A customer enters A la Premsa d’Aquell Dia, a fascinating, captivating, indispensable shop at Joaquim Costa street 44, a Barcelona classic. He asks Àgata if she has any newspaper from June 28, 1957. She consults the volumes, handmade, indecipherable to anyone not from the house, and immediately finds that, from the requested day, they have the Diari de Barcelona, La Vanguardia and Abc. The customer is unsure if the recipient of the gift will prefer La Vanguardia or Abc, and Àgata offers to show him both copies. We accompany him to the warehouse. He climbs the two shelves – from floor to ceiling – where the newspapers should be. And, indeed, he finds them right away.

In one of the industrial estates of Essen, in northern Germany, there is a street named Max Keith. It is the way the city has found to remember the man who, in the midst of World War II, had to solve an unexpected problem: German Coca-Cola factories could no longer make Coca-Cola. The trade blockade had cut off the arrival of the concentrate that the company sent from the United States and without that secret syrup, the plants could not operate. Keith, who managed the multinational's German subsidiary, had to find a way to get by.

If we speak of Israel Beer Josaphat, it is likely that this name will not mean anything to us, but if we refer to Paul Julius Reuter – his other identity – the surname will resonate with us. Indeed, the German Jew Reuter was the founder of the news agency that bears his name and which today is one of the most important in the world. The son of a local rabbi from Kassel, before he was thirty he converted to Christianity and married the daughter of a Berlin banker. Prior to all this, he had already had his first banking experience when the family sent him to Göttingen to work in a financial institution owned by his uncle. The bank job did not satisfy him much, but, at least, his presence in Lower Saxony would serve him to meet a fascinating character like Carl Friedrich Gauss, known as the Prince of Mathematics, but also a physicist and experimenter in the transmission of electrical impulses. For the moment, this last field was only a curiosity, but the seed had been sown.

Changes at CaixaBank. The long-standing Director of Communication and Institutional Relations, Maria Lluïsa Martínez Gistau, is stepping down. She has been at the helm of the entity's communication for 25 years and for the last 10 years has also been a member of the bank's management committee. Her position will be filled by Jordi Soldevila, who until now was in charge of the entity's real estate business. In addition, the Spanish government has rushed to find a name to replace Cani Fernández to chair the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC). The Council of Ministers approved proposing Juan José Ganuza Fernández to assume the position.

The debate is on the table as to whether fuel discounts will be extended until the end of September. We are talking about 21 cents per liter of gasoline and 29 cents per liter of diesel. This discount combines a reduction in VAT and another reduction in the hydrocarbon tax. With the current reduction, Spain is already at the lower limit of taxation allowed by the European Union. Why can the Government influence the price of fuel so much?According to the CNMC, approximately half of the price we pay corresponds to the costs and margins of the companies in the chain, while the other half consists of taxes: VAT and the hydrocarbon tax. In fact, gasoline bears a higher tax burden than diesel. The most striking thing is that VAT is calculated on the base price plus the hydrocarbon tax. In other words, we pay a tax on another tax. Therefore, any increase in price is immediately translated into more revenue for the State.As the holidays approach, the decision is more relevant than ever. An increase in fuel prices would drive up inflation in the coming months, which already stands at a worrying 3.2%. Let's not forget that energy is the raw material of all raw materials: when it becomes more expensive, it ends up making almost everything more expensive. Private car fuel consumption always rises during summer months. The price of fuel, moreover, conditions our perception of inflation. Few people consult the CPI every month, but everyone who drives knows how much it costs to fill the tank. When gasoline approached two euros per liter, it made headlines. Deep down, it's also a political climate decision. And, if not, there's always that joke that says no matter how much the price goes up, we can always put in 20 euros of gasoline.

A few days ago, the governor of the Bank of Spain, José Luis Escrivá, warned that housing is a true national emergency. He is not wrong. This problem, which is a growing concern for citizens, has become the main source of growth in social inequality. Whichever data you look at, the diagnosis is always the same: there is more demand than supply, expensive and practically inaccessible for a large part of the population. And of the supply that exists, some is in the hands of non-residents or are apartments used for tourist rentals. In total, there are about 900,000 across the country, according to data from the Bank of Spain.

Sateliot appeared at the center of Catalan public life in 2021, thanks to InfoK. The company, created three years earlier by a group of veterans from the telecommunications industry, was one of those responsible for Enxaneta, the first Catalan nanosatellite. At that time, it was still difficult to explain the idea of going to space to connect to the Internet of Things and send one message a day to receiving devices. Half a decade later, the company is already an aerospace benchmark, and aspires to fill space with 5G connectivity satellites for security forces, defense units, and strategic infrastructures. The executive director, Jaume Sanpera, receives Empreses in the company's brand new offices to talk about dual-use technologies, satellite constellations, and how to become friends with Elon Musk again.

In January, federal immigration agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti – both US citizens – in Minneapolis, during Operation Metro Surge. The deaths sparked protests across the country and the Administration ended the operation within weeks. They focused on the human cost of the recent escalation in immigration enforcement. What had not yet been measured is the cost to local economies where this surveillance has been most intense.

From Basar Vidal you leave with a frying pan, a knife, a saucepan, a set of pastry molds, a peeler, a shopping cart, or whatever. But above all, you leave having received a masterclass in cooking, practical advice to be as well-equipped as you wish, to optimize all resources, to obtain the best performance from the famous quality-price equation. Marc Vidal and his father Juanjo – now retired, but still occasionally seen – are the second and third generations of the family business. Well, strictly speaking, the fourth, since the founder was, in 1952, Juanjo's father, but it was the grandfather who, in Cerdanya, opened the first family grocery store. Then, already in Barcelona, two more establishments dedicated to food until the specialization in general store arrived at the corner of Tamarit with Urgell, where even today they are a true pillar of the Sant Antoni neighborhood.

In 1881, La Vila Joiosa was a quiet, seafaring, and agricultural town on the Alicante coast: nearly 5,000 people lived there, and tourism had not yet transformed the area. But among the low houses, the fields, and the port's activity, there was an industry that was beginning to make itself known. It was that of chocolate. The bars that came out of it had very little in common with those that fill supermarket shelves today: it was homemade workshop chocolate, made in the back of houses, with grinding stones, rolling pins, small stoves, and the help of the whole family. Many chocolatiers combined that trade with farm work and sold the product by order or on trade routes that soon began to extend towards the southeastern peninsula and La Mancha. By the mid-19th century, the townspeople had discovered that chocolate could provide them with very interesting complementary income.One of these neighbors was Valeriano López Lloret. In 1881, he had also decided to set up his own workshop. He had named it Xocolates Valor. Today, more than 140 years later, that small family business has become one of the major Spanish brands in the sector: it has a turnover of over 220 million euros, exports to some sixty countries and is one of the benchmarks in the dark chocolate segment. But how did Valeriano López Lloret and his descendants manage to lead it to the 21st century?From the stone to the mill and the cart

At the end of the 19th century, Valeriano López Lloret started with a small, family-run, artisanal structure, in a context where chocolate was still produced on stone. With the succession of his son, Vicente López Soler, the business began to change scale: the mechanical mill gradually replaced the grinding stone and, later, the systems moved by animal traction gave way to diesel engines. That mechanization allowed for greater production and a finer, more regular chocolate.The change was also noticeable in distribution. The López family's chocolate no longer stayed only near Vila Joiosa: it reached towns in Cuenca and Toledo, such as El Pedernoso, Belmonte, Osa de la Vega, or Quintanar de la Orden. First it came by cart; then, with a Chevrolet van capable of carrying about 1,500 kilos. The business continued to be family-run, but it was beginning to resemble a small factory more than a domestic workshop.Electricity finally pushed this leap forward. In 1935, Valor already employed several workers, but the Civil War and the post-war period slowed the sector down: factories were subjected to production caps, raw material shortages, and government controls. Nevertheless, chocolate continued to gain weight in the local economy: according to the study The chocolate industry in Villajoyosa, in 1948 there were more than twenty companies linked to chocolate production, while other traditional industries, such as rope making, lost prominence.The assault on supermarkets

In the sixties, Valor made its first major industrial leap. It rented a plant in Torre del Pla and, shortly after, opened a new factory in Villajoyosa, where in 1964 it moved the machinery it had in its first premises. The new plant allowed it to produce more, modernize, and expand its range. It was also then that it began to differentiate itself by cocoa: at the end of the sixties, it launched Chocolate Puro, made without vegetable fats as a substitute for cocoa butter. With mass distribution gaining ground, Valor expanded its management team, created a network of representatives, and began to compete for a place on supermarket shelves.In the eighties and nineties, Valor began to go beyond tiles: it sold chocolates, opened its first chocolate shop, took its first steps in exporting, and in 1995, inaugurated a 22,000 square meter expansion to directly process cocoa beans. From the 2000s onwards, the big change was in the narrative: it modernized the logo, packaging, and advertising. With campaigns like Puro placer or Placer adulto, the brand tried to detach chocolate from children's consumption and present it as a more adult, intense, and everyday pleasure. It was a way of bringing a century-old brand into a market that no longer just bought chocolate for snacks, but also for gifts, for cooking, for self-care, or simply to treat oneself to a moment of pleasure.

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The spring of 1994 saw the film Pulp fiction arrive at the Cannes Film Festival, which months later would be the first major success of a director from Tennessee named Quentin Tarantino. If a couple of years earlier he had already attracted attention with Reservoir dogs, with this second film he would achieve total consecration and transform into a money-making machine (the box office for this production exceeded 200 million dollars). More or less everyone has seen or, at least, has heard of Pulp Fiction, but not everyone knows what concept such a singular title refers to.

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Donald Trump has not yet emerged from one war and has already declared another. The White House has just unleashed hostilities with Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant behind the chatbot Claude. With the prohibition of the use of its most advanced models by foreign citizens, Claude Mythos 5 and its controlled version, Fable 5, Trump has forced the hand of the technology company led by Dario Amodei, which has been forced to exclude the entire product from the market due to the impossibility of filtering individual users. This is, as detailed by technology sources consulted by Empreses, a "before and after in the industry, an interference that destabilizes the market," says Josep Curto, an AI expert and founder of AthenaCore.

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If we had had this conversation in January, most economists were clear: 2026 was going to be the year of interest rate cuts. But, as the months have passed, the analysis has changed radically. Everything points to us ending the year with hikes.

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There is a long way to go in male-female parity in company management. Half of the population is still underrepresented. But despite still low levels, the situation is slightly better in Catalan family businesses. This is highlighted in a study promoted by the Catalan Association of Family Business (ASCEF), according to which, companies of this type "are clearly more inclusive of women".

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For a customer to enter a store and be served by an employee with an intellectual disability should be a completely natural situation. Today, unfortunately, it still isn't. To understand why, we need to change our perspective on what intellectual disability is.

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Philippe Aghion (Paris, 1956) won last year the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on the impact of technology and innovation on economic development. Aghion, a professor at the prestigious Collège de France, Insead, and London School of Economics, currently focuses his work on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in growth and how Europe can improve its policies to reduce dependence on Chinese and American tech giants.

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TV3's youngest meteorologist, Gori Masip (2002), still remembers the day he discovered what snow was. He was very young when his brother ran into his room to tell him it was snowing in Sitges, his hometown: “Automatically I asked him what snow was. I had no idea,” he explains in statements to Empreses.

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If it were possible to travel to the past, one would have to visit Els Petits Encants first. In fact, it would be essential. The shop in Basses de Sant Pere in Barcelona, run for twenty years by Francesc Raich i Puig, is a true institution in the Ribera neighborhood, an emblematic, beloved space, an oasis, a watchtower, a place to get lost for hours. All at once. Everything is objects from the past, as is the custom in these fascinating and fabulous places we call encants.

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In supermarkets, the gluten-free products section is becoming easier to find. Among pasta packages, sliced bread, cookies, flours, pizza bases, and muffins, one color often dominates: the intense yellow of Schär packaging. The image contrasts with the reality of just a few decades ago, when following a gluten-free diet meant navigating pharmacies, health food stores, specialty shops, and homemade recipes based on rice, corn, or potato. Before these products occupied entire shelves, celiac people had to fend for themselves in a market with very little supply.

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In the summer of 2005, the biggest corporate operation in Colombia's history took place, when the country's main brewery was sold to the South African company SABMiller for 7.8 billion dollars. Behind this transaction was Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the most important magnate in that Latin American country. His family had been the main shareholder of the brewery company since the sixties, with a tradition in the sector even further back in time, when in 1933 his father acquired Cervecería Barranquilla y Bolívar.

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