1.ALIBABA:-Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Friday that sales during its annual Singles’ Day shopping frenzy grew 8.5%, the slowest rate ever, underscoring strong regulatory and supply chain headwinds for China’s tech firms.
The Chinese e-commerce juggernaut said sales, or “gross merchandise value” (GMV), over its 11-day Singles’ Day event that ended on Thursday rose to 540.3 billion yuan ($84.5 billion), compared with 26% growth last year.
Sales had grown by double digits every year since Alibaba founded the festival in 2009 and built it into the world’s biggest online sales fest, dwarfing Cyber Monday in the United States. It changed the gala to a multi-day event last year.
The results come as overall consumption in China slows ad cap a relatively muted version of a sales festival that Alibaba once aggressively promoted.
2.SUBWAY :A new version of a lawsuit accusing Subway of deceiving the public about its tuna products said lab testing shows they contain animal proteins such as chicken, pork and cattle, and not the advertised “100% tuna.”
Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed a third version of their proposed class action this week in the federal court in San Francisco, near their homes in Alameda County.
Subway said in a statement it will seek to dismiss the “reckless and improper” lawsuit.
The chain said the plaintiffs have “filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time,” and that its “high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna” was regulated strictly in the United States and around the world.
Since the case began in January, Subway has run TV ads and launched a defending its tuna. It also revamped its menu but not its tuna, saying an upgrade wasn’t needed
3.TOSHIBA:Japanese industrial conglomerate Toshiba Corp is set to outline plans on Friday to break up into three listed companies that will focus on infrastructure, devices and memory chips, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The plan – borne of a strategic review undertaken after a highly damaging corporate governance scandal – is aimed at improving shareholder value and encouraging activist shareholders to exit, they said.
The review calls for its nuclear power and infrastructure-related divisions to be housed under one company while its power chips and hard disk drive divisions would form the backbone of another, said the sources who were not authorised to speak to media and declined to be identified.
The third company will own Toshiba’s 40.6% stake in unlisted memory chipmaker Kioxia.
Toshiba said this week that a three-way split was one option under consideration. It declined further immediate comment on Friday ahead of a series of announcements that will encompass the strategic review, second-quarter earnings and the conclusions of a corporate governance report.
Some Toshiba investors are not convinced that a break-up would create value, shareholder sources said, declining to be identified ahead of a formal announcement of the plan.
“It makes sense to split if the valuation of a highly competitive business is hindered by other businesses,” said Fumio Matsumoto, chief strategist at Okasan Securities.
“But if there isn’t such a business, the break-up just creates three lacklustre midsize companies.”
4.HUAWEI :U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday signed legislation to prevent companies like Huawei Technologies Co or ZTE Corp that are deemed security threats from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S. regulators.
The Secure Equipment Act, the latest effort by the U.S. government to crack down on Chinese telecom and tech companies, was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate on Oct. 28 and earlier in the month by the U.S. House on a 420-4 vote.
The signing comes days before Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to hold a virtual summit. Reuters reported the meeting is expected Monday, amid tensions over trade, human rights and military activities.
The new law requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to no longer review or approve any authorization application for equipment that poses an unacceptable risk to national security.
5. TOYOTA MOTOR :Toyota Motor Corp, the world’s top-selling automaker, said on Friday it would begin making up for production lost from supply shortages in December, with factories at home in Japan returning to normal for the first time in seven months.
Toyota said it plans to produce about 800,000 vehicles globally in December, up from about 760,000 a year earlier, and keep its plan of producing 9 million vehicles worldwide during the financial year ending on March 31.
