Opinion

After a horrid start to the year, UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti finally got some relief. Switzerland’s biggest bank posted its best second quarter results under his watch. Unfortunately, the likelihood that the stars will remain aligned is remote. At $1.4 billion, net income in the three months through June was the highest since 2010, comfortably beating ...

Nokia Oyj started as a single paper mill in 1865. In recent years, it’s the stock that has been through the mill, as the maker of telecommunications equipment has ebbed and soared with each burst of spending on next generation mobile networks. Chief Executive Officer Rajeev Suri has steadily toiled away to drag the Espoo, Finland-based company through to the ...

Things aren’t so desperate for Huawei Technologies Co. after all.Just over a month ago we were told that the Chinese electronics giant was hunkering down for a drop of as much as 60 million units in overseas handset shipments this year. That was quite a blow, I wrote at the time, considering that consumer devices accounted for 45 percent of ...

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the likely successor of Chancellor Angela Merkel, took over as Germany’s defense minister. In a speech to parliament outlining her priorities, AKK, as she is known, said she would “hold fast” to the goal of increasing country’s defense spending to 2 percent of economic output — but that Germany would aim to attain military spending of 1.5 percent ...

When will Boeing Co.’s 737 Max return to the skies? It’s anybody’s guess. The aerospace giant said that it was planning for an early fourth-quarter return for the jet, giving investors hope that it had turned the corner on the crisis that’s engulfed the best-selling plane following two fatal crashes. But in the earnings call, executives threw out an alternative ...

One of the toughest corporate strategies is managing a declining asset while investing in promising but nascent ones. It’s such a well-known difficulty that famous books have been written about it. This management balancing act might be even tougher in technology. If a company has a slow-growing or declining tech asset, often it simply dies or gets taken over by ...

“They call him Britain Trump!” Such was the US president’s ungrammatical reaction to Boris Johnson’s nomination as the UK’s new prime minister. “They like me over there…He’ll get it done.” If “it” means channelling the fire and the fury of Trump’s hostile rhetoric, without really guaranteeing much in the way of concrete results, this analysis is eerily accurate. What it ...

Supply-chain finance is the secret sauce behind Citigroup Inc.’s mid-20percent return on equity from transaction banking. That might sound counterintuitive, especially in Asia. The export-led region is facing the brunt of supply dislocations as the US-China trade war intensifies. But the skirmish isn’t a showstopper for financing. As production moves from one country to another, transactions that need to be ...

You’ve got to feel for the world’s biggest suppliers of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory).Makers of these chips, which temporarily store information in PCs, smartphones and services, endured years of boom-bust profit swings and bruising competition long before the trade war began. The sector finally consolidated into just three companies holding 95percent of global supply of DRAM. And yet earnings stability ...

For all the anxiety about America’s retreat from the world, a vital US institution is becoming more global than ever. While the Federal Reserve’s impulse to juice the economy is laudable, it’s worth asking whether this mission creep is sustainable. Or even desirable, over a long horizon. The Fed, whose policymakers meet this week to set interest rates, lacks a ...