The legal battle that’s starting between Waymo, the self-driving car spin-off of Google’s former “moonshot” unit, and ride-hailing giant Uber appears to be all about trade secrets and patents. But there is a bigger issue behind it: Silicon Valley ethics and employee loyalty. The Waymo lawsuit contends that a former employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded 9.7 gigabytes of sensitive data ...

  No one should be surprised about job cuts at Jasper Infotech Pvt’s Snapdeal. The Indian media have chronicled the struggles facing the country’s e-commerce industry, including executive departures and lower equity valuations, and I foreshadowed trouble back in July in looking at rescinded job offers for college students. Shining a light on these valuation hiccups and stumbles is important ...

  A big day is coming for the faithful followers of the Oracle of Omaha. Warren Buffett’s annual letter is due out, and he’s expected to take up the long-simmering debate about active versus passive investing. Buffett has a somewhat complicated relationship with that debate. On the one hand, he is the most famous — and arguably the most successful ...

  Bloomberg British Airways-owner IAG SA is looking at acquiring more long-range narrow-body planes in order to open up inter-continental routes where demand is insufficient to support bigger twin-aisle jets. IAG has already ordered seven LR variants of the Airbus Group SE A321neo for trans-Atlantic services at Irish unit Aer Lingus and is evaluating plans for a wider roll-out that ...

  Bloomberg Business-jet shipments tumbled to a 12-year low last year because of slow economic growth and probably won’t rebound until 2018 when new models debut. Deliveries fell 7.9 percent last year to 661 from a year earlier, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association. Sales tumbled 16 percent to $18.4 billion as demand for higher-priced large and medium aircraft ...

  Bloomberg Airbus SE expects African operators to buy about 990 new planes over the next two decades to meet increasing demand for passenger and freight services on the continent. While making up only 3 percent of overall global demand, the planes will more than double the number of such aircraft on the continent, according to Airbus’ vice president for ...

  Bloomberg J.C. Penney Co. plans to shutter as many as 140 stores and trim thousands of jobs, becoming the latest department-store chain to make big moves in a world of lower mall traffic and fierce online competition. The closings represent as much as 14 percent of the company’s store base and less than 5 percent of total sales, J.C. ...

  Bloomberg After years of Amazon.com Inc. drubbing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in e-commerce, the brick-and-mortar chain is beginning to push back. Wal-Mart posted its third straight quarter of double-digit online growth, which helped its holiday results top estimates. The world’s largest retailer is benefiting from last year’s acquisition of Jet.com, a $3.3 billion deal that reinvigorated a flagging e-commerce business ...

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc posted annual profit that missed analyst estimates as the bank took losses on a private-equity business it’s shutting down and said efforts to clean up conduct issues affected performance. The shares fell as much as 5.4 percent. Pretax profit for 2016 was $409 million, compared with a loss of $1.52 billion a year earlier, the ...

  Bloomberg Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce climbed in Toronto trading after posting fiscal first-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates and raising its dividend for the ninth time in 10 quarters. CIBC shares advanced 2.1 percent to C$120.62 at 9:52 a.m., the best performance in the eight-company S&P/TSX Composite Commercial Banks Index, which gained 0.4 percent. The stock is trading ...