Catalan beauty firm, that will cost it around $6bn. A deal may add some gloss to the business, but will not do much to fix its deeper flaws. Lauder’s success in the 2010s was thanks largely to China’s booming demand for high-end cosmetics. Its wares became popular in the country’s daigou trade, in which shoppers buy products in bulk abroad (often at duty- free outlets) and resell them at home for a profit. Flush with cash, the company went on a shopping spree. In 2016 it acquired Too Faced and Becca Cosmetics, two cosmetics brands popular with YouTube beauty influencers. In 2019 it snapped up Dr Jart, a buzzy Korean label. By then, however, trouble was brewing. In 2019 Chinese authorities, wary of shoppers evading import taxes, began a crackdown on daigou, including at the duty-free port of Hainan, one of Lauder’s most important sales destinations. The post-pandemic slump in consumer sentiment in China compounded the firm’s troubles. Meanwhile, its earlier wave of acquisitions disappointed. Dr Jart brought in a reported $150m in sales in 2025, down from an estimated $500m in 2019. Becca Cosmetics was shut down in 2021. Part of the problem, says Lindy Firstenberg of AlixPartners, a consultancy, is that Lauder has tended to operate its brands largely independently, treating each as a “special jewel”. That has made it difficult to adapt quickly to changing beauty trends. Internal drama at Lauder, which is still controlled by its founding family, made matters worse. In 2024 Jane Lauder, an executive at the firm, complained that her cousin William, Lauder’s chairman, was too supportive of Fabrizio Freda, its long-serving boss, and argued that she should take over. Although Mr Freda did eventually step down, the board instead appointed Stéphane de La Faverie, another insider. Mr de La Faverie has set about giving the beauty giant a makeover. After decades of prioritising department stores, which have struggled in the age of online commerce, it is expanding on e-emporiums such as Amazon and TikTok Shop, as well as Sephora, a popular beauty retailer. It is also shedding as many as 10,000 jobs, more than a sixth of its total.
There are signs the new strategy is starting to work. On May 1st Lauder reported that its revenue rose by 2% year on year in the first quarter. But Mr de la Faverie appears impatient to regain ground on L’Oréal, which recently nabbed the beauty division of Kering, a luxury conglomerate, for €4bn ($4.6bn). A tie-up with Puig would have merits. It sells well in Europe and Latin America; Lauder is strongest in America and Asia. Three-quarters of Lauder’s revenue comes from skin care and make-up; a similar share of Puig’s is from the fast-growing category of perfumes. Yet the deal may also prove a distraction. Mr de la Faverie has argued that his company needs to be nimbler in responding to shifting consumer tastes. Acquisitions have not helped much in the past. Lauder’s boss must remember that its problems are far from skin deep. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/05/07/can-a-beauty-mega-deal-save-estee- lauder
The pros and cons of commuting Everyone moans about the length of their commute. Should managers care? May 7th 2026 Ask someone if they have regrets, and very few people will say: “I wish I had spent more of my life commuting.” The time spent travelling from home to work and back again tends to be neither relaxing nor productive. It is usually routine and sometimes unpleasant: anything that involves loads of traffic or armpits is hard to like. In popular culture the monotony is the point. Commuting becomes a trap (“Exit 8”), a window on the real action (“The Girl on the Train”) or a commentary on the softness of modern society (“The War of the Worlds”). The covid-19 pandemic gave people the chance to experience a commute- free existence, and many of them loved it.
So when people are surveyed about their perfect commute time, the unsurprising answer tends to be “shorter”. On average people around the world spend roughly an hour a day commuting. But however long their travel time is, they want to lop that total roughly in half. A study published last year by Jonas De Vos of University College London into the commuting preferences of over 2,000 students and staff at the university is typical. The average actual commute time was a hefty 54 minutes one way; the average ideal time was 31 minutes. (Ideals vary depending on how someone gets to work: a person who is on a train for an hour, for example, envisages a commute that is much longer than someone with a 30-minute bike ride.) Long journeys can impose costs on employers as well as commuters. For instance, they can increase staff turnover. A paper by Francisco Santelli of Brown University and Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt University examines the commute times for teachers at public schools serving Nashville, Tennessee. They find that each five-minute increase in one-way commute time predicts a 0.8-1 percentage-point increase in the probability that a teacher will transfer to another school within the district. Time spent travelling can also hurt productivity. A study by Hongyu Xiao of the Bank of Canada and his co-authors found that every 10km increase in an inventor’s commuting distance brought about by a corporate relocation was associated with a 5% decrease in patents. What lies behind this fall-off is not clear, but one explanation is simply that people are spending less time at work. No one yearns to spend more of their life commuting, then. But even long journeys can have benefits. In his study, for example, Mr De Vos also asked people what was the maximum commute length they were prepared to tolerate. This was more, on average, than the length of their current commute, which suggests some awareness of the upsides to tolerating protracted travel times: lower housing costs, better amenities close to home and a greater choice of employer. Ismir Mulalic of Copenhagen Business School points out that the one-hour global average commute has remained pretty steady over time despite big
changes in transport technology. He recalls a study he co-authored into the effects of a corporate relocation; to his surprise, some of the workers who were suddenly handed shorter commutes reacted to this “beautiful present” by moving home to be farther away. A commute can bring rewards of its own, too. Some scholars burble about commuting as “a liminal space”, a pompous term that nonetheless captures something real: the journey to and from the office is a handy way to gear up for the working day or to wind down from it. Active modes of travel like cycling and walking are correlated with greater well-being than sitting in a car. Firms are right not to be indifferent to their employees’ journeys to work. Plenty offer explicit and implicit subsidies to defray commuting costs, from financial help to parking spaces. Hybrid working and flexible hours can also ease the burden of travelling. But the greatest power to improve commute times, through better public transport and more housing supply, lies in the hands of policymakers. And to the extent that commuting time is an expression of individual preferences, firms should pay most attention when those preferences suddenly change. That means one event in particular. A paper co-authored by Mr Mulalic which looked at data for the full working population of Denmark between 2003 and 2013 found that women with a long commute are several times more likely to change jobs when they have a child. (Men are not.) Everyone says they want a shorter commute. New mothers mean it. ■ Step inside the world of work with our Bartleby newsletter. Each week our white-collar oracle muses on the agonies of office life. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/05/07/the-pros-and-cons-of-commuting
Only one of Berkshire Hathaway and SoftBank can survive The two represent competing visions of the future May 7th 2026 For two firms that embody opposite visions of capitalism, Berkshire Hathaway and SoftBank Group have a great deal in common. Both are an uncategorisable mix of operating conglomerate and investment fund. Both were built by singular men recognisable by their first names. And both receive little scrutiny from the bank analysts who write about them and the adoring investors who own their shares. Each would also regard the other’s balance-sheet as an aberration. Berkshire under Warren Buffett, who recently retired as chief executive (though not as chairman), amassed nearly $400bn of cash. It has little idea what to spend it on. Only a crash comparable to that of 1929, 1987 or 2008 would vindicate