Building a new business model

FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) stocks have added fuel to a booming stock market. But has their success distracted investors from the need to drive growth across the global economy?

Perhaps it's time for corporations and their shareholders to make their own pledge: to design a more sustainable long-term business model that emphasises transformative research and development.

In recent years, investors have grown enamoured of FANG firms - Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google - and other mostly tech-driven disruptors. Their phenomenal investment returns have pushed financial markets to all-time highs, helped along by an unprecedented environment of sustained low interest rates. The ascent of such stocks has shone a light through the slow-growth, high-debt gloom that envelops much of the post-financial crisis world - even as government and consumer scrutiny grows of their practices and market dominance.