It might be tempting to think that the era of big financial risks went out with the old year, which capped off a decade that gorged itself nearly to death on easy credit and wishful thinking.
But thinking big has not gone completely out of fashion. The difference these days is that vaulting ambition is now likely to go hand in hand with cautious pragmatism.
James Cameron’s science-fiction epic “Avatar” is estimated to have cost anywhere from $250 million to $500 million. Even for a director with a track record that includes “Titanic,” which grossed $1.8 billion worldwide, it was a huge and risky undertaking. But as The Times reported, Mr. Cameron and his investors hedged their bets.
The studio that produced the film, 20th Century Fox, enlisted private equity partners, took advantage of tax rebates in New Zealand and relied on technological and marketing help from Panasonic. The goal was to protect Fox from the kind of cinematic debacle that has bankrupted studios in the past.
The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is showing a different kind of conservative grandiosity in reinventing its enormous corporate campus in Basel. Its chief executive, Daniel L. Vasella, has hired a roster of famous architects like Frank Gehry and Rafael Moneo to build 10 new office and research buildings, with up to seven yet to come. As Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The Times, “The procession of architectural treasures is laid out like jewels in a display case.”
But it is a carefully controlled form of ostentation: The buildings are arranged in neat symmetry along the campus’s central thoroughfare, each of them conforming to a five-story height restriction, and the campus itself is largely closed to the public. Mr. Vasella said that, unlike monuments to ego built by corporate chieftains of yore, the buildings were designed first with the needs of employees in mind. “We build for real people,” he told Mr. Ouroussoff. “We don’t build for machines.”
Machines figure heavily, however, in another massive project - China’s $3.4 billion deal for copper mining rights in Afghanistan. The risks are obvious in a country still torn by violence and rife with corruption. And as Michael Wines reported in The Times the potential rewards are colossal: the Chinese hope to extract 10 million metric tons of copper over the next 25 years.
While its own money is at stake, Beijing has a silent partner of sorts in the government and military of the United States. Although there is no American involvement in the mine project, it represents the kind of outside investment that Washington sees as vital to the long-term stability of Afghanistan. As one Western official told Mr. Wines, “To the extent that the Chinese bring Afghanistan up to speed and start paying a billion dollars a year in royalties, that would mean that Afghanistan is on a firmer ground to start paying for its own security.” The two countries, in other words, are hedging each other’s Afghan gambles.
Still, grand plans, even carefully calibrated ones, can lead to grand successes. Just ask James Cameron and 20th Century Fox. By the end of December, after just two weeks in theaters, “Avatar” had already taken in an estimated $760 million worldwide. You don’t make that kind of money by thinking small.
JESSE FOX MAYSHARK
