Fixed income

China and Switzerland have enjoyed a longstanding win-win partnership and China has an optmisstic economic outlook, the Swiss minister of Economic Affairs, Education and Research, Johann Schneider-Ammann said in an interview with Xinhua, chinese media on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

"I am very proud that Chinese President Xi Jinping could come to my country and stay four days," Schneider-Ammann said "In April last year we established such good personal relationships, and I’m proud of this success."

IBM reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations on Thursday, thanks largely to the company’s transition towards higher-margin and faster-growing businesses like the cloud and Big Data analytics. But the iconic New York-based enterprise technology company has now suffered 19 straight quarters of declining year-over-year total revenues, a streak that has kept would-be investors on the sidelines.

While earnings per share rose 4% from a year ago, revenues were down 1%, the company said. IBM’s revenue has decline from the year-ago quarter since April 2012, when sales were nearly flat.

George Soros, on the sideline of Davos Forum, gave his views on the state of the world. The EU, according to billionaire investor, is disintegrating following last year’s Brexit vote and Italian referendum, a course that must be reversed. The trading bloc has become dysfunctional because it is governed by laws that are "not appropriate to the current circumstances" and not easily changed, he said.

"If Europe breaks down, the consequences will be very dire," the investor said. "But I do see a way it could be saved, and this is also recognized by many of the people in Brussels. They can’t say so publicly, but they know that Europe is not functioning."

Swiss Life company Zurich will cut 240 jobs in the UK as part of a business restructure. The company said it will remove 240 jobs from the UK business after plans were announced last year to merge the life and general insurance departments. The new structure will be effective immediately but the firm will consult on the job cuts before making any decisions.

Zurich said the jobs cuts would not be in ‘market facing’ roles and were likely to be from back office positions. It said cuts would be made where there was overlap between life and general insurance positions.

Deutsche Bank has warned its employees of more job cuts to come. In addition to announcing radically reduced 2016 bonus payments for top managers, the bank told some staff on Wednesday that layoffs will continue, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions as Bloomberg reported.

In a note to staff on Wednesday, John Cryan, chief executive, said Deutsche’s management board had decided to waive their bonuses for 2016, the second consecutive year in which top executives at Germany’s biggest bank have forgone such awards after it finalised its $7.2 billion legal settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice related to the sale of mortgage bonds into the peak of the global financial crisis.

MasterCard has put forward proposals to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) after the watchdog expressed concern over its acquisition of VocaLink. The CMA said the merger could make it difficult for the UK ATM network Link to negotiate a good infrastructure service because of reduced competition.

The CMA had given MasterCard and VocaLink an ultimatum to remedy its competition concerns or face an in-depth investigation.

The Geberit Group reported that its net sales increased by 8.3% to 2.81 billion Swiss francs in the 2016 financial year. Adjusted for currency effects and in organic terms, net sales rose by 6.4%. Due to synergies from the integration of the Sanitec business, volume growth and lower prices for raw materials, management expects an adjusted operating cashflow margin (EBITDA margin) of around 28.5 percent for the year as a whole – a figure that is significantly up on the previous year.

Italy’s Luxottica and France’s Essilor on Monday announced they have agreed on a 50-billion-euro merger deal to create an eyewear giant with over 140,000 employees and sales in some 150 countries.

The deal, one of Europe’s largest cross-border tie-ups, brings together Luxottica, the world’s top spectacles maker with brands such as Oakley and Ray-Ban, with Essilor, the world’s leading manufacturer of ophthalmic lenses.
By merging, the companies would have jointly reported net earnings of over 15 billion euros, based on 2015 annual results posted by the two companies, and a net combined operating profit EBITDA of about 3.5 billion euros.