International News

  Bloomberg Lonza Group AG agreed to buy US capsule maker Capsugel SA from KKR & Co. for $5.5 billion, as the Swiss biotech and specialty chemicals company seeks to focus more on health care. The price includes refinancing of existing Capsugel debt of about $2 billion, Basel-based Lonza and Capsugel, which has headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, said in ...

  Bloomberg US factory output dropped in November for the first time in three months, showing an anemic recovery in manufacturing after an extended slowdown. Production at factories, which make up 75 percent of all output, fell 0.1 percent, a Federal Reserve report showed Wednesday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 0.2 percent drop. Total industrial ...

  SAN FRANCISCO / AP Uber is bringing a small number of self-driving cars to its ride-hailing service in San Francisco — a move likely to excite the city’s tech-savvy population and certain to antagonize California regulators. The Wednesday launch in Uber’s hometown expands a public pilot program the company started in Pittsburgh in September. The testing lets everyday people ...

  Bloomberg France’s top corporate finance chiefs are getting lessons on the specifics of acquiring startups in a push by a state-backed investment fund to triple tech deals in the country within three years. Chief financial officers from France’s biggest companies, from banks to industrial conglomerates, are learning to pin a price tag to a startup, spot when a company ...

  Bloomberg Amazon Web Services, the cloud-hosting arm of Amazon.com Inc., opened new data centers in the UK as it seeks to stay abreast of competitors in offering cloud computing services to government and health-care customers. The new data centers, announced in a statement on Wednesday, follow decisions by IBM and Microsoft Corp. in the past two months to expand ...

  WASHINGTON / AP The US industrial production dropped sharply in November, mainly because power plants reduced output due to unusually warm weather. The Federal Reserve reported Wednesday that output at America’s factories, mines and utilities fell 0.4 percent last month. It was another sign that American industry is struggling even as the overall US economy looks healthy. The Federal ...

  Bloomberg Line Corp. is planning to shake up its staff and business to build on the 20-plus percent share gain since the messaging company pulled off the tech world’s biggest public offering of the year. Chief Executive Officer Takeshi Idezawa is tapping top lieutenants Jun Masuda and Joongho Shin to lead the hunt for fresh growth ideas. Their new ...

Bloomberg Nowcast Inc., a Japanese financial research and technology startup, has developed a product that estimates economic growth in real time by using satellite images of night-time lights. Based on algorithms that examine changes in the intensity of illumination, as well as a range of published statistics including industrial production and trade, the Tokyo-based company can accurately forecast changes in ...

  Bloomberg South Korea’s youth unemployment rate rose to a record high in November, following political protests that paralyzed the government and led parliament to vote to impeach the president. The unadjusted jobless rate for people aged 25 to 29 rose to 8.2 percent in November, up from 8 percent in October and 7.4 percent a year earlier, Statistics Korea ...

Bloomberg Industrywide demand for passenger vehicles in India will be depressed for a few months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unprecedented cash clampdown, according to senior executives at Tata Motors Ltd. and Honda Motor Co. The cash crunch, following the withdrawal of high-denomination banknotes, has hurt consumer sentiment and is expected to continue through March, Mayank Pareek, president of passenger ...