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In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper?
OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Better?
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.
Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com strategic.
That's oracle.com strategic.
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for 15 a month is back.
So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills.
But it turns out That's very illegal.
So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
This is Andrew Peach with World Business Report.
Good to have you with us today as the European Commission president talks about threats from China and the US.
The Estonian finance minister tells us he's no fan of her deal with Donald Trump.
I am not happy about the deal.
The problem of course is how big was the compromise.
Germans, as I understand, for example, are much more unhappy than Estonia.
We'll hear why people in Mexico are protesting about the rich moving in.
The first apartment I rented here cost around 4,000 pesos a month in 2007.
Today, that same apartment costs more than 10 times as much.
And why British horse racing is on strike.
I think that we're going to see a hell of a lot of owners leave the sport, and for a small trainer like me, it could be catastrophic.
First, the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has been setting out her vision for its future amid growing competition from China and tariffs from the US.
Her State of the Union address came on the day that Polish airspace was violated by Russian drones and President Trump called on the EU to impose its own tariffs on China and India.
She called on European nations to fight for their place in this world.
This must be Europe's independence moment.
To be able to take care of our own defence and security.
To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our own economies.
To decide what kind of society and democracy we want to live in, to be open to the world and choose partnerships with allies old and new.
Ultimately, it is about having the freedom and the power to determine our own destiny.
Jürgen Ligi is the Estonian finance minister and with us on World Business Report.
Thank you for being with us, Jürgen.
Ursula von der Leyen was pretty fired up there about Europe trying to steer its own path amidst all the pressures from the East and the West.
Yes, of course.
I've always been liking her attitude and understanding about the threats towards Europe and the free world in general.
This time it's a little bit contradictory, of course, because she can't talk so much about free world, but just about Europe.
So there are problems in her announcement also, but the...
The decision, of course, is by now that Europe must get more autonomy in defense, in economy and in mentality in general.
And it's a new way of thinking, as you're saying, for Europe to be trying to steer its own course in the world without perhaps always being allied to the US and the rest of NATO.
Yes, this is the dark side of it, but we have used to it already.
It has taken some time to understand it.
Let's talk a bit about tariffs.
This is what Ursula von der Leyen had to say about the deal she struck with the United States on tariffs.
I do not believe in terrorists.
Terrorists are taxes.
But the deal provides crucial stability in our relations with the United States at a time of grave global insecurity.
Think of the repercussions of a full-fledged trade war with the United States.
Picture the chaos.
And then put that image next to the one from China just last week.
China flanked by the leaders from Russia and North Korea.
Putin gloating about how Russia-China relations are at an unprecedented height.
Let me ask you this, Jürgen Liege.
There's a lot of talk about the fact that European countries are not at all impressed with the deal that Ursula von der Leyen did with Donald Trump.
How do you feel about it?
Well, I am not happy about the deal, but I am happy about the words she's talking.
I could sign every word in it.
The problem, of course, is how big was the compromise.
Germans, as I understand, for example, are much more unhappy than Estonia.
And of course, friends do not do such things to each other, I think.
And we always take America as a friend anyway.
I am also not a supporter of protectionism, and so America harms itself as well.
Not only only friends and allies.
Is your objection the position that Europe finds itself in?
In other words, is it just an unhappiness you have with Donald Trump?
Or do you think Ursula von der Leyen could have done a better deal with him?
I am not sure what were the choices.
It doesn't harm Estonia so much, but the fact itself that we have such dealing instead of world order and rule-based wars is the problem.
And friends do not... fight with each other, not with weapons, not with tariffs.
And of course, it's a very big change.
We of course have to take into account, and that's the reason why von der Leyen herself is talking about more autonomy for Europe in economy, among other things.
And what do you make of Donald Trump's suggestion that the European Union should be imposing its own high tariffs on China and India?
Well, it's not him to tell us.
And the answer is the same.
I am not a supporter of tariff war.
At the same time, every occasion should be analysed. the Estonian Finance Minister Jürgen Ligi.
Now, Ursula von der Leyen went on to talk about a push to buy European.
Farmers have a right to a fair price for their food and a fair profit for their families.
And I can announce today that we will boost our promotion budget to launch a new Buy European Food campaign, because we can proudly say that our European food is the best in the world.
Live to Rebecca Christie, Senior Fellow at Bruegel, host of the Sound of Economics podcast.
Rebecca, what do you make of that as an idea, this encouragement to buy European?
You know, it's very Donald Trump, isn't it?
He's very much promoting buying American.
The EU is trying to step up to meet the moment, now that it is being pushed to become more independent from the US.
That includes security and defense and positioning toward Ukraine, and also other things like what is it making itself?
What is it consuming itself and where is its resilience?
One more excerpt from Ursula von der Leyen's address I wanted to bring you, and this is relating to the car market and a message to China.
I believe Europe should have its own e-car, because we cannot let China and others conquer this market.
No matter what, we all know the future will be electric, and Europe will be a part of it.
The future of cars and the cars of the future must be made here in Europe.
Mixed reaction to that part of the speech, for sure.
Rebecca, European carmakers are miles behind China when it comes to the car market, and EVs in particular.
It's a big shift to go from pushing the EU to compete with the fanciest, most luxurious cars and towards the world's wealthiest car buyers to saying we need small practical, household level electric cars.
China makes these.
Now we're going to start making these in Europe.
It remains to be seen what level of support will be available for this battery initiative that she has.
She threw out a number, but it's unclear whether this will make up for all of the money that China is investing in the EU, and also what sort of direction.
The knowledge learning is going to go.
Historically, it's always been European companies wanting to produce in China and China saying you have to do a joint venture.
You have to share some of your technology with us.
Now, the EU is saying we want to build these small electric cars in Europe.
And to the extent that Chinese companies want in on it, they need to work with us.
There's a lot of talk about this at the Munich Auto Show, which has been going on this week.
And I think we can sum that up by saying there's no way European car manufacturers will match the productivity of Chinese firms.
The government support won't be matched either.
So how are they going to do this?
There are going to be people who want a European car.
They don't trust the idea of even thinking about any sort of kill switch or software upgrade dependence from China.
They're going to be looking at something where they know where it comes from.
This is an area where, by focusing on the small cars that people actually want to drive, Europe could make a difference, even if Chinese manufacturers probably always going to corner the bottom of the market.
Rebecca, thank you.
Rebecca Christie with us.
Ross Mould is Investment Director at AJ Bell with me here in the World Business Report studio.
Just give us your take on what you've been hearing from Ursula von der Leyen and our other guests.
I think it's all very aspirational.
It all makes perfect sense.
But, as some of your questions make clear, there's an awful lot of challenges and obstacles in the way for those aspirations to be met.
I think.
And whether it's a matter of finding the funding which Europe is now perhaps trying to do with Russian money for the war, for example, or tariffs.
We will find out.
Good goals, but...
Not easy to achieve for a block that's got an awful lot of debt and quite a few growth problems of its own.
And increased defence spending to contend with as well.
One of the subjects that was running theme was US tariffs.
Let's talk about the idea of them being declared illegal in the US and whether that's really going anywhere.
That's a Supreme Court decision that will now be made in November, after more junior courts have questioned whether President Trump had the authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose taxes and to declare an economic crisis.
He's arguing there's a crisis because America is running a trade deficit.
But he's done that since 1975 and it isn't clear from that act whether he indeed can impose tariffs or levies.
So we will find out in November what the judges think.
Lisa Cook's position at the Fed has been looking shaky for a few days.
It has.
The President has been trying to sack her on the grounds that she's incorrectly filled in mortgage application forms and committed fraud.
She's litigating saying that's not true and that the President does not have just cause to fire her.
A court in America has now said she cannot be fined immediately until that lawsuit is solved.
So she will at least get to vote on the Federal Reserve Policy Committee next week on American interest rates.
We'll see whether the Fed bends to the President's will and gives him the interest rate cuts that he's calling for.
Almost exactly this time yesterday, we were hearing about the Israeli strikes on Hamas within Qatar.
What's the market fallout of that been?
I'm thinking about oil prices particularly.
Oil and gas have done nothing.
Oil unchanged at $67 a barrel.
Natural gas at $3 per million British thermal units.
I think there's still this story out there.
Demand is relatively soft as the Western economies remain soft.
And there's plenty of supply out there, particularly as OPEC continues to increase production.
Ross, stay with me.
We'll have a bit more a little later in the programme.
First to Denmark, and the producer of one of the popular weight loss drugs, Wegevi and Zempik, has announced plans to cut around 9000 jobs.
The most of them will be in Denmark.
Increased competition from rival manufacturers and copycat drugs have taken their toll on Novo Nordisk, once Europe's most valuable listed company.
Its shares have lost nearly 46% this year.
Here's CEO Mike Duster, who says the moves will save them billions.
We will simplify structures, cut duplications and sharpen our focus.
Unfortunately, this also means reducing our global workforce by around 9000 positions, including about 5000 roles here in Denmark.
The changes will deliver savings of about 8 billion DKK, or equivalent to 13 billion US dollars per year.
Frederick Bizard is professor of economics at the ECSP Business School in Paris.
I asked Frederick why Novo Nordisk is leading to shed so many jobs.
It's not so hard, actually, because first of all, it's a very competitive market.
Now, two or three years ago, Novo Nordisk was not alone, but was really the main player.
You know, it has a big competitive advantage.
It's not the case anymore because of Eli Lilly. and other companies.
And even Eli Lilly is probably more competitive with his Mongero products.
So that's one point that is obviously, it's a big obstacle for Novo Nordisk to grow further.
In addition to that, we can say that in Europe, we have a big tension in health public budgets.
So at the beginning the growth came from the US and actually Novo Nordisk was expected to have a big growth in Europe as well.
And it's not really the case because of this tension in the budget, for example in France.
They have the authorization to go on market, but they are not reimbursed.
So we see that there is a huge diminution of the level of growth.
At the same time, they had to grow in terms of number of people working in the company, the workforce.
And so there is a seesaw effect, you know, with a big increase in the fixed cost and actually a diminution of the growth.
So the new manager took I think, the reasonable decision is to try to reduce this fixed cost in order to make sure that the company will be able to be profitable again.
Is there anything that they could have done differently at Nova Nordisk to prepare for that, to be more efficient, to be ready for the challenge?
That's a big challenge for any pharmaceutical company that you never know exactly what's going to happen among your competitors.
So even if you are alone in one market for several months, you have to wait for the result of the clinical trial.
And it was quite a surprise that the last clinical trials for Eli Laney showed that their product was superior to the one of Novo Nordisk.
And you cannot anticipate that.
You had to get the result of that.
The point I'm going to make could have been anticipated by Novo Nordisk.
It's the arrival of Generic.
You know that a drug is protected during 20 years from the beginning of the research.
And so at the end of the patent protection for WigoV, so a Novo Nordisk product.
In several countries, among them Canada, that means that their market share is going to decrease from 80 to 20 or 10 in a few months.
So that's the beginning of... this phenomenon in some countries and important countries.
And that's why they have to take this kind of decision if they want to stay in the market for long.
That's Frederic Bizarre, Professor of Economics at the ESCP Business School in Paris.
Ross Moll from AJ Bell is still here.
Novo Nordisk on the markets.
What's it doing?
Shares up.
Also, don't forget the share's down 44 already this year in Copenhagen.
So lots of bad news priced in.
Investors looking for a bit better news.
The company used to be the biggest company on the European stock markets.
Now it's down to tenths.
And we talked a bit about one of its competitors, Eli Lilly.
How are they doing?
Shares haven't moved that much in relation to Novo's particular press release or announcement today.
But Lilly's shares again a company looking to get a competitive advantage in what remains a growth market.
Okay.
Now time for some news about us.
This is the final week of World Business Report at this time.
Next week at this time you'll hear Business Daily, followed by our new podcast, World Business Express.
The stories that matter, the essential details, the people affected by the fast-changing global economy.
And you'll still be able to hear our later edition of World Business Report at 22.30 GMT.
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper?
OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Better?
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.
Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com strategic.
That's oracle.com strategic.
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for 15 a month is back.
So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills.
But it turns out...
That's very illegal.
So there goes my big idea for the commercial.
Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
This is World Business Report from the BBC with Andrew Peach.
Protesters in Mexico City have been holding demonstrations over gentrification, something happening all over the world where poor urban areas are changed when wealthier people move in.
Well, in La Condesa, activists estimate as many as one in five homes is either now a short-term rental or a holiday let, so local people are being forced out of their own area.
Will Grant reports from Mexico City.
The timing of the anti-gentrification protest in Mexico City was no coincidence.
The 4th of July, US Independence Day.
It began as a peaceful march over aggressive rent hikes, unregulated holiday lettings and the endless influx of Americans and Europeans into the capital's trendy neighbourhoods of La Condesa and Roma, but it soon descended into violence.
Radical demonstrators attacked coffee shops and boutique stores aimed at tourists, while chanting Gringos out.
Two days later, President Claudia Sheinbaum, who'd previously served as the mayor of Mexico City, condemned the protest as xenophobic.
No matter how legitimate the cause, as with gentrification, the demand can never be to just say get out to people of other nationalities, she said.
Her administration would support the mayor, Clara Brugada, in tackling the issue, she added.
Mayor Brugada then set out a 14-point plan to regulate rent prices, protect long-term residents and build new social housing at affordable prices.
For many, though, the mayor's promises came too late.
Activist Sergio Gonzalez says in the past decade his group has recorded more than 4000 cases of forced displacement of long-term residents from his neighbourhood of La Juarez alone.
He was one of them.
The first apartment I rented here cost around 4,000 pesos a month in 2007.
Today that same apartment costs more than 10 times as much.
In La Juarez, I met Erika Aguilar, whose family had lived in the same building for 45 years.
In March 2017, officials came to every apartment in the building and told us we had until the end of the month to vacate the premises.
Erica now lives almost two hours away by public transport.
Her old home is now a building site.
As the new owners convert it into luxury apartments.
Combined with the high cost of living in the US, the draw of the leafy streets of Condesa is obvious.
It's peaceful.
We've really enjoyed it.
Alexis and Richard also Brooks, are on a short trip to Mexico City from Portland Oregon with, they say, half a mind to maybe settle here one day.
Obviously we don't want to contribute to gentrification.
I think, as long as you treat those around you with respect and you try to be a part of the community, I think it goes a lot further.
Learn the language.
But for displaced resident Erika Aguilar, the radical demonstrators don't represent her cause.
Still, she has advice to anyone planning to relocate to Mexico City.
Learn Spanish and pay your taxes.
Will Grant reporting.
Now we're off to the races.
This is one sound you can't hear today because British horse racing is on strike for the first time.
It's protesting about a proposed tax rise on bets placed on horse races.
The British Horse Racing Authority says increasing the rate paid by bookmakers on racing from 15 to 21 would have a destructive impact and lead to an estimated loss in revenue of £330 million, putting 2500 jobs at risk.
The British government says it's consulting on bringing the treatment of online betting in line with other forms of online gambling to cut down on bureaucracy.
Gemma Tutte is a racehorse trainer in North Yorkshire.
She's been telling me what the impact of all this could be on her.
It's already a pretty bleak landscape as it is.
The prize money is just nowhere near what it needs to be to sustain our industry.
The gambling restrictions have already caused a £3 billion black hole.
The owners left the sport due to those gambling restrictions already.
And you know, with this new tax forecast, the research has predicted that's going to take another 66 million pounds out of the racing pot, which is a third of the already bleak prize money that we're racing for.
Right, and the point there is that some people just decide they can't afford to do it anymore and they want to spend their money on something else other than gambling on the horses.
There's just not enough incentive for owners to stay in the sport.
I mean it's it's already become a ridiculously expensive hobby with, you know, a lot of races being run for three thousand pounds prize money.
I mean that's barely going to cover one month's training fees, never mind 12 months.
The way the handicap system works, horses are only supposed to win one race a year.
So, looking at that model, then if you're only covering one month out of the 12, there's just not enough in it for owners to want to stay in the sport.
It strikes me as one of those things that largely people are doing for the love of it rather than for money.
I guess that's true in your line of work.
It's true for jockers.
It's true for owners.
It's true for a lot of people involved.
That's not to say that you don't need money to live on.
Exactly.
And you know that was the only justification for anyone to keep going as it was, given the state of affairs we were already in.
But there's only so much that the industry can take.
And at some point, something's got to give.
And unfortunately...
You know, if this actually comes into fruition, I think there's going to be race courses closing.
They're already struggling, the small independents.
There's going to be redundancies.
And there's going to be a lot of owners that decide it's just simply not sustainable and they can't afford to keep having horses in training.
And for a small trainer like me that relies on owners doing it as a hobby, not as a business without multimillionaires.
A lot of these people are ordinary working class owners that have managed to save a little pot for their enjoyment, and I think that we're going to see a hell of a lot of owners leave the sport, and for a small trainer like me, it could be catastrophic.
That's Gemma Tutte, who's a racehorse trainer in northern England.
Russ Mould is still here, investment director at AJ Bell.
Let's talk about Larry Ellison, not a name all of our World Business Report listeners will have heard of.
Who is he?
He owns 41 of Oracle, one of the world's leading technology companies, really known as a business software publisher, but now getting involved in computing infrastructure and providing the data centres and servers that are needed for large language models and generative artificial intelligence, and the company's doing an awful lot of business with companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, who owns ChatGPT.
That all sounds profitable.
And Larry Ellison could be about to dethrone Elon Musk as the world's richest man, depending on how you measure it.
Oracle yesterday announced first quarter results.
The numbers were fine, but what got investors excited was the bulging order backlog for computing power.
It more than trebled to seven years of the company's annual revenues.
And the shares are up 40% today as a result.
So Mr. Ellison's stake has also gone up by 40% in value.
So Forbes, with their real-time billionaires list, now reckon he's worth almost 400 billion dollars.
Well, perhaps that's why he's been a big fan in the past of yachting and flying F-16 fighter jets for hobbies because he can afford to do so.
Now, we don't mention Apple anywhere near as often as we used to on this programme.
They've debuted another generation of iPhone. iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Air, an ultra-thin version.
They also debuted a new iWatch and AirPods.
But the iPhone is now a 19-year-old product.
And so investors are looking for something perhaps a little bit more selfish people that they are.
And also they're still worried that Apple is lagging in artificial intelligence because its update of series now due in 2026.
So the shares are actually down 2.5% today on the New York Exchange, despite that big announcement.
And the shares, 371st best performer in the S&P 500 this year.
It's probably why you've not mentioned it very much.
That's so interesting.
Are they down because the market's disappointed with the announcements or because they just think the announcements are nothing?
Don't forget, this is a company that's worth trillions of dollars, so expectations are still extremely high, but it is relying on a 19-year-old piece of hardware and it's not growing as quickly as it used to.
Russ, thank you very much.
Russ Mould from AJ Bell.
There's more about some of the stories we've been talking about on World Business Report on our website, bbccom.
Slash news is the web address if you'd like to read more about what's happening today.
But from me, Andrew Peach, and the team, thank you for being with us here on the BBC World Service.
