Corporate

Online retail giant Amazon on Thursday opened its first brick and mortar bookstore in New York, selling a limited range of its highest-rated books and letting customers browse products as in times gone by.

Amazon, which launched as an online bookseller in 1995 but which now sells everything from designer clothes to groceries, bided its time before venturing into the US cultural capital. It launched brick and mortar bookstores in six other cities first, starting in its hometown Seattle in 2015.

Tech giant Apple has been named the most valuable brand in the world for a seventh consecutive year, worth $170 billion. Its brand value is up 10% over last year and represents 21% of the company’s recent market value of $806 billion, a 10 per cent increase on the figure for 2016. Google ranked second place, whose brand value has risen $19.3bn from last year to just under $102bn, according to Forbes. It’s the second straight year Google has placed second to Apple, and it is closing the gap with a 23% gain this year after a 26% jump in 2016.

Hunstman Corp and Switzerland’s Clariant AG announced their merger on Monday; the deal would create a trans-Atlantic company valued at about $14 billion offering an array of chemicals such as polyurethanes, pigments, automotive fluids, additives and resins that are used across industries ranging from aerospace to agriculture to household cleaning.
Under the terms of the proposed deal, Clariant shareholders would own 52 percent of the combined company. Huntsman shareholders, including its eponymous founding family, would own the rest.

Credit Suisse shareholders on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a plan to sell 4 billion Swiss francs ($4.1 billion) of new shares to raise capital, allowing the banking giant to keep full control of its profitable Swiss unit. The capital raising plans, announced last month, received 99.35 percent of the votes at an extraordinary general meeting in Zurich.

Credit Suisse announced the capital hike on April 26, shelving its longstanding plans to partially float its Swiss banking unit through an initial public offering. The bank previously raised 6 billion francs in 2015.

Hackers are claiming to have stolen an upcoming Disney movie and are demanding a ransom, according media reporters. Disney CEO Bob Iger first revealed the hackers’ claim in a staff meeting with employees in New York City, Deadline.com and The Hollywood Reporter reported. Disney is working with federal investigators and will not pay the ransom, the reports say.

Movie website Deadline identified Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which opens on May 26, as the target, without revealing its sources, while some film writers speculated on Twitter that Pixar’s Cars 3, due for release next month, might have been hit.

Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC is selling part of its stake in Swiss bank UBS at a loss, nearly a decade after it first invested in the bank at the height of the financial crisis.

"Conditions have changed fundamentally since GIC invested in UBS in February 2008, as have UBS’ strategy and business," GIC Chief Executive Officer Lim Chow Kiat said early Tuesday (May 16) in a statement. "It makes sense now for GIC to reduce its ownership of UBS and to redeploy these resources elsewhere," Mr Lim said.

Credit ratings agency Moody’s said Monday it will buy Dutch business intelligence company Bureau van Dijk for for about $3.3 billion to extend its risk data and analytical businesses.

Bureau van Dijk is currently owned by investment firm EQT and it distributes financial information and private company datasets of 220 million companies. "Bureau van Dijk is a high growth information aggregator and distributor that positions Moody’s at the center of a unique network of global risk data," said Moody’s CEO Raymond McDaniel. "This acquisition provides significant opportunities for Moody’s Analytics to offer complementary products, create new risk solutions and extend its reach to new and evolving market segments."

Richemont reported worse-than-expected results shortly before Friday’s open as the Geneva-based company said a volatile trading environment had caused its net profits to slip more than anticipated. However, the world’s second-largest luxury goods group noted an uptick in sales growth towards the end of its fiscal year, in large part attributable to easier comparisons and support from a sustainable recovery in mainland China, Reuters reported.

Sales at Richemont fell 4 percent at constant exchange rates in the year to March, missing expectations in a Reuters poll of analysts, but with a clear improvement in the second half thanks to a recovery in the United States and strong growth in China.