The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.

Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG is expecting long-haul travel to finally pick up this year alongside loosening Covid-19 restrictions and vaccine take up, giving some cause for optimism after a second-quarter loss of 952 million euros ($1.13 billion). North America could open up from late summer with Asia following from the end of the year, the company said in a statement. …

Bloomberg PepsiCo Inc is to sell Tropicana, Naked and other juice brands to French private equity firm PAI Partners for about $3.3 billion as it seeks to bolster its balance sheet and focus on healthier snacks and zero-calorie drinks. The US drinks giant will retain a 39% noncontrolling interest in a new holding company for the brands and has also …

Bloomberg Odey Asset Management has sold its stakes in Ryanair Holdings Plc and British Airways’s (BA) owner International Consolidated Airlines Group, the Daily Mail reported, as the UK airline industry prepares for further job cuts. Fund manager James Hanbury sold his IAG holding after shares rebounded, the paper said. IAG rose 8.5% this year while Ryanair added 3.4%, both outperforming …

Bloomberg Sourabh Saini, a delivery driver for Indian online supermarket BigBasket, is thrilled by the attention he gets as he zips around Noida, a satellite city on the outskirts of Delhi, in his three-wheeled electric van. “I like how my electric van always gets noticed,” said Saini, who made the switch from fossil fuels about eight months ago as part …

Bloomberg The pound is about to enter a new era of strength against the euro, thanks to the Bank of England’s (BOE) hawkish turn. Traders have raised the odds of a rate hike in February to 60% after the BOE made clear last week that it’s beginning a countdown to end the era of rock-bottom borrowing costs. And it’s given …

Bloomberg Ecuador’s central bank doubled its emergency credit line with the Bank for International Settlements to $840 million as a precautionary measure in case of a downturn, its governor said in an interview. The credit line is part of efforts to strengthen the bank after previous administrations used its funds for government spending, Guillermo Avellan said. Those actions hurt the …

Bloomberg The creation of central bank digital currencies to address economic inequality with new retail loan and payments channels must be designed so they don’t “cannibalise” a country’s commercial financial system, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. If set up hastily, retail CBDCs could risk “disintermediating commercial banks” and lead to the exodus of 20% to 30% of their funding …

Bloomberg Westpac Banking Corp has agreed to sell its life insurance unit to Dai-ichi Life Holdings Inc’s Australian subsidiary TAL for $660 million as Australia’s second-largest lender continues to jettison non-core assets to focus on lending. The completion of the transaction, confirming an earlier Bloomberg report, is expected to happen in the second half of next year, Westpac said. Under …

Bloomberg Citigroup Inc has sold the first of 13 markets Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser put on the block, agreeing a deal to offload its Australian consumer unit to National Australia Bank Ltd. The Australian lender will pay the US bank cash for the net assets of the Citigroup Consumer Business plus a premium of A$250 million ($184 million), according …

Bloomberg India’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged at a record low to support the economy, even as a split appeared among policy makers on continuing with the lower-for-longer stance. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) six-member Monetary Policy Committee retained its main repurchase rate at 4%, as predicted by all 29 economists in a Bloomberg survey. Policy makers voted …