July, 2018

• 7 July

  Glencore is in the hole, but it keeps on digging

  

  Glencore Plc’s announcement of a $1 billion stock buyback was short on both wit and colour. So allow me to hazard a rough translation: “Don’t worry, we’re rich and our share price should be much higher.” Faced with the unwelcome attention of the US Department of Justice, most companies would be inclined to batten down the hatches. But, just a ...

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• 7 July

  Praxair’s $6bn gas assets hand Japan a solid win

  Japanese acquirers aren’t known for underpaying. So the country’s top industrial-gas producer looks to have lucked out in buying the European cast-offs of the $45 billion merger between Germany’s Linde AG and Praxair Inc of the US. Praxair agreed to sell assets valued at about 5 billion euros ($5.9 billion) to Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp as part of efforts to ...

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• 7 July

  Tests are not the only stress on Wall Street

  

  Wall Street is booming. Mergers and acquisitions are happening at a record pace this year. Initial public offerings are making a comeback. Volatility — the lifeblood of any good trader — is creeping back into markets. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in March that Wall Street’s average bonus jumped 17 percent in 2017 to $184,220, the highest since ...

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• 7 July

  Is KKR building what phone giants couldn’t?

  

  As our appetite for data booms, private equity firms are betting on the cell towers and cable infrastructure to support it. The prize looks to be in creating the pan-European giant that has so far eluded the region’s telecoms industry. For years, Europe’s carriers have struggled to consolidate across the continent in the same way as their US counterparts. But ...

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• 7 July

  Robots will make life grim for the working class

  

  Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and one of the pioneers of the world wide web, once declared: The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Andreessen has since repudiated this declaration, and taken a more optimistic stance. But economists, ...

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• 7 July

  Drone deliveries become reality in China

  

  Bloomberg The day after Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc.’s mid-year sale, a company drone took off from a playground in the city of Xi’an to deliver one of the orders in a football-sized box to a village in the mountains to the south. The six-rotor craft is one of about 40 JD.com designed to cut delivery times for items such ...

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• 7 July

  Japan Display bets big on dashboard flash for drivers

  

  Bloomberg Fully digital screens are replacing speedometres and dials in vehicles, making industry leader Japan Display Inc. optimistic about boosting sales to global carmakers. While most new models usually have a centre information panel for maps, entertainment and other functions, manufacturers are also increasingly replacing the dashboard facing the driver with a flat screen. Look inside the latest BMW or ...

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• 7 July

  Baidu unveils AI chip for self-driving bus

  Bloomberg Baidu Inc. has unveiled an artificial intelligence(AI) chip to run intensive computing in everything from datacentres to autonomous driving, as the Chinese search giant prepares to launch its first self-driving vehicles in Japan. The AI chip, “Kunlun”, joins rival efforts from tech giants around the world, including local peers such as networking giant Huawei Technologies Co. search rankings. Baidu’s ...

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• 7 July

  Despite trade war, China EV-maker forges ahead with US push

  

  Bloomberg Byton, the Chinese electric-vehicle startup founded by former BMW AG executives, is forging ahead with plans to enter the US market even as the trade war casts a cloud of unpredictability for the push. The company plans to begin production of its $45,000 electric SUV in 2019 and still targets a US entry in 2020, CEO Carsten Breitfeld said. ...

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• 7 July

  BOE sees reversal of decade-long slump in Britain’s productivity

  

  Bloomberg Increasing investment by firms in technology means the UK’s abysmal productivity growth should soon start to recover, according to a Bank of England (BOE) staff blog. A shortage of skills and labour is acting as a catalyst for firms to introduce productivity-boosting technology such as automation, said Will Holman and Tim Pike, who work in the central bank’s division ...

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