Corporate

Food group Nestle has confirmed it aims to grow underlying sales by 2-4% this year after growth slowed in the first quarter, hit by weak consumer demand for packaged foods and a deflationary environment.

Underlying "organic" sales growth at the maker of Buitoni pasta and Maggi soups slowed to 2.3 percent in the first quarter, from 3.9 percent in the year-ago period that included one more trading day and an earlier Easter, the group based in Vevey on Lake Geneva said in a statement on Thursday.

This was in line with forecasts in a Reuters poll. Consumer goods groups face challenges as increasingly health-conscious consumers often prefer fresh produce to packaged foods.

In a recent survey of US college students, commissioned by LendEDU, a consumer finance comparison site, only 8% of respondents said they didn’t have a Netflix account. That means that a whopping 92% have Netflix. Additionally, 5% said they used their current or ex-girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s account. Meanwhile, only 34% said they have their own account.
“Netflix continues to be the clear leader in online streaming, but is hurting in one key performance metric,” the report said. Netflix is also the most popular video platform among teens, beating out both YouTube and cable TV in a recent Piper Jaffray survey.

Credit Suisse, which set up a European hub in Dublin creating 100 jobs last year to service hedge fund clients, may apply for a full banking licence in Ireland as it prepares to move jobs out of London following the UK’s decision to quit the European Union, according to sources.

Credit Suisse received regulatory approval in December 2015 to operate as a direct branch of the group’s Zurich headquarters, becoming the first and only bank to date to avail of a change in Irish law in 2013 that allowed non-EU banks to set up a branch in Ireland.
Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Paris and Brussels are among the main locations competing with Dublin to lure financial services activity from London in the wake of the Brexit referendum last June. However, despite the triggering of Article 50 last month, it is understood that Credit Suisse has, as yet, no preferred location.

Credit Suisse chief executive Tidjane Thiam and the bank’s board of directors have offered to cut their own bonuses by 40% ahead of its annual meeting. They also proposed to keep total board pay at the same level as 2015 and 2016.

The move follows pressure from Swiss lawmakers and the bank’s shareholders to address excessive executive pay. Glass Lewis & Co and Geneva-based Ethos, which advises major Swiss pension funds that may represent up to 5 per cent of the bank’s market capitalisation, also criticised the bonuses. The pair had opposed executive and director compensation packages last year, as well, without success. Still, at that meeting, almost one in five shareholders voted to reject the proposed packages.

Facebook Messenger now has over 1.2 billion monthly active users, with the platform adding 200 million users in just eight months.

The milestone, announced ahead of Facebook’s annual conference for software developers next week by head of Messenger David Marcus, is key to Facebook’s push to own more of people’s time and wallets on mobile devices as the arms race with Google and other competitors escalates.

The Barry Callebaut Group, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, saw sales volume growth picking up to +3.5% in the second quarter (first quarter -0.4%), leading to a topline growth for the first six months of fiscal year 2016/17 of +1.4% to 946,782 tons. This contrasts with the -2.1% decline of the global chocolate confectionery market during the same period (Nielsen, Aug 2016-Jan 2017).

"Markets are difficult everywhere, particularly in confectionery in the United States," Chief Executive Antoine de Saint-Affrique told reporters on a call on Wednesday, adding he expected to see an improvement in Europe this year and expected the good momentum for the company to continue.

Toshiba on Tuesday warned its survival was at risk as the struggling Japanese industrial giant reported a loss of $4.8 billion in long-overdue financial results.

The company, a colossus of corporate Japan with 188,000 employees globally, had been threatened with expulsion from the Tokyo Stock Exchange unless it met the extended deadline of Tuesday to file its accounts.

Finally, the integration of the Swiss business of Banca Svizzera Italiana (BSI) into EFG Bank has been completed. From this moment, the majority of the customer relationships and employees of BSI are transferred, as EFG referred in a media release. The combined business will now be launched on the market under the name EFG.

EFG International said it completed the legal integration of "substantially all" of BSI SA’s Swiss business into EFG Bank AG, a 100 percent subsidiary of EFG International. The remaining BSI entities in Luxembourg and Monaco are expected to be integrated in the course of the second quarter of 2017, EFG said.