In an extraordinary intervention, Donald Trump blocked Broadcom’s hostile bid for Qualcomm on national-security grounds. Based in Singapore but with half its staff in America, Broadcom had been pursuing its rival chipmaker for months. To defend itself, Qualcomm had turned to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which recommended that Broadcom should be stopped. The president’s order is based on a fear that allowing Qualcomm to fall into foreign hands would boost China’s role in global chipmaking.
The end of a forgotten era
Blackstone, one of America’s private-equity titans, revealed that China’s sovereign-wealth fund had sold its holding in the firm. The stake had been purchased in 2007, the first time the Chinese fund had invested commercially in America, eliciting hopes at the time of closer business ties between the two countries.
The securities regulator in China slapped a 5.5bn yuan ($871m) fine on the country’s largest private owner of cargo railcars for manipulating the share price of three companies it had invested in. It was the largest penalty handed down by the regulator to date, equivalent to 70% of the fines it dished out in total last year.
Larry Kudlow was given the job of Mr Trump’s economic adviser, following Gary Cohn’s resignation in the wake of the president’s imposition of steel tariffs. Mr Kudlow is a conservative broadcaster who may be more in tune with Mr Trump’s economic agenda than Mr Cohn was. He worked in Ronald Reagan’s budget office and describes himself as a “supply-sider”. See article.
The identity of the likely successor to Lloyd Blankfein as chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs became clearer when Harvey Schwartz abruptly stepped down as co-president, leaving the path clear to the top job for David Solomon, the other co-president. Mr Blankfein has led the bank since 2006.
The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was once a darling of Silicon Valley, $500,000 to settle claims of fraud. Theranos fell foul of regulators in 2015 amid revelations that it had misled investors. Ms Holmes agreed to settle the charges without admitting wrongdoing. See article.
Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison, after being found guilty last August of securities fraud related to hedge funds he once ran. Mr Shkreli is notorious for increasing the price of some medicines by up to 5,000% at a drugs company he founded, earning him the sobriquet of America’s “most hated man”.
Dropbox priced its forthcoming IPO at between $16 and $18 a share. That values the file-sharing service at up to $7.9bn, much less than the $10bn it was thought to be worth at its last round of fundraising in 2014.
Following a similar decision by Facebook, Google said it would ban advertisements for crypto-currencies such as bitcoin across all its platforms, including YouTube and its display-ad network.
Tesla beware
Volkswagen laid out plans for the “massive expansion” of its range of electric cars. The German company will open 16 production sites within five years in Europe, China and America to make electric vehicles, with a goal of selling 3m a year by 2025. It also announced partnerships with manufacturers to supply car batteries to Europe and China. Meanwhile, GEM, a battery-recycling firm in Shenzhen, signed a contract with Glencore to provide it with 50,000 tonnes of cobalt, a key element in car batteries. That is half the total amount of cobalt produced worldwide last year.
Unilever chose Rotterdam as the site for the headquarters of a new unified company. It is a symbolic blow to the British government, which had hoped the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group would keep its headquarters in London. The company denied that the decision was connected to Brexit. See article.
In a complex transaction that reshapes Germany’s power industry, E.ON and RWE agreed to swap assets in a deal that leaves E.ON as an operator of energy networks with a large retail presence and RWE as a producer of renewable energy. Utilities have been forced to reconfigure their businesses in response to the government’s Energiewende policy, which directs them to pivot towards renewables. See article.
Shop till someone else drops
Under pressure from Amazon in the mushrooming market for online food shopping, Walmart announced that it will extend its grocery-delivery service to more than 100 American cities. Instead of using its own drivers Walmart will employ transport startups, including Uber.
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