International News

­­­­­­­­­­­Bloomberg The angry birds at Rovio Entertainment Oy are set to lay a golden egg for the company’s founders. The firm is planning an initial public offering as early as next month that could value the maker of the Angry Birds mobile games and movie at about $2 billion, said people familiar with the matter. The company could raise about ...

Bloomberg In a sign that dealmaking in the financial-technology sector may be heating up, a German fintech firm has made the rare move of acquiring a startup to beef up its customer base. Deposit Solutions GmbH, a Hamburg-based company that enables consumers to move their savings around a network of 15 European banks to find the best interest rate, on ...

Bloomberg Securitas AB is replacing its chief executive officer with an insider who’s almost two decades his junior to steer Sweden’s biggest security company through a paradigm shift from manned guarding to big data and artificial intelligence. Magnus Ahlqvist will take over as CEO in March next year after Alf Goransson asked to step down after more than a decade ...

Bloomberg Google isn’t the only Silicon Valley employer being accused of hostility to white men. Yahoo! Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. were already fighting discrimination lawsuits brought by white men before Google engineer James Damore ignited a firestorm—and got himself fired—with an internal memo criticising the company’s diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to ...

Bloomberg Portugal’s economic growth decelerated more than forecast in the three months through June, expanding at the slowest pace in a year. Gross domestic product rose 0.2 percent from the first quarter, when it expanded 1 percent, the Lisbon-based National Statistics Institute said in a preliminary report on Monday. That fell short of the 0.6 percent increase predicted by economics ...

Bloomberg Netflix Inc. signed a multiyear contract with Shonda Rhimes, poaching the creator of the hit TV series “Scandal” and “Grey’s Anatomy” from Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network. Rhimes will produce new series and other projects, the companies said in a statement on the Netflix website. She will continue her existing work with ABC, but all new developments by her ...

Bloomberg Japan’s second-quarter gross domestic product data put the nation in an unexpected spot: at the top of the growth table among Group of Seven advanced economies. The strongest domestic demand in years helped drive Japanese GDP to a sixth consecutive quarter of expansion, elevating hopes for a sustainable recovery in an economy that’s been better known in recent years ...

Bloomberg Alibaba and Tencent can count themselves among the world’s costliest technology companies after a stellar run. To justify those lofty valuations, China’s two largest corporations have to deliver on some of the riskiest bets they’ve placed in years. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which created China’s largest online bazaar but has scant brick-and-mortar experience, spent $8 billion investing in a ...

Bloomberg Toshiba Corp.’s talks to sell its chips business to a consortium led by Bain Capital hit an impasse over the timing of payments for the business and governance issues, according to people familiar with the matter, casting doubt on the company’s ability to complete a deal quickly. The Bain group wants to make cash payments after Toshiba resolves a ...

Bloomberg China’s home sales grew last month at the slowest pace in more than two years amid regulators’ moves to rein in soaring prices. The value of new homes sold rose 4.3 percent to 779 billion yuan ($117 billion) in July from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. ...