Deal
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The Lyft logo is seen on a parked Lyft Scooter in Washington, U.S., March 29, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
April 23, 2019
(Reuters) – Lyft Inc picked up upbeat ratings from the brokerage arms of its Wall Street underwriters on Tuesday, allowing the ride-hailing company to recover some of the damage done to its share price in the run-up to the debut of larger rival Uber Technologies Inc.
Lyft shares, which as of Monday’s close were down 30 percent from its initial public offering debut on March 29, rose 2.5 pct to $62.49 in trading before the bell. That puts them almost 10 percent up in the past week after hitting lows beneath $56.
At least seven brokerages including Jefferies, JP Morgan and Piper Jaffray initiated coverage of Lyft with “buy” or equivalent to “buy” ratings, even as the stock languishes more than 15 percent below the price set in its heavily-hyped IPO last month.
Piper Jaffray expects “solid near-term top line results”, as the company has been gaining market share in recent quarters, but believes that the path to positive net income will be a “multi-year journey”. The brokerage initiated coverage with an overweight rating and $78 target price.
At Monday’s prices, Lyft had a stock market value of around $17 billion. Both it and Uber have both warned that they may never become profitable, making it difficult for investors to estimate how much they might be worth.
Still, brokerage analysts remained confident of Lyft’s long-term fortunes, despite the competition from Uber both on U.S. streets and among stock market investors.
“Uber’s filing has added pressure, and we acknowledge that the upcoming roadshow could create more near-term uncertainty, but we believe Lyft continues to execute well,” said Doug Anmuth, an analyst at JP Morgan.
Reuters had reported that Uber plans to sell around $10 billion worth of stock at a valuation of between $90 billion and $100 billion. Its IPO is on track for mid-May.
More than 24 brokerages helped underwrite Lyft’s IPO. Industry standards require analysts from those firms to wait until a 25-day cooling off period has ended following the IPO before launching coverage.
At least three of Lyft’s underwriters, Canaccord, Cowen and JMP Securities, are also backing the Uber deal, according to SEC filings.
Some investors give more weight to the opinions of analysts who work at brokerages involved in underwriting a company’s IPO than they do to analysts at brokerages not involved in the IPO.
Including Tuesday’s initiations, 13 analysts now cover Lyft, with five positive ratings, seven neutral ratings and one negative rating. The analysts had a median price target of $74, down from a median price target of $75 on Monday.
Analysts on average expect Lyft’s revenue in 2019 to grow 57.3 percent to $3.39 billion, according to Refinitiv data, a slower pace than in previous years. Lyft’s revenue doubled last year after tripling in 2017.
(Reporting by Noel Randewich in San Francisco and Jasmine I S in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr)
Source: OANN
The price of gasoline is rapidly rising, economic activity is slowing down, the Middle East appears to be on the brink of war, and Democrats are trying to find a way to remove a Republican president from office. In many ways, 2019 is starting to look a lot like 1973. For many Americans, the 1970s represent a rather depressing chapter in U.S. history that they would just like to forget, but the truth is that if we do not learn from history it is much more likely that we will repeat our mistakes. And without a doubt, right now a lot of things are starting to move in a very ominous direction.
“Stagflation” was a term that was made popular in the 1970s, and it occurs when there is a high rate of inflation but economic growth is declining or stagnant.
The U.S. hasn’t had a serious bout with stagflation in quite a while, but it appears that we may be moving in that direction.
Let’s talk about the slowdown in the economy first. On Monday, we learned that sales of existing homes in the U.S. were way down in March…
Home sales are struggling to rebound after slumping in the second half of last year, when a jump in mortgage rates to nearly 5% discouraged many would-be buyers. Spring buying is so far running behind last year’s healthy gains: Sales were 5.4% below where they were a year earlier.
On a year over year basis, existing home sales have now fallen for 13 months in a row.
That is terrible, and there is no way to “spin” that fact to make it look good.
We also learned on Monday that Office Depot is closing 50 stores. Of course this is just the continuation of a trend that The Economic Collapse Blog has been tracking for quite some time.
Overall, U.S. retailers have already announced more store closings in 2019 than they did all of last year, and we are on pace for the worst year for store closings in all of U.S. history.
Ouch.
I could go on and on listing more numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy has been slowing down, but I don’t want to repeat much of what I have already shared over the past several weeks.
Meanwhile, inflation is starting to rise significantly in some pretty key areas. Previously I have explained why food prices are beginning to move up aggressively, and now gas prices are starting to make national headlines once again.
For example, the price of gas in the state of California just hit the highest level in nearly five years…
California’s gas prices continued to climb Wednesday, hitting the highest levels in almost five years.
Motorists throughout the Golden State are paying an average of $4.01 for a gallon of regular gasoline, by far the highest in the country and well above the national average of $2.83, according to a news release from AAA.
The primary factor driving up the price of oil is geopolitical wrangling in the Middle East. According to CNBC, President Trump intends to stop Iran from exporting any oil at all…
Oil prices surged about 3% at midday on Monday, hitting fresh 2019 highs, after the Trump administration announced that all oil buyers will have to end imports from Iran in just over a week or be subject to U.S. sanctions.
The administration said the State Department will cease granting sanctions waivers to any country still importing Iranian crude or condensate, an ultra-light form of crude oil, after May 2.
If President Trump is successful, it will eliminate approximately a million barrels of oil per day from the global marketplace.
That is a big deal.
And this comes at a time when oil prices have already been steadily rising.
Unfortunately, Iran doesn’t plan to take this move lying down, and their response could potentially spark a full-blown oil crisis.
According to Bloomberg, Iran is actually threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz for all commerce…
Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway vital for global oil shipments, if the country is prevented from using it, a senior military official said on Monday in what appears to be a response to the U.S. plan to end waivers on Iranian oil exports.
“If we are prevented from using it, we will close it,” the state-run Fars news agency reported, citing Alireza Tangsiri, head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps navy force. “In the event of any threats, we will not have the slightest hesitation to protect and defend Iran’s waterway.”
If Iran did such a thing, it would throw global oil markets into a state of tremendous turmoil, and it would bring us much, much closer to war with Iran.
In recent days the Iranians and the Trump administration have been trading very angry words, and it certainly doesn’t help that the Iranians just appointed a certified hothead as the leader of the Republican Guards…
Salami has frequently vowed to destroy Israel and “break America.” Iran was “planning to break America, Israel, and their partners and allies. Our ground forces should cleanse the planet from the filth of their existence,” Salami said in February. The previous month, he vowed to wipe Israel off the “global political map,” and to unleash an “inferno” on the Jewish state.
He also said “Iran has warned the Zionist regime not to play with fire, because they will be destroyed before the US helps them.” Any new war, he said, “will result in Israel’s defeat within three days, in a way that they will not find enough graves to bury their dead.”
Hossein Salami is a complete and total nutjob, and I am entirely convinced that he actually wants a war with the United States and Israel.
For a long time I have been warning that we need to watch the Middle East, and a major regional war could potentially erupt at any time.
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail, because a full-blown war involving Iran, Israel and the United States would mean an immense amount of death and destruction.
For the moment, things are relatively calm in the United States, but most Americans don’t realize that we are actually in a very precarious position.
It isn’t going to take much for global events to reach a tipping point, and once they do there will be no going back.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: Headquarters of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, is pictured in Beijing, China September 28, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee/File Photo
April 23, 2019
By Kevin Yao
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s central bank is likely to pause to assess economic conditions before making any further moves to ease lenders’ reserve requirements, after better-than-expected growth data reduced the urgency for action, policy insiders said.
Although the central bank’s easing bias remains unchanged, it sees less room this year for cutting reserve requirement ratios (RRRs) – the share of cash banks must hold as reserves – as fiscal stimulus plays a bigger role in spurring growth, according to government advisers involved in internal policy discussions.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is also worried that pumping too much cash into the economy could reignite bubbles over time, the policy insiders said, and wants to save some of its policy ammunition.
“In the short term, it’s not necessary to use RRR cuts to boost economic growth,” one policy adviser told Reuters. “Monetary policy should leave some room – if economic uncertainties rise or economic conditions deteriorate, the central bank could ease policy.”
The chance of a cut in benchmark interest rates, meanwhile, has further diminished, as the central bank focuses on reforming its interest rate regime this year, the policy insiders said.
LESS ROOM FOR RRR CUTS
China’s economy grew a steady 6.4 percent in the first quarter, defying expectations of a further slowdown, with factory output, retail sales and investment in March all growing faster than expected following a raft of expansion-boosting measures in recent months.
Still, economists do not expect a sharp recovery in the world’s second-largest economy, as many private firms grapple with high funding costs, while external demand may weaken in the coming months as the world economy loses steam.
Optimism is rising, however, that China and the United States will reach a trade deal in coming weeks.
“The possibility of seeing big policy changes is not big. We may maintain the strength of policy support but it could become more structural,” said a second policy source.
The PBOC did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The PBOC has cut RRRs five times since the start of 2018, lowering the ratio to 13.5 percent for big banks and 11.5 percent for small-to medium-sized lenders.
Central bank Governor Yi Gang said in March that there was still some room to cut RRRs, but less so than a few years ago.
The PBOC is likely to cut RRRs for small banks to encourage more lending to small and private firms – which are vital for economic growth and job creation – said the policy insiders, who have penciled in at least one such “targeted” RRR cut this year.
“Monetary policy will maintain counter-cyclical adjustments and keep liquidity ample as interest rates should go lower for the real economy,” said one of the policy insiders.
A Reuters poll, conducted before the first-quarter data release on April 17, showed economists expected the central bank to deliver three more RRR cuts of 50 basis points in each of the remaining three quarters of 2019.
But the stronger-than-expected growth data compelled some economists to trim their forecasts for RRR cuts. UBS now expects another 100 bps cuts this year, with the next one likely in June-July, instead of the 200 bps it had forecast earlier.
ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTIES LINGER
A statement on Friday from the Politburo, a key decision-making body of the ruling Communist Party, said China would maintain policy support for the economy, which still faced “downward pressure” and difficulties.
Authorities would strike a balance between stabilizing economic growth, promoting reforms, controlling risks and improving livelihoods, the Politburo said, adding that China would move forward with structural efforts to control debt levels and prevent speculation in the property market.
First-quarter economic growth was backed by record new bank loans of 5.81 trillion yuan ($865.61 billion) and local government special bond issuance of 717.2 billion yuan, which rocketed ninefold from a year earlier.
Beijing has ramped up fiscal stimulus, unveiling tax and fee cuts amounting to 2 trillion yuan to ease burdens on firms, while allowing local governments to issue 2.15 trillion yuan of special bonds to fund infrastructure projects.
Chinese leaders have pledged to ensure economic stability in a year that will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, while vowing not to adopt “flood-like” stimulus that could worsen debt and structural risks.
The government’s target range for 2019 growth is 6-6.5 percent but growth of about 6.2 percent is seen needed this year and the next to meet the party’s longstanding goal of doubling GDP and incomes in the decade to 2020.
China’s growth slowed to a 28-year low of 6.6 percent last year, and further cooling is expected this year.
(Reporting by Kevin Yao; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Source: OANN
A security personnel observes three minutes of silence as a tribute to victims, two days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, near St Anthony Shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 23, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte
April 23, 2019
By Marius Zaharia and Vidya Ranganathan
HONG KONG/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Sri Lanka faces a likely collapse in tourism following Easter Sunday bomb attacks on churches and hotels, which would deal a severe blow to the island’s economy and financial markets, and potentially force it to seek further IMF assistance.
The International Monetary Fund extended last month a $1.5 billion loan for an extra year into 2020, a key step in keeping foreign investors involved in what so far this year has been a top-performing frontier debt market.
But with growth, and therefore state revenues, now likely to slow significantly, the budget targets agreed with the IMF may have to be reviewed, and the government is expected to resist pressure for any spending cuts before elections expected later this year.
There is even a possibility that more IMF money may be needed if foreign investment falls, adding to the hard currency gap left by plunging tourism receipts.
“If growth slows a lot more and the budget deficit assumptions need to be reassessed, then they’ll have to sit down and negotiate something more feasible,” said Alex Holmes, Asia economist at Capital Economics.
The Sri Lankan stock index dived 2.6 percent on Tuesday in its first day of trading after the attacks that killed more than 300 people, while the heavily-managed rupee held steady.
Tourism is Sri Lanka’s third-largest and fastest growing source of foreign currency, after remittances and garment exports, accounting for almost $4.4 billion or 4.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018.
A fall in tourism receipts is bound to weaken the rupee over time. The central bank, whose coffers are too light to defend the currency through interventions, is likely to have to raise interest rates.
This, in turn, would choke lending, hurting consumers and the investment plans of local businesses, while also making it more costly for the government to seek funding from foreign investors via bond markets.
“The central bank may be forced to hike rates again this year,” said Win Thin, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH).
“With foreign reserves very low right now, the central bank cannot actively support the rupee.”
After falling 16 percent against the U.S. dollar last year to record lows, the rupee had gained 4.6 percent this year as of last week.
Sri Lankan bonds have been among the best performing globally, only bettered by Argentina and Chile. But the main stock index has lost about 10 percent.
WEAK FINANCES
Sri Lanka’s external position was already precarious.
To help fund a record $5.9 billion in foreign loans this year, the country successfully sold $2.4 billion in five-year and 10-year U.S. dollar bonds last month, but that was right after the IMF extension and amid bets of looser monetary policy.
(GRAPHIC: Sri Lanka’s precarious balance of payments – https://tmsnrt.rs/2IAqHKj)
In January, Sri Lanka used its reserves to repay debt worth $1 billion. It had about $5 billion left in February, the least since April 2017, and only enough to cover two months of imports and about two-thirds of its short-term external debt, according to BBH calculations.
Colombo also needs to finance a current account deficit of about 3 percent of GDP.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is already facing heavy criticism domestically for higher taxes, and tight monetary and fiscal policies that have crimped growth to a 17-year low.
Having emerged from a 51-day political crisis in which President Maithripala Sirisena sacked and replaced him with pro-China former president Mahinda Rajapaksa – a decision which was later reversed – Wickremesinghe set an ambitious fiscal deficit goal of 4.4 percent of GDP, compared with 5.3 percent in 2018.
But he also boosted spending on state employees, pensioners and the armed forces and promised more funds for rural infrastructure, leading economists to doubt the targets. A presidential vote is expected later this year followed by a general election in 2020.
“Given the fact they have repayments coming up for sovereign bonds, it could lead to more pressure on foreign currency reserves. So, it’s a near term negative for the tourism sector and also market sentiment as well,” said Ruchir Desai, fund manager at Asia Frontier Capital, who co-manages the $16 million AFC Asia Frontier Fund.
“Valuations are cheap, no doubt… but until they get some kind of political unity which can result in stable policy-making, we will probably remain underweight (equities) until the elections.”
(Reporting by Marius Zaharia in HONG KONG, Vidya Ranganathan in SINGAPORE and Daniel Leussink in TOKYO; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: IRA graffiti painted over with a message declaring it a defeated army in the aftermath of the killing of 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee is pictured in Londonderry, Northern Ireland April 20, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo
April 23, 2019
BELFAST (Reuters) – The New IRA militant Irish nationalist group has apologized for the killing of journalist Lyra McKee – its first acknowledgement that one of its members was involved, the Irish News newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The organization, which opposes Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace deal, described McKee’s death as tragic and offered “full and sincere apologies” to her partner, family and friends in a statement that the Irish News said it received on Monday night.
The 29-year-old reporter was shot dead in Londonderry on Thursday as she watched Irish nationalist youths attack police following a raid. Police said McKee was hit when a gunman opened fire in the direction of officers.
The group said it had sent volunteers to the area after the raid. “We have instructed our volunteers to take the utmost care in future when engaging with the enemy, and put in place measures to help ensure this,” read the New IRA statement.
The group is one of a number of small organizations who remain active and oppose the 1998 deal, which largely ended three decades of violence in the region. It is far smaller than the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which disarmed after the peace deal.
McKee’s death, which followed a large car bomb in Londonderry in January that police also blamed on the New IRA, raised fears that small marginalized militant groups are trying to exploit political tensions caused by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
McKee was writing a book on the disappearance of young people during decades of violence in Northern Ireland
(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson; Writing by Conor Humphries; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: A girl broadcasts live from a phone as she holds a selfie stick with a sign of the live-streaming platform DouYu during an event celebrating the new year in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, December 31, 2018. Picture taken December 31, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer
April 23, 2019
By Julia Fioretti
HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s largest live-streaming platform DouYu International Holdings Limited, backed by social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, has filed for a U.S. initial public offering (IPO) of up to $500 million.
DouYu, which primarily focuses on the live-streaming of games, is one of several Chinese start-ups in the growing market for live-streaming in China, along with U.S.-listed rival Huya Inc and Huajiao.
The rapid growth of the live-streaming sector has seen China’s tech heavyweights – Tencent, Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu Inc – open their wallets to back a slew of firms in the hope it can boost existing services in e-commerce, social networking and gaming.
DouYu has exclusive streaming rights to 29 major tournaments in China, including League of Legends, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and DOTA2, according to the draft prospectus which was uploaded to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission website overnight on Monday.
DouYu was the largest game-streaming platform by average total monthly active users (MAUs) on both mobile and PC during the fourth quarter of 2018, according to the prospectus. The company had 159.2 million MAUs in the first quarter of 2019, representing year-on-year growth of 25.7 percent.
It set a placeholder sum of $500 million for the IPO, which is used to calculate registration fees. The final IPO size could be different, though sources have previously told Reuters DouYu was looking to raise around $500 million.
DouYu’s IPO could be one of the largest this year by a Chinese company in the United States, together with that of Starbucks challenger Luckin Coffee which also filed overnight.
Chinese companies have raised $271 million through U.S. IPOs so far this year, with the biggest deal being that of Ruhnn Holding Limited which raised $125 million, Refinitiv data showed.
LOSS MAKING
China is the world’s largest game streaming market, with approximately 4.9 times the monthly active users of the U.S. market in 2018, the prospectus said.
DouYu’s active users spent an average of 54 minutes per day on the platform in the fourth quarter of 2018.
DouYu is still loss-making and reported a net loss of $127.4 million in 2018, up from $91.33 million in 2017. Revenues jumped 94 percent to $531.5 million last year.
The company significantly increased its sales and marketing expenses – which jumped 73 percent in 2018 – as well as its research and development expenses which increased 55 percent.
Most of DouYu’s revenues come from live-streaming through the sale of virtual gifts, accounting for 86.1 percent of its revenues, with the rest coming from advertisements and some revenue sharing with game developers and publishers, the prospectus showed.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are the underwriters for DouYu’s IPO.
(Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
Source: OANN
Guillermo Giralt, technical director of Cauchari Solar, stands next to solar panels at a solar farm, built on the back of funding and technology from China, in Salar de Cauchari, Argentina, April 3, 2019. Picture taken April 3, 2019. REUTERS/Miguel Lobianco
April 23, 2019
By Cassandra Garrison
JUJUY, Argentina (Reuters) – In an arid, lunar-like landscape in the sunny highlands of northern Argentina, South America’s largest solar farm is rising, powered by funding and technology from China.
Local officials said they had sought help at home, the United States and Europe without success. Potential lenders and partners, they said, were spooked by the project’s size and the fiscal woes of Jujuy province, one of the poorest in the country.
The Import-Export Bank of China saw it differently. The state-funded institution financed 85 percent of the project’s nearly $400-million pricetag. At 3 percent annual interest over 15 years, it is “cheap money” for Jujuy, a person familiar with the terms said. The catch: the province had to purchase nearly 80 percent of the materials from Chinese suppliers.
Those companies include Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecom giant under fire from U.S. President Donald Trump. Some in his administration have concluded, without presenting evidence, that Huawei’s equipment provides the Chinese military with a “backdoor” to spy on users or cripple their networks. In Jujuy, the company is supplying inverters, technology that turns power from solar panels into useable current and serves as a critical gateway to the electrical grid.
The project, known as Cauchari, is a testament to the rising clout of Beijing as a backer of big projects in cash-strapped emerging markets. And it is helping China cement its standing as the world’s leader in clean-energy technology.
At a time when Trump is doubling down on fossil fuels and withdrawing the United States from global partnerships, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s sprawling “Belt and Road” initiative aims to put Chinese companies and innovation at the center of infrastructure development worldwide, including next-generation power sources.
“It is a way of expanding China’s growing global presence and dominant economic force, and it progressively reorients the world from the U.S. and European-centric view of the last fifty years,” said Tim Buckley, director for the U.S-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
(For a graphic on China’s solar strength, see https://tmsnrt.rs/2IBwZJD)
The trend is rattling Trump administration officials.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking April 12 in Santiago, Chile on a tour of South America, slammed China’s “predatory” lending practices, which critics say leave borrowers beholden to Beijing.
He warned repeatedly that Chinese technology, including equipment made by Huawei, poses a security risk that could affect information sharing by the United States.
“It is not okay to put technology systems in with latent capability to take information from citizens of Chile or any other country and transfer it back to President Xi’s government,” Pompeo said.
But in hardscrabble Jujuy province, home to around 750,000 people, officials are in no mood for a scolding. Argentina has set ambitious renewable energy targets. It is China, they say, not the United States, that is stepping up with money and technology to assist them.
“China…was the one that more generously opened its doors to finance this project,” Carlos Oehler, president of Jujuy’s energy agency JEMSE, told Reuters in an interview in the provincial capital of San Salvador.
Goodwill from the solar deal has led Jujuy to make purchases from other Chinese vendors, including a contract for surveillance equipment. Governor Gerardo Morales told Reuters that Jujuy and the southern Chinese province of Guizhou have established a “brotherhood” relationship that he is optimistic will lead to more tie-ups.
“We have received visits from many Chinese companies,” Morales said.
Huawei, the world’s biggest supplier of solar inverters, has repeatedly denied it poses any security risks. The company said in a statement it would continue to provide its customers with “innovative, trusted and secure solutions.”
POWERED BY CHINA
At more than 4,000 meters above sea level, Cauchari is one of the highest solar farms in the world. Reuters is among the few media outlets ever to see it. Rows of panels stretch toward the horizon, while boxes of still-packed equipment wait to be installed. Visitors check in at an on-site clinic to have their blood pressure and heart rates monitored because of the risk of altitude sickness.
Expected to begin sending current to the grid in August, the facility will generate up to 300 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 120,000 homes. A planned expansion to 500MW would boost that to 260,000 homes and bring the project’s total cost to $551 million, provincial officials said.
On the windy dirt track leading to the construction site, signs in Spanish and Mandarin proclaim the involvement of state-owned PowerChina construction company and equipment manufacturer Shanghai Electric.
It is yet another indicator of Beijing’s rising influence in the region. China is the top buyer of South American soybeans, iron ore and other commodities, while Chinese investors are snapping up stakes in key sectors such as energy.
In Argentina alone, China has financed hydroelectric dams and wind farms, and the government is in talks for a Beijing-bankrolled nuclear power project, potentially using China’s own Hualong One reactor design. China has invested some $5.7 billion in energy projects in Argentina since 2000, according to data compiled by the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University.
Argentina’s U.S.-educated President Mauricio Macri attended China’s first Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in 2017, a signal of the tightening embrace between the two nations. A number of Latin American officials are expected to be at the second forum later this month in the Chinese capital.
China has spent more than $244 billion on energy projects worldwide since 2000, a quarter of that in Latin America, according to the Global Development Policy Center data. While the vast majority of that capital has flowed to oil, gas and coal assets, China has been the largest investor in clean energy globally for nine straight years, according to the Chinese embassy in Buenos Aires.
China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels and inverters, dominance that has seen European and U.S. producers struggle to compete. The Trump administration last year slapped steep tariffs on imported panels, citing unfair competition. But many renewable energy experts credit falling prices for speeding global adoption of solar.
So has China’s willingness to finance clean-energy projects in the developing world, opening doors for other Chinese firms. In Jujuy province, for example, the local government inked a deal with Chinese tech giant ZTE to supply it with fiber optic telecommunications systems and hundreds of surveillance cameras in the wake of the solar project.
“(Cauchari) paved the way – a highway – for all other projects,” a person familiar with the situation told Reuters.
Jujuy’s pivot to China underscores the challenge for the United States, whose warnings about the pitfalls of Chinese backing are no match for Beijing’s outreach and resources.
Jujuy Governor Morales recently traveled to China to discuss the Cauchari expansion with PowerChina and the Import-Export Bank of China, one of several trips local officials have made to the Asian nation over the past few years.
Jujuy, with its soon-to-be launched clean power and low seismic risk, is trying to position itself as an attractive location for companies to place their data centers. Morales said Chinese universities in Guizhou are helping Jujuy scale the learning curve, attention for which the long-ignored province is grateful.
“Suddenly Jujuy is recognized in China,” Morales said. “We have a path open there.”
(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Marla Dickerson)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Amazon is seen at the company logistics centre in Boves, France, January 19, 2019. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol
April 23, 2019
PARIS (Reuters) – French supermarket retailer Casino said on Tuesday that it was beefing up its partnership with tech giant Amazon following the success of an earlier deal between its Monoprix supermarket chain and Amazon in Paris.
The new, extended partnership entails the installation of 1,000 so-called Amazon lockers in Casino stores across France and the availability of Casino-branded products on Amazon.
Amazon and Monoprix will also extend their partnership on the Prime Now grocery delivery service outside Paris and onto new cities in the next twelve months.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
Source: OANN
An illustration photo shows the Facebook page displayed on a mobile phone internet browser held in front of a computer screen at a cyber-cafe in downtown Nairobi, Kenya April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer
April 23, 2019
By Maggie Fick and Paresh Dave
NAIROBI/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s struggles with hate speech and other types of problematic content are being hampered by the company’s inability to keep up with a flood of new languages as mobile phones bring social media to every corner of the globe.
The company offers its 2.3 billion users features such as menus and prompts in 111 different languages, deemed to be officially supported. Reuters has found another 31 widely spoken languages on Facebook that do not have official support.
Detailed rules known as “community standards,” which bar users from posting offensive material including hate speech and celebrations of violence, were translated in only 41 languages out of the 111 supported as of early March, Reuters found.
Facebook’s 15,000-strong content moderation workforce speaks about 50 tongues, though the company said it hires professional translators when needed. Automated tools for identifying hate speech work in about 30.
The language deficit complicates Facebook’s battle to rein in harmful content and the damage it can cause, including to the company itself. Countries including Australia, Singapore and the UK are now threatening harsh new regulations, punishable by steep fines or jail time for executives, if it fails to promptly remove objectionable posts.
The community standards are updated monthly and run to about 9,400 words in English.
Monika Bickert, the Facebook vice president in charge of the standards, has previously told Reuters that they were “a heavy lift to translate into all those different languages.”
A Facebook spokeswoman said this week the rules are translated case by case depending on whether a language has a critical mass of usage and whether Facebook is a primary information source for speakers. The spokeswoman said there was no specific number for critical mass.
She said among priorities for translations are Khmer, the official language in Cambodia, and Sinhala, the dominant language in Sri Lanka, where the government blocked Facebook this week to stem rumors about devastating Easter Sunday bombings.
A Reuters report found last year that hate speech on Facebook that helped foster ethnic cleansing in Myanmar went unchecked in part because the company was slow to add moderation tools and staff for the local language.
Facebook says it now offers the rules in Burmese and has more than 100 speakers of the language among its workforce.
The spokeswoman said Facebook’s efforts to protect people from harmful content had “a level of language investment that surpasses most any technology company.”
But human rights officials say Facebook is in jeopardy of a repeat of the Myanmar problems in other strife-torn nations where its language capabilities have not kept up with the impact of social media.
“These are supposed to be the rules of the road and both customers and regulators should insist social media platforms make the rules known and effectively police them,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “Failure to do so opens the door to serious abuses.”
ABUSE IN FIJIAN
Mohammed Saneem, the supervisor of elections in Fiji, said he felt the impact of the language gap during elections in the South Pacific nation in November last year. Racist comments proliferated on Facebook in Fijian, which the social network does not support. Saneem said he dedicated a staffer to emailing posts and translations to a Facebook employee in Singapore to seek removals.
Facebook said it did not request translations, and it gave Reuters a post-election letter from Saneem praising its “timely and effective assistance.”
Saneem told Reuters that he valued the help but had expected pro-active measures from Facebook.
“If they are allowing users to post in their language, there should be guidelines available in the same language,” he said.
Similar issues abound in African nations such as Ethiopia, where deadly ethnic clashes among a population of 107 million have been accompanied by ugly Facebook content. Much of it is in Amharic, a language supported by Facebook. But Amharic users looking up rules get them in English.
At least 652 million people worldwide speak languages supported by Facebook but where rules are not translated, according to data from language encyclopedia Ethnologue. Another 230 million or more speak one of the 31 languages that do not have official support.
Facebook uses automated software as a key defense against prohibited content. Developed using a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, these tools identify hate speech in about 30 languages and “terrorist propaganda” in 19, the company said.
Machine learning requires massive volumes of data to train computers, and a scarcity of text in other languages presents a challenge in rapidly growing the tools, Guy Rosen, the Facebook vice president who oversees automated policy enforcement, has told Reuters.
GROWTH REGIONS
Beyond the automation and a few official fact-checkers, Facebook relies on users to report problematic content. That creates a major issue where community standards are not understood or even known to exist.
Ebele Okobi, Facebook’s director of public policy for Africa, told Reuters in March that the continent had the world’s lowest rates of user reporting.
“A lot of people don’t even know that there are community standards,” Okobi said.
Facebook has bought radio advertisements in Nigeria and worked with local organizations to change that, she said. It also has held talks with African education officials to introduce social media etiquette into the curriculum, she said.
Simultaneously, Facebook is partnering with wireless carriers and other groups to expand internet access in countries including Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo where it has yet to officially support widely-used languages such as Luganda and Kituba. Asked this week about the expansions without language support, Facebook declined to comment.
The company announced in February it would soon have its first 100 sub-Saharan Africa-based content moderators at an outsourcing facility in Nairobi. They will join existing teams in reviewing content in Somali, Oromo and other languages.
But the community standards are not translated into Somali or Oromo. Posts in Somali from last year celebrating the al-Shabaab militant group remained on Facebook for months despite a ban on glorifying organizations or acts that Facebook designates as terrorist.
“Disbelievers and apostates, die with your anger,” read one post seen by Reuters this month that praised the killing of a Sufi cleric.
After Reuters inquired about the post, Facebook said it took down the author’s account because it violated policies.
ABILITY TO DERAIL
Posts in Amharic reviewed by Reuters this month attacked the Oromo and Tigray ethnic populations in vicious terms that clearly violated Facebook’s ban on discussing ethnic groups using “violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion.”
Facebook removed the two posts Reuters inquired about. The company added that it had erred in allowing one of them, from December 2017, to remain online following an earlier user report.
For officials such as Saneem in Fiji, Facebook’s efforts to improve content moderation and language support are painfully slow. Saneem said he warned Facebook months in advance of the election in the archipelago of 900,000 people. Most of them use Facebook, with half writing in English and half in Fijian, he estimated.
“Social media has the ability to completely derail an election,” Saneem said.
Other social media companies face the same problem to varying degrees.
(GRAPHIC: Social media and the language gap – https://tmsnrt.rs/2VHjwTu)
Facebook-owned Instagram said its 1,179-word community guidelines are in 30 out of 51 languages offered to users. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook as well, has terms in nine of 58 supported languages, Reuters found.
Alphabet Inc’s YouTube presents community guidelines in 40 of 80 available languages, Reuters found. Twitter Inc’s rules are in 37 of 47 supported languages, and Snap Inc’s in 13 out of 21.
“A lot of misinformation gets spread around and the problem with the content publishers is the reluctance to deal with it,” Saneem said. “They do owe a duty of care. “
(Reporting by Maggie Fick in Nairobi and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Alister Doyle in Fiji and Omar Mohammed in Nairobi; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: OANN
A worker stands in front of Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Railway exhibition hall at Walini tunnel construction site in West Bandung regency, West Java province, Indonesia, February 21, 2019. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan
April 23, 2019
By Fanny Potkin and Tabita Diela
WALLINI, Indonesia (Reuters) – In a rural part of Indonesia’s Java island, two orange-clad workers confer in Mandarin over plans to lay tracks on a stretch of a $6 billion high-speed rail project between the capital Jakarta and the textile hub of Bandung.
Both are employees of the state-owned China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC), and have previously worked on a rail project in Uganda, another part of Beijing’s sweeping multi-billion dollar “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond.
Delayed for nearly three years over land ownership issues, construction on the 142 km (88-mile) Indonesian line finally kicked into high gear in 2018.
When China hosts its second summit of nations that are part of BRI this week, Beijing is likely to showcase the Indonesian project along with its recent success in getting Malaysia’s East Coast Railway Link (ECRL) back on track after months of negotiations.
Analysts say the two projects will be held up as China’s answers to criticism about high debt and the lack of transparency in the BRI and its attempt to refocus the program on sustainable financing, green growth, and high quality.
China’s foreign ministry said last week Beijing would “work together with all parties to benefit people across the world by jointly promoting the high-quality development of BRI in line with the national conditions of each country”.
The BRI is a key policy of Chinese President Xi Jinping but has been controversial in many Western capitals, particularly Washington, which views it as a means to spread Chinese influence abroad and saddle countries with unsustainable debt through nontransparent projects.
According to a draft communique seen by Reuters, participants at this week’s summit will agree to project financing that respects global debt goals and promotes green growth.
“This bucks the trend of recent negative headlines around the BRI and challenges facing projects in several countries,” said Peter Mumford at the Eurasia Group consultancy.
But in Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed agreed to put the 668-km ECRL back on track only after cutting the cost of the project from $16 billion to $10.7 billion.
“The risk for China is that other countries, having seen Mahathir’s success, now try to adopt similar tough re-negotiating tactics on BRI projects, which could slow progress elsewhere,” said Mumford.
To be sure, there is no sign of any of the BRI countries attempting to re-negotiate deals signed with Beijing. Analysts say China is likely to use its willingness to work with partner nations and make projects feasible to seek more business.
“GOLD-PLATED”
Bankers familiar with the deal say the Indonesian project is being constructed under “gold-plated terms”.
Of the total $6 billion cost, China’s Development Bank will provide a $4.5 billion loan at 2 percent interest, according a project prospectus seen by Reuters. The remaining 25 percent of the project cost will be funded by equity provided by the consortium.
The loan will have no sovereign guarantees, which are among the most controversial parts of Belt and Road projects, as they shift risk onto the governments of partner countries.
Beijing lobbied hard against Tokyo in 2015 to win the Indonesian project as a way to showcase its high-speed rail expertise to international customers.
“China wanted to deliberately show that its fast train was better than Japan … we asked for the lowest rate possible and they gave 2 percent,” Rini Soemarno, Indonesia’s minister for state-owned enterprises, told reporters earlier this year.
The railway’s financial terms came under debate during April’s presidential election between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto, who pledged to review the project if he pulled off a victory.
While the results are still to be officially confirmed, sample vote counts by independent pollsters show Widodo to be headed for a second term.
At the project site, there seem to be no doubts that it will be completed. Deep in Indonesia’s tea country, workers are directing drilling machines into a hillside, displacing red earth to carve out two tunnels that will lead to the station of Wallini, a tea plantation near Bandung.
Chinese workers there told Reuters they had been at the site for a year and expected to stay until the project’s completion in 2021. Four new satellite towns will be built by the train consortium along the route.
Widodo’s government is currently offering up to $91 billion in infrastructure projects to Chinese companies, according to Luhut Pandjaitan, the coordinating minister for maritime affairs, who said Chinese officials have toured regional governments in search of projects to fund.
Two top officials told Reuters Widodo intends to lead a delegation to the Belt and Road forum, where some of those projects are expected to be signed.
One of the officials, Indonesia’s investment board chief, Thomas Lembong, told Reuters he expected this week’s summit to be a turning point, a “Belt and Road 2.0” with China more willing to negotiate.
“The Chinese leadership will do whatever it takes to make Belt and Road a success, even if that means making it more professionalised, transparent, and more cooperative,” he said.
THE SINGAPORE LINK
The revival of the Malaysian project is likely to give China hope of securing another train project: the high speed rail (HSR) between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, which was postponed by Mahathir after he initially threatened to cancel it.
“China will likely take heart from the ECRL outcome and focus their efforts on ensuring that the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore HSR remains on track,” Harrison Cheng, an analyst at Control Risks, told Reuters.
Beijing had been intent on being awarded the project to prove that its rail expertise could win over rivals in a first-world country like Singapore, with its diplomats describing it as a “must win at all costs project”.
Apart from CREC, consortiums from Japan, South Korea, Europe, Singapore and Malaysia are also in the race, if the project is revived.
A source in the Singaporean government said Malaysia would have to pay significant penalties to cancel the project altogether.
Mahathir as well as Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will take part in this week’s Belt and Road summit, which could see China make a renewed push for the project.
(Reporting by Fanny Potkin and Tabita Diela in JAKARTA and WALLINI; Additional reporting by Gayatri Suroyo and Cindy Silviana in JAKARTA, Sumeet Chatterjee in HONG KONG, Brenda Goh in SHANGHAI, Joseph Sipalan and Liz Lee in Kuala Lumpur, and Joe Brock and John Geddie in SINGAPORE, Editing by Ed Davies and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: OANN
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