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Business

Shell posts profit of nearly $40 billion and announces $4 billion in buybacks

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Hong Kong/London
CNN
 — 

Shell made a record profit of almost $40 billion in 2022, more than double what it raked in the previous year after oil and gas prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Europe’s largest oil company by revenue reported adjusted full-year earnings of $39.9 billion on Thursday — more than double the $19.3 billion it posted in 2021 — driven by a strong performance in its gas trading business. The company’s stock was up 1.7% in London.

The company reported $9.8 billion in profit in the fourth quarter. Just over 40% of Shell’s full-year earnings came from its integrated gas business, which includes liquified natural gas trading operations.

Shell CEO Wael Sawan said the results “demonstrate the strength of Shell’s differentiated portfolio, as well as our capacity to deliver vital energy to our customers in a volatile world.”

The earnings are the latest in a series of record-setting results by the world’s biggest energy companies, which have enjoyed bumper profits off the back of soaring oil and gas prices.

ExxonMobil this week posted record full-year earnings of $59.1 billion. Last month, Chevron

(CVX) reported a record full-year profit of $36.5 billion.

That has led to renewed calls for higher taxation. Governments in the European Union and the United Kingdom have already imposed windfall taxes on oil company profits, with the proceeds used to help households struggling with rising energy bills.

Shell said it expected to pay an additional $2.3 billion in tax related to the EU windfall tax and the UK energy profits levy. The company paid $13 billion in tax globally in 2022.

Shell

(RDSA) also announced another $4 billion share buyback program and confirmed it would lift its dividend per share by 15% for the fourth quarter.

— This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Business

GM shares surge after record earnings and new stake in lithium company

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New York
CNN
 — 

General Motors reported a much stronger than expected fourth-quarter profit, lifting full-year results to record levels for the second straight year.

The largest US automaker also said Tuesday it is buying a $650 million equity stake in Lithium Americas, which will give it access to the raw material needed to build batteries to power 1 million electric vehicles a year in the first phase of production.

For the quarter, GM earned adjusted earnings of $3 billion, or $2.12 a share, up from $1.35 a share a year earlier and far better than forecasts of $1.69 a share from analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. That lifted full-year adjusted income to $11 billion, up from the $10.4 billion it earned in 2021, which had been its previous record.

The company said it expects strong earnings in 2023, though it expects it to slip a bit from the just posted levels, coming in at between $8.7 billion to $10.1 billion. But company CFO Paul Jacobson said its automotive business is expected to remain strong, with much of the decline likely to be at GM Financial. That’s due to the hit it will take from higher interest rates and the sinking value of used cars, as well as the higher interest rates resulting in an accounting hit to pension earnings.

“Actually that [guidance] is a strong statement about where we see things going, stronger than others” he told journalists on a call Tuesday.

Jacobson told journalists that GM does not expect to follow Tesla and Ford in cutting the prices for its electric vehicles.

“I don’t think there’s any surprise there’s increasing competition in the EV space,” he said. “Our customers are saying we’re priced well based on the demand that we’re seeing.”

The company’s investment in Lithium Americas is part of the company’s efforts to lock-up the supply of raw materials it will need to convert from traditional gasoline powered cars to electric vehicles. The Lithium Americas deal will not supply any lithium to the company until 2026, but Jacobson told media that “we’ve already achieved all the lithium we need through 2025.”

GM expects to build 70,000 EVs this year, a small fraction of its overall vehicle output. It sold 5.9 million vehicles in 2022, down about 6% from 2021 due to the shortage of parts needed to build all the vehicles for which there was demand.

“We continue to face some supply chain and logistics issues, but overall, things remain trending in the right direction,” said Jacobson.

But the company expects to be rapidly increasing its EV supply and offerings, with a new battery plant that opened last year, two more under construction and a fourth planned soon. GM has a target to build 400,000 EVs through the middle of 2024, and 1 million annually by 2025.

CEO Mary Barra predicted there will be more deals like the Lithium Americas one to be announced soon.

“We continue to pursue strategic supply agreements and partnerships to further secure our long-term needs,” she told investors.

GM said it will reduce its staff in 2023, part of its effort to cut $2 billion in costs over the next two years. But unlike a number of major companies that have announced layoffs in recent months, company officials stressed GM would not be shrinking through layoffs. Instead the reduction would be handled through attrition.

GM did not disclose how many jobs might be trimmed, with Jacobson saying the company would end this year “slightly lower” in headcount.

GM has 167,000 employees globally, with 124,000 in North America. That includes more than 42,000 members of the United Auto Workers union. Those workers will get profit sharing bonuses of an average of $12,750 for the year, up nearly 25% from the $10,250 they received a year earlier.

Shares of GM

(GM) soared more than 5% in pre-market trading on the results.

This story is developing and will be updated.

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Entertainment

Taylor Swift: Live Nation exec will face lawmakers about concert tickets fiasco

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New York
CNN
 — 

Lawmakers are set to grill top executives from the event ticketing industry on Tuesday after Ticketmaster’s inability to process orders for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour left millions of fans unable to buy tickets or without their ticket even after purchase.

Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment, is set to testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday, two months after the Swift ticketing fiasco reignited public scrutiny of the industry. Jack Groetzinger, CEO of ticketing platform SeatGeek, is also scheduled to testify at the hearing.

Tickets for Swift’s new five-month Eras Tour – which kicks off March 17 and will have 52 concerts in multiple stadiums across the United States – went on sale on Ticketmaster in mid November. Heavy demand snarled the ticketing site, infuriating fans who couldn’t snag tickets. Customers complained about Ticketmaster not loading, saying the platform didn’t allow them to access tickets, even if they had a pre-sale code for verified fans.

Unable to resolve the problems, Ticketmaster subsequently canceled Swift’s concert ticket sales to the general public, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

As fury grew among legions of hardcore Swifties, Swift herself weighed in on the fiasco. “It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote on Instagram in November. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

As a result, the US Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled the hearing on Tuesday, titled “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry.

“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who sits on the committee, said in a statement about the hearing. “We will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industries harms customers and artists alike. Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

In his prepared opening remarks, Berchtold blamed “industrial scalpers” for recent online ticketing snafus and called for legislation to rein in those bad actors. Ticketmaster, he said, was “hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than we had ever experienced” amid the “unprecedented demand for Taylor Swift tickets.” The bot activity “required us to slow down and even pause our sales. This is what led to a terrible consumer experience that we deeply regret.”

“As we said after the onsale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans as well as to Ms. Swift,” he said in the opening remarks. Berchtold also noted some things the service could have done differently “in hindsight,” including “staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets.”

In addition to the executives, the committee said witnesses at the hearing will include Jerry Mickelson, CEO of Jam Productions, one of the largest producers of live entertainment, and singer-songwriter Clyde Lawrence.

Lawrence, who has composed music for motion pictures including the Disney+ holiday comedy movie “Noelle,” wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times in December titled “Taylor Swift’s Live Nation Debacle Is Just the Beginning,” in which he criticized Live Nation for allegedly being a monopoly and detrimental to artists.

“Whether it meets the legal definition of a monopoly or not, Live Nation’s control of the live music ecosystem is staggering,” he wrote.

Criticism of Ticketmaster’s dominance dates back decades, but the Swift ticketing incident has once again turned that issue into a dinner table discussion at many households.

Concert promoter Live Nation and ticketing company Ticketmaster, two of the largest companies in the concert business, announced their merger in 2009. The deal at the time raised concerns, including from the US Department of Justice, that it would create a near-monopoly in the industry.

The Justice Department allowed the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger to proceed despite a 2010 court filing in the case that raised objections to the merger. In the filing, the Justice Department said that Ticketmaster’s share among major concert venues exceeded 80%.

Ticketmaster disputes that market share estimate and says it holds at most just over 30% of the concert market, according to comments on NPR recently by Berchtold.

While irate fans were left scrambling to wade through the Swift ticket confusion, their collective anger caught lawmakers’ attention.

Members of Congress used the debacle to criticize Ticketmaster’s control of the live music industry, saying that because Ticketmaster dominates so heavily, it has no reason to make things better for the millions of customers who have no other choice.

“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” Klobuchar, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee, wrote in an open letter to Ticketmaster’s CEO in November. “That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal echoed Klobuchar’s concerns. He tweeted at the time that the tour “is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly.”

In December, lawmakers from the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, demanding a briefing on what went wrong and what steps the company is taking to fix the problems.

“The recent pre-sales ticketing process for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras tour – in which millions of fans endured delays, lockouts, and competition with aggressive scammers, scalpers and bots – raises concerns over the potential unfair and deceptive practices that face consumers and eventgoers,” the committee wrote in its letter.

The committee noted it had previously raised concerns about the industry’s business practices and said it wanted to meet with Rapino to discuss how the company processes tickets for concerts and major tours. It also wants answers about how Ticketmaster plans to improve in the future.

Brian A. Marks, a senior lecturer in the department of economics and business analytics at University of New Haven’s Pompea College of Business, said he would have liked Swift to make an appearance at the hearing.

“This hearing seems to be focused on Swift and what happened with the ticket sales. We also have to remember that Taylor Swift and her team negotiated a contract with Ticketmaster for sale of her concert ticket,” said Marks.

“Will Congress want to look at that contract? To me, what happened with the Swift concert tickets was not necessarily the result of Ticketmaster being the dominant player in the industry,” he said. Artists, and especially larger artists like Swift, “are free to elsewhere,” he said. “This point may get missed in tomorrow’s hearing.”

– CNN’s Frank Pallotta, Chris Isidore and David Goldman contributed to this story



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World

How Ukraine became a laboratory for western weapons and battlefield innovation

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CNN
 — 

Last fall, as Ukraine won back large swaths of territory in a series of counterattacks, it pounded Russian forces with American-made artillery and rockets. Guiding some of that artillery was a homemade targeting system that Ukraine developed on the battlefield.

A piece of Ukrainian-made software has turned readily available tablet computers and smartphones into sophisticated targeting tools that are now used widely across the Ukrainian military.

The result is a mobile app that feeds satellite and other intelligence imagery into a real-time targeting algorithm that helps units near the front direct fire onto specific targets. And because it’s an app, not a piece of hardware, it’s easy to quickly update and upgrade, and available to a wide range of personnel.

US officials familiar with the tool say it has been highly effective at directing Ukrainian artillery fire onto Russian targets.

The targeting app is among dozens of examples of battlefield innovations that Ukraine has come up with over nearly a year of war, often finding cheap fixes to expensive problems.

Small, plastic drones, buzzing quietly overhead, drop grenades and other ordinance on Russian troops. 3D printers now make spare parts so soldiers can repair heavy equipment in the field. Technicians have converted ordinary pickup trucks into mobile missile launchers. Engineers have figured out how to strap sophisticated US missiles onto older Soviet fighter jets such as the MiG-29, helping keep the Ukrainian air force flying after nine months of war.

Ukraine has even developed its own anti-ship weapon, the Neptune, based off Soviet rocket designs that can target the Russian fleet from almost 200 miles away.

This kind of Ukrainian ingenuity has impressed US officials, who have praised Kyiv’s ability to “MacGyver” solutions to its battlefield needs that fill in important tactical gaps left by the larger, more sophisticated Western weaponry.

While US and other Western officials don’t always have perfect insight into exactly how Ukraine’s custom-made systems work – in large part because they are not on the ground – both officials and open-source analysts say Ukraine has become a veritable battle lab for cheap but effective solutions.

“Their innovation is just incredibly impressive,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has also offered the United States and its allies a rare opportunity to study how their own weapons systems perform under intense use – and what munitions both sides are using to score wins in this hotly fought modern war. US operations officers and other military officials have also tracked how successfully Russia has used cheap, expendable drones that explode on impact, provided by Iran, to decimate the Ukrainian power grid.

Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations,” said one source familiar with Western intelligence. “This is real-world battle testing.”

For the US military, the war in Ukraine has been an incredible source of data on the utility of its own systems.

Some high-profile systems given to the Ukrainians – such as the Switchblade 300 drone and a missile designed to target enemy radar systems – have turned out to be less effective on the battlefield than anticipated, according to a US military operations officer with knowledge of the battlefield, as well as a recent British think tank study.

But the lightweight American-made M142 multiple rocket launcher, or HIMARS, has been critical to Ukraine’s success – even as officials have learned valuable lessons about the rate of maintenance repair those systems have required under such heavy use.

How Ukraine has used its limited supply of HIMARS missiles to wreak havoc on Russian command and control, striking command posts, headquarters and supply depots, has been eye-opening, a defense official said, adding that military leaders would be studying this for years.

Another crucial piece of insight has been about the M777 howitzer, the powerful artillery that has been a critical part of Ukraine’s battlefield power. But the barrels of the howitzers lose their rifling if too many shells are fired in a short time frame, another defense official said, making the artillery less accurate and less effective.

The Ukrainians have also made tactical innovations that have impressed Western officials. During the early weeks of the war, Ukrainian commanders adapted their operations to employ small teams of dismounted infantry during the Russian advance on Kyiv. Armed with shoulder-mounted Stinger and Javelin rockets, Ukrainian troops were able to sneak up on Russian tanks without infantry on their flanks.

The US has also closely studied the conflict for larger lessons on how a war between two modern nations might be waged in the 21st century.

The operations officer said that one lesson the US may take from this conflict is that towed artillery – like the M777 howitzer system – may be a thing of the past. Those systems are harder to move quickly to avoid return fire – and in a world of ubiquitous drones and overhead surveillance, “it’s very hard to hide nowadays,” this person said.

When it comes to lessons learned, “there’s a book to be written about this,” said Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

US defense contractors have also taken note of the novel opportunity to study – and market – their systems.

BAE Systems has already announced that the Russian success with their kamikaze drones has influenced how it is designing a new armored fighting vehicle for the Army, adding more armor to protect soldiers from attacks from above.

And different parts of the US government and industry have sought to test novel systems and solutions in a fight for which Ukraine needed all the help it could get.

In the early days of the conflict, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency sent five lightweight, high-resolution surveillance drones to US Special Operations Command in Europe – just in case they might come in handy in Ukraine. The drones, made by a company called Hexagon, weren’t part of a so-called program of record at the Defense Department, hinting at the experimental nature of the conflict.

Navy Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at the time, even boasted publicly that the US had trained a “military partner” in Europe on the system.

“What this allows you to do is to go out underneath cloud cover and collect your own [geointelligence] data,” Sharp told CNN on the sidelines of a satellite conference in Denver last spring.

Despite intense effort by a small group of US officials and outside industry, it remains unclear whether these drones ever made it into the fight.

Meanwhile, multiple intelligence and military officials told CNN they hoped that creating what the US military terms “attritable” drones – cheap, single-use weapons – has become a top priority for defense contractors.

“I wish we could make a $10,000 one-way attack drone,” one of these officials said, wistfully.

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Business

Start-up fails first launch as rocket explodes off Alaska’s coast

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CNN
 — 

A rocket operated by a California-based start-up failed near the coast of Alaska Tuesday, marking yet another mishap for companies hoping to offer their services to launch scores of small satellites into orbit.

The privately held ABL Space Systems attempted to launch its RS1 rocket at 1:27 p.m. local time (5:27 p.m. ET) in Alaska. But the company confirmed shortly after that there was an “anomaly,” an aerospace term for an issue or misstep, and the rocket “shut down prematurely.”

“This is not the outcome we were hoping for today, but one that we prepared for. We’ll revert with additional information when available,” the company said in a tweet. “Thanks to all for the support.”

The mission was aiming to carry two small satellites to orbit for OmniTeq, which recently spun off its space division. The company signed an agreement for ABL’s first launch in 2021 when it was still operating under the name L2 Aerospace.

ABL’s launch attempt on Tuesday was the second failure in two days for a burgeoning new industry: ABL is one among a long list of companies pursuing the same market — offering relatively cheap and easy access to launch services for operators of small satellites, which in years past have had to wait for extra room to open up aboard larger rockets.

On Monday, Virgin Orbit, a direct competitor of ABL attempting to launch its first mission out of the United Kingdom, acknowledged that its air-launched rocket failed to reach orbit.

The core of the business model propped up by companies like ABL and Virgin Orbit is offering frequent rides to space and making the process more responsive to the needs of small satellite companies, including those that are essentially building massive constellations of satellites in low-Earth orbit for a variety of purposes, such as providing space-based internet or monitoring Earth’s climate and resources.

These small spacecraft include SmallSats, which are as big as a family-size kitchen fridge, and a popular subset of SmallSats called CubeSats, which are standardized, miniature satellites that can be smaller than a shoebox.

The start-ups build rockets that are much smaller than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, for example. But so far, the new class of smaller rockets have not proven to be as reliable as their larger counterparts. Nearly every start-up in the industry has suffered at least one launch failure.

In a packed field, ABL was hoping to join a short list of US-based ventures that have notched at least one successful mission. The first, in 2018, was Rocket Lab, which so far has more than two dozen successful launches and three failures. Start-ups Astra and Firefly have also delivered satellites to orbit — as well as suffered setbacks.

Those companies may soon be joined by yet another start-up, Relativity, which currently has its first rocket poised at a launch site in Florida.

While all these rockets dedicated to launching small satellites are taking off, they do face competition from larger rockets that have started catering certain services to the same market. SpaceX, for example, started a SmallSat “rideshare” business in 2019 with its hefty Falcon 9 rocket, and the company so far has launched six missions dedicated to small satellites for various customers.

The failed ABL launch Monday comes after the first few attempts to get its RS1 rocket off the ground in December came up short. The company worked through several technical problems, including a faulty sensor and a couple pressurization issues, to get the RS1 ready for Tuesday’s flight attempt.



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Science

Two supermassive black holes, very close together, found by astronomers

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CNN
 — 

Two supermassive black holes have been spotted feasting on cosmic materials as two galaxies in distant space merge — and are the closest to colliding black holes astronomers have ever observed.

Astronomers spotted the pair while using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array of telescopes, or ALMA, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, to observe two merging galaxies about 500 million light-years from Earth.

The two black holes were growing in tandem near the center of the coalescing galaxy resulting from the merger. They met when their host galaxies, known as UGC 4211, collided.

One is 200 million times the mass of our sun, while the other is 125 million times the mass of our sun.

While the black holes themselves aren’t directly visible, both were surrounded by bright clusters of stars and warm, glowing gas — all of which is being tugged by the holes’ gravitational pull.

Over time, they will start circling one another in orbit, eventually crashing into one another and creating one black hole.

After observing them across multiple wavelengths of light, the black holes are located the closest together scientists have ever seen — only about 750 light-years apart, which is relatively close, astronomically speaking.

The results were shared at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held this week in Seattle, and published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The distance between the black holes “is fairly close to the limit of what we can detect, which is why this is so exciting,” said study coauthor Chiara Mingarelli, an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, in a statement.

Galactic mergers are more common in the distant universe, which makes them harder to see using Earth-based telescopes. But ALMA’s sensitivity was able to observe even their active galactic nuclei — the bright, compact regions in galaxies where matter swirls around black holes. Astronomers were surprised to find a binary pair of black holes, rather than a single black hole, dining on the gas and dust stirred up by the galactic merger.

“Our study has identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a galaxy merger, and because we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in the distant Universe, these black hole binaries too may be much more common than previously thought,” said lead study author Michael Koss, a senior research scientist at the Eureka Scientific research institute in Oakland, California, in a statement.

“What we’ve just studied is a source in the very final stage of collision, so what we’re seeing presages that merger and also gives us insight into the connection between black holes merging and growing and eventually producing gravitational waves,” Koss said.

If pairs of black holes — as well as merging galaxies that lead to their creation — are more common in the universe than previously thought, they could have implications for future gravitational wave research. Gravitational waves, or ripples in space time, are created when black holes collide.

It will still take a few hundred million years for this particular pair of black holes to collide, but the insights gained from this observation could help scientists better estimate how many pairs of black holes are close to colliding in the universe.

“​​There might be many pairs of growing supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies that we have not been able to identify so far,” said study coauthor Ezequiel Treister, an astronomer at Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile, in a statement. “If this is the case, in the near future we will be observing frequent gravitational wave events caused by the mergers of these objects across the Universe.”

Space-based telescopes like Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in the Atacama Desert, and the W.M. Keck telescope in Hawaii have also observed UGC 4211 across different wavelengths of light to provide a more detailed overview and differentiate between the two black holes.

“Each wavelength tells a different part of the story,” Treister said. “All of these data together have given us a clearer picture of how galaxies such as our own turned out to be the way they are, and what they will become in the future.”

Understanding more about the end stages of galaxy mergers could provide more insight about what will happen when our Milky Way galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.

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Business

Fisher-Price reminds consumers of 2019 recall of Rock ‘n Play Sleepers after more deaths

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New York
CNN
 — 

Fisher-Price for a second time recalled its Rock ‘n Play Sleepers on Monday after at least eight infant deaths occurred after the initial 2019 recall, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“On April 12, 2019, at the time the original recall was announced, over 30 fatalities were reported to have occurred in the Rock ‘n Play Sleepers after the infants rolled from their back to their stomach or side while unrestrained, or under other circumstances,” the commission said in a statement. “Since the recall, approximately 70 additional fatalities have been reported, which includes at least 8 fatalities that were reported to have occurred after the initial recall announcement.”

“Approximately 100 deaths have reportedly occurred while infants were in the products,” the CPSC indicated. “Fisher-Price notes that in some of the reports, it has been unable to confirm the circumstances of the incidents or that the product was a Rock ‘n Play Sleeper.”

The CPSC indicated that “consumers should stop using the Rock ‘n Play immediately and contact Fisher-Price for a refund or voucher. It is illegal to sell or distribute the recalled sleepers.”

The initial 2019 recall affected about 4.7 million sleepers. The sleepers were sold at stores such as Walmart, Target and Amazon from September 2009 to April 2019.

At the time of the initial recall, Chuck Scothon, general manager at Fisher-Price, said the company considered the recall the “best course of action” and would continue to stand by the safety of all its products.

“With these actions, we want parents around the world to know that safety will always be a cornerstone of our mission, that we are committed to these values, and will continue to prioritize the health, safety and well-being of the infants and preschoolers who utilize our products,” Scothon said during the initial recall.

– CNN’s Nicole Chavez contributed to this report

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Business

Jack Ma to relinquish control of Ant group

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CNN
 — 

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma will no longer control Ant Group after the fintech giant’s shareholders agreed to reshape its shareholding structure, according to a statement released by the company on Saturday.

After the adjustment, Ma’s voting rights will fall to 6.2%, according to the statement and CNN calculations.

Before the restructure, Ma held 50.52% of voting rights at Ant via Hangzhou Yunbo and two other entities, according to its IPO prospectus filed with stock exchanges in 2020.

Ant added in the statement that the voting rights adjustment, a move to make the company’s shareholder structure “more transparent and diversified,” will not result in any change to the economic interests of any shareholders.

Ant said its 10 major shareholders, including Ma, had agreed to no longer act in concert when exercising their voting rights, and would only vote independently, and thus no shareholder would have “sole or joint control over Ant Group.”

The voting rights overhaul came after Chinese regulators pulled the plug on Ant’s $37 billion IPO in November 2020, and ordered the company to restructure its business.

As part of the company’s restructuring, Ant’s consumer finance unit applied for an expansion of its registered capital from $1.2 billion to $2.7 billion. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission recently approved the application, according to a government notice issued late last week.

After the fund-raising drive, Ant will control half of its key consumer finance unit, while an entity controlled by the Hangzhou city government will own a 10% stake. Hangzhou is where Alibaba and Ant have been headquartered since their inceptions.

Ant Group is a fintech affiliate of Alibaba, both of which were founded by Ma.

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Business

GM is the top car seller in America, retaking the title from Toyota

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New York
CNN
 — 

One year after losing the title it held for nearly a century as the top car seller in America, General Motors is back on top.

GM

(GM) reported Wednesday US sales of 2.3 million vehicles. Strong fourth quarter sales, up 41% from a year ago, allowed it to end the year with sales up nearly 3% from the 2.2 million US vehicles it sold in 2021, when it suffered a 13% decline.

Meanwhile Toyota

(TM), which had captured the top sales spot in 2021, had its full-year sales fall nearly 10% to 2.1 million, despite posting a 13% increase in fourth quarter sales.

In each of the last two years, industry-wide auto sales were limited by a shortage of parts, primarily computer chips, needed to build the cars and trucks consumers wanted. Total US new vehicle sales are expected to be down to just less than 14 million vehicles when the final sales results are reported across the industry later this week.

That would be the lowest sales total since the country was just climbing out of the Great Recession more than a decade go. Sales bottomed out at 10.5 million in 2009, the year GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy and received federal bailouts, and had only climbed back to 12.7 million by 2011, the last year the industry sales fell below 14 million.

Sales had been 17 million in 2019, the year before the pandemic upended both the economy and supply chains.

Most forecasts say the supply chain problems are getting better, and that should allow automakers to increase production in 2023. They point to the better sales that took place in the fourth quarter than earlier in the year as a proof of that, even with higher car prices and rising interest rates making it more expensive for buyers than in the past.

That in turn has led them to forecast a modest increase in sales this year to just north of 14 million vehicles once again.

But many experts caution that their forecast of increased sales depend on the US economy not falling into recession, and instead simply experiencing slower growth. And uncertainty about what will happen to the economy is making the outlook for car sales far more uncertain than in years previous, they say.

“I’ve been forecasting the car market for decades now. This next year is the most challenging,” said Charlie Chesbrough, chief economist for Cox Automotive. “Normally we an idea which way it is headed. But this year it could be up or down.”

There are a number of factors supporting new car sales in the coming year, even if the economy stumbles. One is the fact that car rental companies have not be able to buy the supply of new cars they need in the last two years, as automakers limited the supply of cars available for lower priced fleet sales, selling all or virtually all the cars they had to consumers instead.

“Rental companies have been running at half of the purchases that they’re accustomed to,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds.

And Drury said if automakers start to see weakness in consumer demand, they can bring back incentives, including lower rate financing, that they haven’t had to offer in recent years when there was more demand than supply.

“The incentives recently have been virtually nothing,” he said.

So far demand is still strong, as there is pent-up demand from potential buyers who have delayed purchases because they couldn’t find the vehicle they wanted. But both Drury and Chesbrough say the higher average prices and higher interest rates are already driving buyers out of the market.

A turn in the economy, especially if historically low unemployment rates start to rise, could quickly result in lower new car sales.

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Technology

A $3,300 self-driving stroller is at this year’s CES. Are parents ready?

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New York
CNN
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Hang onto your baby bonnets: Self-driving technology is coming to strollers.

Canadian-based baby gear startup Gluxkind was showing off its Ella AI Powered Smart Stroller at this year’s CES, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas that offers some of the most cutting edge – and out-there – new technologies.

The smart stroller offers much of the same tech seen in autonomous cars and delivery robots, including a dual-motor system for uphill walks and automatic downhill brake assist. Like a Tesla with “Autopilot,” the Gluxkind’s stroller’s onboard technolgy has sensors that detect objects around it – but it’s meant to serve as an “extra pairs of eyes and an extra set of hands,” according to the company’s website – not a replacement for a caregiver.

The Ella stroller is able to drive itself for hands-free strolling – but only when a child is not inside. It uses cameras to monitor surroundings and navigate the sidewalks.

For parents who are probably and understandably nervous about putting their baby in a stroller with a mind of its own, Gluxkind provided a YouTube video with some use cases. A parent walking a stroller down hill rushes to save a child’s dropped toy that is rolling away. The stroller brakes on its own.

In another demo, a child is tired of sitting in the stroller and wants to be carried. The Ella strolls itself while the parent carries the child.

Still self-driving technology isn’t totally proven and certainly not ready for prime time. Although companies that have implemented the technology in cars say they add an element of safety when used properly and the driver is paying attention, putting children in the care of AI may not be for everyone.

Gluxkind, founded in 2020, also put additional stroller-specific features into the Ella including “Automatic Rock-My-Baby” and a built-in white noise machine to soothe sleeping toddlers. The entire system is outfitted with a car seat, infant bassinet and toddler seat.

“The development has been driven by our own experience as new parents.,” Anne Hunger, Gluxkind CPO and co-founder, wrote in a November press release. “We’ve put a lot of hard work into this product and are excited to get it into more customers’ hands in 2023.”

For $3,300, parents can join the pre-order list for the 30-pound Ella, one of the consumer tech products named as an Innovation Awards Honoree at the 2023 CES show. Deliveries of the stroller are expected to begin in April 2023, according to the company website.

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