Bloomberg India ordered airlines this week to stop selling tickets. Hardly any listened. Four of the country’s top six airlines, which together control 80% of the local market, are selling domestic flight tickets for as soon as the third week of May, searches on their websites showed. That’s despite the government saying no decision has been made on allowing flights ...

Bloomberg United Airlines Holdings Inc raised $1 billion by selling new shares, stepping up efforts to increase capital to survive a collapse in travel demand. The company sold 39.25 million shares at $26.50 apiece, with an option for underwriters to buy an extra 10%, United said in a statement. The price is at the high end of what the stock ...

Bloomberg BOC Aviation Ltd, a Singapore-based aircraft leasing company, is testing bond markets at a time when global passenger airlines are nearly shut due to the coronavirus pandemic. The unit of Bank of China Ltd is marketing dollar bonds at significantly wider spreads than similar debt sold in January. Since that time, the crisis has plunged the aviation industry into ...

Bloomberg The coronavirus outbreak has stalled American retailers’ e-commerce growth, sparked traffic declines and pushed many to lower quarterly guidance, according to a survey published on Wednesday by CommerceNext, which organises conferences for retail and direct-to-consumer marketers. Since mid-February, when coronavirus began impacting the US, about half of retailers said their e-commerce traffic has been trending downward. This is a ...

Bloomberg South African Airways’ (SAA) administrators will be asked to suspend a legal process to dismiss the airline’s entire workforce, a labor union said. Unions with members at the state-owned airline met with South Africa’s public enterprises, labour and tourism ministers in a video conference today after the administrators said they would start talks on retrenchments after the government cut ...

Bloomberg Australian retail sales soared by the most on record in March as households embarked on a buying frenzy, led by massive purchases of toilet paper, ahead of an expected lockdown to contain the coronavirus. Preliminary sales advanced 8.2% last month, exceeding the previous record of 8.1% ahead of the introduction of a consumption tax in 2000, the Australian Bureau ...

Abu Dhabi / WAM Abu Dhabi’s Hub71, the tech ecosystem powered by Mubadala, has been selected by the top US data residency hosting platform, InCountry, to be the home of its Middle East headquarters. This new development marks a strategic move to capitalise on the UAE’s growing cloud market, which Gartner predicts is set to increase by 21 percent year ...

Bloomberg The Kremlin put on a brave face as prices for Russia’s benchmark crude closed in on levels last seen in a devastating 1998 financial crisis. “The pandemonium with futures is absolutely speculative, just a trading issue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday, referring to negative prices on some US futures contracts. “There’s no need to give this ...

ABU DHABI / WAM The trade in food and beverage (F&B) in Abu Dhabi in January amounted to a total value of AED1.2 billion, according to a report by the Statistics Centre-Abu Dhabi on non-oil merchandise trade. This overall value accounted for 7.9 percent of trade in non-oil goods in 2019 totalling AED15.2 billion, as per the centre’s figures. The ...

DUBAI / WAM Careem has introduced a new on-demand service ‘Shops’ to deliver daily essentials, such as groceries, medicine and pet food, to homes across Dubai. The courier service company said customers can shop via the Careem NOW app and a driver will pick up and deliver the purchases in under an hour. In a statement on Tuesday, the company ...