Inhoudsopgave van March 1, 2016 - Fortune

DESPITE THE BILLIONS being spent by the governments of dozens of Latin American countries, Zika—a global epidemic linked to birth defects in an estimated 4,000 babies in Brazil alone—is "spreading explosively," according to the World Health Organization. Brazil's health minister recently admitted the country was "badly losing" the fight against the virus. Some tactics, though, show more promise than others. GLOBAL HEALTH'S BATTLE PLAN Pregnancy Prevention Because Zika is most dangerous to unborn babies, governments have asked all women to delay pregnancy—a daunting task given the limited access to birth control in affected regions. The UN estimates that expanding access to contraception would cost $1.7 billion annually. Vaccines Drugmaker Inovio Pharmaceuticals expects to have the first Zika vaccine ready for human testing by the end of 2016. Sanofi also…

IN NORMAL TIMES, Davos, Switzerland, is a snow-covered ski village whose main street—the Promenade—is lined with quaint shops offering chocolate, watches, and ski boots. But this January the Promenade was transformed. The stores were emptied, their signage scraped off windows, and they were turned into high-tech "networking hubs," plastered with ads for companies like Salesforce, Flex, Infosys, Accenture, and more. Palantir and Facebook built entirely new buildings for the occasion. The reason? More than ever before, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has become a place to do business. The forum's goal is to "improve the state of the world." But the CEOs who arrive here en masse do so in large part because it's an efficient way to meet with colleagues. The pop-up stores along the Promenade…

FOR ABOUT A DECADE, luxury sport-utility vehicles have been living large in the hearts and heated garages of the well-heeled. But the category has been growing so fast that some brands, like Bentley and Jaguar, which heretofore had refused to enter the muddy fray, are launching their first SUVs and will take on established players like Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Jeep. Sales of U.S. cars and light trucks grew 5.4% in 2015, a record year. But with the drop in oil prices, luxury SUV and crossover sales jumped 20%, to 985,480, according to data compiled by Autodata. The shift to luxury-appointed SUVs is not difficult to figure out. "This is about the needs of utility with the emotional wants of prestige," says Rebecca Lindland, senior director of consumer insights at Kelley…

THE GUIDE American Underground 201 W. Main St. Durham, N.C. 27701 1 CLOUDFACTORY Cloud-based software and 3,000 workers in Kenya and Nepal power this service, aimed at on-demand tasks, such as video captioning for ESPN and image tagging for Microsoft. 2 CROWDTUNES The app, which allows a venue's patrons to bid on the music they want to hear, has partnered with bars, universities, and even Applebee's. Instead of $1 jukebox plays, bids go as high as $24—and users can "nuke" unwanted songs by paying five times a song's current value. 3 SHOEBOXED This service combines a human team and automated optical-character-recognition technology to digitize business cards and receipts for more than 1 million people. Its QuickBooks- and Evernote-ready output is intended to streamline expense reports, tax returns, and other back-office…

THREE YEARS after its botched IPO, Facebook is a Wall Street darling. (Blockbuster growth and profits for 12 consecutive quarters will do that for a company.) Investors traded shares of the company up 33% last year; the social media behemoth is now worth $293 billion. The message is clear: Wall Street adores Facebook. The sentiment is evident on Facebook's earnings calls. Analysts no longer use the opportunity to needle CEO Mark Zuckerberg about whether Facebook is still cool with teens or whether it can figure out how to sell ads on smartphones. (No need on the latter—mobile now makes up 81% of the company's revenue.) Instead they lob softballs. How expensive can its advertisements get? How big of a Scrooge McDuck vault should we acquire for all that sweet video…

QUESTION: IF YOU WANTED TO BUY A PAIR OF MEN'S SHOES AT A DEPARTMENT STORE, WOULD YOU LOOK FOR THEM NEXT TO (a) Men's Clothing, or (b) Women's Footwear? Most shoppers would probably answer "a." But at J.C. Penney, the 114-year-old retailing mainstay, the answer until very recently was "b." Women make up about 80% of Penney's clientele, and Penney managers believed that, generally speaking, those women were likely to buy shoes for their spouses and beaus, just as they did during the Kennedy administration. "It was a terrible idea," says Marvin Ellison, shaking his head as he walks a reporter through a Penney store in Frisco, Texas. "It took space away from women's shoes, and it made it very difficult for men to want to buy shoes." Ellison, Penney's…

YOU KNOW, I'm willing to swallow a lot of stuff: Jeff Bezos taking us into space. Elon Musk moving us around at the speed of sound in hermetically sealed tubes. But artificial intelligence? I'm not so sure. It's possible that when machines are taught to think, they'll be just as stupid as we are. Let me tell you a story. The dental insurance site was down, and I needed to print out a set of ID cards. So I contacted Betty, the live-chat help person. Her thumbnail made her look pretty and friendly. But it was all a sham. Betty was really "Betty." What follows is our text "conversation." I swear on next year's bonus that every word is true, but I've changed Betty's name to protect her company, which…

ON THE NIGHT of Feb. 15, the split screen that has defined the 2016 presidential race repeated itself with a new urgency. In one half there was Republican front-runner Donald Trump, rallying thousands at an arena in Greenville, S.C., with immigration jeremiads and classic rock anthems. In the other, on a stage 203 miles away in North Charleston, there was Jeb Bush, the pack leader Trump had long since deposed, making his first public appearance with his brother, former President George W. Bush. Here was Jeb, fighting for his political life in a state that had long favored his family dynasty. This cycle, dynasty hasn't counted for much. In the debate two days earlier, Trump viciously attacked the elder Bush's record, marking the first time anyone can remember a GOP…

SO-CALLED ACQUI-HIRES—buying a startup for the purpose of hiring its talented people—have become common among the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. The result is an expensive buy-and-sell market in top tech talent. Excellent engineers can cost $1 million to $2 million just to get on board, and then you have to pay them. Google director of corporate development Dave Sobota told a conference on this topic, "Talent deals are a horribly expensive way to get talent—10 to 100 times as much as we'd pay a recruiter. But it's a necessity." The larger phenomenon is that it's now possible to know the market worth of talent, and not just in Silicon Valley. Employees can monitor their general value through social media and career sites. The stock market sometimes puts…

HOW BIG IS THE CLOUD BUSINESS? Big. Really big. The global market for public cloud services will grow 17% to $204 billion this year, estimates market researcher Gartner, more money than General Motors makes in a year. The growth is a sign that businesses increasingly opt to keep their websites, applications, and services on another company's computers in a bid to speed operations and save money. It's also evidence of just how big the opportunity is for companies in the technology industry. Amazon, the market leader, knows this well. Its Amazon Web Services dominates, with a 29% share of the cloud services market, according to Synergy Research. Microsoft does too. Its up-and-coming Azure platform claims another 12%. IBM rounds out the top three with 7%. And then there is Google.…

DETERIORATING, POTHOLE-strewn highways, collapsing bridges, and corroded, toxic water mains. Disasters waiting to happen, all aggravated by bureaucratic bumbling and inaction. Discussions of the country's infrastructure can conjure dystopian images right out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. While there's some hyperbole in that conversation, there's no question that public investment in highways and utilities has declined. In dollar terms, public construction spending in the U.S. in 2015 was about the same as in 2007, and as a percentage of GDP, it stands at a two-decade low. That's why some business leaders cheered in December when Congress finally passed the FAST Act, a $305 billion transportation-infrastructure bill. It also explains why civic leaders were encouraged by the attention brought to the nation's water arteries by the lead-poisoning crisis in Flint, Mich.…

Ten days before Christmas, Jerry Feng got the bad news. ¶ His company, Shenzhen Bojulong Display Technology, was wrapping up a terrific 2015. His factory was one of hundreds in China cranking out no-name versions of the two-wheeled devices Western culture has adopted as "hoverboards." Shenzhen Bojulong produced as many as 2,000 a day, selling them to distributors who resold them online to thrill seekers from Australia to America. But then Amazon abruptly pulled most hoverboards from its sites, worldwide, because of safety concerns. By then the battery-driven gadgets had shown a distressing tendency to burst into flames, occasionally burning down owners' homes in the process. And it wasn't just Amazon applying pressure: Around the same time, Razor, an American company best known for its two-wheeled scooter, bought licensing rights…

TO SEE THE FULL LIST, OPEN GATEFOLD [This article consists of 13 illustrations. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.] THERE'S A NEW AAA STANDARD IN CORPORATE AMERICA: the one-two-three punch of Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon. For the fourth time, our list of the World's Most Admired Companies Top 50 All-Stars is led by a trio of tech giants under 40 years old. They preside over a class of blue chips and even younger tech stalwarts, such as Facebook (No. 14), Salesforce (No. 34), and Netflix, which makes an impressive return to the list at No. 19. Other returnees to the top 50 include St. Jude Medical (No. 40), Deere (No. 46), and Charles Schwab (No. 50), which join newcomers Visa and Publix, debuting at Nos. 47 and 49. For…

TRANSPARENT CORPORATE PRACTICES, Singaporeans' fluency in English (one of four official languages), and a pro-business government have helped this 50-year-old city-state become the world's third-richest country. Established sectors include shipping and finance, and there's an emerging biotech scene: Amgen opened a $140 million plant in 2014. Impressive but more telling is Singapore's first-place rank on the World Bank's Doing Business 2016 report (the U.S. is seventh). • Getting around Changi Airport handled 55 million passengers last year, yet immigration and baggage-claim waits are rarely longer than 10 minutes. Taxis take about 30 minutes to get to the business district (tipping is not expected); the MRT subway is a shade longer. • Best business hotels The number of world-class hotels is mind-boggling. Among them, the huge resort-style Shangri-la Hotel; on Raffles…

Why do you hate Silicon Valley? I feel ambivalent about Silicon Valley. Some of the most brilliant businesspeople the U.S. has ever known are there. I have a profound respect for many of them. But whenever an industry achieves the sort of mythic power that Silicon Valley has, I think there's a lot of falsehood and arrogance too. I like the light side of it like anyone else. It's the dark side that bothers me. What's dark and what's light? If you take Netflix or Amazon, for example ... I look at Netflix as a company that's trying to take over the world. I don't look at them as a company that wants to be a part of an ecosystem. I look at them as a company—like many companies in…

FORTUNE THE BOY WITH THE MACHETE is watching us. We're sitting in an SUV in the middle of a rugged, red-dirt road about 10 miles outside the city of Abengourou, in eastern Ivory Coast. It's just after 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and the early morning haze hasn't yet burned off, so a mist hangs over the fields around us. We've been slowly bumping along on our way to meet some farmers in a nearby village called Appoisso but stop for a moment to take in the scene. Suddenly the boy is standing right next to us. He looks curious, but wary too. We scramble out to greet him. In French my translator asks him his name. "Ibrahim Traoré," he replies. How old is he? "Fifteen." Ibrahim is wearing…

THIS YEAR BMW TURNS 100, and it's still roaring like one of its deep-throated V-8 engines. In 2015 it outsold rivals Mercedes-Benz and Audi for the 11th straight year, keeping its crown as the largest luxury-car maker in the world. The newly launched 7 Series, which has reclining rear seats, has been wowing the auto press. What could go wrong? Well, plenty. If Munich-based BMW wants to stay ahead of the pack, it must figure out how to maneuver through the biggest disruption in transportation since the car displaced the horse-drawn carriage. And that disruption is coming faster than most think. "The next 10 years will bring more change than the last 30," says Christoph Grote, head of BMW's advanced technologies group. We're not talking about more horsepower or improved…