Two-thirds of companies with lowly ratings from Moody’s were bought by PE groups

Investors braced for years of lower payouts by some of the most reliable dividend-paying stocks

German conglomerate hopes to offload lossmaking division to focus on steel

French group braced for revenue losses this quarter despite reopening most of its China factories

World’s largest auto group enjoys earnings boost and increases dividend

Blume says industry faces supply constraints because of production ‘bottleneck’

Jingye to keep close contact with Paris as it completes takeover and saves 3,200 jobs

German supplier scraps outlook and warns smaller contractors could go out of business

Japanese conglomerate expects rebound in construction industry as cities end lockdowns

Ministers’ challenge to manufacturers sets basic specifications that are not suitable to task, say experts 

Idan Ofer’s Kenon offloads shares to majority owner Baoneng in $237m deal

Tesla appears to be ramping up installations of its solar tile roofs in the San Francisco Bay area and will eventually roll out to Europe and China, according to CEO Elon Musk, who, in a series of tweets, provided the first substantial update since the company launched the third iteration of its product in October. […]

Across the U.S., sustainable microgrids are emerging as a vital tool in the fight against climate change and increasingly common natural disasters.

Microsoft is embarking on a new sustainability initiative as part of its overall approach to support environmental protection measures, with a project it calls the “Planetary Computer.” This will actually be a computing endeavor that uses aggregated global environmental data collected from a number of sources as its input, and that will seek to employ […]

Google’s data centers run 24/7 and suck up a ton of energy — so it’s in both the company’s and the planet’s interest to make them do so as efficiently as possible. One new method has the facilities keeping an eye on the weather so they know when the best times are to switch to […]

Mark Mills Contributor Share on Twitter Mark Mills is the author of the book, “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund. An epic number of citizens […]

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]

Tesla is aiming to ramp up “limited operations” at its factory in Fremont, Calif., a decision that puts the company and its CEO Elon Musk in direct conflict with a stay-at-home order in Alameda County. Update: On Friday, Alameda County health officials said the automaker was told not to reopen. Employees received two emails — […]

Uber has pushed its target to achieve a measure of profitability to a quarter in 2021, reversing a decision made just three months ago to move up the goal to the end of this year. Uber will miss its target to reach an adjusted EBITDA quarterly profit in the fourth period of 2020, CFO Nelson […]

Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass. His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment […]

Tesla has not been given the “green light” to open its factory in Fremont, Calif., Alameda County Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan said in a videostreamed town hall meeting Friday. Tesla made plans to open as early as Friday in defiance of the county’s extended stay-at-home order. Tesla said in an internal email sent to […]

Four years ago, Adnan Asar, the founder of the new addiction prevention service Lucid Lane, was enjoying a successful career working as the founding chief technology officer at Livongo Health. It was the serial senior tech executive’s most recent job after a long stint at Shutterfly and he was shepherding the company through the development […]

The original Go was a mostly well-received addition to the Surface line when it arrived in late 2018. It was a nice, pint-sized alternatively, positioned fairly well to serve as a secondary device for some. It did the convertible double duty and traveled well, but otherwise was lacking in guts and versatility. Launching at the […]

Amazon is bringing a year’s worth of free, live and on-demand cooking classes to tens of millions of Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablet owners across the U.S., thanks to an expanded collaboration with Discovery’s Food Network Kitchen. The subscription service launched last fall as a flagship app for Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo Show, bringing daily […]

Apple and Google have released the first version of their exposure notification API, which they previously called the contact tracing API. This is a developer-focused release, and is a seed of the API in development, with the primary intent of collecting feedback from developers who will be using the API to create new contact tracing […]

Modern Games is a new studio working to create games that combine physical and digital play. The company was founded by husband-and-wife team Justin and Amanda Kifer — serial entrepreneurs who previously launched companies including Citizen Local (acquired by MyLife in 2011) and Fidgetly, a fidget spinner company that also created a motion controller for […]

Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building. Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, […]

Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans […]

Is “Too Hot to Handle” the dumbest show on Netflix … or the most diabolically brilliant? The reality TV series brings a group of twentysomethings together on a secluded tropical retreat, then — after a brief getting-to-know-you period — warns them that anything even coming close to sex will result in a reduction of the […]

23andMe. MongoDB. Eventbrite. Evernote. Bird. Square . Tumblr. Unity. YouTube. Xoom. Roelof Botha has had a seat on each of these companies’ boards, but his list of investments is much, much longer. The Sequoia partner, leading the firm’s U.S. business, is legendary in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world, and we’re very excited that […]

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, who runs the firm’s US business, has a portfolio that’s rather impressive. It includes 23andMe, MongoDB, Eventbrite, Evernote, Bird, Square, Tumblr, Unity, YouTube, and Xoom to name just a few. And his perspective on the startup ecosystem as a whole is unique in that Sequoia invests in companies at the very early […]

“Waco,” a Paramount Network series that recently started streaming on Netflix, dramatizes the tragic real-life standoff between the FBI, the ATF and the Branch Davidians. A couple of your Original Content podcast hosts only had a fuzzy idea of what actually went down in Waco, Texas in 1993. And all of us were surprised by […]

The Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) has set up a dedicated webpage and will be organizing webinars to examine the trade impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on least developed countries (LDCs).

The WTO Secretariat has published a new report on the treatment of medical products in regional trade agreements (RTAs) amid current supply shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report examines the extent medical products are traded among preferential partners and the difference in liberalization rates within and outside these trade agreements.

The WTO Secretariat has published a new information note looking at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected e-commerce, including the implications for cross-border trade. It notes the increased use of e-commerce as consumers adapt to lockdowns and social distancing measures and draws attention to several challenges, such as the need to bridge the digital divide within and across countries.

Adam Neumann, the co-founder and chief executive of the international real estate co-working startup WeWork has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of its initial public offering. The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, […]

Impossible Foods made huge waves in the food industry when it came up with a way of isolating and using “heme” molecules from plants to mimic the blood found in animal meat (also comprised of heme), bringing a new depth of flavor to its vegetarian burger. This week at CES, the company is presenting the […]

Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them. Struggling […]

The worlds of virtual and augmented reality have yet to land on the applications and hardware to truly spark mass-market, consumer interest in the space, but in the meantime, a startup building mixed reality services for business users has raised a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity in enterprise. Spatial, which has developed a “holographic” […]

This evening’s Square E3 press was…something. After more than an hour of Final Fantasy remasters, the publisher closed things out with far and away its most eagerly awaited game. Licensing some white hot IP, the RPG masters at Square are offering up their own take on Earth’s mightiest heroes. Bay Area-based Crystal Dynamics addressed what […]

Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term sheet and then pass that document to their […]

We’ve spent so long asking tech to turn its attention to real-world problems. Let’s not complain when they do so now. 

Fintech companies have been lobbying for weeks to be able to participate in the U.S. government’s emergency lending program for small businesses. Now those efforts have paid off, as PayPal, Intuit and Square have all been approved to participate in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program, which provides aid in the form […]

23andMe. MongoDB. Eventbrite. Evernote. Bird. Square . Tumblr. Unity. YouTube. Xoom. Roelof Botha has had a seat on each of these companies’ boards, but his list of investments is much, much longer. The Sequoia partner, leading the firm’s U.S. business, is legendary in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world, and we’re very excited that […]

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released updated projections of future U.S. energy production and use in its Annual Energy Outlook 2020 (AEO2020) today.

In the April Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), EIA forecasts that the United States will again become a net importer of crude oil and petroleum products in the third quarter of 2020 and remain a net importer in most months through the end of 2021. Fewer barrels are available for export as U.S. crude oil production continues to decline. In addition, net exports of petroleum products will be lowest in the third quarter of 2020, when U.S. refinery runs decline in response to lower demand for refined products.