1.DAIMLER:-Daimler AG Â reported a higher quarterly profit on Friday despite a 30% drop in Mercedes-Benz unit sales due to a global semiconductor chip shortage, as it focused on more profitable cars and cut costs, and said it should meet its 2021 profit targets.
The German premium carmaker said it expects chip supplies to improve in the fourth quarter and that the “overriding structural shortage of semiconductors is expected to remain an issue in 2022 but should improve compared to 2021”.
But the company warned that “it remains difficult to deliver an accurate forecast on how the supply situation will continue to develop.”
The chip crunch has pummeled the auto industry for much of this year. Carmakers, which shuttered plants as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold last year, have found themselves competing against the sprawling consumer electronics industry for chip supplies.
2.VOLVO :-Geely-owned automaker Volvo Cars said its initial public offering (IPO) was substantially oversubscribed as it geared up for its bourse debut in Stockholm later on Friday.
Gothenburg-based Volvo Cars, owned by Geely Holding which will retain the vast majority of shares in the company, said the IPO would see it add more than two hundred thousand new shareholders.
“The offering was substantially oversubscribed as it attracted strong interest from institutional investors in Sweden and abroad as well as from the general public in the Nordics,” the carmaker said in a statement.
The IPO had already been priced at 53 Swedish crowns ($6.22) per share and the sale of nearly 380 million new shares will provide Volvo with gross proceeds of about 20 billion crowns to help fund its shift to an electric-only model line-up.
3.APPLE:-Supply chain woes cost Apple Inc $6 billion in sales during the company’s fiscal fourth quarter, which missed Wall Street expectations, and Chief Executive Tim Cook said that the impact will be even worse during the current holiday sales quarter.
Cook told Reuters on Thursday the quarter ended Sept. 25 had “larger than expected supply constraints” as well as pandemic-related manufacturing disruptions in Southeast Asia. While Apple had seen “significant improvement” by late October in those Southeast Asian facilities, the chip shortage has persisted and is now affecting “most of our products,” Cook said.
“We’re doing everything we can do to get more (chips) and also everything we can do operationally to make sure we’re moving just as fast as possible,” Cook said.
Cook said the company expects year-over-growth for its quarter ending in December. Analysts expect growth of 7.4% to $119.7 billion.
4.BOSCH :German technology group Robert Bosch has earmarked more than 400 million euros ($467 million) for investments in microchip production in Germany and Malaysia next year to ease a global shortage.
A lack of chips for automakers has disrupted vehicle production around the world, with suppliers relying almost exclusively on chips from only a few manufacturers in Asia and the United States.
The largest part of Bosch’s budget will be spent on a faster expansion of its Dresden, Germany factory for 300-millimeter wafers, which the group inaugurated in June, it said in a statement on Friday.
About 50 million euros will be invested at a site in Reutlingen near Stuttgart making 200-millimeter wafers, said the company, which also makes car parts and factory automation systems.
Another project to be funded will be the construction of a semiconductor testing facility in Penang, Malaysia, it added, without specifying the level of investment.
Intel , the biggest maker of processor chips for PCs and data centres, said last month it could invest up to 80 billion euros in Europe over the next decade.
5.PFIZER :-Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE said on Thursday they expect to deliver 50 million more doses of their COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. government by April-end, as the country prepares to vaccinate children.
The move comes after a panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration voted on Tuesday to recommend its authorization for the vaccine in children aged 5 to 11. The agency’s decision on the vaccine for the age group is awaited.
If authorized and subsequently recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) advisory panel, the companies said they expect to then begin shipping the vaccine immediately, in 10 microgram pediatric doses, as directed by the U.S. government.
The U.S. government has so far secured 600 million doses of the vaccine for use within the country and additional 1 billion doses for donation to low- and lower-middle-income countries.
The drugmakers said they expect initial clinical trial data on the vaccine’s use in children — aged 2 to less than 5 years, and 6 months to less than 2 years — is expected in the fourth quarter this year or early first quarter of 2022.
