Bloomberg “We are always looking at acquisitions,” Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told analysts last month. “There’s not a size that we would not do.” It’s a message he’s increasingly stressed over the past year as investors question how the world’s most valuable technology company plans to use its $246 billion cash pile to meet ambitious sales ...

  Bloomberg Nestle SA’s new Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider said it will take years to return to the growth rates targeted by his predecessors and will consider exiting underperforming businesses if he can’t fix them. The world’s largest food company forecast revenue will increase 2 percent to 4 percent on an organic basis this year, below a long-held goal ...

  Bloomberg Investors counting on a bidding war to drive up the price of German drugmaker Stada Arzneimittel AG well past its $3.66 billion in market value may be out of luck. The German maker of generic medicines this week said it had two offers, including one from Cinven Ltd. valuing it at about 56 euros-a-share. And people familiar with ...

  Bloomberg Alphabet Inc. named broadband executive Gregory McCray to lead its Access subsidiary as the company tries to develop a new strategy for the internet-communications business. With the appointment, the Access unit, which includes the high-speed Fiber internet service, is getting slimmer. Several hundred employees are moving over to Alphabet’s main Google business, according to a person familiar with ...

  Bloomberg Serbia needs to stop subsidizing unprofitable state companies to lock in progress the largest former Yugoslav republic has made in cutting the budget, staunching one of the largest drains on state coffers, the local head of the International Monetary Fund said. “Fiscal costs from loss-making state-owned enterprises need to be plugged,” said Sebastian Sosa in an Belgrade interview ...

  Economists are increasingly turning their attention to the problem of monopoly. This doesn’t mean literal monopoly, like when one utility company provides all the power in a city. It refers to market concentration in general — when an industry goes from having 20 players to having only 10, or when the four biggest companies in an industry start taking ...

  Part of Warren Buffett’s mystique is his fondness for a good value. He still lives in an Omaha house he bought in the 1950s. Buffett’s license plate at one point read “Thrifty.” When it comes to Apple Inc., however, Buffett’s firm isn’t exactly plucking from the bargain bin. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. first disclosed a $1 billion stake in Apple ...

  Is Europe heading back to financial mayhem? Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras warned this week that it might be. Any further delay in reaching agreement between Greece and its creditors, he said, risked a new recession and a fresh crisis of confidence across the euro zone. Maybe that’s a little alarmist — but he’s right about one thing. ...

  US President Donald Trump on Wednesday did about-face on Palestine-Israel conflict. He abandoned the US policy on ‘two-state’ solution for Middle East peace. Trump, during a joint White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held back from clearly supporting an independent Palestinian state. Trump said he would be open to a Mideast peace agreement that doesn’t ...

  Why does everything cost so darn much? More to the point, why does it cost so much more than it used to? Well, not everything costs more than it used to. Food is cheap. Electronics are absurdly cheap: I can get a clock radio on Amazon today for not much more than I would have paid in 1965 (before ...