January, 2019

• 9 January

  Mercedes 2018 sales growth dips

  Bloomberg Growth in Mercedes-Benz car deliveries tumbled to the lowest in a decade last year in a swift reversal from double-digit gains after sales in Europe and North America declined. Daimler AG’s luxury brand delivered 2.31 million cars worldwide in 2018, a rise of just 0.9 percent almost entirely driven by China. The small uptick probably was still enough to ...

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• 9 January

  Union Pacific surges as COO hiring dazzles

  

  Bloomberg Union Pacific Corp surged the most since 2009 after hiring a protege of railroading legend Hunter Harrison to guide the company’s shift to a new efficiency strategy. Jim Vena, 60, will become chief operating officer on January 14 and oversee the implementation of precision sche- duled railroading, a system pioneered by Harrison and adopted by Union Pacific late last ...

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• 9 January

  IBM expects revenue from quantum computing soon

  

  Bloomberg International Business Machines Corp took another step towards bringing the world of quantum computing to commercial applications — and CEO Ginni Rometty sees real results coming as soon as 2021. “We’re probably in a two- to five-year time frame that you’ll actually start to see commercial businesses doing real commercial applications,” Rometty said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. ...

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• 9 January

  No ‘emergency’ will allow Trump to build his wall

  

  President Donald Trump has said that he can declare a national emergency and order his border wall to be built. He’s wrong. The US Constitution doesn’t contain any national emergency provision that would allow the president to spend money for purposes not allocated by Congress. And it’s clearer than clear that Congress not only hasn’t authorized money for a wall ...

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• 9 January

  China has ignored this iPhone alert

  

  A slowing economy and relatively high prices have been highlighted as chief culprits behind the slump in demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhones in China. There’s a third factor that’s been overlooked: the end of easy money. Apple last week cut its quarterly revenue forecast for the first time in almost two decades, blaming weak sales in Asia’s largest economy. Cheaper ...

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• 9 January

  Tech’s brave investors should look at Samsung

  

  Samsung Electronics Co. missed analyst estimates for fourth-quarter operating profit by 22 percent, the most in two years. That shortfall may be as much a function of sell-side analysts’ financial modeling as Samsung’s inability to deliver stronger earnings. Buy-siders, for example, have been selling down the stock since the middle of the third quarter, an indication that they saw tough ...

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• 9 January

  Italy’s revolution is gone in 480 seconds

  It took Italy’s populists just eight minutes to renege on one of their flagship stances. The coalition government gave its go-ahead to a bank bailout, saying it is willing to recapitalise Banca Carige, a troubled mid-sized lender, if needed. The plan smacks of hypocrisy. For years, the Five Star Movement has accused its political opponents of using public money to ...

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• 9 January

  Calling time on Ghosn not a moment too soon

  

  Where did Nissan Motor Co. end and the world of Carlos Ghosn begin? It’s unclear after his decades-long reign. “I have dedicated two decades of my life to reviving Nissan and building the Alliance,” Ghosn told a Tokyo court on Tuesday in his first appearance since his arrest, according to a prepared statement. He had worked “day and night, on ...

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• 9 January

  In Brexit Britain, taking back control means the opposite

  

  Prime Minister Theresa May likes to insist that her Brexit deal means Britain will “take back control” over its borders. But with just three months to go before the UK leaves the European Union, the very opposite is happening. Control is being outsourced, not taken back. The money and skills needed to create Britain’s post-Brexit infrastructure are making the country ...

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• 9 January

  Industrial investors in US should proceed with caution

  

  Fourth-quarter earnings tend to be an afterthought for investors in the US industrial giants. By this point in time, they usually have a good sense of the year that was and have already heard from companies on the near-term outlook. Not this year. Investors don’t have the same assurances headed into this earnings season and will be parsing the numbers ...

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