Is the knife falling on a revolutionary kitchen staple? Shares in global brand Tupperware plummeted this week, prompting fears that without a liquidity injection the household icon could go bust, reports the BBC. The company saw a brief reprieve in sales of their air- and water-tight containers during the covid-19 pandemic as more households spent time cooking and baking at home, but the share price rise was only temporary. And with an easily copied product, Tupperware has been unable to keep up with competition in a market that has been flooded with cheaper alternatives — nor has the brand shown a willingness for innovations that would help grow and maintain its customer base. Yet, as a brand whose name has outstripped its product, Tupperware could be attractive to retail giants, like Amazon, with the ability to inject funds rapidly.

Despite inspired a cultural revolution, Tupperware is going out of fashion: Created during the 1950s and 1960s, Tupperware harnessed housewives to sell its products through parties that glamorized dull housework, says Alison Clarke, author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. At that time, containers could only be bought if you knew someone selling them, making the products and parties exclusive, and hosting Tupperware parties gave a source of employment to women with little access to flexible labor. The scheme was retired in 2003, but the brand has done little in terms of further innovation to the plastic containers, which are now at odds with a new market of young consumers, looking for more environmentally-friendly products.

The Middle East beckons: Silicon Valley tech investors are pursuing the region’s sovereign wealth funds to fill the financing gap, the Financial Times reported. As American and European financiers are reeling from the worst financial crisis in a decade, there’s growing appetite for tech investments in countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar who are actively pursuing economic diversification. “We came to San Francisco looking for them in 2017. Now … everyone is coming to [us],” Ibrahim Ajami, the head of ventures at Mubadala Capital — the USD 6 bn arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund — was quoted as saying.

KSA’s spending spree: Sanabil, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), has partnered with nearly 40 venture firms in the US including Coatue Management and Craft Ventures. In 2016 alone, PIF invested USD 45 bn in the USD 100 bn SoftBank Vision Fund and USD 3.5 bn in Uber. In 2018, it shelled out another USD 1 bn on electric vehicle (EV) company Lucid Motors. But that investment cooperation came to an abrupt halt when politics got in the way in 2018 after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Money talks: After a boom in the industry during covid-19, the subsequent drying up of funds in the West has significantly altered the course of investments. Over the past year, VC funding for start-ups has decreased by more than 50%, prompting Silicon Valley to mend its ties with KSA.

Now, the kingdom is being heralded as a “start-up country” by Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Private VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose ties with the Kingdom have been warming lately.

And more is yet to come: The region is expected to “become an increasingly important area of the world over the next decade. It reminds us of going to China in 2003,” Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer was quoted as saying.

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