Fixed income

Netflix added more subscribers than expected around the world in the third quarter and projected growth in line with Wall Street forecasts, saying it had a head start on rivals as internet television explodes globally.

Netflix’s 5.3 million additional subscribers in the third quarter included 4.45 million in international markets and 850,000 in the United States. Wall Street had expected 4.5 million overall, with 3.69 million overseas and 810,000 in the United States, according to FactSet.

Voters in Switzerland will decide whether to ban Muslim face veils including the burqa after a campaign by far-right groups to outlaw the garment which they say undermine the "dignity of women". The public will get a chance to have its say in a referendum expected to be rolled out next year in the country where less than 5 per cent are Islamic in the largely Christian nation.

Germany’s Bayer said Friday it would sell parts of its agrichemical business to rival BASF, kick-starting a competitor in the seeds market even as it clears the way for its mammoth takeover of US-based Monsanto.

Bayer is selling some of its Crop Science business to BASF to help clear the way for its pending $66 billion acquisition of Monsanto Co. Bayer announced Friday that it had signed an agreement to sell the units for 5.9 million euro, or about $7 billion.

"We are taking an active approach to address potential regulatory concerns, with the goal of facilitating a successful close of the Monsanto transaction,” Werner Baumann, Bayer chairman, said in a statement.

Lufthansa is set to sign a deal to buy parts of Air Berlin, the failed German carrier. The deal was reported Thursday morning by the Rheinische Post and confirmed to Fortune by Lufthansa.
Germany’s second-largest carrier filed for bankruptcy in August after its main shareholder, Etihad, said it would not give further financial support.

LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury goods company, reported higher-than-expected revenue growth for the third quarter on Monday, setting a high bar for peers after strong sales at its fashion brands.

LVMH, home to labels like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Moet & Chandon champagne, said like-for-like revenues, which strip out currency swings and acquisitions or disposals, grew 12 percent from a year earlier to €30.1 billion ($35.4 billion).

That beat the 9 percent organic growth forecast in an analyst poll compiled for Reuters by Inquiry Financial and was stable from the previous quarter, in spite of a weaker showing by LVMH’s spirits unit and a tricky foreign exchange climate.

IKEA plans to test “open-source” design and full-range town-centre showrooms as part of the furniture retailer’s efforts to adapt to rapidly changing consumer shopping habits. The budget furniture retailer’s strategy will still be based on its out-of-town warehouse stores, where shoppers pick up their purchases, but it also wants to become more accessible, physically and digitally. It has launched trial store formats such as smaller city centre stores, order and pickup-points and – the latest test format – a kitchen showroom in Stockholm’s financial district.

Verizon Communications, which acquired Yahoo this year, said on Tuesday that a previously disclosed attack that had occurred in 2013 affected all three billion of Yahoo’s user accounts, as the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Last year, Yahoo said the 2013 attack on its network had affected one billion accounts. Three months before that, the company also disclosed a separate attack, which had occurred in 2014, that had affected 500 million accounts.

Swiss private bank J. Safra Sarasin Group has agreed to buy Bank Hapoalim’s private banking businesses in Luxembourg and Switzerland, with offices in Zurich and Luxembourg, the Swiss group said on Tuesday.

"The agreement covers qualifying clients and their relationship management teams who are focused on private banking clients across Israel and Europe," it added in a statement. It gave no purchase price for the deal, which it said was set to wrap up in the first half of 2018 pending regulatory approval.