International News

Bloomberg British firms that get foreign direct investment (FDI) are more productive, especially small and medium-sized businesses. Experimental data from the Office for National Statistics showed that small firms that received money from overseas were 147.2 percent more productive on average than their counterparts. Medium firms saw a 197.4 percent boost, the report said. While just 1.1 percent of British ...

Bloomberg Sonos Inc., the wireless speaker pioneer taking on Amazon.com Inc., Google and Apple Inc., plans to raise as much as $264.1 million in its upcoming initial public offering. While the wireless speakers market is booming — Sonos says its customers listen to about 70 hours of content a month — competition has increased since the company introduced its first ...

Bloomberg Google is still raking in marketing dollars from advertisers, propelling the online search giant to another strong quarter in the face of costly regulatory trouble in Europe. The shares jumped as much as 6.1 percent in extended trading, putting them on course for a record. Parent company Alphabet Inc. reported second-quarter sales, minus partner payouts, of $26.24 billion during ...

Bloomberg Italian coffee maker Illycaffe SpA has attracted interest from suitors including JAB Holding Co. and Nestle SA, but the family owners have so far rebuffed approaches, according to people familiar with the matter. JAB, which has built a coffee empire through a series of acquisitions, is interested in acquiring all of the Trieste-based coffee roaster, according to the people, ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. will double the amount of space it occupies in London as technology firms continue to expand in the UK. The new office buildings in the city’s King’s Cross district will have room for more than 6,000 people, compared with a target of 2,300 workers by the end of this year. Facebook’s statement did not say how many ...

Bloomberg Apollo Global Management LLC will buy hospital chain LifePoint Health Inc. for $65 a share, expanding the private equity firm’s ambitions in rural health care. The deal values LifePoint at $2.52 billion, or $5.6 billion including debt and a minority interest, the firms said in a statement. The price is a 36 percent premium to where LifePoint shares closed ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s food delivery platform Ele.me plans to spend $443 million this quarter trying to wrest customers from Meituan Dianping. Ele.me wants to command more than half of all food delivery transactions in China over the short- to medium-term, according to Chief Executive Officer Wang Lei, who took the reins after Alibaba acquired the startup this year. ...

Bloomberg The bruising telecommunications price war unleashed by the entry of India’s richest man into the sector may continue for at least a year or as long as it takes Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. to nearly double its user base. Ambani’s telecom unit “will strive to double subscribers to 400 million before raising prices,” Kunal Agrawal, a Hong Kong-based analyst ...

Bloomberg China unveiled a package of policies to boost domestic demand as trade tensions threaten to worsen the nation’s economic slowdown, sending stocks higher. From a tax cut aimed at fostering research spending to special bonds for infrastructure investment, the measures announced following a meeting of the State Council in Beijing are intended to form a more flexible response to ...

Bloomberg Japan’s manufacturing sector lost steam in July as demand for exports weakened. The Nikkei Japan Purchasing Managers Index for manufacturers for July showed a preliminary reading of 51.6, the lowest since November 2016, and down from 53.0 in June. Output came in at 52.4, down from 53.6, and the index for stocks of finished goods fell. A reading above ...