SoftBank invested $5bn in Didi’s record funding round

  Bloomberg SoftBank Group Corp. has contributed $5 billion to last month’s record $5.5 billion fundraising by Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing. SoftBank Group Capital Ltd., an investment arm of Masayoshi Son’s technology empire, contributed $2 billion to last month’s record fundraising by Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing. SBGC invested the money in Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc., the formal name for ...

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Gold imports by India rises four-fold in April

  Bloomberg Gold imports by India gained more than four-fold in April driven by jewelers restocking in anticipation of a recovery in sales during the wedding season that will last till mid-June. Shipments rose to 98.3 metric tons last month from 22.2 tons a year earlier, according to a person familiar with provisional data from the finance ministry, who asked ...

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Hyundai Heavy breakup paves way for more deals

  Bloomberg The world’s second-largest shipbuilder has split itself into four companies, a move that would facilitate a potential sale of some of the businesses. Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. started trading as four entities on Wednesday as the conglomerate tries to insulate the group from a financial crisis at any one of its divisions. The breakup splits the operations into ...

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China factory price gains more sluggish that forecasts

  Bloomberg China’s producer price gains slowed more than expected in April, adding to signs of a potential easing of global reflation fueled by the world’s second-largest economy. Producer price index rose 6.4 percent from a year earlier, versus a 6.7 percent Bloomberg survey estimate and 7.6 percent gain in March. Consumer price index climbed 1.2 percent, versus 0.9 percent ...

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China’s belt-road plan may top $500bn

  Bloomberg China could pour more than half a trillion dollars into its Belt and Road Initiative, and the push for greater global influence looks even more promising with US President Donald Trump pulling back from engagement, according to Credit Suisse Group AG. The plan could funnel investments worth $313 billion to $502 billion into 62 Belt-Road countries over the ...

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Canada’s largest gas-station owner may set sights on US

  Bloomberg In the past five years, Parkland Fuel Corp. has more than tripled its market value by snapping up gas stations, propane distributors and other types of fuel sellers across Canada. Its next wave of acquisitions may be in the US. Since Chief Executive Officer Bob Espey took the helm in 2011, Parkland has struck 18 deals valued at ...

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Price boom far from over in $450bn Danish mortgage market

  Bloomberg After half a decade of negative interest rates, Denmark’s housing market looks like it can only move in one direction: up. Michael Rasmussen, the chief executive officer of Nykredit Realkredit A/S, the biggest Danish mortgage lender, says the “tailwind” looks like it will last. “We have a strong real estate market and we, of course, benefit from that. ...

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On re-examination, the euro doesn’t look so bad

  It’s always worth re-evaluating one’s views, and my latest revision is that the euro currency is better and less vulnerable than I had thought. I still believe its creation and later expansion were mistakes, but I now see them as much smaller mistakes than before. Many of the biggest costs lie in the past, so the euro might be ...

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Why Buffett hasn’t delivered a big deal

  There’s certainly no shortage of cash lying around at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Even so, Warren Buffett’s struggle to find the $407 billion company’s next meaningful acquisition shows that his relative buying power has diminished. If you attended or streamed the shareholder meeting on Saturday, you heard a lot about Berkshire’s soaring cash pile, which stood at $96.5 billion as ...

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Goofing off at work masks rising productivity

  In his new book “The Complacent Class,” my Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen mentions that more Americans may be slacking off at work. He offers this as one more measure of the comfortable malaise into which American culture has settled. But it also occurs to me that if leisure is replacing effort at work, it means that the country ...

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