Corporate

Birkenstock has terminated its business relations with Amazon, accusing it of breaking the law. From January 1, Birkenstock will cease trading with the online retail giant within the EU, citing a breakdown in trust between the two parties.

In a statement issued on Monday, Birkenstock claimed there has been a series of violations of the law on Amazon’s Marketplace platform, which the online retailer failed to prevent. Birkenstock said on a number of occasions, it filed complaints that counterfeit products of poor quality, which infringed the company’s trademark rights and misled the consumers regarding the origins of goods that, were being made available on the platform.

Swiss private bank EFG International has concluded the integration of all operations of local rival BSI into its platform. The deal came to a close with migration of BSI’s Ticino business to EFG’s IT platform. The merger comprised 15 individual IT migrations this year. With the deal, EFG advances to one of Switzerland’s largest private banks, which 147.5 billion in assets under management as of October.

General Electric announced plans on Thursday to ax around a third of its Swiss workforce as the industrial conglomerate responds to a sharp fall in demand for fossil fuel power equipment.

GE aims to cut up to 1,400 jobs in Switzerland where it employs 4,200 people, but said no locations would close. According to French newspaper Les Echos, General Electric will cut 4 500 jobs in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. The cuts are associated with businesses, which General Electric acquired from France’s Alstom two years ago.

Nestlé Chief Executive Officer Mark Schneider made his biggest acquisition yet, agreeing to buy Canadian dietary supplements maker Atrium Innovations for $2.3 billion in a bid for growth beyond stagnating mainstream food brands.

The world’s biggest food company is acquiring Westmount, Quebec-based Atrium from an investor group led by Permira Funds, Nestlé said in a statement Tuesday. The Swiss owner of Nespresso and Lean Cuisine is paying cash for the Garden of Life supplement maker, whose 2017 sales are expected to approach $700 million.

Credit Suisse plans to complete its group restructuring in 2018, it said Thursday as it raised its 2018 profit target for its wealth-management and connected business in Asia-Pacific, and announced new guidance for 2019 and for 2020.

"Our teams remain strongly focused on driving value for our clients and shareholders through 2018 and our objective is to achieve a group reported return on tangible equity of between 10-11% for 2019 and between 11-12% for 2020," CEO Tidjane Thiam said in the statement.

Banks and financial institutions of particularly intrinsic importance to the global financial ecosystem are sometimes blithely referred to as "too big to fail".
A more sober term is ‘global systemically important banks’, or G-SIBs for short. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, at the 2009 G20 summit, an international body called the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was set up, its aim being to monitor the global financial system and make recommendations, when it deemed appropriate. The 2017 list was published on Tuesday and it makes for interesting reading.

Credit Suisse is considering spreading its trading, investment-banking and wealth management activities across several European locations after Brexit, «Bloomberg» reported, citing three sources on condition of anonymity.Switzerland’s second-largest bank is considering moving the activities affected by Brexit to a number of European cities, instead of replacing London with one large alternative location.

It’s been over two weeks since the last ever Air Berlin flight landed on October 27th and anyone who has bought domestic tickets since then has almost certainly noticed the difference.
Passengers flying domestically are paying on average 32.5 percent more for short haul flights compared to four weeks ago, according to an analysis carried out by MyDealz.de. The shopping portal analyzed prices on 25 short and medium haul routes in October and again in November before coming to its conclusions.