Hello and welcome to a special edition of World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Frey Lindsey, and today we're taking a look back at 2025, the business and industry news that really shaped the world we all live, work and spend in.
And I promise it's not all going to be about tariffs.
It is mostly going to be about tariffs.
But there were other things happening this year as well.
We're going to hear about the sky-high company valuations driven by AI investment.
So investors are looking at that artificial intelligence impact, expecting it to lead to huge productivity gains.
We'll hear about the wave of cyber attacks unleashed around the world this year.
What is going on?
The world of cyber is on fire and not in a good way.
We're also going to take a moment to reflect on what can be learned from one of the worst aviation disasters in recent history.
One group of people saying the focus should be on the pilots.
The other group of people saying the focus should be on the plane.
And by the end of this program, I will have learned about a global toy trend that I spent the whole year trying to ignore.
That's all coming up.
Well, let's start at the obvious place.
A 25% tariff on goods imported from India.
50% tariff on Brazil.
A new 50% tariff on all imports from the European Union.
An additional 100% tariff on imports from China.
We're just getting some breaking news here, actually.
Remember, there were 34% tariffs on all US goods coming into China.
That's now been increased to 84%.
2025 was a year where the biggest business story was also one of if not the biggest stories overall.
What you just heard.
There was a very small sampling of the various headlines from throughout this year.
And in most cases, things typically only got more complicated and hard to follow as extra tariffs were added or reciprocal tariffs were announced, and on and on and on, all throughout the year.
It's all just been very difficult to keep up with, even though all of these announcements have had a huge impact on prices and our everyday cost of living.
And here at the BBC, it's so often fallen to our business journalists to unpack all of it, even as they try to keep us up to date with all of the other stories going on.
I wanted to know what that's been like this year, so I called our US business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, in New York.
I mean, I've sort of almost renamed myself the tariff correspondent, because so much of this year has been dominated by that.
But you know someone living in America.
It's a story I'm reporting on, but that I'm also feeling the impact on directly.
You know, you kind of go out, you spend anything in any of the shops and you kind of ask yourself, hang on, were things always this expensive?
And then you realize, oh, tariffs.
You know, I was trying to buy some British tea bags recently.
And they were substantially higher than than they have been in the past.
You know remember, to the start of this year, we were all talking about tariffs and whether or not it would tip the US economy into recession.
And here we are now at the end of the year.
And clearly that hasn't happened.
Nonetheless, there have been these sort of huge, sweeping changes right
But, that being said, it hasn't been the direct line I think all of us expected at the start of the year, right?
Because we've seen tariffs paused.
Others have been tied up in court.
We've seen big companies learn to adapt.
But smaller companies probably have found it a bit more of a struggle.
And I think that's why we're still trying to kind of understand exactly the impact on the economy, even though that recession didn't come in part because economists now think actually we may not see the full impact till next year.
And tariffs, of course, weren't the only story throughout this year that really feels quite seismic.
The other one being, of course, the rise in technology and valuation of AI and AI companies.
How significant do you think this will be in the economies of the future?
We've seen tech companies this year pull billions, I mean, billions into data centres.
And that has led to a demand for power that is exploding.
But here's the problem.
Hardware makers cannot keep up, which brings us really to the bubble question.
And that is that you've seen stocks, especially companies like Nvidia, that have shot up.
You know, we now talk of them as trillion dollar companies.
And big tech is spending these huge sums on infrastructure.
And so that's making investors a bit nervous.
And they're starting to ask questions.
And the questions they're thinking is, you know, is this spending ever going to pay off?
You know, is it going to live up to the hype?
Michelle Fleury, the BBC's US business correspondent.
Thank you very much.
And have a good holiday if you get some holidays.
If I can afford my tea bags.
That question about whether the AI hype will last isn't the only one people are wondering about.
Another one is this paradox that, despite all of the global trade upheaval, US stocks have had a pretty good year.
Now, some of that paradox might be down to what Michelle talked about, that the real effects of tariffs aren't being felt yet.
But AI, artificial intelligence, might be playing a role here as well.
I asked Susan Schmidt, portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources in Chicago and a World Business Report regular, to explain that take to me.
Well, I think investors are very good at focusing on one big issue at a time.
And, fortunately for the markets, performance levels at least.
Investors have come to focus on AI rather than tariffs.
Tariffs are in the background.
But they're in the background because they still don't have full clarity on how they're going to impact costs.
And it's hard to get that precise information into companies' operating margins and profits as they're forecasted.
So, while investors wait for that to happen, instead they've become very focused on also ambiguous AI, but ambiguous in a very positive light.
So investors are looking at that artificial intelligence impact, expecting it to lead to huge productivity gains and hoping that that means future years of additional profits, better operating margins and and increased productivity overall in the baseline economy of the United States.
Susan Schmidt, Portfolio Manager at Exchange Capital Resources, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Tariffs in AI are, of course, not just U.S. stories.
The impact of both has been felt right around the world.
So let's take a quick tour around some parts of the world, although we've not got that much time here, so it's going to have to be kind of a whirlwind tour.
Let's start in the South Asia region, and our correspondent, Archana Shukla, in Mumbai India, working on a heavy deadline, as is always the case for our correspondents, took the time to send us this brief overview.
Tariffs really became India's big stress test this year.
Those 50 US duties hit right at India's manufacturing and export story, especially sectors like textiles jewellery, leather that keep millions of people in work.
And you could see the impact straight away.
American orders dropped.
Factories slowed down.
By October, India's exports to the U.S. were down by nearly a third.
However, India didn't dip into a full-blown crisis, at least as of now.
Exporters tried moving fast.
They tried to find new buyers in Asia Europe, Middle East, at least for some of their goods, which helped cushion some of the hit.
Back at home, the government cut taxes to boost spending during the festive season.
This kept the economic growth from sliding too sharply.
But 2025 is really the year when India shifted gears on trade.
After years of being pretty protectionist, India suddenly pushed forward actively on trade deals with the United Kingdom EU, the Gulf Australia, in a bid to access more markets for its own exports.
New Delhi is now showing flexibility on cutting tariffs on sectors that it protected earlier, like whiskeys cars, bikes.
But with the US, it has been a much tougher conversation.
Our thanks to Archana Shukla, BBC correspondent in Mumbai.
Let's cross to the African continent now.
And of course, that's a very large continent with dozens and dozens of individual nations.
We don't want to fall into the Africa is a country trope here, but there are some common themes.
I spoke to another World Business Report regular, Ma Mara Ekarucha, who's a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa.
She's based in Abuja in Nigeria.
So we're basically living in a hostile geoeconomic environment where there are a lot of protectionist economic policies underway.
Several African countries have had job losses.
Also, the supply chain disruptions have not helped.
Reduced foreign investments and also currency instability have, And one example is the African Growth Opportunities Act, where the US had preferential trade arrangements with some African countries.
It expired in September and it hasn't been renewed.
And we saw in other parts of the world.
There's kind of a geopolitics angle to it as well, with lots of regions pivoting away from the US or looking for other trading partners.
Did you see similar things?
Is there an idea that the US... maybe not so reliable a partner as previously?
Are people looking for opportunities elsewhere?
Of course, definitely.
So, whereas the US was seen as a global power, now it's very clear that it is, you know, America first.
Basically,
A lot of countries on the continent are are partnering with non-traditional partners.
So you have the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
You also have European countries that are not necessarily your traditional partners.
And then you also have African countries leaning into themselves which, in my opinion, is the new world order.
Okay.
Well Mara Ekarucha, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Economies of Africa.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Free.
Let's cross back to Asia now, but further east, and Suranjana Tiwari is one of our Asia business reporters, based in Singapore.
As she explained to me, and as many of you will know, Asia really is at the center of so many global supply chains.
A huge amount of the products people rely on every day depend on that region.
So it was a real shock when Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, because some of the countries in this region had free trade agreements with the US.
But you know these countries, these companies, they really just dug their heels in and they started sending their trade negotiators over to Washington DC to negotiate those trade deals.
They really came together to to sort of form a united front against the US.
Yes, they want to trade with the US.
It's a very important market.
But they also want to work with each other to be able to service their own markets.
And of course, the big elephant in the room is China.
China really pitched itself as a reliable trading partner in amidst all of this tariff chaos.
And it's a very delicate balancing act between the US a very important market, a very influential market and China, which you know is the second largest economy in the world, also the big brother of the region in many senses.
And it seems that in many ways, 2025 was defined a little bit by this kind of intermingling of diplomacy and geopolitics, and trade in the case of tariffs.
But also the other big theme that seems to also unite a lot of those same aspects is AI.
That's absolutely right.
I mean, even though a lot of the chip designers are American.
Your NVIDIA, your AMD, your Micron.
Actually, the manufacturing once again happens in this part of the world.
And not just that.
Now we're seeing immense growth in things like data centers.
And a lot of that is happening over here.
And then there's the other aspect of it.
So that's the infrastructure, something that everyone seems to be investing in.
And then it's how do we leverage A.I.?
? in order to make those products, in order to do the work that's required.
And that's something that this part of the world is really investing in, is really forward looking.
And this isn't just coming from the private sector.
This is governments saying we need to buy chips because our factories need to be running on those AI chips in the future.
Okay, well, Saranjana Tiwari, Asia Business Correspondent, thanks for joining us.
Thank you so much.
Let's go back to that point Suranjana made about moving manufacturing, moving production.
That's the kind of thing we've been hearing a lot about on our daily business podcast, World Business Express.
Businesses, big and small, doing their best to adapt to their supply chains, keep costs down and keep their businesses alive.
Leanna Byrne is the host of World Business Express and I asked her what she's been hearing from business owners throughout this year.
Yeah, there's lots of different strategies.
I think the overarching one, though, Frey, is you can't beat these tariffs.
So you just got to go around them.
So you've got businesses shifting their production to places like Vietnam, Mexico, Eastern Europe.
And then you know Canada.
There's a particular angle there, because Canada and Trump just are not getting along at the moment.
And I spoke to Scott Morrison, who runs Launchpad Copac, and that's a bottling company in Ontario.
And he says his suppliers... they're avoiding selling to the US completely.
As a beverage manufacturer we unfortunately are tied to a lot of products coming out of the US, but I have more and more customers asking me to find supply chain for juice directly from Brazil.
From Egypt is a big supplier of some different juices.
People are consciously trying to get around this.
And then actually I also did a piece on the rise of trade tech, or customs technology, during the year.
And I spoke to these startups that are using AI to automatically do the paperwork for customs and even help businesses to make decisions on where to route their goods through.
So there you go.
People are actually taking this as an opportunity as well sometimes.
Leanna Byrne, host of World Business Express on the World Service.
Thank you very much.
Frey, always a pleasure.
You're listening to the BBC World Service and our 2025 Business Year in Review.
Let's move away from tariffs now and onto some of the other biggest stories that happened this year.
And really, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, is something that shook the world.
On June 12th, Air India Flight 171 had only just left Ahmedabad in Western India, on its way to London, when it crashed into a building, killing all but one of the 242 people on board and 19 more on land.
An investigation into the crash was launched, of course, but five months later, we still don't have a clear picture of what happened, and the investigation has become, in the words of the BBC's Theo Leggett, mired in controversy.
A month after the accident, the Indian Air Accident Investigation Bureau published a basic report.
And that report was mainly, as it's meant to be, factual and pretty basic.
It says what happens and it sets out the known facts.
But it also kicked off something of a storm because there was a brief reference in in that report to a conversation between the pilots which was reported third hand.
And it also mentioned that the fuel's cutoff switches in the cockpit had been turned from run to cutoff.
Now, that is something which normally would only be done either during an in-flight emergency, if the pilots needed to cycle the engines over and restart them, or when the plane is on the ground.
So the idea that the fuel cutoff switches would have been cycled to cutoff shortly after takeoff is something of a red flag.
There was also a reported conversation between the pilots, with one of them asking why did you do this?
Or something very close to that.
But we didn't get the actual words and we didn't get the context of those words.
So that has set off really a flurry of speculation about whether this accident was perhaps caused by deliberate or accidental pilot activity.
But there is also backlash against that, with many people, in India in particular, rejecting that analysis and suggesting that in fact there was an issue with the plane itself.
And frankly, until the Indian authorities release a fuller transcript from the cockpit voice recorder, We won't know what's happening and this controversy will continue.
Yes, and aside from the kind of emotional impact of a disaster like this, as you say, there's focus on the plane itself and the plane's manufacturer, Boeing.
Now, we'll have to be a bit careful here, of course.
As you say, the investigation's ongoing and there's nothing concrete that we know for sure to conclude either way.
But Boeing has had a bad couple of years, with quite famous crashes related to its planes and known technical glitches.
How existential is that for Boeing's future and for the aviation industry going into 2026 and beyond?
Well, I don't think it's existential Frey, because Boeing is such a big company and it has an enormous amount of political support in the United States.
Boeing does have a powerful status.
It's a big employer.
It has powerful friends.
It will not go bust.
However, it is at the moment a diminished company which needs to prove to the market, prove to airlines, prove to customers in particular, that its planes can be relied on.
So any concerns about the Dreamliner, the 787, are a point of concern.
Now, you could say that all of this plays into the hands of the European aerospace giant Airbus.
But that isn't really true either.
Airbus has order books that are full to bursting, and it means that airlines who order from Airbus are having to wait years for their planes.
Really, Airbus needs Boeing to be there as a good rival to drive up standards, but also to help it cope with an ever-growing market.
The market needs at least two strong players.
And if one of them isn't Boeing, then it creates an opportunity for somebody else to come into the market.
And that's the real threat for both Airbus and Boeing.
If they're not dominating the market, someone else will come in and they could suffer from that in the long term.
Theo Leggett, the BBC's international business correspondent.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure.
Another big theme that comes to mind when thinking of the business news of 2025 is cybersecurity and the advent, with a vengeance, of global cyber attacks.
The British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover has confirmed it will extend its shutdown until the 1st of October following a cyber attack at the end of August.
There's been another crippling cyber attack on a public computer system, this time in Nevada.
An update now on that cyber attack that hit Marks & Spencer three weeks ago.
Officials in Belgium say at least nine flights were cancelled at Brussels airport.
Cyber attacks are a concept I think we're all familiar with from movies and science fiction, something that we've been warned about more and more in recent years, but it really was this year 2025, when they seemed to really break out onto the main stage.
Joe Tidy is the BBC's cyber security correspondent, and I asked him just how bad 2025 really was.
There have been such really impactful and high profile cyber attacks this year.
There was this wave of retail attacks that started in the UK and had a really major impact.
And in some cases it led to such logistics problems that these department stores and supermarkets they had problems filling up the shelves.
They had empty shelves in some of the stores.
And that had a really big impact, of course, on the public.
It caused chaos and, in some regards, some sort of panic, really that people started realising hang on a minute cyber attacks can have a real impact on my life.
Then, of course, we've had this attack on JLR, which is Jaguar Land Rover, owned by an Indian company called Tata, but based mostly in the UK.
And it's got to the point where the UK government has had to supply some loans to bail out some of the suppliers in some of JLR's supply chain.
And for the first time ever first time that we've ever seen this.
When the UK released its GDP figures, it was mentioned that a cyber attack had had a material impact on the UK's economy.
Yeah.
I mean talking about that impact, I mean looking globally.
Has anyone tried to kind of look at how much that has hit the economy this year, in 2025 and also in the future, how much we could see this damaging economies all around the world?
Well, I sometimes see these kind of estimates bandied around of you know X number of trillions of dollars worth of damage are caused every year by cyber.
But I'm always a bit sceptical, to be honest, because every single attack is different and we never really know the full, long term impacts.
And obviously these kind of research projects are done by cyber security companies who very much are in the business of telling the world that they need their cyber products to stay safe.
So I'm a bit sceptical of that kind of thing.
But one thing that's absolutely certain is that if you are a business, cyber is now at the top of, or near the top of, your risk register of things that could affect your business.
Before I let you go.
Joe, I understand this year as well.
You were I don't want to say tempted.
You were invited to take part in maybe some cyber scams, hacking yourself.
What was going on there?
Yeah, it was a really strange one.
So it was in the summer when I got a random message on Signal from a cyber crime group.
They were saying if you give us the login details of your BBC accounts, then we'll get into the BBC.
We'll hack the BBC.
Hold it to ransom for you know, potentially tens of millions of dollars, and you will get a cut.
So I said to my bosses when I first started looking into this and I realised that it was real.
I said let me follow this along and let's see where it leads.
Obviously completely with BBC permission, and we had BBC information security teams on hand in case anything got, you know, spicy.
LAUGHTER
So obviously I never had any intention of selling out the BBC.
But towards the end of the interaction with them they sort of lost patience and they carried out this cyber attack.
Basically, they tried to force my hand into handing over my credentials, which obviously I blocked and stopped and wrote the story.
Joe, I fear to say you're a journalist of much stronger will than I am, because I'm glad it wasn't me in that position.
Joe Tidey, the BBC's cybersecurity correspondent.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Now, we're almost done with our 2025 year in review program.
But before we go we've got just enough time to talk about the biggest toy trend and really consumer trend overall this year.
You might have already guessed what I'm talking about, but I managed to get through this whole year without really figuring out what these things we're going to talk about were.
I know that they're very trendy.
I know that they come from China and that prices for them have exploded.
That's all I really knew.
So I called my friend and colleague BC Adebayo, a reporter with the BBC's business unit based in Salford, Northern England.
BC, I hate to ask this, what is a labubu?
What are these things?
A labudu toy is called a collectible furry monster figure with pointy ears.
It's got white eyes and a mischievous green with exactly nine teeth.
So some call it creepy, you know, because it's got this aesthetic created by an artist called Kasing Long and popularized by PopMart's blind box system.
And what we've seen this year really is one of those that no one expected.
Labubu was this collectible that a small group adored.
And then suddenly TikTok gets a hold of it.
Celebrities are unboxing them and it just ignites.
And tell me about this.
You mentioned it's a blind box thing.
That means when people go to the store that they...
They buy a box and they don't know what's in it, right?
Is that something that kind of contributed to the hype of it, like these being collectibles?
Yes, I think predominantly social media played a huge role in this.
I mean, I'm here in Manchester and I can tell you at the city centre what Pop Mart store is.
There's always a queue of people trying to get in to get a Labooboo toy, and a lot of that really happens is down to how they are sold.
You know, the blind box model, as you talked about, fuels that sense of mystery and chase.
And when you only release a handful of rare ones, the resale value shoots up.
Now probably the hype for these things, in particular these Lububus, is going to die down at some point.
But do you think this is, is this kind of the model?
Can we just expect another one of these in 2026?
Well, to be honest, we'll wait and see, because I can tell you that the frenzy that we saw at the start of the year has sort of calmed a little.
But the rare ones are still commanding serious prices.
And I think buyers are a bit more measured now.
It hasn't disappeared as a trend.
You've got people still following the trend and will still give anything.
So we'll just wait to see which direction it swings.
So basically, what you're saying is I shouldn't cash out my pension just yet and invest all of them in the book.
Not just yet, Frey, not just yet.
Well, B.C.
Adebayo, BBC's business reporter, thank you very much for joining us and happy holidays.
Happy holidays.
And that's it for this special 2025 year in review edition of World Business Report.
From myself, Frey Lindsay and the rest of the BBC's money and work team.
I wish you all a happy end of the year and a bit of rest before it all starts up again in 2026.
But bye for now.
