Behind Your Business

EASTERN EUROPEAN airlines are sick. Fuel is dear, their markets are small and budget airlines are poaching their passengers. Most eastern European airlines lose money. Malev, Hungary’s flag carrier, went bankrupt in February. To avoid a similar fate, four Balkan airlines are considering a novel strategy: flying together.The idea is not officially on the agenda when the bosses of Croatia Airlines, Montenegro Airlines, Serbia’s Jat and Slovenia’s Adria meet in Montenegro on May 19th. But it will be discussed behind closed doors. All are in debt and losing money, but between them they have many profitable routes. Serving the scattered Balkan diasporas ought to be lucrative.Zoran Djurisic, the boss of Montenegro, says that before Yugoslavia collapsed, it represented a market of 10m passengers a year, of which 7m flew with JAT or Adria. Now, 11m people fly to or from the seven ex-Yugoslav states each year, but only 4m use the four carriers meeting in Montenegro. Bosnia’s B&H airlines has only one functioning plane. Kosovo, with a large diaspora, has no domestic airline. And Macedonia’s MAT went bust in 2010.Mr Djurisic, who called the summit, says that in the short run the four airlines must co-operate to cut costs. He hopes that, in five to eight years, they might create “a single airline for this whole area, including Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo”. Vladimir Ognjenovic, the...

SOUTH KOREANS take romance seriously. Lovers are expected to swap sweet nothings many times a day and woe betide the clod who forgets a “100-day anniversary”. Some pairs dress in “couple style”, in the same garish red sweater and blue jeans combo, for instance. Small wonder that a Korean firm has created a social network for couples.VCNC’s app is called “Between”. It creates a private space for two people, in which they can share photographs and special memories, chat in real time and exchange any number of cute “emoticons”: smiley faces, winks, hearts and so on. Though revolting to singles, Between is a hit. Since its launch in November, more than 560,000 Koreans have fallen for it. This comes despite VCNC spending virtually nothing on marketing. Park Jae-uk, the firm’s boss, claims another 200,000 users abroad, divided between China, Japan and North America.Between is part of a trend towards intimacy in social networking. Some Facebook users are fed up with the torrent of “friend” requests from people they barely know. Others resent being tagged in embarrassing...

ONLINE as well as offline, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Vente-Privée, a firm founded on the strange notion that French women might like fashionable clothes at deep discounts, has been paid this compliment more than most. Companies cut from similar cloth have appeared in one country after another. In 2008 two German men, Damian Doberstein and Oskar Hartmann, spotted that Russian women were missing out. “No one was telling Russian women, ‘You could look good for 70% less’,” Mr Hartmann says.They expect that their company, KupiVIP, will have sales of around $200m this year. Mr Hartmann says it breaks even. Given the fast growth of Russia’s internet population and of a middle class eager for nice clothes but mostly a long way from nice shops, the two men think they could turn over $1 billion within five years.The pair want to fill more than just the smarter end of the female wardrobe. Besides their original business, which is still the biggest part of the group, they have an online full-price shop, ShopTime, aimed at both sexes and all shapes and sizes. They also run online shops on behalf of well-...

IT MAY well turn out that pilot error, or something other than a fault in the aircraft, made a Russian-built Sukhoi Superjet crash into a mountain in Indonesia on May 9th, killing all on board. But the disaster, on top of recent reports of unreliability among the first Superjets to go into service, is bound to hinder Russia’s ambition to become a big exporter of modern commercial aircraft. And the Russians are not the only ones trying, and struggling, to do so.The Chinese, like the Russians, have spent years working on planes that, they hope, will muscle in on the two near-duopolies in the world airliner market. Russia’s Superjet, and its Chinese equivalent, the ARJ21, are smaller “regional” jets, the market for which is dominated by Embraer of Brazil and Bombardier of Canada. The much juicier market for full-sized airliners is currently divided between America’s Boeing and the Franco-German Airbus. Russia’s MC-21 and China’s C919, also under development, are potential competitors to Boeing’s 737 and Airbus’s A320.The Superjet, which has been certified by the...

ON THE roof, where staff can smoke as well as work, is a big chess set. The names of meeting rooms are in the Cyrillic alphabet. Two sides of the courtyard are a building site of five hollow storeys. You could say that the headquarters of Yandex, Russia’s biggest online-search company, symbolises the country’s whole internet economy: a bit smaller than expected, but growing fast, and unmistakably Russian. Last year the number of Russians online went up by 14%, to 53m. That made Russia’s online population Europe’s biggest, just ahead of Germany’s, with lots of room left to grow (see chart). GP Bullhound, an investment bank, reckons that only 18% of those people shop online and that online advertising, though rising fast, takes up only 9% of Russian ad budgets. Yandex’s revenues, most of which come from ads, reflect this pretty faithfully. In the first...