The world’s largest beef producer joined a chorus of Cassandras this week signaling the end of alternative meats. Meat giant JBS SA killed its Planterra business in the US and shut down a 190,000 square-foot Colorado facility producing plant-based products. Yet the closure was gravely shortsighted. It reflects a crisis of confidence at a time when investors should be ...
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Investors place too much trust in flattering numbers
What’s a profit? A recent ill-tempered television appearance by the co-founder of home-flipper Opendoor Technologies Inc., Keith Rabois, showed just how far we have drifted from a common understanding of earnings. Rabois, a Miami venture capitalist, was irritated by his interlocutor’s (not unreasonable) suggestion that Opendoor is loss-making. Net losses total $1.7 billion since inception, according to the latest ...
Read More »Why UK pension funds are this much exciting
Pension funds are supposed to be among the least exciting financial institutions. Their job is to make long-term investments to meet the predictable needs of future retirees. They should be immune to short-term shocks. Yet last week in the UK, they were the center of an incipient financial crisis. What led to this was a novel variation on a ...
Read More »Cathay Pacific needs another 1,000 flight attendants by ’23
Bloomberg Just over 1,000 people have signed up for Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd.’s flight attendant recruiting drive, around half of the 2,000 targeted by the end of 2023, underscoring the labour challenges the airline faces as it seeks to fully restore flights in and out of the Asian financial hub. Cathay said it was satisfied with the expressions of ...
Read More »Levi cuts 2022 profit forecast on softening demand, strong dollar
Bloomberg Levi Strauss & Co reported quarterly revenue that fell short of expectations, and the denim maker also reduced its outlook for the full year, citing economic uncertainty along with supply-chain disruptions and a stronger US dollar. Revenue in the fiscal third quarter ended August 28 was $1.52 billion, below the $1.6 billion average estimate of analysts surveyed by ...
Read More »F-35 deliveries to resume after Chinese alloy prompted halt
Bloomberg Deliveries of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 will resume after the Pentagon’s acquisitions chief issued a “national security†waiver from a ban on a Chinese alloy used in a component on the fighter jet. The component — a magnet in a device supplied by Honeywell International Inc. — has been used in the plane since 2003. After the Chinese ...
Read More »United plans to resume Hong Kong flights from January
Bloomberg United Airlines Holdings Inc. is planning to restart Hong Kong flights as soon as January, according to people familiar to the matter, becoming one of a handful of major airlines to resume passenger flights to the city, which has largely been cut off to the outside world since the start of the pandemic. The Chicago-based carrier is evaluating ...
Read More »Partnerships don’t always put customer first, says American
Bloomberg American Airlines group Inc’s top commercial officer said the airline hadn’t focused on customers in creating its earlier corporate partnerships, validating the suspicions of many disgruntled air travellers. Testifying with unusual candour during Justice Department’s antitrust trial seeking to block American’s partnership with JetBlue, American’s chief commercial officer, Vasu Raja, said customers were an afterthought compared to business and ...
Read More »US to screen air travellers for Ebola
Bloomberg The US will begin redirecting travellers from Uganda to five airports to screen for Ebola, as the East African country grapples with an outbreak of a strain of virus for which there is no approved vaccine. The notice is not a travel ban or suspension on those coming from Uganda, but is being put in place out of ...
Read More »Russia races to reopen Crimea bridge damaged in fiery blast
Bloomberg President Vladimir Putin’s flagship bridge to Crimea was severely damaged in a blast that hit a fuel train and caused the partial collapse of the only road link running from the Russian mainland to the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014. Local authorities raced on Saturday to reopen one lane of the Kerch Strait Bridge to ...
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