1.BANK OF AMERICA:-Gulf exchanges are likely to have another busy year of initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2022, possibly surpassing this year’s bumper crop, a Bank of America executive told Reuters.
After a year that featured three major IPOs on both Abu Dhabi’s ADX and Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul markets, Dubai has announced plans to list as many as 10 state-owned companies.
“We expect ADX and Tadawul to be very busy. The major difference in 2022 is that the Dubai financial market will be busy too,” said Christian Cabanne, Bank of America’s head of equity capital markets for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The plans announced by Dubai, which has not had a major IPO since a unit of state-linked developer Emaar Properties in 2017, seek to help the emirate to contend with intensifying competition for capital in the region.
Cabanne said the success of Dubai’s IPOs will depend on factors such as whether the size of the offers are digestible for the market, with price ranges that are deemed appealing to both international and local investors.
There is still plenty of capital to deploy in the region, Cabanne said.
“Certainly between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, we expect a similar investor base … we would expect to see some discipline in terms of not having similar types of issues going on the same timetable,” he said.
2.ALI BABA:Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding has dismissed a female employee who accused a former co-worker of sexual assault earlier this year, government-backed newspaper Dahe Daily reported late on Saturday.
Dahe Daily interviewed the employee, saying she had received notification of termination at the end of November, and published a copy of what she said was her termination letter.
The letter said the employee had spread false information about being assaulted and about the company not handling the case. It added this “caused strong social concern and had a bad impact on the company”.
“I have not made any mistakes, and certainly will not accept this result, and in the future will use legal means to protect my rights and interests,” the newspaper quoted the employee as saying in the interview.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment outside of working hours. A lawyer for the employee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce firm, was rocked by the sexual assault allegation in August after the female employee published an account on the company’s intranet stating that she was assaulted by her co-worker and a client during a business trip.
Alibaba fired the co-worker accused of assault, but also dismissed 10 other employees for publicizing the incident.
3.INTEL:-Research teams at Intel Corp on Saturday unveiled work that the company believes will help it keep speeding up and shrinking computing chips over the next ten years, with several technologies aimed at stacking parts of chips on top of each other.
Intel’s Research Components Group introduced the work in papers at an international conference being held in San Francisco. The Silicon Valley company is working to regain a lead in making the smallest, fastest chips that it has lost in recent years to rivals like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
While Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has laid out commercial plans aimed at regaining that lead by 2025, the research work unveiled Saturday gives a look into how Intel plans to compete beyond 2025.
One of the ways Intel is packing more computing power into chips by stacking up “tiles” or “chiplets” in three dimensions rather than making chips all as one two-dimension piece. Intel showed work Saturday that could allow for 10 times as many connections between stacked tiles, meaning that more complex tiles can be stacked on top of one another.
But perhaps the biggest advance showed Saturday was a research paper demonstrating a way to stack transistors – tiny switches that form the most basic building bocks of chips by representing the 1s and 0s of digital logic – on top of one another.
4.DAIMLER:Luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz aims to maintain double-digit operating margins, its finance chief told Boersen-Zeitung, adding this resulted in very good dividend prospects.
“Despite raw materials and semiconductor shortages our results at Mercedes have developed very well, with double-digit operating margins,” Harald Wilhelm was quoted as saying, adding it was the aim to keep those margins stable.
“With regard to the dividend, this translates into very good prospects for our shareholders.”
Wilhelm currently also serves as CFO of Daimler , which will soon be renamed Mercedes-Benz AG following the recent spin-off of Daimler Truck, in which the carmaker retains a 35% stake.
Mercedes Benz Cars & Vans posted an adjusted return on sales of 11.9% for the first nine months of 2021. For the full year, the division targets an adjusted margin of between 10% and 12%.
5.VOLKSWAGEN :-Volkswagen’s software unit Cariad and automotive supplier Bosch are nearing an agreement to cooperate on automotive software, Handelsblatt reported, citing company sources.
Volkswagen plans to invest a triple-digit million euro amount as part of the deal, the paper added.
Volkswagen has bundled all its software efforts into Cariad, hoping it can challenge Tesla and Alphabet in a field in which it has not traditionally been active.
Cariad ranks high on Volkswagen’s transformation agenda, with CEO Herbert Diess taking on responsibility for the unit on the group’s management board this week as part of a reshuffle.
Diess sees software as the key future battleground of the automotive industry, ranging from operating systems to enable autonomous driving to software services that can be installed over the air.
Cariad, which gets 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in funds from Volkswagen each year, declined to comment. Bosch was not immediately available for comment.
