026, Brent crude settled at $107.38 a barrel. Europe’s natural gas benchmark jumped 6% in a single trading day. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, schoolchildren stayed home, not because of a storm or a public holiday in the conventional sense, but because their government ran the numbers on
There is an old saying in trade: every disruption is somebody else’s opportunity. Right now, as two of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints face closure or active threat, that opportunity is sitting directly off the southern tip of Africa. The question is whether South Africa and the continent more
The Case for reclamation There is a version of what Senegal just did to Industries Chimiques du Sénégal that reads as a textbook African agency. A sovereign government, that is armed with audit findings and a democratic mandate, reclaims a strategic national asset from a foreign conglomerate that allegedly bled
There is a particular kind of corporate irony in watching a German luxury automaker and a Chinese mass-market challenger circle the same factory floor in a South African port city not out of ambition, but out of mutual necessity. The reported talks between Mercedes-Benz and Great Wall Motor over sharing
There is something quietly tragic about a country that watched its own greatness and then watched it recede, barrel by barrel, into the Atlantic. Angola was once the undisputed deepwater champion of the African continent , a petro-state whose geological fortune seemed, for a moment, inexhaustible. Today, that crown sits
Let me tell you something about Iran that Washington never quite learns. Iranians have been negotiating with empires for three thousand years. The Achaemenids, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and every single one of them, at some point, declared they had broken Iran. Every single one of
The numbers on paper have never looked better for African manufacturing. The continent holds 18.3% of the world’s population, is projected by the IMF to grow at 4.1% in 2026, outpacing the global average of 3.0% and consistently ranks among the world’s fastest-growing regions. Global supply chains are fracturing. Companies
There’s a version of the Russia story that everyone understands. Oil. Gas. The energy weapon. The pipeline politics. It’s the version that gets written about because it’s visible; you can see it in the petrol price and in the gas bills of European households. But there’s a quieter instrument that
Everyone is watching the Strait of Hormuz right now. The burning tankers, the oil price ticking above $100, the White House press conferences. That’s understandable. However while that drama plays out, something arguably more consequential is happening in the background and it’s barely getting a line of coverage. Russia is