August, 2018

• 4 August

  Kraft Heinz narrowing list of bidders in $1 billion India sale

  

  Bloomberg Kraft Heinz Co. has narrowed the list of bidders for a portfolio of Indian businesses it’s selling that includes the children’s milk drink Complan, people with knowledge of the matter said. Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate, and Dabur India Ltd., the $11.3 billion consumer-goods company, are among suitors selected for the second round of bidding, according to the people. ...

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• 4 August

  Senators slam Google over ‘China search engine’

  

  Bloomberg A group of Republican and Democratic senators slammed Alphabet Inc.’s Google over reports it is developing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market. China critic Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, was joined by five other lawmakers on a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding answers about the proposed “Dragonfly” search engine. “If true, ...

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• 4 August

  Fiat Chrysler seeks to block Mahindra jeep knock-off in US

  

  Bloomberg Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV filed a US trade complaint seeking to prevent Indian automaker Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. from importing an off-road vehicle that looks similar to its iconic Jeep. The Fiat Chrysler group filed the complaint on August 1 at the US International Trade Commission, claiming that the Mahindra Roxor infringes key characteristics of Jeep’s signature trade dress ...

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• 4 August

  The EU whispers sweet nothings to Theresa May

  

  With only eight months left until Brexit, the UK government has become desperate for a transition deal. For all the talk of stockpiling food and medicines, no self-respecting politician would take the country through the economic calamity of a “cliff-edge” Brexit. The prime minister is doing the rounds to promote her “Chequers” blueprint, which includes a free trade area for ...

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• 4 August

  US consumers could ‘feel the pinch’

  

  The earnings season three months ago raised one key question for corporate America: Did companies have the pricing power to respond to rising freight and commodity costs by raising their own prices? This quarter’s earnings season is providing an answer: Yes. So companies are going to raise prices. That aims to protect their profit margins. At whose expense? The whole ...

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• 4 August

  Kraft Heinz’s Buffett glow may be fading

  Kraft Heinz Co. represents all that is wrong with aspects of corporate America. So why does Warren Buffett like the stock? The US markets and economy may be holding up, but there’s a corner of the business world with an unsettling combination of factors: few growth opportunities, resistance to new customer trends, ruthless cost-cutting to make up for revenue shortfalls, ...

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• 4 August

  Treasury’s big, backward and bold idea for taxes

  The Treasury Department is apparently looking into using its regulatory power to change the way taxes on capital gains are assessed. The idea is to confine the taxes to real, inflation-adjusted gains, not nominal gains, as now. There’s a particle of sense in this notion, but it’s buried miles deep in bad faith and bad economics. The change would amount ...

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• 4 August

  Honey, I shrunk $1trn Apple’s profit margins

  

  Apple Inc has been a profit geyser well before it was valued at the $1 trillion milestone the company reached . Even Warren Buffett is impressed. “It is an unbelievable company,” the legendary investor and Apple stockholder said in May as he marveled that Apple earns almost twice as much as the second-most profitable company in the US. Buffett is ...

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• 4 August

  Japan Inc needs to start paying for performance

  

  Almost three decades ago, the Texan oilman T. Boone Pickens attempted to charge into a Japanese boardroom. He had accumulated around one-third of the company – worth almost $1 billion at the time – yet a seat at the table eluded him. There was nothing to force the directors to accept him. Japan Inc has come a long way since ...

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• 4 August

  Cars keep getting better, making disruption harder

  

  Tesla Inc announced its second-quarter results. Those results, along with Elon Musk’s apologies to analysts for his rudeness three months earlier, pushed its stock price up and 2025 bond yields down. During the earnings call, Musk and his colleagues said “improve” or “improvements” 14 times in describing everything from Tesla’s production lines to its in-car computing to its gross margins. ...

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