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Why artists make great collectors; interviews with Cai Guo-Qiang, Sadie Coles and Arthur Jafa; and tales of art world excess

At this year’s DealBook Summit, there was a sense that trust was becoming harder to come by and that the rules for how people judge the truth had shifted.

Toward the end of my more than hourlong interview last week with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space entrepreneur, there was a comment that struck me — that’s been rattling around in my brain for days.

“I gave up on being well understood a long time ago,” Mr. Bezos said. “To be understood is too difficult.” He added: “It’s hard enough, by the way, to be well understood by your loved ones, by your kids and your closest friends. It takes a lot of energy. If you think you understand any public figure, you probably don’t.”

It was a profound thought because so much of what the public does on any given day is try to take the measure of our world’s public figures — and the institutions they run. We judge them. We are constantly assessing them — online and off. We try to determine whether we like them, whether we trust them and whether they deserve our hard-earned dollars.

This is particularly true of elected officials, but it is increasingly true of the leaders of our nation who are unelected — who run the companies that touch our lives in various ways. We read about the rankings of the Forbes and Fortune magazine lists, and we look at their philanthropic efforts as a sign of both their success and, perhaps, their humanity.

All of this is being processed through human sensibilities that are both imperfect and increasingly polarized by politics and a bubble of social media feeds.

Underneath conversations about geopolitics, our global economy, artificial intelligence and more at this year’s DealBook Summit with some of the most consequential individuals in the world, there was a pervasive sense that trust at any level was becoming harder to come by — and that the rules of how people comport themselves and even judge the truth had shifted.

Prince Harry said, “I do really find myself even more so now wondering how or why people trust the information that they’re given, how they trust it and where they’re getting it from, and how any form of accountability can actually happen.”

The point was made personal when Bill Clinton spoke about how Americans think about the character of their elected leaders — a particularly poignant moment given Mr. Clinton’s own moral failings as a result of his affair with Monica Lewinsky during his presidency.

“Nobody is running a perfect life,” he said. “And people are determined to keep score. But I bet my definition wouldn’t be the same as a lot of other people.”

He said that “the voters have a deep-seated suspicion of letting anybody, including the press, tell them how to define character and what matters.” He asked, “Would we disqualify Eisenhower now? Would we disqualify Roosevelt? Would we still let Harding run?” (All three had documented extramarital affairs.)

Alex Cooper, one of the most successful podcasters in the nation, said that the public is constantly being told: “Believe this, believe this, believe this.” She added: “People don’t want to be told what to do anymore. I think Gen Z, the minds of young creators and adults and young individuals, people want to figure it out for themselves. They don’t want to be told what to do.”

This moment appears to be a switch from the past: Perhaps the most trusted individuals and companies are ones that don’t preach a particular mantra. After a period in which companies have taken to espousing — and marketing — a “mission” that often extended beyond its direct purpose, it seems that the public has decided such efforts are either polarizing or disingenuous.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and Alphabet, said that his company, which had been known for almost being like a university campus when it came to employees’ speech, had shifted. “As a company, I feel like the values are enduring, but your culture kind of needs to evolve with time, right?” He added, “The company is not your personal platform.”

One of the big revolutions that we’re all grappling with — and trying to figure out whom to trust — is around artificial intelligence. We’ve been besieged by questions of safety — with even internal employees going public with their concerns over the technology.

Mr. Pichai spoke about the decision by Geoffrey Hinton, one of the original artificial-intelligence scientists at Google, who won a Nobel Prize, and ultimately left the company, publicly declaring that he regretted his life’s work and worried about the dangerous implications of it.

“He’s definitely of the opinion we need to think deeply about this technology as early as possible and get it right for the benefit of humanity,” Mr. Pichai said. “And I think he has concerns we may not and he’s speaking up about it.”

“So look, I’m definitely on the optimistic side,” he added, saying that he imagined that the technology would help “tackle problems like cancer and vaccines and so on.”

Sam Altman, a co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, made a strong case for the way in which his company had rolled out ChatGPT quickly and perhaps early, despite some of the concerns from those who worry about the safety implications.

“We believe and, you know, this is an opinionated stance, that this idea of iterative deployment is really important,” he said. “We’ve got to put these systems out into the world. Society and technology have to evolve. You have to start while the stakes are lower. You have to understand how people are going to use this and what it doesn’t work for, what it does.”

In other words, he suggested, the only way society is going to learn to trust artificial intelligence is to use it as it gets more sophisticated.

And so while we may not trust each other, will we trust the technology instead?

A different kind of trust issue arose at one of the four DealBook task forces, one titled “Women, Power and Money” and moderated by a New York Times reporter, Jodi Kantor. Thasunda Brown Duckett, the chief executive of TIAA, suggested that part of creating a sense of trust is the simple act of listening.

“It’s not about being right. It’s about just being heard,” she said. “And I think whenever you hear a roar, it’s about, ‘Do you hear me?’ And I think we also can’t ignore why people are roaring.”

Perhaps nowhere is trust — or the lack of it — going to be more consequential than in the economic fate of the world. The Federal Reserve is one of most powerful and independent institutions in Washington that has uniquely relied on being trusted for its entire existence. Its independence has been a cornerstone of that trust, but one that increasingly may have to be earned given the skepticism that has bubbled up in this moment of distrust.

“We’re not in the Constitution,” Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said at the DealBook Summit. “We’re a creature of statute. So that’s what independent means. And that gives us the ability to make these decisions for the benefit of all Americans at all times, not for any particular political party or political outcome.”

The AI war is increasingly waged among ‘hyperscalers’ – companies with full-stack capabilities across software, hardware and applications

When Alibaba Group Holding’s CEO Eddie Wu Yongming took the stage at the company’s annual Apsara conference in Hangzhou on September 24, few people expected the media-shy executive to deliver anything shocking, especially since he read from prepared statements at last year’s event.

Wu, however, immediately outlined a clear road map for Alibaba’s AI development, with a goal towards so-called artificial superintelligence (ASI) – when the firm’s Qwen open-source models and cloud services would serve as the software and computing infrastructure of the future.

In essence, Alibaba aimed to become the “world’s leading full-stack AI service provider”, he said. Alibaba owns the Post.

The blueprint laid out in Wu’s 23-minute speech signified not just a strategic upgrade for Alibaba, but also highlighted the competition between Chinese and US tech giants for the future of artificial intelligence – a field that has drawn some of the largest investments in history, with profound economic, social and geopolitical implications.

As he spoke, Alibaba’s shares surged to a four-year high in Hong Kong, leading several banks to raise their price targets for the stock.

A day later, US chipmaker Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang referenced Wu’s remarks during a podcast with tech investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, in which he underscored the importance of spending big on AI.

When asked about Nvidia’s US$100 billion investment in OpenAI, Huang predicted that the ChatGPT maker could become a “multi-trillion-dollar hyperscale company” on the back of its rapidly expanding array of products.

The AI arena has now shifted from just large language models to include upstream hardware and downstream applications, according to Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.

China was engaged in a “different AI race” from the US, and it was no longer enough to have the strongest foundational model: one must also possess the best chips, algorithms and applications across the entire AI stack to stand out in a crowded field, Chan said.

“Only in a pure ‘race to AGI’ world would the US be miles ahead, but that is probably not the world we live in,” he said, referring to artificial general intelligence – a hypothetical AI system capable of matching human performance in economically valuable tasks.

Some estimates suggested that US and Chinese tech giants would collectively spend more than US$400 billion on AI infrastructure this year – roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Romania, the world’s 39th-largest economy according to the International Monetary Fund.

That prompted some analysts to argue that the AI competition between China and the US was now being waged by “hyperscalers” – the world’s largest tech companies with major capabilities across the entire AI stack.

Both Washington and Beijing have voiced support for their respective AI industries. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July, aimed to promote the export of “American AI” technology globally, led by Nvidia and OpenAI – the world’s most valuable company and start-up, respectively.

As part of their partnership, Nvidia is helping OpenAI establish its own “self-hosted” data centres, which the start-up previously relied on Microsoft to provide. The move could also allow OpenAI to catch up with Tesla founder Elon Musk’s xAI, which is building its own Colossus data centres in Memphis, Tennessee.

Alongside its recent deals with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Samsung Electronics, as well as the US$500 billion in pledged funding for the Stargate Project – OpenAI’s joint venture with SoftBank Group and Oracle – the start-up’s computing deals amounted to at least US$1 trillion this year.

More partnerships could be announced “in the coming months”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a podcast on Thursday.

“To make the bet at this scale, we kind of need the whole industry, or a big chunk of the industry, to support it,” he said. “And this is from the level of electrons to model distribution and all the stuff in between, which is a lot.”

China, too, has its share of hyperscalers, but their size lags behind their US counterparts. The big three American players – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google – command about 63 per cent of the US$900 billion global cloud computing market, according to Synergy Research Group.

In China, Alibaba’s AI and cloud computing arm Alibaba Cloud holds a clear lead with 36 per cent of the market, according to research firm Omdia.

At last month’s conference, Wu announced additional AI infrastructure spending beyond the initial US$53 billion commitment unveiled earlier this year. The company hinted that these extra funds would support the company’s largest overseas data centre expansion to date, including its first hubs in Brazil, France and the Netherlands. Wu said demand overseas “far exceeded” domestic growth.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s semiconductor design unit T-Head has developed an AI processor comparable to Nvidia’s H20 – a chip tailored for China-based customers to meet US export curbs – according to a report by the mainland’s state broadcaster last month.

Despite their advances, Chinese companies remained significantly behind their US peers in terms of investment. Alibaba’s three-year spending pledge is less than what any one of the US big three hyperscalers spends in a single year.

OpenAI is currently valued at US$500 billion, while US AI model developer Anthropic saw its valuation nearly triple to US$183 billion following a funding round in September. In contrast, China’s leading start-ups, such as Moonshot AI and Z.ai, are valued at US$3.3 billion and US$5.6 billion, respectively.

That did not necessarily mean China was falling behind in AI, Princeton’s Chan said. In the US, Silicon Valley executives – including Altman – stressed the urgency of beating China to achieve AGI.

The US preoccupation with achieving AGI before China had led to an excessive focus on scaling computing resources and restricting Chinese access to advanced semiconductors, at the expense of developing the full US stack, Chan said.

“Chinese policymakers are not ‘AGI-pilled’,” he said. “I think they see AI as something like the internet that can turbocharge, if not transform, existing industries, where the focus is on diffusing the technology broadly and increasing adoption,” said Chan, adding that he did not believe AGI was imminent.

Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai, meanwhile, has stressed the importance of adoption. At an event hosted by the US podcast All-In last month, he said the winner in AI should not be defined by “who comes up with the strongest AI model”, but on “who can adopt it faster”.

“I’m not saying China technologically is winning the model war,” he said. “But in terms of the actual application and also people benefiting from AI, it has made a lot of developments.”

The Chinese government is betting on the integration of AI with the country’s formidable industrial and manufacturing sectors to win the tech race, a strategy known as “AI plus”.

China now leads the world in industrial robot installations, with a record 2.027 million active robots, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

The country’s humanoid robot market has also seen rapid growth, with prominent start-ups like Shanghai-based AgiBot and Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics landing orders from state-owned firms.

In March, for the first time, Beijing designated “embodied intelligence” – AI integrated into physical machines – as a key future industry. Authorities later outlined plans to promote robotics adoption across various sectors, including manufacturing, aerospace and logistics.

Government support has filtered down to the entrepreneurial level, with nearly half of AI fundraising this year directed towards embodied intelligence start-ups, according to consultancy IT Juzi.

“China is running away with the hard-power part of AI – robotics,” Martin Casado and Anne Neuberger, a general partner and senior adviser, respectively, at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in a recent post.

“We start seeing intelligence embedded in the physical world – culminating in generalist robots that perform a wide variety of tasks across applications, from manufacturing to services to defence,” they wrote. “The country betting on that future is China, not the US.”

Signs indicate that the US increasingly recognises the importance of AI applications in hard technology. OpenAI is reportedly ramping up hires for its robotics team and has partnered with autonomous driving start-up Applied Intuition.

However, none of the world’s “big four” industrial robotics firms – ABB Robotics, Fanuc, Kuka and Yaskawa Electric – are based in the US.

The spending disparity between Silicon Valley and Chinese firms may not be critical, as Chinese hyperscalers do not always compete directly with their US counterparts, according to Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst and founder of the Hello China Tech newsletter.

“At least in the AI field, the market has become completely parallelised, with each playing its own game,” he said. “I think many people in the English-speaking world do not understand just how big the Chinese cloud market really is, with many demands from different segments, from large state-owned enterprises to small and medium-sized enterprises.”

“It is impossible for any company to be like Amazon – to be a one-stop shop that meets everyone’s needs, which gives Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu and ByteDance different opportunities.”

It also remained unclear just how far ahead US foundational models were compared to their Chinese rivals, according to Tilly Zhang, a Beijing-based tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.

Chinese models consistently top popular global AI leader boards, particularly in image and video generation, often delivering comparable performance at a fraction of the training costs of US competing products.

The US government acknowledged the potential of China’s open-source ecosystem in driving global adoption.

According to a report last week from the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Commerce, downloads of models from DeepSeek and Alibaba on the developer platform Hugging Face had surged nearly 1,000 per cent and 135 per cent, respectively, since January.

Meanwhile, partners at Andreessen Horowitz pointed out that US start-ups and universities were heavily reliant on Chinese models.

The AI Action Plan emphasised the need for the US to develop leading open-source models, as the country’s previous open-source leader, Facebook owner Meta Platforms, has signalled it is no longer interested in open-sourcing its Llama models.

OpenAI swiftly responded to the government’s call in August with its first open model in six years, but the gap with China’s well-established ecosystem – similar to that in robotics – may already be too wide to bridge, according to open-source AI expert Nathan Lambert.

“Qwen alone is roughly matching the entire American open model ecosystem today”, Lambert said at a recent industry conference.

He highlighted the depth of China’s open-source ecosystem, which spans from Big Tech giants such as Huawei Technologies and ByteDance to unexpected developers like food delivery giant Meituan and Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, which open-sourced a 1 trillion-parameter model on Thursday.

Just as OpenAI has allied itself with Nvidia and AMD, a self-sufficient AI ecosystem is emerging in China through a collaboration between Huawei and DeepSeek.

In the latest example, when DeepSeek introduced a new programming language called TileLang as part of its new foundational model, Hygon Information Technology and Cambricon Technologies quickly announced “day zero” chip support for the new model, while Huawei said it was developing core operators for TileLang.

“This synchronicity suggests a strategic alignment,” Hello China Tech’s Zhao said. “It is the second phase of a deliberate campaign to build a self-sufficient AI stack, free from Nvidia’s influence.”

The jury is still out on whether Chinese AI players can achieve ASI with local hardware, although Huawei touted that its clustering solution could address computing power needs.

Meanwhile, American lawmakers have called for broader chip export controls, believing access to US technologies remains crucial for China’s AI ambitions.

At the Apsara conference, hundreds of developers and customers listened intently to the presentations, many using a Qwen-powered translation and transcription tool. Alibaba appeared undeterred, as it stressed its commitment to cultivating a vibrant AI ecosystem.

There would only be “five or six hyperscalers globally” in the future, Wu said, implying that Alibaba would be one of them.

Trump keeps door open to Xi meeting, even after new 100% China tariff bomb

Trade escalation comes hours after the US leader appeared to cancel a meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping

US President Donald Trump on Friday signalled he may still meet Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later this month on the sidelines of a multilateral forum in South Korea, even as he announced an additional tariff of 100 per cent on all Chinese imports, on top of levies already in place – doubling down on his tough trade stance.

“I haven’t cancelled, but I don’t know that we’re going to have it, but I’m going to be there regardless. So I would assume we might have it,” Trump told reporters in the White House when asked about his earlier remarks indicating that the meeting could be off.

He asserted that Beijing had “hit the world with something that really is not anything that people are going to do, and ... it was shocking”, referring to Beijing’s new curbs on rare-earth exports announced on Thursday.

Trump hinted that his latest tariff plan could still evolve, and that few understood “this whole import-export concept”.

“We’re gonna have to see what happens. That’s why I made it November 1. We’ll see what happens,” he said.

His comments came just hours after a social media post declaring that the US will impose a tariff of 100 per cent on China from November 1, “over and above any tariff that they are currently paying (or sooner, depending on any further actions or changes taken by China)”.

“Also on November 1st, we will impose Export Controls on any and all critical software”, the “America first” advocate added, blaming Beijing for “hostile” trade behaviour.

Trump described China’s actions as “absolutely unheard of in International Trade, and a moral disgrace in dealing with other nations”.

Previously in the day, he appeared to cancel a planned meeting with Xi and threatened “massive” tariffs.

Trump claimed that countries “throughout the world” had received “letters” from China expressing intentions to “impose export controls on each and every element of production having to do with rare earths, and virtually anything else they can think of, even if it’s not manufactured in China”.

In a lengthy social media post, Trump said he had been “surprised” by China’s move, which he warned would “clog markets” and hurt global production across industries.

“There is no way that China should be allowed to hold the world ‘captive’,” he wrote, calling the move “sinister and hostile”.

Trump said he was scheduled to meet Xi in two weeks at the Apec summit in South Korea, and that the talks may now be off.

“I was to meet President Xi in two weeks … but now there seems to be no reason to do so,” he said, warning that the US had “much stronger” monopoly positions, “far more reaching than China’s.”

“One of the policies that we are calculating at this moment is a massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products coming into the United States of America,” Trump added as he noted that “many other countermeasures” were “under serious consideration”.

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Wall Street reacted strongly to Trump’s threats, sending markets spiralling. The S&P 500 dropped 2.7 per cent in its worst day since April. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.9 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite lost 3.6 per cent.

Beijing on Thursday widened its rare earth export curbs, adding five new elements and imposing stricter scrutiny on semiconductor users.

The world’s top supplier also restricted dozens of refining technologies and warned that foreign producers using Chinese materials will have to follow its rules.

Hours later, during a cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump emphasised the US market’s leverage over China, saying: “We import from China massive amounts, and maybe we’ll have to stop doing that.”

“I have things that I want to discuss with him. And one of the things is soybeans,” he added, recalling that he used to call Xi “every two weeks” during his first term to ensure Beijing stuck to their trade commitments.

He blamed his successor, Joe Biden, for failing to follow through on the phase one trade deal made with China in 2020 under Trump’s first term.

Ryan Hass, director of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Centre, reacted to Trump’s missive, noting that despite a “fair amount” of US-China activity, “under the surface” both countries have been “pursuing strategies to reduce dependence and insulate themselves from each other”.

He added that Xi has made self-reliance a “central feature of his national agenda” and that Beijing had grown “overconfident” about its leverage in the relationship over rare earths.

Hass expected more “twists and turns” before Trump and Xi arrive in South Korea, but did not “expect either side to make major concessions to the other”.

“If the two leaders end up meeting in Korea, it will be to set a course, direction and boundaries around future competition. Beijing will want to use the meeting to signal greater stability and predictability in the relationship. I would not bet on major deliverables,” he said.

Taisu Zhang, a professor of Law at Yale Law School, in a social media post, argued that it depends on “whether you think China is wise to impose export controls on rare earths technology, should largely mimic, whether you think the US is wise to impose export controls on chip technology”.

“If you think the former is shrewd whereas the latter is dumb, or vice versa, you’re likely being biased and logically inconsistent (especially when, as became obvious this summer, the technological research environment is deteriorating in both countries due to fiscal policy),” he said.

“The most likely medium-term outcome is still a trade detente between the two countries based on technological mutual dependence.”

Veda Partners, a Maryland-based firm that specialises in capital markets and federal policymaking, in a statement ruled out any breakthrough in the relations even if Xi and Trump end up meeting.

“At most, further discussion of the TikTok sale could be held, but the critical issues of rare earth access and commitments from China to buy US agricultural exports are unlikely to be announced in the wake of this meeting, if it occurs at all,” it read.

On Thursday, John Moolenaar, chairman of the hawkish House Select Committee on China, said China’s new restrictive measures on rare earths were an “economic declaration of war” against the US and “a slap in the face to President Trump amid his efforts to fight for a level playing field.”

The Michigan Republican expressed his readiness to work with the Trump administration to “show China that its belligerent trade actions will be met with serious efforts to protect the American people, secure our supply chains, and cut off the flow of US capital and technology into China”.

However, Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee blamed Trump for China’s tightening of rare earth exports in a statement on Friday.

“China’s export controls didn’t come ‘out of nowhere’,” said Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the panel, in a social media post.

“They are retaliation for Trump’s reckless trade war, where he used American export controls as negotiating leverage. Trump’s actions are resulting in expensive consequences for American families.”

The latest developments come as the world’s two largest economies now face a November 10 deadline to reach a comprehensive trade deal. Amid their negotiations, China has yet to purchase any US soybeans this season, diverting orders instead to Brazil and Argentina.

Last month, Trump spoke with his Chinese counterpart for a third time on the phone. The conversation, which was described by the US president as “very productive” and by Beijing as “pragmatic, positive and constructive”, paved the way for a US$14 billion TikTok deal.

Right before the call, Trump, in a social media post, called Xi a “gentleman” and announced that the two leaders would meet later this month. In another social media post last week, the “America first” leader expressed his displeasure over China’s snub to US soybeans this season.

China is one of the key buyers of US soybeans. Trump slammed Beijing’s latest move as a negotiation tactic.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has reignited his aggressive trade posture, first imposing a 20 per cent tariff on Chinese goods tied to fentanyl concerns, followed by additional duties that prompted Beijing to retaliate.

In April, China imposed a 25 per cent levy on American soybeans, further eroding their price competitiveness. At one point, the tit-for-tat tariffs escalated to over 100 per cent on both sides.

Since May, the two sides have been negotiating, reaching a framework on lowering some tariffs and select trade in rare earths and semiconductors.

Despite these developments, average tariffs on Chinese imports remain around 55 per cent, as Trump’s trade team has refused to remove the fentanyl-related levies and kept the talks focused on broader issues like state subsidies, overcapacity and export controls.

As trade frictions escalated on Friday, the Trump administration announced the success of efforts to stop the illegal online sale of certain Chinese unauthorised electronic equipment.

Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), posted on X, saying that the Communist Party of China is “engaged in a multi-prong effort to insert insecure devices into Americans’ homes & businesses”.

“This new FCC effort has resulted in millions of listings for prohibited Covered List devices – including certain Huawei and ZTE gear – being removed from leading e-commerce and online retailers,” he added.

Move to manufacture insulin locally is set against forecast of nearly 55 million Type 2 diabetes cases in sub-Saharan Africa by 2045

China is advancing its “health silk road” in Africa by initiating major offshore projects to manufacture essential medicines, such as insulin and antiretrovirals.

Nigeria is set to produce Chinese-made insulin, while in the Ivory Coast further west, Chinese giant Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical is on track to complete the first part of its three-phase €50 million (US$58 million) facility by the end of the year. The facility near Abidjan, the country’s biggest city, will manufacture antimalarial and antibacterial drugs.

Chinese firms are stepping in to fill Africa’s medicine manufacturing gaps, driven by high demand for generic medications and chronic illness treatments.

Africa, home to about 18 per cent of the global population, bears a quarter of the world’s disease burden and imports nearly all its vaccines and 70 per cent of its essential medicines, according to global health agencies.

Beijing’s ambassador to Nigeria, Yu Dunhai, announced late last month that Chinese companies planned to build an insulin production plant in the country.

The facility would expand access to life-saving diabetes medication and lower treatment costs as rates of the disease surge across the continent, “potentially ending Nigeria’s reliance on imported insulin and positioning Nigeria as a hub for African medical biotechnology”, Yu said.

His comments followed the signing of the related deal between Nigeria’s National Biotechnology Research and Development Agency and the Shanghai Haiqi Industrial Company.

Lauren Johnston, a China-Africa specialist and senior research fellow at the AustChina Institute, a Melbourne-based think tank, said there appeared to be a race to produce insulin in Africa. This included efforts agreed to or under way in Egypt with a US-based partner, in South Africa with a European partner, and now Nigeria with a Chinese partner.

“This is amazing news – unless this also relates to forecasts in diabetes onset prevalence,” Johnston said.

Nigeria, as a starting point on medical manufacturing for China, offered the continent’s largest domestic consumer market, as well as a presumably underserved West African market, Johnston said.

Egypt’s EVA Pharma began producing insulin last year in partnership with US firm Eli Lilly. The initiative is similar to one involving South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk for the local “filling and finishing” or final, critical manufacturing stage of insulin, to improve regional access.

Kai Xue, a Beijing-based lawyer who advises on foreign direct investment and cross-border financing, said the diplomatic framework for China’s health engagement was provided under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which includes mechanisms such as the health silk road cooperation conference and the China-Africa ministerial forum on health cooperation.

But sustained momentum required commercially viable projects, Xue noted. For instance, if insulin production in Nigeria proved profitable, it could encourage related investments, such as the manufacture of blood glucose monitors.

He said Chinese firm Sinocare was already selling blood glucose monitors in Nigeria. “Commercial success will invite expansion and competing investments not only from other Chinese companies but also firms from elsewhere, creating a biotech hub in Nigeria,” Xue added.

Diabetes cases have been sharply rising across Africa. A recent Lancet study estimated that Type 2 cases in sub-Saharan Africa alone would rise to nearly 55 million by 2045, driven by changes in diet and reduced physical activity.

Johnston said while the situation implicitly represented competition for existing exporters of related medicines to Africa, it might “ultimately be difficult to compete with the prospect of producing such essential medicines locally”.

This could represent both a major contribution to the globalisation of China’s health-related industries and an incremental advance for Africa’s health and pharmaceuticals sector, she said.

The health silk road is a nickname for health sector investments under the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global trade and infrastructure strategy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping promised during the FOCAC summit in September last year that Beijing would promote pharmaceutical production and the medical equipment industry in Africa, including access to active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), through co-investment by Chinese and African private sector players.

Zhou Taidong, vice-president of the China Centre for International Knowledge on Development, said it was a state-driven push factor that accelerated commercial opportunity, framing health cooperation not as charity but as a “win-win” partnership.

According to Zhou, this would build goodwill by helping African countries develop their own pharmaceutical capacity, as was evident during Covid-19 when China supported local production while Western nations were accused of “vaccine hoarding”.

“China’s [expansion] in the sector can undercut price, ensure supply security and leverage Chinese API advantage,” Zhou said.

By focusing on African production, Chinese companies were “more willing to engage in technology transfer and joint ventures with local partners”, he added.

Besides insulin, Nigeria is also angling to make antiretroviral drugs. Nigerian drug maker Fidson Healthcare signed a deal last year with Chinese firms to build a US$100 million pharmaceutical plant in the city of Lagos.

The agreement with Jiangsu Aidea Pharma, PharmaBlock Sciences Nanjing Inc and the China-Africa Development Fund supports construction of the facility in the Lekki Free Trade Zone to boost Africa’s self-reliance in healthcare delivery, particularly in tackling HIV.

The facility is expected to be completed by early 2027. Crucially, it will help fill the gap left by the exit of major Western pharmaceutical giants GSK and Sanofi from the Nigerian market in 2023.

Meanwhile, Fosun Pharma’s plant in Ivory Coast is expected to produce antimalarial drugs and antibiotics, with a full capacity of 5 billion tablets annually once all three phases are complete. Fosun’s business in Africa will cover 17 French-speaking countries, including Senegal, Cameroon and Mali.

Chinese pharmaceutical firms are also boosting local production in other African countries, especially in Ethiopia, Zambia and Kenya.

Other recent moves include Chinese firm Africa Bio Chem’s partnership with the government in Zanzibar, Tanzania, for a drug and vaccine facility, and Jijia International Medical Technology’s deal last year to build a cholera vaccine plant in Zambia.

Analysis from the Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined indicated that African markets offer Chinese pharmaceutical companies high-margin opportunities they cannot access at home.

This high growth capacity is quantified by Africa’s low health expenditure. At just under US$35 per capita in 2019, it is far below the global benchmark of US$160.

How high-end restaurants went global

As a new generation sets out in the footsteps of Nobu and Zuma, Jay Rayner examines the rise of ‘luxe’ food chains — and whether it has come at a cost

In Dubai’s International Financial Centre you are never far from a prettified plate of raw tuna. At the city’s branch of the Venetian-born Cipriani, it’s a tuna tartare. Across the pedestrianised precinct at La Petite Maison, it’s a tuna carpaccio with hazelnuts. Two minutes’ walk down the street from there, at the Japanese-inspired Zuma, it’s tuna with chilli, coriander and sesame, and a further five minutes’ walk on at the generic Asian Shanghai Me, it’s bluefin tuna oshizushi. Early next year there should be a new tuna tartare on the block. The British-based tapas restaurant group Barrafina is opening its first international outpost. And they do so love their raw fish. 

On the sort of brutally hot day many people would call a climate emergency and Dubai calls Wednesday, I am taken on a WhatsApp video tour from London of the hard-edged DIFC. My guide is Sam Hart, co-owner of London’s Quo Vadis and the Mexican El Pastor group alongside Barrafina. With him is Anna Watkins, MD of the highly regarded tapas part of the company. “There’s a really good business crowd here,” Watkins says, as they dance from one shadow to the next. “We think our small plates will appeal to them.”

Hart nods vigorously before pointing out that what they’ll be offering is very different to all the other restaurants we’ve peered at. “A lot of these places are 300 to 400 covers,” he says. “Whereas we’ll be Barrafina-sized, so only about 50 covers. Oh, and we won’t have a DJ.”

In Dubai the restaurant DJ is a big thing. As are blancmange-pink slabs of Wagyu, lozenges of sushi and dollops of caviar. A little rustic pan con tomate and a plate of chicken thighs with a nutty romesco sauce might well prove a blessed relief. Either way, the new international Barrafina will be part of a booming global hospitality sector which, post-Covid, has become a proven cornerstone of the luxe economy.

The restaurateurs, chefs and brokers who have made this their business say it’s a product of premium shopping habits moving online through the pandemic, just as they did for all categories of consumer, so the big brands no longer need so much physical floor space. “Premium retail has just shrunk,” says Noah Tepperberg of the New York-based Tao Group, which has the international brands Hakkasan and Lavo. “But you can’t buy what we do on Amazon.”

In the UK, restaurateurs talk only of economic headwinds and brutal trading conditions. “A lot of it is to do with the UK economy right now,” says Mark Wingett, group editor of Propel, the hospitality business newsletter. “Businesses are questioning whether it’s worth opening here and instead are looking overseas.”

Meanwhile, from the UAE to Singapore, from Hong Kong to Mykonos to LA, it’s boom time for anyone with a menu of, say, crispy squid, king crab and Wagyu, a wine list stacked with marquee names and a veritable army of suited-and-booted waiters who know how to service the demanding $150-a-head crowd. 

It’s a feverish business. The US-based Major Food Group has just opened its ninth branch of the high-camp New York Italian Carbone in London, serving lasagna bianco at £98 a pop. The London-founded Azumi group has dispatched Zuma west across the US and east to Dubai and all points beyond. Dubai’s Fundamental Hospitality group has returned the favour by opening branches of the sort-of-but-not-very Greek Gaia, and the kind-of-French La Maison Ani in London. The Swedish chef Björn Frantzén has sent his Wagyu beef sliders and veal tartare toast to Bangkok, Singapore, Marbella, the Maldives and Dubai. None of them miss out Dubai. There are now 56 branches of Nobu worldwide, doing a roaring trade in black cod with miso and rock shrimp tempura. There are 25 Zumas, about two dozen Ciprianis, 13 LPMs and 12 Hakkasans.

These restaurants sell themselves on the promise of a unique, perhaps even bespoke night out; increasingly, however, they are defined by familiarity, fully detached from the neighbourhood in which they sit. They appear to represent different culinary traditions, but they all offer deracinated takes on the same reassuringly luxurious ingredients. And many of them are to be found side-by-side in the same resorts and developments. On the small Greek island of Mykonos there are, of course, local Greek restaurants. They’re probably lovely. But there’s also a Zuma, an LPM, a Matsuhisa from the founder of Nobu and a Nusr-Et steakhouse from Turkish chef Salt Bae. Though it’s not quite clear what the island did to deserve that.

It plays out as a gilded version of the British high street from the turn of the millennium onwards, when mid-market hospitality businesses came to dominate. Eventually, you could eat anywhere you liked across the UK as long as it was at an Ask, Zizzi, Wagamama or Côte. In 2025 a slab of prime Wagyu has become for the international wealthy what a sourdough pizza was for the British middle classes in 2010. It’s just dinner.

Restaurants spreading their wings is not especially new. In 1964 a restaurant in Tokyo called Benihana opened a sibling of the same name in New York, where skilled chefs did tableside tricks with knives and ingredients that had little to do with eating. It was the beginning of an empire. In the 1970s the New York restaurateur Joe Allen oversaw the opening of branches of his eponymous theatreland American bistro, first in Paris and then in London. In 1978 a second Hard Rock Cafe opened in Toronto, a sibling to the original 3,500 miles away just off Park Lane. But these were rare examples of international restaurant expansion.

The modern story begins with the 1994 arrival, in New York’s Tribeca, of the first Nobu. The original restaurant, overseen by a bullet-headed, bright-eyed chef called Nobu Matsuhisa, had opened in Beverly Hills in 1987, serving a Japanese menu with Peruvian influences. One of its regulars was the actor Robert De Niro, who was looking to diversify. He went into partnership with both the chef and the restaurateur Drew Nieporent to open the first Nobu. A second branch, famed for its minimalist clean lines, opened at London’s Metropolitan Hotel off Park Lane in 1997. Many more followed.

“We never sat in a room and said we’re going to build a thing,” says Richie Notar, former general manager of the original Nobu, who later helped oversee the opening of 19 further branches worldwide. “We just suddenly had the hottest restaurant on the planet. Nobody else was doing this sort of food. We wanted to polish it up, put it in designer jeans. A few months after opening in London, we had a Michelin star and Princess Diana sitting in the corner.”

The fight for tables in London was so intense that it inspired the Karachi-born businessman Arjun Waney to back a little-known German chef called Rainer Becker, who had spent six years cooking in Japan. Waney was apparently fed up with not being able to get a table at Nobu, and Becker believed he could write a menu of Japan’s greatest hits, only with bolder flavours designed to appeal to an international crowd. The first Zuma opened in London in 2002 and became a huge success, spawning those multiple outposts. 

So what’s the secret to international expansion? “You have to get the first one right,” says Notar. “There’s no three, four or five if you don’t get number one right.” For Tao Group’s Tepperberg, it’s about research. “I visit a city 10 to 15 times before I’m comfortable opening there.” And then it’s about training. “We’ve had our exec chef and our general manager for Dubai working with us in London for three months,” says Watkins of Barrafina. All of which is aimed at one goal. “You need to be consistent,” Becker says. “The signature dishes have to taste as close to the same as possible everywhere.” Despite once helping to launch the opposition, Notar cannot hide his admiration. “Zuma has done an amazing job.”

On a late summer’s morning, the restaurateur François O’Neill is also thinking about Zuma, perhaps because the business is reputed to have made Becker a multimillionaire. The old joke, that to make a small fortune from restaurants you have to start with a large one, has been subverted by the Zuma model.

“Zuma holds the crown, doesn’t it?” O’Neill says, over an espresso. He’s sitting in a blonde wood window booth at Maison François, his modern take on the French brasserie, tucked away off London’s Piccadilly. His restaurant, which opened five years ago, has built a devoted fan base drawn to its sexily lit dining room filled almost exclusively with corner tables, and a smart menu of updated French classics. They do escargot flatbreads and a killer bavette Bordelaise, followed by tarts from the drop-dead-gorgeous dessert trolley. Last year it spawned a more casual sibling, Café François, at Borough. 

For the past 18 months, inspired by the success of Zuma and other chefs including Gordon Ramsay and the late Joël Robuchon, O’Neill has quietly taken trips to Dubai. As he says, “The UK is not a desirable market to invest in at the moment.” The UAE, he says, “is a hotspot for restaurants. That’s what they do at weekends. They’re obsessed with brands.” O’Neill knows he has one, but he’s also desperate to protect it. “This is a beautiful part of my life,” he says, looking around the dining room, quiet now before the lunchtime rush. “You need to find the right people to share your DNA. But if you get the opportunity to scale your business in a soft-landing environment, you’ve got to look at it.”

Clearly, he is now fluent in both French food and the language of investment. He’s also aware of the effort it will take. “I’d be on a plane once a month, which brings stress on my family. I want to be a good husband and father. My wife needs to sign off on this.” 

O’Neill recognises, however, that if he’s going to do it, this is probably the right time. He’s already passed on one site in Dubai’s Marina because, he says, it “just wasn’t right for us”, but he continues looking and he continues talking. Anecdotally, international property groups report a major uptick in premium hospitality offerings inside new developments in Dubai. “What is increasingly evident is that the best office spaces are incorporating more food and beverage and hotel offerings,” says Prathyusha Gurrapu, head of research at real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Core. “It is a differentiating factor.” 

The same applies to residential blocks. Or as Noah Tepperberg of the Tao Group puts it, “People aren’t going to live on ground floors. You can’t put hotel rooms there, and premium retail brands have less and less interest. Real estate developers believe that if they do a deal with a premium restaurant brand, customers will assume the development is of the same quality as the tenant.” 

A beneficiary of this is JKS, the group behind the two-Michelin-starred Indian restaurant Gymkhana and the more recent Ambassadors Clubhouse off London’s Regent Street. Like the Indian café group Dishoom, which recently took investment from luxury goods behemoth LVMH, it is riding a wave of interest in quality Indian food in the US. A Gymkhana will open in Las Vegas in December, and a few weeks before that New York will get an Ambassadors Clubhouse, on the ground floor of a new office block in the city’s NoMad district.

“A big part of my job is building relationships with real estate developers,” says Jyotin Sethi, the J of JKS, alongside his chef brother Karam and sister Sunaina. “The New York opening is a case in point. They have one commercial retail space at ground level and it’s going to us. In the great scheme of things it’s a rounding error for them.” As a result, landlords offer highly preferential deals. “In the US we’re finding landlords operate as partners,” Sethi says. “They’re not trying to squeeze every cent out of you.” 

As to the blanding-out of the international premium restaurant sector, many of the players quietly acknowledge it’s a problem, while denying it’s anything to do with them. “We get plenty of requests to open our restaurants,” says Zuma’s Becker. “But we have to be careful where we go.”

The one challenge all these restaurateurs know they face is reputational damage, if they get it wrong. The key, they say, is the kind of deal they make. These start with the hands-off licensing of trademarks and menus. It’s financially risk-free, but there is no brand quality control. Then there are joint ventures, in which risks are shared, through to simply leasing a space and carrying both profit and loss home.

“I wouldn’t put Maison François in someone else’s hands,” says O’Neill. Barrafina’s Watkins seems a little more flexible. “The risk for us, if we f*ck it up, is indeed the brand. That’s why we have a franchise management deal with Anthem Hospitality in Dubai. It means we are responsible for all the key decisions: the head chefs, the managers and so on.” 

Some companies seem a little more cavalier. They are happy, for example, to trade in Saudi Arabia, heavily criticised for its human rights record. Recently, top-flight comedians including Jimmy Carr and Jack Whitehall were attacked for taking vast fees to participate in the obviously hilarious Riyadh Comedy Festival. Meanwhile, JKS has quietly opened in the Saudi government-backed Via Riyadh hospitality development, alongside a branch of Richard Caring’s fish restaurant Scott’s and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago.

JKS says its deal is with a local hospitality business which has merely rented the space in Via Riyadh. “The Saudi government never approached us,” Sethi says. “We want to grow our brand in different markets. We decided we are comfortable with the macro picture.”   

Back in Dubai, the Barrafina team are still chewing over the challenges of their new venture, due to open in January. For one, they won’t be able to serve pork. “In Dubai you need a special licence and a separate kitchen for that,” Watkins says. “And it won’t work in the space we have.” A Spanish restaurant without any pig on the menu sounds like a contradiction in terms, but Watkins insists otherwise. “It’s only four dishes.”

Perhaps they have bigger things to consider. As Sam Hart says, “The restaurants that do well here do the most crazy numbers.” He talks about yearly turnovers of $40mn. And so, despite the hoarding still being up on the new restaurant in the DIFC, they are now looking beyond Dubai. They are certain, Hart says, that there are other places where their classy, modern take on the tapas tradition would work. The next day he and Watkins were off to look at sites in Abu Dhabi’s cultural district. The Barrafina rollout has begun. 

Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has confirmed to TechCrunch that a U.S. investment group has acquired the company.

NSO spokesperson Oded Hershowitz told TechCrunch on Friday that “an American investment group has invested tens of millions of dollars in the company and has acquired controlling ownership.”

Confirmation of the deal came soon after Israeli tech news website Calcalist reported Friday that a group led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds agreed to purchase the surveillance tech maker in a deal valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

Hershowitz declined to specify the amount invested, as well as who the investors are.

“This investment does not mean that the company is moving out of Israeli regulatory or operational control,” said Hershowitz. “The company’s headquarters and core operations remain in Israel. It continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities, including the Ministry of Defense and the Israeli regulatory framework.”

(After sending the messages, Hershowitz declared his comments “off the record,” which requires both parties to agree to the terms in advance. TechCrunch is publishing the responses as there was no agreement made.)

In 2023, The Guardian reported that Simonds and an associate, through their investment firm, were exploring making a bid to take control of NSO. The deal never materialized.

Calcalist reported that as part of the new deal with Simonds, NSO’s co-founder and executive chairman Omri Lavie’s involvement with the spyware maker will end.

Lavie did not immediately comment when contacted by TechCrunch. Neither Simonds nor his Hollywood company STX Entertainment responded to our request for comment, either.

NSO Group has been mired in controversy since its very beginning.

Researchers at the digital rights group from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, and others, have for years documented dozens of cases where NSO’s government customers targeted and hacked journalists, dissidents, and human rights defenders in Hungary, India, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among others.

NSO has long claimed that its spyware is designed to not target U.S. phone numbers, likely to avoid hurting its chances to enter the U.S. market. But the company was caught in 2021 targeting about a dozen U.S. government officials abroad.

Soon after, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American companies from trading with NSO by putting the spyware maker on the U.S. Entities List. Since then, NSO has tried to get off the U.S. government’s blocklist, as recently as May 2025, with the help of a lobbying firm tied to the Trump administration.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab who has helped investigate abuses of NSO’s spyware for a decade, told TechCrunch he is concerned about the acquisition.

“NSO is a company with a long history of going against American interests and supporting the hacking of American officials. In what world can such a person be trusted to properly oversee a company like NSO Group?” said Scott-Railton, referring to Simonds.

“Going further, my real concern is that NSO has strenuously tried to enter the United States and sell their product to American police forces in U.S. cities. This dictator tech does not belong anywhere near Americans, or our constitutionally protect[ed] rights or freedoms.”

NSO’s ownership has exchanged hands before.

Originally founded by Niv Karmi, Shalev Hulio, and Omri Lavie, NSO Group was acquired by U.S. private equity firm Francisco Partners in 2014. Lavie and Hulio retook control of the company in 2019 with help from European private equity firm Novalpina. Then, in 2021, the California-based Berkeley Research Group took over management of the fund. In 2023, Lavie retook control of NSO as majority owner.

Famed roboticist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks has sounded the alarm on a humanoid robot investment bubble. He’s not the only one.

In a recent essay, Brooks calls out the billions of venture dollars being poured into humanoid robot companies like Figure. His take: Despite the amount of money being injected into the industry, humanoids won’t be able to learn dexterity — or the fine motor movements with hands — rendering them essentially useless.

His take might surprise some, especially those VCs investing in the sector. But not the multiple robotics-focused VCs and AI scientists who have told TechCrunch in recent months that they don’t expect to see wide adoption of humanoid robots for at least a few years — if not more than a decade.

Fady Saad, a general partner at robotics-focused VC Cybernetix Ventures and former co-founder of MassRobotics, told TechCrunch that beyond sending humanoids into space in place of human astronauts, he doesn’t see a huge market yet.

“People who probably haven’t seen humanoids before, or haven’t kind of been closely following what’s happening, they are impressed with what’s happening now in humanoids, but we continue to be a little bit conservative and skeptical about the actual use case and the actual revenues that will be generated,” Saad said.

Saad is also concerned about safety, especially when humans and humanoid robots share the same space. Safety issues could arise from humanoids and humans working closely on a factory floor, or other industrial sites. Saad says those concerns mount when humanoids enter people’s homes — a goal many humanoid companies are working toward.

“If this thing falls on pets or kids, it will hurt them,” Saad said. “This is just one aspect of a big hurdle that no one is paying attention to, or very few people are paying attention to. The other thing is, how many people are comfortable with having a humanoid in their home sitting there? What if it got hacked? What if it went crazy at night and started breaking things?”

The timeline for this technology also isn’t clear — a crucial factor for VCs who have fund lifecycles and timelines to return capital to investors.

Sanja Fidler, the vice president of AI research at Nvidia, told TechCrunch in August that while it’s hard to pin the development of humanoids to an exact timeline, she compared the current swell of interest to the excitement in the early days of self-driving cars.

“I mean, look at self-driving cars, in 2017 and 2016, I mean it felt tangible, right?” Fidler said at the time. “It still took them quite a few years to really scale and even now, no one really scaled to the entire world, full autonomy. It’s hard. It’s really hard to go and fully delivery on that technology.”

Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally agreed in an interview with TechCrunch. Dally and Fidler’s comments are especially notable as Nvidia is also pouring money into developing the infrastructure for humanoid companies to follow.

Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse, said while it can be easy to get excited as each new technological development happens, or the latest demo drops, humanoids are incredibly complicated. He added that it will be a while before they reach their full capabilities.

“It’s difficult to do software releases to six degrees of freedom systems; what we’re talking about with some of these humanoids is 60-plus degrees of freedom systems,” Winterroth said, regarding a robot’s ability to move on a 3D axis. “Then you need to be able to have good unit economics around that solution, such that you’ve got strong gross margin, such that you can be building an enduring business. I think we’re pretty early.”

In most cases, humanoid robots aren’t ready for the world yet, either.

Tesla is a great example of the struggles companies are running into. The company announced it was building its humanoid, Optimus, back in 2021. The following year, Tesla said the bot would be introduced in 2023.

That didn’t happen. When the bot was introduced in 2024 at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event, it was revealed later that the bots were largely being controlled by humans off scene. The company claims it will start selling the bots in 2026.

Robotics startup Figure, which was valued at $39 billion in a September fundraise, has also drawn skepticism regarding how many of its humanoids the company has actually deployed, a claim the company staunchly defends.

That doesn’t mean humanoids won’t have a future market or that the technology is not worth working on.

Brooks himself said he doesn’t doubt that we will have humanoids in the future. But instead of what the market pictures when they hear humanoids, a robot with a human form, he predicts they’ll likely have wheels and other inhuman features and won’t be coming out for more than a decade.

There are startups working on the dexterity technology Brooks is skeptical humanoids will be able to reach, including Y Combinator-backed Proception and Loomia, which built a kit that can help robotics companies start to incorporate touch into their machines.

There are also numerous humanoid companies that are starting to take orders and gather interest in their robots. K-Scale Labs received more than 100 preorders for its humanoid bot in the first five days, surprising even the founders, CEO Benjamin Bolte told TechCrunch.

Hugging Face has also seen strong demand from developers for its two humanoid bots. The company opened up preorders for its smaller desktop version, the Reachy Mini, in July. The reaction was palpable. Just five days after opening orders on its Reachy Mini robots, Hugging Face had logged $1 million worth of sales.

The Tod’s Group chairman and chief executive officer expressed criticism over the probe’s development and the narrative of Made in Italy lacking ethics.

MILAN — Diego Della Valle got vocal on Friday, expressing his criticism of the conduct of Milan prosecutors in their allegations of labor abuse in Tod’s supply chain that emerged on Wednesday.

Gathering journalists in the afternoon at the group’s headquarters on Milan’s Corso Venezia, the Tod’s Group chairman and chief executive officer clarified the company’s position in the probe — which alleged the group had sub-suppliers engaged in sweatshop schemes it failed to properly audit. Della Valle did not get into specifics as a matter of respect for and protection against the ongoing proceedings.

The executive also voiced his defense of Made in Italy ethics.

“What I have seen happen truly does not reflect our mentality, does not reflect what we have sought to build over the past 50 to 60 years — my family, us, my children, my brother [Andrea Della Valle]. We make ethical values a pivotal factor in any situation, all the more so in business matters,” Della Valle said, echoing his company’s statement issued on Wednesday when the probe was made public.

“When it comes to my group, we don’t just do beautiful goods, we do truly excellent goods of absolute quality, [imbued] with craftsmanship that we oversee in every possible way, with workshops, [employing] young people…in short, those who know us know these things, and to speak lightly about such topics as if we were truly criminals is, in my opinion, something to be ashamed of,” he said.

As reported, Milan prosecutor Paolo Storari had been investigating Tod’s’ value chain since last year, unearthing alleged labor abuse and poor working conditions at a handful of its subcontractors in the Lombardy and Marche regions. The former were reportedly involved in the production of staff uniforms, while the latter were allegedly supplying footwear’s upper parts.

Tod’s is not facing any criminal charges, but Milan prosecutors have requested that the Italian luxury brand be put under judicial administration.

However, as reported, a Milan court and a Milan Appeals Court ruling dismissed the judicial administration procedure in relation to incidents in the Lombardy region and asked for the relocation to the Court of Ancona, in Italy’s Marche, for proceedings related to the incidents occurred in the latter region. Storari appealed the decisions to the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeal court, which led to the probe being uncovered.

A hearing in Storari’s appeal is scheduled for Nov. 19.

On Friday, Della Valle criticized Storari’s approach to the investigation, claiming that allegations were made lightheartedly, ignoring the ripple effect they could have on Made in Italy.

“I see that over the past year, four or five companies have been placed under investigation — coincidentally, all luxury companies, all very well-known, all questioned by the same prosecutor,” he said. “I prefer not to interfere in ongoing matters, [but] it makes me suspect that perhaps the use of certain actions might stem from a need for popularity, which in this case hurts us deeply. Therefore, we cannot stay silent,” Della Valle argued.

Cautioning against indiscriminate use of power, Della Valle urged entrepreneurs to be reactive. “Today, I am reacting.…If we never speak up, nothing will ever change,” he opined. “With the great respect due to Italian laws, we must, however, raise a finger and say: you are creating serious trouble for us. You must urgently find a solution that provides Italian law enforcement with all the necessary tools to monitor everything, but at the same time grants us the ability to work.…Made in Italy must be protected,” he said.

“Audit us as thoroughly as possible — of course — but with judgment, not superficially, because you are touching on extremely delicate matters,” Della Valle said.

“Prosecutor Paolo Storari, whom I do not know, is officially invited to come and visit my companies, and then I challenge him, if he dares, to claim that we are people who are not law-abiding, people who do not care about respect,” he continued. “And I believe that other Italian companies would gladly invite him, as well,” he said.

“We are addressing an extremely delicate subject: Our country is one of the strongest excellences [in luxury fashion] on a global scale. Everyone acknowledges our leadership.

“If someone calls this into question, lightly, it causes us great harm. It causes great harm to the country, to craftsmanship, to young people who are looking for a job in companies that might no longer exist,” he added.

Like Tod’s probe, others made public over the past two years and involving, among others, Loro Piana, Valentino, Dior and Giorgio Armani alleged that the luxury brands failed in properly auditing their value chain partners.

As a result, brands have been put into judicial administration to correct and enhance audits and oversight through court-mandated procedures. Dior’s and Giorgio Armani’s probes were fully resolved and the judicial oversight lifted.

Della Valle noted that current law requesting companies to hit the third tier of the sub-supplying chain is hardly feasible.

“One must be careful not to assume that we know what happens within a [supplier] company. Once we have evaluated it and the company meets our requirements, they sign a contract with us, a contract that protects everything: welfare, pricing, what we pay, everything is detailed. After that, whatever happens inside, even if one might expect us to know, how could we possibly know? We are not the finance police, after all,” Della Valle explained.

“We have an [auditing] division that deals with this full time…but then, if a supplier does whatever they want behind closed doors, we don’t see it; if they work at night, we don’t know. This is where we need to delve into the specifics of the law and think about how to rewrite certain rules, because the current ones are not compatible and are very frustrating for us entrepreneurs. I can say that I don’t know a single reputable entrepreneur who would even remotely think of exploiting the people they work with,” he said.

“As far as we are concerned, if we notice something [unlawful], [contract termination] becomes automatic. And the law states that we must go down the entire supply chain, to the third level. That is not possible, because we don’t have the authority to do such things, nor do we truly have the competence. We must stop at the first level and then certify that the first level is a serious and reliable one,” Della Valle said.

“I strongly believe that there must be rigorous and relentless monitoring, but when someone is almost in compliance, they cannot have a Sword of Damocles suddenly thrown upon them, sometimes only because of the notoriety they represent,” he said.

Della Valle is not alone. Industry associations, including Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and Confindustria Moda, have been equally vocal about the need for a shared, nationwide auditing system.

Ongoing negotiations with the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy are reportedly closer to a draft law.

Addressing the Tod’s probe this week, minister Adolfo Urso said: “Tod’s is an Italian brand of great standing and excellence, with an indisputable international reputation. This reputation must be safeguarded, especially today, as Made in Italy is perceived worldwide as equivalent to beautiful, good, and well-crafted [goods], but also increasingly as sustainable from an environmental, social and legal standpoint.”

“We’ve included a legislative measure in the draft law on small businesses and craftsmanship currently under examination in the Senate to find an upstream solution that safeguards the reputation of Made in Italy,” he said. The law would allow companies to have their entire supply chain preventively certified by a third party for suppliers’ compliance with environmental, social and labor laws.

“With this preventive certification we can more effectively combat all forms of labor exploitation, which we must, of course, suppress, while also safeguarding the reputation of our brands, something we cannot afford to compromise,” he said.

Touting the ministry’s approach to the issue on Friday, Della Valle concluded: “Protecting ourselves does not mean neglecting control in order to safeguard the country. We do need to monitor everything, but do it properly so that we are in a position to work.”

The retailer has begun incubating European beauty brands and partnered with the Al-Nassr women’s soccer club in Saudi Arabia.

PARIS — The Sephoria beauty festival has just globetrotted to Paris, where it’s being held in a Left Bank venue Friday and Saturday.

The multilevel, sweeping extravaganza, sprawling over two floors and featuring more than 45 brands, is housed at the Maison de la Mutualité.

“Sephoria never ceases to reinvent itself, and therefore create new dimensions for clients who are going to come and visit,” said Catherine Spindler, president of Sephora’s Europe and Middle East operations, speaking at a press conference Thursday. She introduced this session of Sephoria Paris and also shared her strategy since starting the role eight months ago.

The LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned retailer has begun incubating beauty brands born in Europe, similarly to and how it does in the U.S., through its Kendo division, and with the same objective.

“Until now, we were used to launching brands that came from all over the world — a little less to be in the dynamic of incubating European brands,” Spindler explained. The incubator has started running but is much smaller than its San Francisco-based counterpart.

More than 50 percent of Sephora’s brands are exclusive, and a large part of those have been incubated by the retailer at the global level.

At Sephoria, Sephora is showcasing one of its European incubated start-ups, Glowery Skin, from France.

Also new to this session is a preview of some exclusive brands that the retailer will carry starting in early 2026, including Aestura, Authentic Beauty Concept, Goa Organics, Le Monde Gourmand and One/Size. In The Next Big Thing area, visitors can immerse themselves in some of the brand’s universe. A section was carved out for K-beauty labels such as Erborian, Lineage, Beauty of Jose and Yepoda.

Masterclasses are being held by the likes of Byoma Kérastase, Sephora Collection and Tatcha.

Sephora has a global reach. Since 2017, the retailer has operated in the Middle East, where it now has 92 stores.

“We have just very recently signed a partnership with the women’s soccer club in Saudi Arabia,” Spindler said, referring to Al-Nassr. That tie-in is currently signed for a year to promote the team and support its players.

“It is really a strong symbol for us,” she said. “It is a sign of how much Sephora is committed to continuing to support the empowerment of women throughout the world.”

Sephora does business in 22 European countries and is gaining share in all of them, Spindler said.

“One of the markets of which I will place a very strong emphasis in terms of development is England,” she said. Sephora returned there in 2022 and today counts 10 stores in the country.

“We will open two new ones by the end of the year,” Spindler said. At the close of 2026, the plan is to have at least 20 doors in the U.K.

Altogether, Sephora has 850 stores in Europe, with 20 openings since the start of this year, including in Lisbon and Madrid.

“We will continue to develop many markets where we have potential, starting with Italy, Spain, Turkey and Germany – to name a few of them,” Spindler said. “I can never say enough how convinced we are that retail has its place more than ever.”

The executive said the renovation of Sephora’s Champs-Élysées flagship in Paris has beaten expectations.

Rankings-wise, Sephora is the prestige beauty retail leader in France, Turkey and — by far — the Middle East. It ranks in the top three in Italy, Spain and Germany, she said.

On Sept. 30, Sephora relaunched its loyalty program, called My Sephora, in France, Luxembourg and Monaco.

Sephoria was birthed in the U.S. in 2018 and evolves yearly. In 2025, it’s already held events in Milan and Shanghai. The Paris edition opened to Sephora’s gold customers Friday and will welcome the general public on Saturday. Sephoria is then due to travel to Dubai at the end of November.