Bloomberg Some of the world’s biggest fund managers are ratcheting up the pressure on oil and gas companies, expressing fear that a lack of action over tackling climate change could risk their investments. The comments come days before Big Oil kicks off annual shareholder meetings, where they are already facing calls from smaller investors to set clear targets on climate ...

Bloomberg BP Plc and ConocoPhillips are in discussions for an asset swap deal that would see the UK energy major gain a greater foothold in a key project in the North Sea and the US explorer get Alaskan assets, according to people familiar with the talks. BP is considering taking Conoco’s 24 percent interest in the Clair field, in which ...

Bloomberg Environmental groups opposed to US natural gas exports just found an unlikely ally: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The government agency that regulates futures and options markets found that shipping gas overseas could raise costs for Americans. Domestic prices could rise as much as 20 percent due to the burgeoning industry that liquefies gas so it can be shipped ...

Bloomberg The technology boom powering Asia’s economies is about to get a reboot. Explosive growth in new-era gadgets such as wearable devices and internet-linked home appliances is tipped to offset cooling sales of smartphones, which has already dinged Asia’s tech manufacturers. “Where demand may be softening in some areas it will be strengthening in others,” Koshy Mathai, a senior official ...

Bloomberg China’s biggest Netflix-like streaming site finally has a plan to get into the rapidly expanding arena of social and user-generated short-form videos. But iQiyi Inc. reckons it’ll take as long as three years to get there. The Baidu Inc. spinoff had long recognised the potential but chosen to focus on its core business out of necessity, iQiyi Chief Executive ...

Bloomberg Japan’s Preferred Networks Inc. has only one publicly available product, a whimsical application that uses artificial intelligence to automate the coloring of manga cartoons. Yet the four-year-old firm has become Japan’s most valuable startup, with a venture capital funding that priced it at more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Toyota Motor Corp., its biggest ...

Bloomberg BMW AG offered another glimpse of its futuristic self-driving iNext car as the German manufacturer seeks to gain momentum in the race to overtake rival Mercedes-Benz in luxury car sales. The company, showing the iNext in a copper-colored version for the first time in 2016, will offer a more concrete concept of the vehicle this year, Chief Executive Officer ...

Bloomberg The first video-game built using technology developed by Improbable Worlds Ltd., the virtual reality startup backed by SoftBank Group Corp., has been released by British developer Bossa Studios. Worlds Adrift uses Improbable’s SpatialOS software, which lets programmers create realistic simulations of massive scale and complexity and run across a cloud-computing network. Softbank acquired a non-controlling stake in London-based Improbable ...

Bloomberg Emerging-market central banks are going on the defensive. A surging dollar and the highest 10-year US Treasury yields since 2011 are fuelling bets that policy makers in key developing nations from India to Mexico will raise interest rates faster than economists previously anticipated. The turnaround is led by concern that a failure to tighten monetary policy risks the possibility ...

Bloomberg Slower-than-expected UK growth this year won’t stop the Bank of England from at least one interest-rate increase, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Output will stutter to 1.4 percent from 1.8 percent in 2017, the median forecast showed, slightly lower than the 1.5 percent previously forecast. Nearly 60 percent of economists see a hike at the August meeting. ...