International News

  Bloomberg Accor SA, Europe’s biggest hotel operator, is expanding its luxury vacation-rental offering with listings in the Hamptons, Wall Street’s summer playground. The Long Island rentals cost as much as $2 million for the season and are the first launches in the Collections portfolio of Accor’s onefinestay unit, according to a company statement. More sites will be added over ...

  Bloomberg Luxury developer Toll Brothers Inc. has a deal for those shopping for a condo in Manhattan: buy something soon, and we’ll pay the taxes on your purchase. The publicly traded homebuilder is offering to pay the city transfer tax and the New York state “mansion tax” — an effective discount totaling almost 2.5 percent — on deals made ...

  Bloomberg A UK energy-storage startup is aiming to take on Tesla Inc. in the competition to outfit homes with affordable back-up battery power. Powervault Ltd. is preparing to boost production of its lead- and lithium-ion batteries, said Managing Director Joe Warren. The London-based company is targeting sales of 50,000 units a year by 2020, up from about 1,000 this ...

  Bloomberg As the clock ticks toward a takeover deadline, Kraft Heinz Co. faces an uphill battle getting Unilever to negotiate. Publicly, the company has decried Kraft’s $143 billion buyout offer as lacking merit and said there was no basis for further talks. Behind the scenes, Unilever executives have fretted over Kraft’s penchant for slashing costs and lack of vision ...

  Bloomberg AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. promised lawmakers who criticized their planned merger that the combined company wouldn’t withhold programming from rivals to gain a market advantage. “Restricting distribution of Time Warner content would not only sacrifice revenues, but also damage Time Warner’s reputation and relationships in the entertainment industry,” the companies told the lawmakers, according to a ...

  Bloomberg Deere & Co., the world’s biggest maker of farm machinery, raised its 2017 profit outlook and pointed to signs that the worst may be over in a years-long industry slump. Sales of the company’s signature green-and-yellow agriculture and turf equipment will rise about 3 percent in the fiscal year through October, while construction and forestry sales will climb ...

  Bloomberg A US regulator is looking at whether auto finance companies that use sophisticated technology like ignition kill switches are illegally harassing subprime borrowers that have fallen behind on their payments. The Federal Trade Commission, a consumer protection agency, has asked for information from at least two lenders, according to securities offering documents from both companies this month obtained ...

  Bloomberg T-Mobile US Inc. rose as much as 5.3 percent following a report that SoftBank Group Corp. would be willing to give up control of Sprint Corp. if it would help cement a potential merger of the two mobile-phone carriers. SoftBank can’t yet talk to T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom AG, because of a gag rule related to an ...

  Bloomberg Toshiba Corp., seeking to make up for a huge writedown in its nuclear-equipment unit, finally took the drastic step of putting its crown jewel — its chip business — up for sale. Finding a buyer might prove to be even more difficult. The Tokyo-based conglomerate had been entertaining offers for a minor stake in the flash-memory operations, until ...

  Bloomberg Singapore’s economy grew at its fastest pace in more than five years in the fourth quarter, driven by a surge in manufacturing as export demand recovered. Gross domestic product rose an annualized 12.3 percent in the three months to December from the previous quarter, rebounding from a contraction of 0.4 percent, the trade ministry said in a statement. ...