Bloomberg Uber Technologies Inc. is in early talks to buy food-delivery company Deliveroo for several billion dollars, according to people familiar with the plans. A bid for London-based Deliveroo, last valued at more than $2 billion, would mark a major attempt by Uber to dominate the food-delivery business in Europe. An acquisition price is unknown. Any offer would need to ...
Read More »â€˜Angriest man’ creates tariff headache for made-in-USA bikes
Bloomberg Arnold Kamler has experienced the trade dispute between President Donald Trump and China first hand, and is trying to respond as quickly as possible. His company, Kent International Inc., assembles about 400,0 00 bikes annually at its factory in Manning, South Carolina. But this is no shield from the latest round of tariffs, since — in an effort to ...
Read More »Trump’s trade war enters a dangerous new phase
As the US-China trade war escalates, with both parties imposing higher tariffs on the other, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross tried to defuse some of the tension. Because America’s 10 percent tariff on some $200 billion worth of Chinese imports is “spread across thousands and thousands of products,†he noted, “nobody is going to actually notice it at the end ...
Read More »Forget robots, retailers need people power
The ongoing fight for talent in the retail industry appears to be kicking into higher gear. Bloomberg News’s Matthew Boyle wrote that Walmart Inc. has surveyed workers about whether perks such as child-care services or gym memberships would be “meaningful†to new hires. It’s just the latest example of a growing focus on the workforce. J.C. Penney Co. is reportedly ...
Read More »May sends Brexit message to skeptics
With the European Union summit in Salzburg this week viewed in the UK as a failure for Theresa May’s Brexit plan, the UK prime minister felt the need to issue a clarifying statement. In it, May did what she always does in negotiations: She doubled down. It was a statement for two different audiences. Her message to Europe was simple: ...
Read More »Crazy rich Asians are so yesterday in China
There’s a new breed of spender in charge of China’s wallets, and it’s not crazy rich Asians. The rise of Pinduoduo Inc. and the decline of JD.com Inc. are good proxies for this shift. Founded three years ago, the e-commerce site Pinduoduo processed 262 billion yuan of transactions in the second quarter, just 40 percent shy of JD’s gross merchandise ...
Read More »Saving the planet doesn’t mean killing growth
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a few countries got fabulously rich. These included most of Europe, parts of East Asia, some small oil producing states and parts of the former British Empire. In recent decades, more of the world — large parts of China, portions of India, Southeast Asia and part of Latin America — have joined the rich ...
Read More »China goes for broke in Indonesian e-commerce
China’s deep-pocketed internet giants are fighting a turf war in Indonesia, where e-commerce sales could surpass India’s as soon as 2020. The only problem is that there’s almost no path to profitability. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and JD.com Inc. already back four of the top five online-shopping startups in Southeast Asia’s most populous country. In March, Alibaba ...
Read More »Don’t blame business for slow wage growth
Are wages determined by market forces, or do businesses get to decide what pay they offer to workers? This question gets at the heart of a lot of the debate about the economy. Why has wage growth been so sluggish for so many years? If you’re on the market-forces side of the wage question, you might answer that productivity growth ...
Read More »Aston Martin confirms ‘003’ supercar for 2021
Bloomberg Aston Martin has confirmed plans to build a hybrid supercar code-named “003.†It’s the third high-performance, mid-engine car the private equity- and Kuwaiti-owned company will have built in recent years, following the $2.6 million Aston Martin Valkyrie and Valkyrie AMR Pro (called “001†and “002,†respectively) that debuted in 2017. The announcement comes as the brand plans to go ...
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