International News

Bloomberg SoftBank Group Corp. and Saudi Arabia formally announced the first round of capital commitments for the largest- ever technology investment fund, as founder Masayoshi Son seeks to accelerate his financing of cutting-edge technologies and startups. More than $93 billion has been secured from backers led by the Japanese company and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, SoftBank said in a ...

Bloomberg Samsung Electronics Co.’s security guards once dragged a bespectacled professor out of the building after he heckled the chief executive officer for not doing anything when the chairman was accused of making illegal political donations. Thirteen years later, the professor — Kim Sang-jo — has the backing of South Korea’s new leader to hold the biggest conglomerates accountable in ...

Bloomberg The Polish government’s hopes to get special treatment from the European Union for its coal-dependent economy may be quashed by the bloc’s strict approach to limiting the dirty fuel. The EU’s largest eastern economy needs to build more coal-fired power plants to avoid blackouts and an economic slump, Poland’s energy minister said in the southern city of Katowice. That ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. plans to cut about 10 percent of staff worldwide as Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields faces escalating pressure to boost profit and a lagging stock price, the Wall Street Journal reported. The job cuts are expected to be outlined as early as this week and mostly target salaried employees, the newspaper said, citing unidentified people briefed ...

Bloomberg The UK will quit talks on leaving the European Union unless the bloc drops its demands for a divorce payment as high as 100 billion euros ($112 billion), Brexit Secretary David Davis said. Britain’s negotiations would otherwise be plunged into “chaos,” and even a 1 billion-pound settlement wo- uld be “a lot of money,” Davis said in an interview. ...

Bloomberg Glencore Plc Chief Executive Officer Ivan Glasenberg said the rise of electric cars will significantly boost demand for minerals including copper and lithium in the coming decades. “The electric vehicle revolution is happening and its impact is likely to be felt faster than expected,” Glasenberg told investors at an industry conference in Barcelona. Almost all carmakers are increasing investm-ent ...

Bloomberg China buys more raw materials than any nation, but that doesn’t mean it always gets the best prices. So the government is altering domestic commodity exchanges to bring in more foreign investors and expand the country’s influence on global markets. Two decades of rapid economic growth have left the world’s biggest population consuming more food, energy and metals than ...

Bloomberg A residential plot in Singapore may fetch a record price for a government land sale, with a Chinese consortium putting in the highest bid at S$1 billion ($718 million). Logan Property (Singapore) Co. and Nanshan Group Singapore Co. submitted the highest bid in the Stirling Road land auction, according to a statement from the Urban Redevelopment Authority. The winning ...

Bloomberg Billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s mining company may be asked to pay as much as $1.2 billion to former partner Vale SA after choosing not to attend an arbitration hearing in London in a dispute over one of the world’s richest mineral assets, two people with knowledge of the case said. The decision by Steinmetz’s BSG Resources Ltd. to back out ...

Bloomberg The UK may find itself in a rare position of becoming a net impo- rter of wheat this season. Imports have exceeded demand in recent months, and if that continues the nation could finish the season that ends in June as a net buyer, according to the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board. That’s only happened three times in the ...