 So, good morning everybody. Thank you all for waking up early on this first day of the World Economic Forum. We're thrilled to be here and to hopefully engage in what I imagine is going to be a bit of a back and forth about the future of business, about business size and scale of business and big business and what it means in this day and age of Trumpism and Brexit and all of that. And we also want to address the question about big business, which is to say, is size and scale the friend or enemy of performance and innovation, which is something that I think is an issue that all of the people on this stage and so many of you can tend with and think about hopefully every day. Let me introduce this group because it is a tremendous collection on all sides. Ruth Porat is here. She is the CFO of a company that I call Google. She calls Alphabet and you know it well. Excuse me? Said both work. Both work, both work. To John Tiam is here. He is the CEO of Credit Suisse and we're thrilled to have him. Martin Sorrell is here from WPP and we're thrilled to have him. Sunil Bharti is here. One of the great businessmen and philanthropists in India and we're going to talk about the role of philanthropy also in big business. I want to talk to you about that and then Andrew Liveris just went from a big business to a bigger business at Dow Chemical and we will talk about that. Let me start with you, Martin, if I could, which is to say, just big picture, is big business a bad word? You mean from an electric point of view or from a who's point of view? From a societal point of view, from the sense that so many people in this room always wanted to become a big business. But we now live in an age where this, all of everything that we're doing here has come into question given the politics of the moment. Absolutely. Big business and lack of trust. We had a session this morning before we got here about lack of trust in government. But lack of trust in institutions is a big issue. The question is how you define big business. If I look at our own business for a minute, in terms of scale as opposed to let's say alphabet, what 650 billion of market cap or what they're about, we're a puny little 30 billion but to some extent we're a frenemy. We compete and cooperate. So if I look at our, in our own industry, we would be regarded as being the largest by a factor of about 50% from the second largest by market capitalization. But if I look at the way that we compete and who we compete with, we're competing with companies that are far bigger and far better resource. And just to your point for a minute, just moving away from how the world sees big business, if I look at our own business, we have to be big and small. We have to, if I look at the digital revolution, which you're well aware of and everybody in the panel is well aware of, we have traditional legacy parts of our business that we're driving into digital. We have digital parts of a business that we want to go faster. And then we have, let's say experimentation or what I call cannibalization, if you don't eat your children, somebody else will. And so you have to experiment and disintermediate and disrupt your own business. So it's a question about how you define it. But to your fundamental point, given where we were at Davos last year, when a lot of people, and myself included, were forecasting, we would remain in the EU and probably Hillary Clinton would win the US election. That has generated a populist trend where big business is in the front line of the criticism. John, let me ask it, let me put it to you this way. Is there been a misarticulation of the benefits of big business? Or is it the reality that big business has not necessarily succeeded? I think surely. For society. Thinking about your question, I think surely it has to be a mixture of both because there is no perception, but it's not grounded in some degree of reality. So if that perception is out there, we cannot just deny it and say we're completely innocent. We have seen across the world the benefits of globalization. I mean, some of us are the direct beneficiaries of that. But we've also seen the tensions, the cracks in the system, which then found a political translation. Because if people feel that the system is not working for them, that will find a kind of political expression. That's what we've seen lately. So maybe differently from some commentators, I see what's going on as a symptom, not the problem itself. The problem is to make sure that globalization works for everybody. So that people don't end up taking extreme political options, which is what we've seen. And business, of course, has a big role to play in that, in terms of behavior. Because first of all, there is no way to sell to the public of behavior that is unacceptable. So we have to behave better. And then we also, but your question, have to become more effective at articulating those good things we do and the positive things we do. Because I think having a lot of positives going on, all our companies train people across the world. We're just going around. We say 70,000 for you, 70,000. I'm paying 78,000 for me, 200,000. How many employees do you have? 50,000. 50,000? 60,000. So it's a small nation here, easily. And so what do we do matters? So talking about a small nation, you've become a bigger nation, Andrew Liveris over at Deochemical. You're about to close on your deal. When does it become, people talk about too big to fail. When does it become too big to manage? Is there an inflection point at which size is too big? Look, just on the deal itself, just to be clear, that's a merge and spin model, not a merge of equals model, to actually overcome the negatives of scale which you're hunting for. The negatives of scale, especially in our industry, I said on this stage, or maybe a stage around here somewhere last year, that the large scale diversified public company has probably seen its day. That commoditization cycles, which is a race to the denominator, innovation cycles, it's a race to the numerator, that these are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter. And the cannibalization point that Martin made means you have to reinvent yourself. At Dow, we're on our sixth reinvention after 119 years. But the speed of that reinvention means that we still have to have smart scale. We have to invent and innovate. But we have to do it differently and faster. So the enemy of a combined, like the Dow-Dupont deal, is if we combine, just for the sake of combining, we're not. We're combining to separate into three deep verticals. These three verticals will be innovators. They will innovate in their spaces, agriculture, a range of specialty products, and a range of materials products, packaging, infrastructure, transportation. So how do you actually get this innovation to move at scale, 60,000 people, 50,000 people? You have to have the ecosystem of the small inside the big. Smart scale, that term smart scale has another issue which is affordability. You have to afford innovation. A lot of little companies can't scale up because of regulations, and so should be. Smart regulations on food, ingredients, and all the things we consume and breathe in this world means it's getting costlier to innovate. So you have to have an innovation cycle that incorporates the small's invention but enables you to scale to the large, smart scale through size. But you can't be diversified to a fault. So our deal is to actually combine, recraft the asset structures, and then spin out three deep verticals. So not wide anymore and deep, narrow and deep. But can you speak and maybe, and maybe Neil can speak to this as well, the cycle, which is to say every business wants to grow as big as possible until some point where either an investment banker calls them or something else happens when they say, you know what, actually, I need to become small again. I need to focus. The investment bank having built the business and then taking it the other side. I'm going to then divest. I'm going to become small in focus. And then if it works out, I'm going to grow and I'm going to do it all over again. What is, is there a balance in all of that? Well, if you're asking me about the world of service providers, like Martin's business, et cetera, I think the world of service providers, I'm kind of passionate about the world of manufacturing because I think the innovation cycle in manufacturing and the sorts of things Alphabet is now doing, which is to get data to a point where we can make smarter decisions on what to make to provide a better world. That needs, if you like, an innovation ecosystem that is enabled by service providers, whether it be your reputation or whether it be your access to capital. But when you build those structures to a fault, you lose sight of what you're actually innovating for. So you have to have a value system and goals, and you were hunting in this when you introduced Sunil about philanthropy. And I believe that the collision of business, government, and civil society has finally arrived. And if we don't have sustainability drivers as our goals, cleaner air, safer food, affordable medicines, people at the bottom of the pyramid, income inequality, we have to recast our lens on what innovation is for. And then the ecosystem, including investment bankers, who tell you to go big or small depending, OK, on the flavor of the month, have to be overcome by, does it meet my criteria to create a better product for my goals? And that's your North Star. We call that our North Star. OK, I want to read something to the panel. I want you to react to it. And then I want to get to this question of performance in terms of the innovation being the friend or the enemy. This is President Obama, who I spoke with last year. We had a conversation about the role of society and big business. And this is what he said. When you're talking about CEO perks these days or the gap between the assembly line worker, what they're making compared to what the CEO is making, all those things used to be constrained by the fact that you lived in a city, you went to church in that city, your kids might be going to the same school as the guy who was working on the assembly line because public schools actually were invested in back then. And all those constraining factors have greatly reduced or in some cases eliminated entirely. And that contributes to this trend towards inequality. That contributes to this divergence between how the people who run these companies and economic elites think about their responsibilities and the policies they promote with political leaders. And that's had, I think, a damaging effect on the economy overall. So anybody want to take that on? Well, I'll take that on for starters. Our mission at Google from the earliest days has been to build products for everyone. And that's whether it's for a 1%er here at Davos or a student in an emerging market who's coming online for the first time on a mobile phone or a senior who's homebound. We've always been focused on building products for everyone, and that's if you think about search or you think about maps, it's about creating information that's usable for everyone. And the way we've approached this is by building platforms, open source platforms, again, that enable anyone to reach millions. It's about, again, closing this gap, whether it's the app, the Android developer somewhere around the globe who can then reach millions with her app or the small local merchant who can then reach a broader group of people. And very much to the question about shared responsibility, we start with collaboration embedded in our products, but we also think about the importance of collaboration because we do have a shared responsibility to ensure that everyone benefits from technology. And so we focus on things, for example, like digital skills training. Here in Europe, in the last two years, we've trained 2 million people in digital skills. We want to make sure that everyone has the ability to benefit from technology. And so you also are going in a direction of what about what does that mean for your culture and how do you take it? Our view is that you need to not just innovate because you have the opportunity with talent, but you have to be deliberate about it. And we've built a whole host of things like 20% time, which has been written a lot about, or our moonshot factory, so that, again, we can continue to innovate, push the frontier, and try and solve whatever those next set of problems are for a broader swath of people. I want to get directly into that in just a moment. What were you going to say, Martin? Yeah, well, I just think Ruth and Alphabet are in a privileged position in the sense that they are a controlled company. And therefore, their structure gives them a long-term advantage because they're controlled by Sergey and Larry or whoever else controls the gold and shares there, effectively. And that is not regarded as being good governance by the corporate governance wonks, if I can put it like that. But it does mean, I mean, if you look at the S&P 500 and treat all those companies as one company, in five of the last six quarters, they have paid out more to shareholders in dividends and buybacks than retained earnings. Since Lehman, there has been this inexorable focus on the short term, maybe with the exception of the snapback in 2010, but 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, I think going into 17, low growth, very little inflation, and therefore, very little pricing power, and therefore, an inexorable focus on cost. And there has not been, because of this question about the short-term performance, there has not been the focus on innovation and branding. Because we know that the top 10 companies in our annual branding survey that we do, sorry to mention the Financial Times on CNBC, but with the Financial Times, we know that if we invested, if all of us here invested in a fund of those top 10 over the last 10 years, you'd outperform the S&P 500 in terms of stock market performance by 70% and the MSCI by four times. So innovation works. And where President Obama, I think, is absolutely right is those big companies have not made. They made incremental investments. What Clay Christensen and Roger Martin have always referred to, incremental investment, but not fundamental, because the system is very focused on the short term. Average life of a CEO is about six to seven years. Jump in, and then I want to get to this. Well, just to build on that last point, one of the very important statements I think that we talk about a lot at Alphabet is that incrementalism leads to irrelevance. And you really do need to look and plan and invest for the long term. And if you don't push the frontier, you end up really becoming that incremental player. And so again, very much in agreement that short-termism is a problem. Keeping a long-term view on what's best for the user and therefore continues to extend your growth. We're invested for the long run, and we keep coming back to this mantra, which I think is as true outside of technology as it is within technology. If I can jump in on that and just build on that point, I think you're absolutely right. Incrementalism, I think you become big by not being incremental, by definition. And the origin, there's somebody with a vision and generally a long-term vision and an idea that went in and created Google, et cetera, the search engine, and then you become big. And the challenge is almost like human nature. Once you become big, your natural impulse is to be incrementalist and conservative and protect your position. So really, for all of us in terms of management and to be the challenge we have at Credit Suisse, and frankly, we've broken down the bank in smaller units which we believe are more manageable, closer to the market, more likely to innovate because they are regional. How do you keep that spirit of innovation going whilst continuing to benefit from the benefits of scale? And just one last comment, maybe, on the concentration because that's just an interesting piece of data. If you look, the top 10% of listed companies in the world generate 80% of the profits that was in the film of this panel. It's actually, I'd like to put a geographic dimension in that. It's been the case in the West, broadly, in the US and Europe and Japan for 30 years. So that 1080 has been there. What's been happening is actually that the top 10% in emerging markets, who used to generate 50% of the value, have gone to 1890. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see that new breed of companies changes that equation and especially in terms of how the benefits of that are spread. Sunil has been so patient, but you've made faces, so I want you to respond to all of this if you could. No, to my mind, we are discussing this particular topic today. In itself is a clear message that something has gone wrong in the last 10 years. Up to 2007, just before the 2008 crisis, we would have been celebrating big business. Big business was revered, was respected, was celebrated. And suddenly, in the last eight, nine, 10 years, we have come to a point where we have started to put a question, is big good or not? The fact is, disparities have risen in the last 10 years dramatically. It's not that the big companies are doing bad things. Quite the contrary, they're better governed, they're more transparency today, returns are lower than before, so they have to sweat it out much more, it's hard work. Yet, they're not being celebrated because the disparities have gone up. And people who are affected by that are the voters. And the politicians get it very clearly, where is the next election going to come through? And that is on the side of people who have been left behind. I think all of us recognize this. And we do, in our own way, create jobs to the extent possible, do some philanthropic. But the fact is, as C.M. said, 10% of the world's companies are getting 80% of the world's profit. And then you see 1% of the people, even in countries like India, having large pockets of wealth in the country, and the rest of the people are struggling. Nearly 65% market cap of the world is of those companies, which are above a billion dollars. And this all suggests that the entire wealth flow is moving into one direction. And what's happening now, new, is Google alphabet type of companies where winner takes it all. You could have had three or four large giants of chemical companies or maybe a dozen telecom companies, but you can't have more than one Google. You can't have more than one Facebook. Now that's a new order of the day that one company will take it all. And that makes it even more extreme. Okay, so then the question is, what do we do about it? You're working with the new president's administration. What do you do about it? That's a loaded question there. So the, I wanna, can I just jump to that previous question because I think the narrative point that Martin was on with short termism that Ruth and to Jane base said, that's a narrative issue we have as big business that needs to be filled with something else. And what I would suggest rather than 10% of the world's companies are generating and have 80% of the profits, what percent of the world's companies that say 10% generate 80% of the world's jobs? We need to reclaim that narrative because I can tell you our deals, all the deals we've done at Dow and the chemical industry, we've grown the ecosystem of jobs around us. SMEs are thriving around us. We create SME ecosystems. That's a narrative that we all need to reclaim and rebrand. Define SME for everybody. Small, medium enterprises. And so over 50,000 suppliers, partners, collaborators, innovation partners, universities, you name it, communities. This term that some of us are being used to, inclusive capitalism, unfortunately, is branded itself as an elitism term. We need to take it away and recraft for what it is, which is everyone benefits if companies like ours grow. Communities do, employees do, partners do, governments do, and yes, shareholders do. No matter what your shareholder structure, that narrative has to be our narrative going forward to overcome this dislocation point that you were talking about. Look, the Trump assignment is very new to me. Not a lot I can tell you about it. It's four weeks old or young, depending on what you'd say they're in transition. Obviously, this week is a big week, but the mission the President Ollett gave me, I'm very excited about it. I wrote a book about it and I just talked about it in my earlier comment. I think the manufacturing innovation ecosystem is a job provider, a job creator. It actually, every job we create within the chemical company boundaries called Dow creates five jobs around me. So I'm a five times job multiplier. Service sector is 1.3, just to get the stat right. So what he wants and what he campaigned on was to put manufacturing jobs competitive back in the United States. Now, there's a lot that has to be done to do that. Some of the rhetoric out there, I think you should leave it in the world of rhetoric. The actual specific that needs to be done in the areas of tax, in the areas of education, retooling the American workforce, in the areas of regulation and what smart regulation looks like. And then of course, in the areas of trade are the work product in front of us. I take comfort when we announce this team, which will be very soon. You'll see serious companies, serious players in the US and global economy that care about global trade, fair trade, not unfair trade. And so what's the work product? I'll see. But I'm excited about the opportunity to work with them to create a better answer to creating jobs in the US. I can tell that Martin T. John wanted to jump in. Fundamentally, we don't have enough growth and therefore enough jobs. And if I look at the way that companies are run, if you just think about it, we're going into most are on a calendar year a new budget cycle. If by the end of Q1 or Q2, companies are not hitting budgets or their plans. What do they do? They cut back the labor input. I was looking at Squawk bulk oil, and there was a comment, doesn't matter which one, announced that it was cutting 9% of its workforce in share price rises by 9%. This whole productivity question that people talk about, I don't think it's a lack of investment. It's people reduce their headcount and the labor input in order to make their numbers, particularly in people-driven business. That's the fundamental issue. The issue on Trump is what you will win on the U.S. swings, you may lose on the international roundabouts, that it's clear that Trump's policies, as he announced, if he implements them, will be growth stimulating in the U.S. economy, which is the biggest economy, what, 16, 17 trillion out of 72 trillion, a worldwide GDP. But the issue is also as a result of his international policies, whether it be with China, with Mexico, whatever it happens to be, is that going to reduce growth for us? So it's there. The fundamental problem is that big business, and on this repatriation of profits, taxes, corporate tax reduced, tick, good news. But if the repatriation of profits is used yet again to invest in dividends and buybacks, what's the point? It's really got to be much more fundamental, long-term investment. And I just have to say this, going back to Ruth's point, and Ruth's structure of Google, Alphabet or whatever. That structure gives you, ironically and paradoxically, the strength and the control to make the long-term bets. Okay, can I ask you one question about your structure though? Because everybody here has looked at this as a model. Let me take the devil's advocate position, which is to say that one of the things about this restructuring was that before, you couldn't really tell what was necessarily going on in any of the divisions. You had this great business in Google that was powering or at least financing all these other projects. And in a way, everybody who was developing smaller projects could hide behind all of this other stuff. And that some people might argue that that actually allowed them to grow or to build or to try these new things. And that under an environment where it's more transparent, it actually makes it harder. What do you think of that? I very much disagree. I'm sure you do. As you would have expected. Look, one of the core premises for Alphabet is that incrementalism leads to relevance. And you need to push people to take risk. And even at Google, where so much of the mantra was about pushing the frontier and making those bets, people didn't really want to go outside of their comfort zone. And so we created a structure where we said we're going to take bets. We're gonna be focused because focus yields results. And one of the very important things, I think, is that we created a transparency, not just externally, but internally. By actually dividing the business as we did, we pushed expenses down within Google and within what we call other bets, the various other companies that are longer term moonshots, if you want to call it that. And we were able to look at it and say, okay, how do we want to prioritize amongst what is much about what you do as what you stop doing? And so prioritization becomes key. How do you prioritize? My view very strongly is we have extraordinary leaders and engineers, they know within their set of products and projects and efforts, what are the most important, what are gonna yield the most results? And rather than dissipating resources across many of them, we're getting them to focus. Is you knew right though, by the way, about the idea of in certain types of technology, in certain types of businesses that they have to be a winner, take all. That it's too hard to have others competing. I don't know the answer. Yeah, our view very strongly is that competition is always one click away. And that what's most important is the experience of the user. And unless you stay incredibly focused on innovation, unless that is the key thing you wake up and worry about all the time, you can be disintermediated. And that's why this whole notion of incrementalism leads to relevance is so important. We have been and will be, shall act in areas by companies large and small, age is not a factor. In fact, it's actually, as you've seen, so much of innovation comes from around the globe, young people seeing new needs for users. So our view is that, yes, if you just try and rest on your laurels, there's a problem. You need to continue to innovate because otherwise somebody will find the opening, the better experience for users. And that goes back very much to Martin's point. You need to stay focused on the long run. I know you want to say something, but I want to ask you, are banks still too big? No easy questions this morning. No, short answer I think is no. And we could talk about why. I think that clearly in America, what we've seen is that we've, the emergence of very large, very diversified banks. And I think objectively, a requirement for them to hold more capital, which frankly was necessary to a degree. We have a system that is well performing and quite solid. What you see in Europe, and I'm not the first one to say that, is a system that is still in flux where we could see benefits to further consolidation, which would certainly bring benefits to our clients. But that has to be done in a climate where nobody wants banks to be bigger, which brings me to a point I wanted to make, which is about our mandate from society, or our license to operate. I think the biggest risk we run as big business is to lose that mandate. And it goes back to stakeholders. We took for granted for a long time that we had a license to operate. That society wanted big companies to exist and to grow. And I think that under the pressure of the financial crisis, the spread of information through social media, it means that that mandate is getting weaker and weaker. And when we used to work very hard at convincing investors and talking to you the media, et cetera, I think we really need to become much more nimble and much better at articulating what we do and the benefits of what we do. Otherwise the feedback loop is immediate. We all talk a lot about regulation and tend to complain about it. But for me, regulation in many ways is an expression of the loss of that mandate because then politically, the voters vote in a certain direction and the people that have elected use regulation to, if you wish, put pressure on business to behave in a given way. So really, that articulation is what Andrew talked about, what we do for SMEs. To take us as clinicians, our strap line is the entrepreneurs' bank. We want to be the entrepreneurs' bank. We talk about it a lot. We were created by an entrepreneur. People forget that Switzerland was a very, the poorest country in Europe. All it had to export was its people, like Africa. That's why Swiss were mercenaries everywhere and they keep the Pope today. And it was Alfred des Cheurs in 1856 because the European banks were extracting so much value from Switzerland and said, we need a Swiss bank. And that's how conditions were created. So this notion that it's entrepreneurs who create all value in the end of society. Business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs. But banks actually do nothing that provide capital to them, give them the means to innovate and grow and develop. It's a narrative we need to go back to because otherwise we luck really the support of a public without which we cannot operate. Sunil, I said I wanted to talk about philanthropy and you are a great philanthropist but I do want to mention this and this goes back to the connection between big business and their communities. If you look at corporate philanthropy over the last 30 years, it's fallen by more than 60%. Now that may be in large part a function of the pressures, a shareholder pressures, the idea that maybe companies should make as much money as possible and if you're a shareholder and you make money as a result, you should give it back. There were people who were misappropriating money, there were executives at one point who were using corporate money to benefit their own. Favorite philanthropies, if you will. What is the right model there? You know, a lot of NGO is also in the room, so I thought I'd... First of all, we must separate the corporate social responsibility from philanthropy. The first part is really your social contract with the society. As a large company or as a business, you need to put back something into the society and I think most of the companies end up doing it, it depends on the relative scale. Some people do it in a very big way and some people do it much less than they should be doing and many countries in the world, for example, India is now sort of mandated you must spend 2% of your profits in CSR. It's still not having the sanction of law, but it's clearly name and shame. So you will put in your annual report at the end of the year, how much of the 2% you've spent and people are starting to track it, it's published, people talk about it, but that's CSR. When you move to philanthropy, that's a matter of heart. I mean, that you cannot really force upon anyone and Bill Gates and many others decided to give it all of it away. We saw Mark Zuckerberg and his wife signing off all the wealth. So there has to be a matter of heart and in my own belief today we are in a society where if you do a lot more for our society, you do develop soft edges and that does directly play into your business. You have better sales in the marketplace, you have better brand loyalty, people look at you in a different way. Gone are the days when brute force of large corporations will carry you through. And let me give you an example. Today in India we see a bitter battle which has erupted in the house of Tata's. Any other company with that kind of, that intensity of rivalry or problems could have gone down. Tata's will survive because it's done a lot of work in the Indian society. They do a lot of work in scientific development away from their business, rural areas, tea gardens. And I think that counts for a lot. So that's philanthropy to my mind. Martin, what are you thinking about this? Well, I come back to the long term. John Brown, we complicate the CSR area. We obfuscate it with language. I can't think of any of our... First of all, the CSR marketing, you're a marketing guy. Yeah, yeah, but okay, let's call it social responsibility, whatever it is, sustainability, whatever. I can't think of a client that isn't focused on this. But John Brown many years ago simplified it. It's Stanford Business School thing in 1997. He said, if you're in business for the long term, you will do good. Doing good is in the interest of the business in the long term. Let me just give a specific example where I think we have these contradictions. So companies espouse these sustainability programs. And yet payment terms, okay? Big companies are increasingly insisting on suppliers like ourselves, providing finance effective, becoming banks, displacing, disintermediating, credit suites. And we find it difficult and we're a mid-sized company. Goodness knows how small businesses can operate in an environment where big companies are asking for 90 days credit, 120 days credit, and I've even heard of 180 days credit. We as a business, 60% of our revenues are invested in people. I can't remember any people inside our company that are willing to be paid 90 days, 120, 180 days, or landlords that would be willing to pay it on those terms. In fact, some of them insist on getting quarterly in advance. There are some contradictions, let me put it like that, that I think have to be sorted out. And for small companies, which are the engine of jobs that come back to growth, and jobs we talk about, the big companies being dominant, but the real engines of the small, the SMEs, I don't know how they can survive and prosper in that area. There's one other thing about, because coming back to the question that Tijan responded to on leveraging big companies. We have our number one core priorities, what we call the horizontality. It's a terrible word. But what it is is about leveraging the benefits of scale and size, because clients want us to unify our offer increasingly. That goes against trying to maintain entrepreneurial enthusiasm and endeavor inside large companies. So you split down the units, but again, the paradox is, how can you bring them together to provide more benefit as part of the whole? Andrew, I know you wanted to comment and also we're gonna go to questions in just a moment, but I also want you to answer this while you're answering, while you're jumping on this other conversation, which is, he just said small businesses create the most jobs, which is a statistic you've heard over and over and over again. And so the question though, and dare I say, is whether big businesses are preventing small businesses to the point that you just made from growing in the way that they need to and that society demands. Yeah, I think the two questions come together, the previous one and that one, around this notion that hasn't come up yet, that Sunil was getting at and the way I'll phrase it is, so we're in roughly 150 towns around the world, communities, not big cities. In those towns, we make products and each of those towns are communities and they're local, they're very local. So what we do with philanthropy and what we do with sustainability is local, is the air of the same quality from Bahá'u Blanca in Argentina to Muptaput, Thailand, to Tunis in the Netherlands, to Midland Michigan, is the services in that community of the same quality. And do we help build that infrastructure around schools, the security, police force? Yes, we do. Do we create an innovation and education ecosystem? Yes, we do. Do we help local schools? Yes, we do. Community colleges, yes, we do. This is what actually corporate social responsibility looks like on the ground. And the people and use Midland Michigan as the example, that's our headquarters, our founder started there in 1897. Our ivory tower execs, people like me and our kids, go to the same schools as our factory workers' kids and we commingle in neighborhoods and suburbs. There's no elitism, there's no class structures, which is what we get trapped into when we talk big. When we go to local, it's all very identifiable. It's the families, the neighborhoods and what they have access to in terms of a safe, high quality lifestyle. So if you take that point and say that's philanthropy and that's small business and that's society at work, SMEs in those towns benefit mightily from the existence of our company. It's the ecosystem I talked about before. So it's the answer, the question cut both ways. Ruth wants to jump in. Just a quick one on small businesses. We agree small businesses are an engine for growth and are very focused on small businesses. There are about 28 million small businesses in the US. They employ about half the private sector workforce and it's a big area for us. How do you use technology to bring small businesses online? And last year we worked with 200,000 US companies giving them free technology support access to actually do exactly what you're talking about, which is continue to fuel them as the engine for growth in the economy. It's a very important area and technology can be an important catalyst for them. Final question for me and then I want to throw it open, which is this, John Chipman recently said, every company needs a foreign policy in this new age. And we've talked about having a public policy here, but a foreign policy in a world where everybody here is global, they want to be in many different countries in a world where we might be moving away a little bit from globalization. So where the new Secretary of State comes from? Mr. Rex Tillerson, how do you think about that? How do you all think about where you're based and what the benefits and incentives may be there and your ambitions globally? I'll start, I mean, I don't know what everyone's travel schedule is like. I do 40 countries a year. When people ask me where I'm based, I use 45,000 feet as my answer. I think you have to turn up. I think you have to be present as a company at every level, head of state down to represent your company and you have to do geopolitical risk as part of your risk scenarios. Every time you put one dollar, one euro at play. And to do that, you have to have great local partners, great local relationships. And we're in 169 countries, okay? But are you an American company? We're a global company based in America with American values and we care about those values. We think those values, sorry, I'm Australian but I'm gonna say it, the American system is still the best human system invented by humankind. Maybe there's a better one out there. We should all work to it but it's a freedom system. This crazy accent can run down chemical. I mean, and we've had six foreign CEOs in a row. What other system that America gives you that opportunity? I think other countries, my home country of Australia is not too bad but we have an American value system that we can't trade against every other value system. If there's one better out there, we'll adopt it. But we're a global company based in the United States. Well, I think most of the large businesses have no choice but to expand and go as much further away from home base than you can. But let me digress a little bit. You do that in spurts and then you consolidate and you make some retreats as well. We are now in 21 countries. We are now down to 17 countries. So we have moved out of a few countries because you need to consolidate. You need to take a deep breath, see where you're going and then probably go and move out again. We are rooted in India. That's our base. It's a continent of consumers. That gives us the capacity to go out into other markets and use that massive scale that we have at home to then use the frugal models of providing low cost services to places like very deep Africa, sub-Saharan countries which are very, very difficult to serve otherwise. So I would say an Indian company rooted in India but yet aspiring to be global. Martin, you're a British company? Well, yes, but the danger, of course, is that if you look at the world, we're in 113 countries. The 113th was Cuba. Iran, question mark now. That would be the 114th. Myanmar was not one of Vietnam before that. This is the fundamental. We're a third US, the third Western Europe, including the UK and a third Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Central East in Europe. The next billion consumers are gonna come from the latter. They're not gonna come from the two former. And indeed, the intensified competition, if you think of about a procter and gamble and a unilever, ironically, the competition is not between those two. The competition between procter and unilever and the local Chinese company that is gonna be the multinational in the future. We just published this survey on the top 30 Chinese companies in terms of building their brands globally. Top of the, the number was Lenovo, number two was Huawei, I think number three was Haya. These are companies that are increasingly challenging the multinationals. But the problem is that you get accused of being rootless. I mean, we've had that on both sides of the Atlantic. We've had that in the UK. We've had that recently in the US. And you're seeing, it's being seen as a company or a group of companies that is rootless and is looking for the best possible structure and all the taxation issues that are being raised in Europe, in particular, in the UK and Ireland and everywhere else are emblematic of that. A lot has been said already. So just a few more comments. I'd like to say a few words in favor of Switzerland. After the US model, Andrew, I think Switzerland is contrary to perceptions an extremely open country. If you take the top 20 companies, I think about half hour run by foreigners. It's one of the best exporters in the world. You've got the exporter orientation of this economy, it's absolutely phenomenal. I mean, Davos is taking place here and I do run a Swiss bank, but it doesn't really feel like a Swiss bank. We're all passionate about having a local face everywhere we are. And we're really significant in Asia, Central Asia, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Latin America, the US. And if I just, this all goes for people. I was just reflecting as the others were talking, I was going in my head through the executive team. I've got five divisions. One is run by, I know it's quite an unlikely combination, but a Pakistani Swiss who emigrated to Switzerland at the age of 11 and speaks perfect Swiss German. One is run by a Swiss, a Swiss. The one is run by an American of Lebanese origin. Another one is run by an American of Chinese origin whose grandfather fled Mao in 1949. And so on and so on and so forth. So really the whole ethos of the company is about, and I'm African, so it's about meritocracy, being extremely respectful of all the cultures in which we operate. We actually love operating in different cultures. And having standards in terms of ethics and compliance, et cetera, but they're established globally. And I must say that I think Switzerland provides a number of examples beyond credit sheets of companies along that modern, it's quite successful. Does Google think about this differently? There's certain big countries you don't do business in like China. So we definitely look at users around the globe as the objective. How do we address the needs, the growing needs of users around the globe? I talked about it at the outset, by building platforms upon which Android developers anywhere around the globe can innovate. It's about reaching the user anywhere. And very much I agree that one of the major focus areas is there's still four billion people who are not online. We have something called the next billion users who will be coming online. How do we think about the types of needs they're gonna have in very different markets? And much of that innovation is actually happening in those markets. You look at innovations in Asia, whether it's in payments or chat, different approaches based on either the requirements, or smaller phone, let's access broadband. So we do have to look at markets around the globe and we're continuing to do that. Okay, let's open it up. I know we said we'd get to some questions and I know, I hope that there will be a multitude of questions in the audience. I know it's early, but we have some hands over here. So when we go over here, if we could. Thank you very much. My name is Kumagai and I am a Chief Economist at Daiba Institute of Research. And I think that one of the most important things we should consider today is urbanization. And the essence of urbanization is to make the best use of unutilized assets. So I think companies will be smaller and smaller because platformers will be stronger. So companies should not have big assets or many employees. And my question is, how do you evaluate the impact of urbanization? And I think that urbanization will spread in all industries. So how do you cope with or fight against the urbanization? Anybody feeling the Uber effect in your business? Everybody. Everybody. How so? Well, if I think about our own business and I sort of implicitly answer the question in the comments, one is you've got legacy. Everybody in a traditional business has legacy businesses. You have to push hard. I mean, those people, you have to change the engines on the aeroplane whilst you're flying. And you have to keep, make sure, another analogy is make sure the trains run on time. So you have, the companies that throw off cash, let's call them the cash cows, unfortunately, were put in that way. So that's one. And you have to push them to change. You then have digital assets that you push to change, and then you have to experimentation. You have to do some very painful things. And this comes back again to the long-term. I can't, you can come back to it all the time. If you are going to intentionally disintermediate, disrupt your own businesses, that causes some comparisons issues, precedent issues, performance issues. And if you make a long-term decision, it inevitably means that shareholders, including your employee shareholders, are gonna have to take maybe some pain in the short term, but the market doesn't give you, you know, Larry Fink, McKinsey, Dow, have all been in the forefront. There are sessions there at Davos later this morning, specifically on this issue. This, I think, is the fundamental issue for business. I mean, we can talk about the sustainability. We can talk about all the things that people are doing in terms of CSR, but at the end of the day, it's about growth and it's about jobs. And nobody yet has managed, has mentioned the technological challenge where the technology, improved technology, to your point on uberization, improves job prospects or diminishes them. I happen to think it diminishes them. So the crisis, the populist crisis that we're going through is likely to intensify because of that. But the answer is push traditional, push digital, and then cannibalize. Well, clearly, I think shared economy is what is being talked about here is going to have a very, very deep and wide impact on large industries. When we talk about other big businesses here forever and what Ruth was saying, we have to innovate all the time. We have to create new models. 4% of world's cars are actually on the roads. Rest of the time, they're sitting in the garage or at home. So in a world of shared economy, what happens to the automobile industry? So if only four or maybe six or 10% of the existing cars are going to be in use, what happens to the entire industry? So there are serious issues that we need to ponder over as large businesses and those changes will not come from large to large. They will come from the uber, the small ones, which will then become very large. Can I posit this though? With the exception of Airbnb and uber and Lyft and a couple of others, the sharing economy, which we talk about all the time, has not had the success that we've all thought. And in fact, if you look at the economics, even of an uber, for example, you could argue that it has been a transfer of wealth from venture capitalists subsidizing all of our rides than it has been a revolutionary change. Now it may happen with technology ultimately in AI and when actually drivers can't drive and we actually have computers driving that we see the true benefit. But it's not clear that despite all of the conversations about the sharing economy, that we've actually gotten there yet. Yeah, I think uberization hits efficiencies and low-hanging food and efficiencies like the two that have been mentioned are there, but I have no desire to have a shared economy in my IP generation, as does the farmer industry, as does Google, as does, I mean, IP-generated industries are asset structures. They're physical and human asset structures that need to be protected, not shared. And so I'm not gonna share it with J.P. Klamadoa from Solve, what Dow invents in our labs. There's no uberization opportunity there. So I think Martin was saying the three buckets. The commoditization cash cow will fund the confluence of digital and new efficiencies based on scale, based on innovation. If you do that smartly, like Alphabet's trying to do what he's doing. And I think that combination is what we're dealing with rather than just a low-hanging food of uberization. We only have about five minutes. So let's try to sneak in as many questions as we can. We're gonna go fast with the questions, fast with the answers. Please have a question mark at the end of your question, if you could. Ma'am in the front, yeah. There's a microphone coming. Hello, I'm Daisy Guo. I'm a global shaper from Shanghai Hub. So I'm running a business that is a startup that we provide creative services to big enterprises through the platform. So I have a question for Martin Zerio, because we were also providing the service to agencies belonging to WPP. But it is essentially from the bottom to top. It's like we approach it to them. So I'm quite curious about the top to bottom strategy from WPP. It's like you building up infrastructure for the startups. Well, we don't do enough early stage, but we have WPP ventures on the West Coast, which is specifically to pick up early stage investments. And then we have a vehicle which looks at mid stage and late stage investments. But we've been very aggressive in investing and making small bets. I don't believe in what I call the plonker strategy, which is to plonk down large amounts of money and take great risk. And somebody mentioned earlier, I think it was Andrew or somebody mentioned earlier that as you grow bigger, the irony about it is you probably take less risk when you're smaller. But what we tend to do with so, we're the second largest shareholder. I think it is in Vice or Vice.com, I should say. After Disney, we've invested in Refinery29 in media rights capital, large number of other companies in order to embrace technology. Now, we do most of that, it is fair to say in the United States, but whether we're talking about India or China or Brazil or Argentina, Argentina we've made a significant investment in Globan. But we are looking at that. So the answer to your question is we're very aggressive in trying to find midterm, late stage and early stage investments. Okay, we're gonna stick in a couple more. Good morning everyone. My name is Anton, I'm from Kazanihab from Russia. It's a very brief question about AI, about artificial intelligence, the product which is very deeply realized in Google and Alphabet right now. But the question actually for manufacturers, what do you think about this according to your social responsibilities as a big companies, as a big nations because these trends in the next future, it will be sort of challenged according to number of your employees. I mean, together with robotics and its development. So what's your opinion, what do you think about this? To Neil, fourth industrial revolution, the other thing of the world's economic form. For me the clear position here is the AI is here now and it's gonna get bigger and wider. It has implications for jobs and I personally believe that we are as a world, as a globe looking at jobless growth. And whatever you may say, you are going to move into UBI and one of the reasons for getting into universal basic income would be the advent and growth of AI. There's a direct correlation. If I could add on that. I think throughout history when we've seen technology change, it is easier to fear the jobs and roles that you see being displaced and it's harder to see those which are being created. And throughout history what we've seen is the impact that technology can have across so many different industries to solve so many big problems, many of which still remain. And when we look at it what we're excited about is that actually technology and machine learning can actually provide support for humanity in solving big problems. We're applying machine learning to education, to training, to life sciences, to understanding diseases, to drug discovery. We're focused as most people hopefully know on self-driving cars. 30,000 people die in the US every year. Over a million people die on the roads globally and self-driving cars can help with that and can help as we look at how do you transform cities to make them more livable. So what we're focused on is how do you use technology to solve problems that actually improve lives for all. Now we do very much think that we have a shared responsibility to ensure that we are helping to create the jobs and work with people from kindergarten on through school to make sure people are getting the education for the jobs of the future. But this we view is actually a source for solving some of these very large problems that still remain. Okay, we're out of time on questions. I have one final one. Literally it's a one word answer for everybody here, which is if we all came back 10 years from now, a decade from now and we had this conversation all over again and I read out the statistic fewer than 10% of the world's public companies account for 80% of all of the profits. Will that number be higher or lower in the future? Andrew, are we getting bigger? So a smaller number generating more of the profit? Yeah. That, that's what I think. That's your one word answer. Well, I feel there will be a shift. The politicians will force the shift. In what direction? And my own belief is that whether it's TFA, the trade facilitation agreement at WTO, subsidies, lower interest rates, lower taxes for the SMEs will help to shift some of that away from large businesses. Martin. Higher unless we shift to the long term. Say that again. Higher unless we shift to the long term. John. Higher too, but I think it will be for the good of the world. I came here the first time in 96. I do believe the world is better today than in 96. So I hope in your 10 years things will be better. Ruth, pour out. I think it can be lower because technology can empower small businesses and provide the ability to take an idea and run with it by leveraging technology, technical infrastructure, the ability of the cloud. And so you don't need to invest in hard assets as much as you did previously to execute on a great idea. OK. I'm not qualified to my hire. Because countries will be like companies. I think we're heading to a world where nation states will be companies. Nation states will be companies. Take that to the bank, everybody. Thank you for the conversation. Thank you for the questions. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, guys. That was fun. That was a lot of fun. Thank you.