As Samsung (re)unveiled its clamshell folding phone last week, I kept seeing the same question pop up amongst my social circles: why? I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest. I’m not sure even Samsung knows; they’d win me over by the end, but only somewhat. The halfway-folded, laptop-style “Flex Mode” allows you […]

Another on-demand transport app is making a move into payments to expand the existing relationship with its customers (and subsequent margins that it makes from serving them). Bird today announced the launch of Bird Pay, a service that will let people use its app to purchase items from local participating businesses alongside renting scooters. The service […]

Let’s talk about money. More specifically, let’s talk about how much things cost. A few years back, the price of flagship smartphones leapt above the $1,000 threshold, owing largely to the cost of screen technology. It’s a tough calculus, but that’s the price of innovation. The rising cost of smartphones is largely regarded as a […]

Some big moves in the payments platform space: Ant Financial Group, the owner of China’s Alipay payment platform, has announced it’s taking a minority stake in Swedish payments platform Klarna . Klarna has a strong European presence and a flagship product that lets shoppers buy now and pay later in interest-free installments (typically 14 or […]

No surprise, really, that 5G smartphone sales are on the way up. Frankly, there’s really no other way to go, according to the latest numbers from NPD’s Mobile Phone Tracking. The firm noted that 5G handsets accounted for less than 1% of total sales in the U.S. The hurdles are also what you’d expect: namely, […]

Doxzoo proudly says on its website that your “documents are in safe hands.” But for some time, that wasn’t true. The U.K. printing company left its customer files on a cloud storage bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services, without a password. Anyone who knew the easy-to-guess bucket name could access the massive trove of customer […]

Samsung overnight released its earnings guidance for the first quarter of 2020, stating that it expected sales of $45.4 billion and an operating profit of roughly $5.3 billion. The company’s fiscal year is aligned to the standard calendar year, and it will announce official earnings results on April 23. Those numbers are slightly up from […]

Another week in quarantine. As the world adjusts to working from home under mandatory stay-at-home orders, hackers are keeping busy. Microsoft said this week that coronavirus-related attacks are on the rise but still make up just a fraction of the overall malicious activity. Cybersecurity companies seem to be faring mostly well — in part thanks […]

Google is reportedly on the verge of stepping up their hardware game in a way that follows the example set by Apple, with custom-designed silicon powering future smartphones. Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too. Google’s efforts around its […]

A few months ago, the idea of a hand-washing app would have seemed trivial, at best. We’re all adults here, right? We’ve been washing our hands our entire lives. But things change. It’s mid-April and we’re afraid to go outside and engage with other humans — and thorough hand-washing is one of very few tools […]

Here’s a nice thing. It’s not revolutionary or life-changing, but it’s nice. And right now we can all use a little bit of nice. Earlier this month, Samsung announced an addition to its line of “eco-packing” that will turn TV boxes in a wide variety of different “furniture.” I use furniture in quotes here because […]

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Samsung said it expects the COVID-19 pandemic to continue impacting its business for the rest of the year, cutting into sales for smartphones and TVs, but increasing demand for PCs, servers and memory chips as people continue to work or study from home. Samsung’s results for the first-quarter of […]

Glance, which serves media content, news and casual games on the lock screen of Android -powered smartphones, has amassed 100 million daily active users, it said today. The subsidiary of ad-firm InMobi Group reached the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest duration for any popular internet service to gain their […]

Paige, the Sloan-Kettering spinout that has been building an artificial intelligence platform to improve cancer pathology and subsequently use those insights to develop better drug therapies, has raised an additional $5 million in funding to continue its work commercialising its platform and expanding its research reach, while also getting FDA clearance to launch in hospitals […]

At a time when more transactions than ever are happening online, payments behemoth Stripe is announcing three new features to continue expanding its reach. The company today announced that it will now offer card issuing services directly to businesses to let them in turn make credit cards for customers tailored to specific purposes. Alongside that, it’s going […]

A big changing of the guard is underway at one of the world’s biggest and iconic names in telecoms and media: AT&T today announced that Randall Stephenson will be stepping down as the chairman and CEO of the telco, and he will be replaced by John Stankey, currently the COO. The change is effective on […]

Thanks to smartphones and their downsized keyboards, autocomplete has become a nearly ubiquitous feature of how we write these days. To save us precious seconds composing and (at least in my fat-thumbed case) correcting words, our keyboards now prompt us with suggestions of what we’re trying to write to get the job done a little […]

A startup that’s hoping to be a contender in the very large and fragmented market of human resources software has captured the eye of a big investor out of the US and become its first investment in Spain. Barcelona-based Factorial, which is building an all-in-one HR automation platform aimed at small and medium businesses that manages […]

While human travel has become severely restricted in recent months, the movement of goods has remained a constant priority — and in some cases, has become even more urgent. Today, a startup out of Switzerland that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport one item in particular — pharmaceuticals — is announcing […]

A lot of restaurants have shuttered in the wake of stay-at-home guidance and government orders for non-essential businesses to close down, so a startup called Cheetah that provided a wholesale delivery service for them pivoted to selling to consumers, and now it’s raised a round of funding, both to expand its business and to help […]

The coronavirus may be decimating some corners of the economy, but the impact on the digital music, as evidenced by the world’s biggest music streaming company, appears to be minimal. Today Spotify reported its earnings for Q1 with revenues of €1.848 billion ($2 billion at today’s rates) and an inching into a positive net income […]

As coronavirus-hit financial markets continue to flip-flop in the wake of bad news followed by pockets of hope, a startup that aims to introduce ordinary consumers to investing has raised a big round of funding. New York-based Stash, which provides a mobile-first route to managing money through investment — as well as retirement, custodial and […]

Less than 24 hours after it was reported that Uber was considering layoffs of 20% of staff, its big rival Lyft is announcing its own cuts. Today the company said it would be reducing employee count by 17%, working out to 982 employees, and furloughing an additional 288, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic […]

After a quarter in which eBay, tussling with an activist investor, completed the sell-off of its ticketing business StubHub for $4 billion and saw appointed a new CEO after its previous one departed, while also weathering waves of surging demand and dodgy supply resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, today the e-commerce company reported its Q1 […]

Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today, Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out. The ad-based social networking and media company said that […]

Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post […]

Amazon has been one of the biggest names synonymous with how the consumer masses are experiencing life under lockdown: its site lets you buy anything from soup to nuts, from books to baking pans for all your sourdough; and via its streaming services, it gives you many ways to stay entertained. But it can also […]

Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some […]

On the heels of a spate of reports over the weekend, today Intel confirmed its latest move to grow its automotive division. The chip giant is acquiring Moovit, an Israeli startup previously backed by Intel that analyses urban traffic patterns and provides transportation recommendations with a specific focus on public transit. The deal values Moovit at […]

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]

The regulators said “NO” when Telefonica tried to combine its O2 operations in the UK with rival carrier, Hutchison-owned Three, back in 2015. But Telefonica didn’t let go of the idea of divestment, and five years later, in the middle of a health pandemic with related threats of a global economic depression looming over us, […]

With unemployment growing at a worrying rate, we’re seeing a lot more people finding themselves in hot water when it comes to their finances. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help identify and help those users when they find themselves unable to make payments is announcing a very large growth round of funding […]

Suppliers that exploited cheaper labour hit by big wage bills for shuttered plants

Carmaker puts brakes on dividends and buybacks in order to preserve liquidity

Pressure mounts on carmaker and alliance with Renault and Mitsubishi as groups burn through cash

How to save on costs, and pay premiums to your dear leader.

Chief executive criticised over move to offer liability cover following premium increase

Chief executive Jim Hackett signals disruption to carmaker’s plans as losses mount

Volkswagen and Daimler report billions of dollars in lost profits due to impact of coronavirus

Investment in company’s new China entity is led by state-owned enterprises

Shares soar in after-hours trading following better than expected figures

The plan may be to keep the ‘pedal to the metal’ but self-funding is still out of range

On the impossibility of future earnings.

Transport demand will rebound while the pandemic will reboot the use of plastics

“I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.”

‘Stock price is too high’, writes outspoken chief executive

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding to the mix. You can catch last week’s show with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas right here if […]

Today Microsoft reported its third-quarter, fiscal 2020 quarter earnings, the period of time corresponding to Q1 2020 on the regular calendar. The technology giant generated $35 billion in revenue, up 15% from the year-ago period. That top line led to $13 billion in operating income (+25% YoY), and $10.8 billion in net income (+22% YoY). […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]