globalEDGE Blog Podcast

The globalEDGE team is excited to return to our regular Monday through Thursday blog schedule.  Members of our team took the time over our winter break to recharge, reflect, and explore and we are ready to hit the ground running to provide you, our readers, with new content during the spring semester.  Continue to expect timely, intriguing, and well-prepared posts that will help you learn and expand your international business knowledge.  We look forward to a great semester and, as always, we appreciate your support.

As another semester comes to a close, the globalEDGE team will be heading home for winter break.  In our first fully remote work experience, our team has been resilient and worked hard to provide our users with the most up-to-date and interesting information possible.  As a team, we appreciate your support in reading our blogs and in browsing our website and we hope that our efforts positively contributed to your learning and research goals.  So, thank you for another great semester, and we will see you soon on January 11, 2021.

As the holiday season approaches us, it is clear to everyone that the stores are going to be packed. Well maybe not physically, but virtually this year. With rising cases of the Coronavirus in the U.S., Brazil, and India, shoppers everywhere are staying safe in their homes and resorting to e-commerce to spread the holiday spirit. Retail websites will be put to the test with the high volume of shoppers to see whose advertising teams produce the most efficient and appealing designs. It will be interesting to see the differences in revenue between companies that thrive with in-store shopping as opposed to online.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020, consumption levels and prices of petroleum and other fossil fuels have dramatically decreased. With many people working from home, and not traveling for the holidays and vacations, almost every corner of the world has seen a dramatic decrease in oil demand and consumption, but will this be the future for fossil fuels?

The globalEDGE team has recently updated the Forbes 2000 corporations list with the latest 2020 information. For every country under the "Corporations" tab, a list of companies will appear in descending order of total sales value. Every company is categorized into a gloablEDGE industry, where you can learn about other similar companies and general industry trends. The display order of companies can also be adjusted by clicking on the corresponding column headers: Profits, Assets, and Market Value. 

For example, here is the link to the United States' corporation list.

As speculated for weeks, Salesforce recently finished the acquisition of the popular messaging app, Slack. The total cost of this purchase is $27.7 billion. This acquisition unites a giant in business software with a newcomer with the mission to replace office emailing. As of Wednesday, November 25, 2020, Slack Technologies had a value of $17 billion and a decreasing stock of -1.81%.

With the COVID-19 pandemic greatly decreasing travel around the world, airlines quickly retired their older and less economical planes, including Airbus’ A380 and A340, older models of the Boeing 747, and their aging fleets of intercontinental jets. When confronted with the reality that the pandemic would be cutting the world’s airlines revenues by almost $500 billion and the impending climate crisis’ effects, these retirements were necessary for most, but the expected recovery by 2025 also brings several new developments in the world of aviation.

Social media is skyrocketing in popularity; just ask the 4.14 billion people active on social media throughout the globe.  These apps offer connection and communication and many target different demographics, such as Facebook, which is geared towards adults, and Snapchat, which is aimed at a teenage audience.  But as these apps grow and develop, we can see an increase in similarities.  Let’s look at the top apps dominating social media today, how advertising looks in each app, and what features they share.

Scientists and pharmaceutical companies alike are finally nearing the ending stages of preparing a vaccine for COVID-19 for commercial use. With at least 10 vaccine candidates currently in the early phases of human testing and two candidates likely to receive FDA authorization in the coming weeks, governments and citizens worldwide are eager to begin the end of the ongoing pandemic.

As the days continue to get colder and darker, many Americans flock to the grocery store to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner. Families gather to celebrate with turkey, potatoes, pumpkin pie, parades, and football. The holiday is commemorative of the original feast between Pilgrims and Native Americans. While Thanksgiving has been a national holiday in the United States since the Civil War, many other countries have their own version of Thanksgiving.