Alibaba Shares Rise After Jack Ma Cedes Control of Ant Group
Shares of Alibaba Group Holdings are higher following news that co-founder Jack Ma is ceding control of affiliate company Ant Group Co., potentially paving the way to revive plans for an initial public offering by the fintech giant.
Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares advanced as much as 8.3% in early trade Monday, widening its year-to-date gains to 27%. Shares are outperforming a 1.7% gain in the city's broader Hang Seng Index and helping lift the city's tech index by 3.0%. Alibaba is a shareholder of Ant.
Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment
Machinery manufacturer Deere & Co. signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation on Sunday that the group said ensures farmers can repair their own farm equipment or take it to independent repair shops.
The agreement addresses a debate that has grown in recent years, as the farm industry has implemented high-tech equipment like software and sensors in machinery like tractors and harvesters aimed at boosting harvests and speeding planting.
Google Might Need to Be Un-Google-Like
Google doesn't like to do layoffs. It might still find that it has to.
The internet giant has been avoiding the tech layoff trend so far. Salesforce announced cuts affecting about 8,000 employees last week, following a raft of reduction plans from a swath of tech players. Layoffs are falling especially hard on Google's main competitors in the online advertising business. Combined cuts at Facebook-parent Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, Snapchat's parent Snap and Twitter total about 34,000 workers, according to disclosures from the companies and reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX Aims to Increase Launches as Rivals Prep New Rockets
SpaceX is pushing to increase its flight rate this year as competitors work to debut new vehicles for the launch market.
The rocket-and-satellite company Elon Musk leads is aiming to conduct up to 100 orbital flights in 2023, Mr. Musk said in a tweet last August. That would represent a 64% jump compared with the 61 missions the company handled last year-itself the top number among private and government rocket launchers around the world, according to a new report from astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks global space flight.
Developing Nations Aren't Ready for EVs-Unless They Are Made in China
KORAT, Thailand-When Wimonsiri Boonyopakorn's husband moved to Bangkok for work, the 35-year-old schoolteacher decided to buy a car so she could make the 160-mile trip to visit him on weekends.
She was surprised to find several electric vehicles from Chinese manufacturers that cost less than gas-powered cars of a similar size.
Elon Musk Seeks to Move Trial Over Tesla Tweets, Saying San Francisco Jurors Are Biased
Elon Musk is seeking to have a coming securities-fraud trial involving his conduct running Tesla Inc. moved out of San Francisco, arguing that negative publicity surrounding his use and recent management of Twitter has biased local jurors against him.
San Francisco's jury pool has been "exposed to excessive and adverse pretrial publicity concerning Defendant Elon Musk that will deprive him of an impartial jury and his constitutional right to a fair trial," Mr. Musk's attorneys argued in a Friday court filing.
Worst May Be Over for Macau Casinos, but Challenges Remain
HONG KONG-Macau's struggling casinos are poised for a recovery, say analysts, with visitors from mainland China expected to surge after the country reopens its borders Sunday.
Longer term challenges remain as they face burdensome new operating licenses designed to finally cure the city's addiction to gambling.
The Race to Build the 'Yellowstone' Universe
FEELY, Mont.-Helen Mirren had her shoes off and her feet propped close to a hissing propane heater. With co-stars Harrison Ford and Timothy Dalton she was huddled in a nook of a hollow building, a film set that looked like a stately stone-and-timber lodge on a snowy hill outside Butte, Mont. The actors were keeping warm while running dialogue for an outdoor scene they had tried in vain to shoot two days earlier, when subzero temperatures made it impossible for them to enunciate their lines.
It was early December, winter was bearing down, and a premiere date was looming in two weeks for "1923," a big-budget TV series saddled with two mandates. The first: to pull audiences deeper into the stories linked to the most-watched series on television, "Yellowstone." The second: to do so on deadline as Paramount Global, the company behind "Yellowstone," races to capitalize on the show's popularity and fix a major gap in its streaming-television inventory.
GE's Spinoff Deserves Healthy Skepticism
Healthcare spinoffs are everywhere you look these days.
Just in the first week of January, Johnson & Johnson's consumer unit Kenvue officially filed for an initial public offering, GE's newly spun-off healthcare unit started trading and Baxter announced plans to spin off its kidney care unit. Swiss giant Novartis, meanwhile, is working on spinning off its generic Sandoz business.
FTX Seeks to Recoup Sam Bankman-Fried's Charitable Donations
Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX doled out millions in charitable donations. Now, new management is asking for it back.
Some of the money, however, has already been spent, and the gifts flowed through myriad sources and agreements that are proving difficult to tally.
Wall Street Sets Low Bar for Corporate Earnings Season
The stock market faces its next big test this week with the kickoff of a corporate earnings season that is expected to be dominated by worries about inflation and the health of the economy.
Analysts expect companies in the S&P 500 to report their first year-over-year decline in quarterly earnings since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, according to FactSet. Fourth-quarter profits are projected to have dropped 4.1%, a sharp reversal from the more than 31% growth logged a year earlier.
Retiring Chicago Fed President Sees Path for Slower Pace of Rate Rises
A long-serving Federal Reserve official set to retire from the central bank next week said he was hopeful milder inflation data would allow for the Fed to return to raising interest rates in more traditional quarter-percentage-point increments at its next meeting.
Tech Industry Reversal Intensifies With New Rounds of Layoffs
A new wave of tech layoffs signals how executives in the industry are pivoting from a growth-above-all mindset to protecting their bottom line.
After a bruising 2022 in which companies from small startups to tech giants slammed the brakes on expansion, some of the biggest names in the sector are demonstrating that an era of austerity is only beginning, with expenses scrutinized and moonshot projects abandoned. Amazon.com Inc. and Salesforce Inc. both announced plans for layoffs in the past week.
Higher Rates, Tech Selloff Fuel Options Boom
Investors trying to capitalize on higher interest rates and the deep selloff in big technology stocks are stoking a flurry of activity in the options market.
Popular stocks such as Amazon.com Inc. and Nvidia Corp. lost about half of their value in the past year, raising the worth of some options tied to those shares. Their share declines have been much steeper than many investors wagered, creating a mountain of deep in-the-money put option contracts-or those that allow investors to sell the shares at a price that is now far above current levels.
Foreign Investors Are Leery of China Bets, Despite Rebound Expectations
Market strategists say the stars are aligned in 2023 for Chinese assets to stage a comeback-but a return of foreign capital may take longer.
Foreign investors have pulled more than $100 billion out of China's bond market since February, according to two major Chinese clearinghouses. They have also dramatically slowed their investments in the country's stock market. Foreign institutions bought a net $13 billion worth of yuan-denominated shares last year via a Hong Kong stock-trading link, down sharply from $63 billion in 2021.
German Industrial Production Rebounds
Germany's industrial production rose in November after contracting in October, suggesting some resilience in the country's factory sector midway through the fourth quarter despite high energy prices and slowing global demand for goods.
Industrial output--comprising production in manufacturing, energy and construction--increased by 0.2% in November after falling by a revised 0.4% in October, data from the German statistics office Destatis showed Monday.
Eurozone Unemployment Rate Remained at Record Low in November Despite Slowing Economy
The eurozone jobless rate was stable in November at its record low, highlighting resilience in the labor market despite slowing economic growth.
The eurozone unemployment rate stood at 6.5% in November, unchanged from October, data from the European Union's statistics agency Eurostat showed Monday. This is the lowest level of the historical series, which dates back to 1998.
Swiss National Bank estimates it'll record $143 billion loss
Fixes the size of the 2021 profit.
The Swiss National Bank on Monday estimated it will lose 132 billion francs ($143 billion) for 2022, reportedly the largest in its history.
House Republicans Turn Focus to Spending, China After Dramatic Speaker Vote
WASHINGTON-The House will dive into its first week of substantive work with bills to cut Internal Revenue Service funding and investigate economic competition from China, after a leadership election that underscored Republican divides and the fragile position of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).
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