Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Being big, technologically advanced and able to serve giant clients is a pretty formidable moat. That’s what has powered shares in giant European software maker SAP over the past year. But the little guy sometimes gets a chance to catch up. Witness Sage, a rare inhabitant of the British tech landscape, whose stock rose by a fifth on strong annual results on Wednesday to reach almost £13bn of market capitalisation. To some extent, this is a relief rally. Sage’s business model — which…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Shares in UK software group Sage rose almost a fifth as it reported a jump in annual operating profits, launched a £400mn share buyback and increased its dividend.The FTSE 100 company, which provides accounting and financial software for small and medium-sized enterprises, posted 9 per cent organic revenue growth and a 43 per cent increase in operating profit to £452mn for the year to September.Steve Hare, chief executive, said it had achieved “strong, broad-based revenue growth”, adding that SMEs “remain resilient, despite…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.ProRata.ai, a US artificial intelligence start-up aiming to bring greater fairness in how media groups are paid for content, has agreed licensing deals with publishers including Daily Mail-owner DMG Media, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Sky News.As part of the deal, which is set to be announced on Wednesday, DMG Media will acquire a stake in ProRata in a funding round that people familiar with the situation said would value the group, which was founded in January, at about $130mn. Nicholas Thompson,…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Klarna should be the kind of story Europe dreams of. A continent without a contender to rival Google, Facebook or Apple has had a rare tech triumph with the Swedish buy now, pay later loan pioneer. The back story of co-founder and chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski also speaks to the strengths of, if not Europe, then Sweden. Born in the country to immigrant parents who struggled after they arrived from Poland, Siemiatkowski now runs a company eyeing a big public market debut.The…

Palantir has added more than $23bn to its market capitalisation since Donald Trump was elected US president this month, as investors bet the secretive government contractor will be among the biggest winners of enhanced federal spending on national security, immigration and space exploration.The latest stock rise adds to a blistering rally for Palantir in the past year, with its shares up having almost tripled to $61 per share, giving the company a value of almost $140bn. That surge marked a bigger jump than chipmaker Nvidia in the past 12 months, and pushed Palantir to a larger market cap than Lockheed…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The head of the £800mn supercomputer project cancelled by the Labour government has warned the UK risks stifling “science and innovation” by not investing in the advanced technology. Mark Parsons, supercomputing professor at Edinburgh university whose exascale venture had its funding scrapped over the summer, said it would be a “disaster” if the UK did not restart efforts to build next-generation capabilities.“We can’t be a country the scale of Britain without a supercomputer,” he told the Financial Times. “It would block the…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The writer is professor of computer science at the Université de Montreal and founder of Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute Mila Lack of internal deliberation abilities — thinking, in other words — has long been considered one of the main weaknesses of artificial intelligence. The scale of a recent advance in this by ChatGPT creator OpenAI is a point of debate within the scientific community. But it leads many of my expert colleagues and I to believe that there is a chance that we are…

Jack Naidoo began his career in apartheid South Africa. “I experienced some really horrible cases of racism,” he says of his early working years. Now, he is a leader of people and communities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at technology conglomerate Cisco.Naidoo shared these early experiences with a senior colleague through Cisco’s so-called proximity initiative. This encourages all the company’s leaders to reach out to a colleague whose identity and background differ from their own. The one-to-one conversations are an opportunity to understand the impact of different lived experiences — whether of race, sexuality, disability or otherwise —…

This article is an on-site version of our FirstFT newsletter. Subscribers can sign up to our Asia, Europe/Africa or Americas edition to receive the newsletter every weekday. Explore all of our newsletters hereIn today’s newsletter: Chinese tech groups expand into Silicon Valley Singapore oil trader sentenced to lengthy jail termVietnam’s vulnerability to potential Trump tariffsGood morning. China’s biggest tech groups are building artificial intelligence teams in Silicon Valley, hoping to poach staff from US rivals who could help them make up ground in the race to profit from generative AI.Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan have been expanding their offices in California in…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.British Airways’ passengers were hit by widespread disruption on Monday after the airline suffered a fresh IT failure. The carrier said its flights were suffering from delays and it was “working to resolve a technical issue with some of our systems”.Passengers around the world reported major hold-ups as the problems swept through BA’s operations, including leaving some planes unable to take off because of issues communicating with the carrier’s base at London Heathrow.Other customers complained of problems accessing the BA app, while…