Image of the week: Cook’s keynote
Monday was a typically sunny Californian day in Cupertino, where doubtless there was nowhere developers would rather be than sitting on deckchairs listening to Apple chief executive Tim Cook make a string of product announcements at its on-campus Worldwide Developers Conference.
They included a new shared iCloud library that will make it easier to share photos with family and friends, a buy now pay later feature for Apple Pay, and an update to phone lock screens that lets users choose to only receive personal not work-related notifications (or the other way round, if that’s how you roll). Users with its new iOS 16 operating system will also be able to recall or edit iMessages after they are sent.
But Cook’s keynote was defined by one unexpected absence. There was no mention at all of the tech giant’s forthcoming augmented reality headset, unofficially known as Apple Glasses. It’s either nowhere near ready or so good it needs an event all to itself.
In numbers: Boardroom quotas
40%
Share of seats on the boards of large companies operating in the EU that will have to be held by the “underrepresented sex” from June 30th, 2026, under this week’s “landmark” EU agreement.
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1
Number of EU member states where female representation on corporate boards currently exceeds 40 per cent. That member is France, where in 2021 some 45.3 per cent of boardroom seats were occupied by women in 2021.
5
Years since it became a 40 per cent boardroom quota became mandatory in France for companies that are listed on the stock exchange, have more than 500 employees or have annual revenues of more than €50 million. More recently, the French have switched their attention to gender balance in top management posts. Allez!
Getting to know: Bill Kramer
Hollywood has a new sheriff in town: Bill Kramer, the new chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka the Academy, the overseers of the Oscars. And it’s a surprisingly complicated task that faces him: how to engineer a ceremony that shows off the best his industry has to offer but doesn’t send what’s left of the Oscars’ telecast audience to sleep.
Because while Will Smith certainly woke up a few people when he made the unexpected journey from his front row seat to the stage to slap award presenter Chris Rock, violence on live television probably wasn’t the perfect image for the Academy to project.
“I deeply believe in the power and artistry of cinema,” said Kramer, who succeeds Dawn Hudson. This should come in handy, though might not be quite enough in itself to boost the ceremony’s US viewership – last March, it came in at 16.6 million, the second smallest on record. Maybe check in with Rock to see what his availability is like?
The list: Bleak outlooks
You don’t have to spend much time online to find an array of major stocks feeling less than upbeat about the future. Here are five of the companies not expecting wonderful times ahead in a war-wracked global economy.
1. Wizz Air: One of Ryanair’s rivals admitted on Wednesday that it was suffering the effects of “operational hiccups” at UK and other airports, which it described as “lose-lose” and “highly damaging”.
2. Heathrow: Airport boss John Holland-Kaye says it could take the aviation industry 12-18 months to fully recover its capacity, the prediction prompting his Virgin Atlantic Airways counterpart, Shai Weiss, to label him “Lord Doom”.
3. Target: The US department store retailer cut its profit outlook for the second time in three weeks and said it would slash prices to get rid of unsold inventory, taking the hit on its margins.
4. Microsoft: Shortly after blaming a strong dollar for cuts to its profit and revenue outlook, the tech company announced it would “significantly scale down” its operations in Russia (where it suspended new business in March), citing “changes to the economic outlook”.
5. Tesla: The electric vehicle maker’s chief executive, a shy and retiring type by the name of Elon Musk, has a “super bad feeling” about the economy. Don’t we all?
