1.SIEMENS: – Siemens has completed its reorganisation, Chief Executive Roland Busch has told Manager Magazin, with the recently appointed executive favouring smaller acquisitions to expand the German engineering and technology company.
“We have already completed our spin-offs,” said Busch, who took over as CEO from longstanding boss Joe Kaeser in February. “Additional value is not created by further portfolio changes.
“A company’s portfolio should be reasonably coherent, that means it has a connection and does not diverge too much in terms of growth and margin. That’s why we spun off Energy – coal and gas-fired power plants have limited growth opportunities and are technologically quite far away.”
Siemens did not lack ideas, money or courage to make big acquisitions, Busch said, although he thought smaller deals had more potential.
The company has recently completed the $700 million acquisition of electrical component marketplace Supplyframe, and spent 100 million euros on five smaller software companies, he said in the interview published on Thursday.
“Smaller complementary acquisitions take us further. We generate new functionalities and additional volume with them, and they are easier to integrate,” Busch said.
Siemens’s core portfolio of software for digital product development, manufacturing and manufacturing logistics and for designing electronics already had a strong base, with 5.3 billion euros in annual sales, he added.
2.APPLE:More than 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter on Thursday urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children’s messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse.
“Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children,” the groups wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters.
The largest campaign to date over an encryption issue at a single company was organized by the U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT).
Some overseas signatories in particular are worried about the impact of the changes in nations with different legal systems, including some already hosting heated fights over encryption and privacy.
“It’s so disappointing and upsetting that Apple is doing this, because they have been a staunch ally in defending encryption in the past,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, co-director of CDT’s Security & Surveillance Project.
Those signing included multiple groups in Brazil, where courts have repeatedly blocked Facebook’s WhatsApp for failing to decrypt messages in criminal probes, and the senate has passed a bill that would require traceability of messages, which would require somehow marking their content. A similar law was passed in India this year.
3. NVIDIA:- Nvidia Corp on Wednesday said talks with regulators to clear its $40 billion proposed acquisition of British semiconductor technology firm Arm Ltd are taking longer than expected.
The disclosure came as Nvidia , the world’s biggest maker of graphics chips for gamers and artificial intelligence chips for data centers, forecast third-quarter revenue above Wall Street expectations on Wednesday as it benefits from a boom in demand.
But investors have focused on whether Nvidia’s move to acquire Arm will withstand regulatory scrutiny and close by March of next year as Nvidia promised. Arm has long been a neutral supplier of technology throughout the chip industry, and Nvidia competitors such as Qualcomm Inc have objected to having Arm land in the hands of a rival.
In a statement, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the company is still confident the deal will close.
“Although some Arm licensees have expressed concerns or objected to the transaction, and discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, we are confident in the deal and that regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition to Arm, its licensees, and the industry,” she said.
Nvidia shares dropped 2% but later rose as executives predicted higher selling prices for gaming chips on a conference call with analysts.
“Many investors already place a low probability on the deal ultimately being approved. If it is blocked I think it will be met with a collective shrug,” said Logan Purk, analyst at Edward Jones.
The company estimated current-quarter revenue at $6.80 billion, plus or minus 2%. Analysts on average had expected $6.53 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Nvidia also beat expectations for second-quarter revenue with a 68% rise to $6.51 billion. Data center and gaming revenue were $2.37 billion and $3.06 billion, respectively, beating analyst estimates of $2.3 billion and $2.94 billion, according to Refinitiv data.
4.CISCO:– Cisco Systems’s first-quarter profit forecast fell short of estimates on Wednesday, with the network gear maker warning that supply chain issues would continue to drive up component costs and delivery backlogs.
Businesses across the globe have been facing an unprecedented semiconductor shortage that has inflated costs of even the cheapest parts, hurting companies like Cisco which use those chips in their routers.
.5.HSBC – HSBC Holdings said the banking group has initiated legal proceedings against El Salvador for what the company called a breach of the nation’s investment treaty with the UK.
“HSBC Latin American Holdings initiated legal proceedings against the Republic of El Salvador for breach of its investment treaty with the United Kingdom, and seeks to recover at least $49.3 million in damages that the bank alleges were wrongly awarded against it by the Supreme Court of El Salvador”, the company said in a statement late on Wednesday.
The arbitration case will be heard by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), HSBC said.
Based in Washington, ICSID is part of the World Bank Group and supports the resolution of international investment disputes between investors and sovereign states.
The dispute arises from a case in El Salvadoran courts in which HSBC sought to recover approximately $2 million in unpaid loans to a local business, the bank said.
Two courts in El Salvador had ruled in HSBC’s favour but the country’s Supreme Court overturned the lower courts’ decisions, the statement added.
The Supreme Court had ordered HSBC to pay the defendant $49.3 million, with HSBC saying the damages award was more than twice the $22.5 million sought by the El Salvadoran business.
