January, 2018

• 27 January

  Russia remains China’s top oil supplier

  

  BEIJING / Reuters Russia held firm as China’s top crude oil supplier in December for the 10th month and racked up its second year as the largest supplier in 2017, customs data showed, leaving rival exporter Saudi Arabia in second place on both fronts. Exports from Russia hit 5.03 million tonnes in December, down 0.2 percent from a year earlier, ...

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• 27 January

  Weakening dollar helps propel oil to 3-year high

  Bloomberg Oil just got an extra tailwind from a weakening dollar as this month is shaping up to be the best January for black gold in 12 years. That’s because when the greenback is losing value, investors tend to flock to commodities as a store of value, and this is coming on the back of a record streak of declines ...

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• 27 January

  Kuwait cuts oil, gas output target

  

  Bloomberg Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co. reduced its output target for oil and natural gas due to the drop in crude prices that started in 2014, Chief Executive Officer Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah said. Kufpec, a unit of state-run Kuwait Petroleum Corp., revised its production goal for 2020 to 150,000 barrels a day of oil equivalent from 200,000 barrels a ...

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• 27 January

  Genel Energy expects drop in production for third year

  

  Bloomberg Iraqi Kurdistan-focussed Genel Energy expects oil and gas production to fall for a third year in 2018, it said, as it shifts its focus to two new gas fields. The decline in production is due to a continuing slide in output from the Taq Taq field, once considered Genel’s flagship field, after the well hit water in 2016. Genel’s ...

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• 27 January

  Big tech takes repentance tour to Davos to fend off backlash

  

  Bloomberg Google’s top executive said the search giant would welcome higher taxes. Uber Technologies Inc.’s new CEO said it must be more accommodating with regulators. Salesforce.com Inc.’s veteran leader Marc Benioff said Silicon Valley has been arrogant and compared Facebook to the tobacco industry. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, technology executives struck a conciliatory note in ...

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• 27 January

  Strike threat looms at Daimler, Siemens as union wage talks fail

  

  Bloomberg Germany’s most powerful union IG Metall failed to reach a labour deal for some 3.9 million workers in Europe’s largest economy, setting the stage for potentially disruptive 24-hour strikes at industrial giants from Siemens AG to Daimler AG. Talks with IG Metall broke off with no deal after 16 hours of negotiations, employer organisation Suedwestmetall said. The union, which ...

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• 27 January

  Uber chief targets profitability by 2022

  

  Bloomberg Uber Technologies Inc., whose losses have piled up in the quest for growth around the world, will be profitable in three years as its ride-hailing business matures and the company reaps the rewards from investments in areas such as autonomous vehicles, said Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi. Bending the company’s financial trajectory out of the red would be a ...

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• 27 January

  Starbucks tumbles most in 6 months

  Bloomberg Starbucks Corp.’s US slowdown has gone global. The coffee chain posted disappointing sales growth in all its major regions, signalling that it now has bigger problems than an overly saturated US market. The results from the quarter that ended on December 31 sent shares down the most in six months. “Our holiday merchandise and limited-time offers did not perform ...

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• 27 January

  Ford heads for treadmill as unfit automaker’s profit sags

  

  Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. has stepped onto the scale and found it’s out of shape. The automaker signalled it’s even more resolute in the diet prescribed by its new CEO after reporting another underwhelming profit. Ford hasn’t coped well with rising costs because of bloat within its product lineup and engineering budget. Ford “should still be performing at a higher ...

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• 27 January

  Banks prepare for battle as Europe plans rules to cut risk

  

  Bloomberg European banks may have scored a victory in having the Basel III capital standards toned down, but that doesn’t mean they can rest on their laurels. There are more battles to come in 2018, in particular lobbying lawmakers on a series of measures designed to reduce risk in the system. The regulations are deemed a vital step towards the ...

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