- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Stephan Tanda, CEO of AptarGroup, about working with China.
- The big story: Musk’s decision on electric doors preceded 15 deaths.
- The markets: Low drama.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. It’s easy to assume that China must have been crippled by the U.S. trade battle that reached a temporary truce when President Trump and President Xi met in October. But China’s trade surplus is at a record high of $1.08 trillion in the first 11 months of this year. Some of that is due to China doubling down on other markets: overall exports were up 6% in November over the previous year, even though exports to the U.S. were down 29%.
But part of it reflects the fact that U.S. companies didn’t go away. I recently spoke with Stephan Tanda, CEO of AptarGroup, a $3.7 billion-a-year manufacturer of specialized packaging and delivery systems for pharma, beauty, and consumer companies, based in Crystal Lake, Illinois. He points out that China remains a key manufacturing hub with longstanding infrastructure and relationships that are central to the company’s regional supply chain. What’s more, he says the speed to market is an advantage that’s hard to replicate in their other innovation centers around the world.
“The amount of grit and sheer willpower is on a different scale,” said Tanda, noting that he now leverages Chinese talent to help his European plants develop product prototypes in six weeks vs. up to 18 months. “We need the China ecosystem to create the pilot mold. We may still want something made in France for luxury beauty products but a lot of innovation used to be China [producing] for China and now it’s China for the region, China for the world.”
Tanda does have the advantage that his products are not considered sensitive from a national defense perspective—”essential items but, yes, there’s not going to be a war waged over them”—and he echoes his U.S. peers in focusing much of his production on local needs, with more than half of his customer base for Chinese-made products coming from China. “It used to be you’d want the Western luxury brand but now you buy the Chinese brand because it’s just as good or better … It helps that we’ve been an early leader in automating our core processes and it’s much easier with AI.”
Added Tanda: “China is more capitalistic than any other country that I know in terms of real drive, hustling, making things work, iterating. For companies doing business, that’s what you compete with. And that means you become a much more competitive actor yourself to be successful in that environment. It helps us to stay sharp and get more competitive because if we can do it there, we can also learn it here.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top news
Musk's decision on electric doors preceded 15 deaths
Fifteen people have died in traffic accidents in which passengers or rescuers were unable to open the doors of burning Teslas because the electric door handles malfunctioned, keeping the doors closed, Bloomberg reports. The decision to make the handles all-electric was originally pushed by Elon Musk, the news service reported.
White House halts all U.S. wind-power projects
The Trump administration said it would stop leases for offshore wind projects due to "national security risks." The Interior Department claimed wind turbines interfere with radar. “The clutter caused by offshore wind projects obscures legitimate moving targets and generates false targets in the vicinity of the wind projects,” the department said.
Larry Ellison vows $40 billion in son’s bid for Warner Bros.
Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison intervened to salvage his son David Ellison’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. David’s company, Paramount Skydance, announced that the elder Ellison had provided a guarantee of $40.4 billion to finance the deal. David Ellison has proposed an all-cash offer of $108 billion. WBD’s board previously rejected that offer in favor of one from Netflix for roughly $83 billion.
Trump names class of warships after himself
The U.S. Navy’s new “Trump-class” ships are part of a push to modernize the fleet. The president previously named the F-47 stealth weapon system in a nod to himself as the 47th president. And he added his name to the Trump-Kennedy Center and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
AI spurs near-record amount of debt
U.S. companies have issued $1.7 trillion in new, investment-grade corporate debt this year, much of it to fuel funding for AI data center buildout. The record for debt issuance was set at $1.8 trillion in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, when companies borrowed heavily to tide themselves through the lockdowns. AI-related debt funding is expected to grow further in 2026, the FT reports.
iRobot cofounder points to China competition as one reason for recent bankruptcy
iRobot cofounder and former CEO Colin Angle revealed that intense competition from China was the reason the company filed for bankruptcy last week. He said that once the company’s vacuuming robot took off in the country, “China decided that this was a market of interest, and they were going to ensure that Chinese companies were advantaged to succeed there.”
Google’s “ultimate” search engine could soon arrive
It was 25 years ago that Google cofounder Larry Page predicted that “artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google.” With the company’s Gemini model edging out competitors, the prediction could be close to coming true.
Gold price hits new record high
The price of gold hit $4,459.60 an ounce yesterday, setting a new record. Demand for the safe-haven investment was fuelled by conflict over oil between the U.S. and Venezuela and Ukraine and Russia, the Fed’s lowering of interest rates and a collapse in the price of Bitcoin which, briefly, had appeared to be a candidate for “digital gold” status.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up marginally this morning. The last session closed up 0.64%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.18% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was flat in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.2%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.28%. India’s NIFTY 50 was flat. Bitcoin sunk to $87K.
Around the watercooler
Mitt Romney says the U.S. is on a cliff—and taxing the rich is now necessary ‘given the magnitude of our national debt’ by Dave Smith
Billionaire philanthropy’s growing divide: Mark Zuckerberg stops funding immigration reform as MacKenzie Scott doubles down on DEI by Ashley Lutz
Notorious crypto conman Sam Bankman-Fried has a prison passion project: giving legal advice to other inmates by Carlos Garcia
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
