Antarctica to Hobart: Ponant’s ultra-luxury icebreaker is headed Down Under

The world’s first ultra-luxury icebreaker is charting a course for Hobart, bringing billionaires, scientists and an idea born over dinner in Brittany to Australia’s edge.  In 2015, over dinner and a bottle of wine in Brittany, France, a handful of Ponant executives discussed an idea that sounded implausible. They wanted a ship strong enough to […]

Winter Sports World Peter Magnisalis

Chinese operator signs on for Australia’s largest tourism development

Australia’s first indoor snow resort has taken a step forward, signing a partnership with global Chinese operator Bonski Group — a move its developers say positions western Sydney for a new era of tourism investment. Key Takeaways Key Background Winter Sports World, a $700 million indoor snow resort planned for Penrith in western Sydney, has […]

Saluda

Saluda’s long journey towards hitting the ASX pain barrier

Saluda had a disastrous debut on the ASX on Friday, shedding half its value. But here’s the inside story of resilience in the company that learnt how to read signals going up the spinal cord and to turned them into pain relief. Saluda founder John Parker has just delivered a talk at an international biomedical […]

Esper founders Shoaib Iqbal and Przemyslaw “Joey” Lorenczak.

The startup that used JB Hi-Fi parts to get four satellites into orbit

Two Melbourne engineers turned undergrad frugality into a superpower, leveraging their Forbes Australia 30 Under 30 listing into a space up and comer. At an age when most engineering grads are still polishing their LinkedIn pages, Shoaib Iqbal, 25, and Przemyslaw “Joey” Lorenczak, 28, have put four hyperspectral sensors into orbit for less than the […]

Car_t

The Australian biotechs racing toward the next billion-dollar cancer drug

There’s a revolution going on in cancer treatment with more than 1,000 clinical trials underway into CAR-T therapies promising an immune response up to 1,000 times stronger than ordinary immune cells. Chasing a market worth billions, we take a look at three Australian biotechs with their elbows out. “We take your immune cells, we engineer […]

QuickBooks

Australian small business leaving $35 billion on the table

QuickBooks has launched a new “virtual team” of AI agents in Australia to help small businesses recover billions in unrealised growth, with new research showing inefficiency costs the sector an average of $209,000 per firm each year. Key Takeaways Key background Intuit QuickBooks, the dominant global player in small-business accounting software, is pushing harder into […]