As Somali pirates become ever more audacious, they are regularly portrayed in the press as vicious aggressors, taking innocent people hostage, only to auction them off at vast ransoms. There is much truth in that: on Thursday one pirate band hijacked a US-bound oil tanker even as it emerged that another had killed two Filipino crewmen in late January after a botched rescue mission. But there is another way to assess these buccaneers: as businessmen, who have smartly figured out the way trade is flowing, and how to get their share.
The booming piracy industry is a neat metaphor for our globalised economy. Just about everything you need to know about how money is made and lost is encapsulated in the daily battles between cargo captains and the pirate skiffs in the Somali basin.
For starters, know your customer. One of the keys to understanding the modern multinational is to realise it hates embarrassment. Bear in mind that when faced with any challenge, whether from a lobby group, government or nerdy teenager on Twitter, its instinctive response is to crumple. Then imagine what it will do when confronted with poor people with guns: give in without a fight. Sure enough, most shipping companies don’t even allow their guards to bear weapons. It is not the kind of thing Human Resources wants to get involved in. All the pirates have to do is take a ship, steer it to harbour, then ask for a few million dollars for its return. So long as they don’t hurt anyone – and usually they don’t – they have understood that a modern multinational will always pay up, to make the problem go away.