- Argentine president praised for calling out Davos elites abandoning freedom for socialism: ‘Drops truth bombs’ Fox News
- WEF Summit: Argentina’s Milei praises free markets, slams socialism at Davos Global News
- ‘The Western world is in danger’: Argentina’s Milei, a self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist,’ urges Davos elite to reject socialism CNBC
- Argentina’s President Milei Missed a Key Point in His Defense of Capitalism Bloomberg
- Argentina’s Milei tells Davos ‘heroes’ how it should be done CNN
Tag Archives: Davos
UBS earnings Q4 and FY 2022
UBS reported fourth quarter and full-year earnings.
Fabrice Coffrini | Afp | Getty Images
UBS beat market expectations with its latest results on the back of lower expenses and higher interest rates. But the lender’s revenues declined because of weaker client activity.
The bank reported $1.7 billion of net income for the fourth quarter of last year, bringing its total annual profit to $7.6 billion in 2022. Analysts had expected UBS would achieve a net income of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter and of $7.3 billion for the year, according to Refinitiv data.
Looking ahead, the Swiss lender said that revenues for the first quarter of 2023 are set “to be positively influenced” by higher client activity and interest rates, as well as by the easing of Covid-19 restrictions in Asia.
“We delivered good full-year and solid fourth-quarter results in a difficult macroeconomic and geopolitical environment,” CEO Ralph Hamers said in a statement.
Here are a couple of highlights from the latest release:
- CET 1 capital ratio, a measure of bank solvency, stood at 14.2%, down from 14.4% in the previous quarter;
- Revenues dropped to $8.029 billion from $8.705 billion a year ago;
- Return on tangible equity, a measure of bank’s performance, rose to 13.2% at the end of the quarter, up from 10% a year ago.
Among the bank’s units, Global Wealth Management posted a fourth-quarter net interest income increase of 35% on the year, given higher deposit margins off the back of higher interest rates. Personal and Corporate Banking also recorded a 21% year-on-year hike in net interest income over the same period, as a result of higher interest rates and loan revenues.
But market uncertainty hit the investment banking and asset management arms of the business. The former saw a 24% yearly drop in revenues, whereas asset management revenues fell by 31% year-on-year due to the “negative market performance and foreign currency effects.”
“The rate environment is helping the business on one side, and that offsets some of the lower activity that we see on the investment side,” Hamers told CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore on Tuesday.
He added that, following the first half of last year, there was a shift in the markets that put pressure on the investment side of the bank.
“We saw a move from what we would call micro focus, which is equity focused, to macro focus, which is rates focused,” he said, noting that the Swiss bank was not able to benefit from that transition as much as some of its peers, given its smaller presence in the U.S.
‘Uncertain’ Outlook
UBS said it will be purchasing more shares this year.
“We remain committed to a progressive dividend and expect to repurchase more than $5 billion of shares in 2023,” Hamers said in a statement.
However, the Swiss bank is cautious about the economic outlook, citing central bank activity as a potential catalyst for market volatility.
“While inflation may have peaked in the second half of 2022, and an energy crisis in Europe seems likely to be averted, the outlook for economic growth, asset valuations and market volatility remains highly uncertain, and central bank tightening may have an impact on market liquidity,” the bank said in its latest results.
UBS shares are up by about 15% over the last 12 months.
Analyst sees market making a big mistake with the energy transition
The pace of change in the modern world is often rapid and dizzying. Technologies that seem integral to our lives can, in what feels like an instant, become redundant and irrelevant.
Energy is one sector where innovation and new ideas matter a great deal, as countries and companies try to find ways to shift to a society based around renewables like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.
During a panel discussion at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one analyst expressed his fear that the market did not seem to have learned from other technological revolutions.
Thomas Hohne-Sparborth, head of sustainability research at Lombard Odier, highlighted the huge shifts taking place in the field of low and zero-carbon technologies and, by extension, wider society.
“We’ve seen past industrial revolutions, including past energy transitions,” Hohne-Sparborth said. “What we’re really seeing now is the complete transformation of our entire economy.”
“The demand side of our economy, the way we power vehicles, the way we heat our buildings, the way we use energy in industry — all of that needs to be transformed.”
We were, Hohne-Sparborth said, “looking at investment needs in the trillions of dollars.”
When it comes to the energy transition, the sums being discussed are indeed significant. Last year, the International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2022” report said clean energy investment could be on course to exceed $2 trillion per year by 2030, an increase of over 50% compared to today.
As the discussion in Davos — which was moderated by CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche — progressed, Hohne-Sparborth was asked if clean energy was now affordable at the scale required.
The answer to that question was, he replied, “very rapidly shifting, and today I would say, yes, it has become the cheapest source of energy.”
“What I think the market at large is underestimating is simply the pace at which this transition is unfolding,” he added, explaining that lessons could be learned from history.
“We’ve done some work looking at past technological revolutions, whether it’s the adoption of steamships, of mobile phones — any piece of major sort of new technology of infrastructure.”
All such transitions had, Hohne-Sparborth argued, “tended to follow a very similar pattern. They unfold very slowly … and then the transition completes in a span of 10 to 20 years.”
“Yet if you look today at what the market is anticipating — how long it will take us to electrify our buildings, to electrify our vehicle fleets — the timeframes there are still much longer.”
For Hohne-Sparborth, it didn’t seem to be getting through that, “when a new, superior technology emerges, that becomes cost competitive, that rollout can happen very quickly.”
Dramatic change
Also appearing on the CNBC panel was Andrés Gluski, the CEO of energy firm AES.
“What we’re facing … is a dramatic change,” he said, adding that renewables now represented “the cheapest form of energy, in most cases.”
“The problem is capacity — how do you keep the lights on 24/7 — and that’s where you have to use lithium-ion batteries on a daily basis.”
Expanding on his point, he went on to emphasize the importance of adopting a variety of technologies.
“To really get to a complete decarbonization we’re going to need green hydrogen, we’ll probably need small modular nukes, etcetera.”
“And I also agree very much that what we need is for renewables to be more than just competitive — just better so that we lower costs, [and] equal in quality.”
“And that’s honestly what the corporate sector is demanding very much, and many consumers.”
Is crypto better or worse since its collapse? Here’s what CEOs at Davos said
While business leaders showed cautious optimism at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the same sentiment wasn’t felt for crypto.
Compared to before, the once buzzy area of finance had a much smaller presence.
As our Jennifer Schonberger put it, “gone were the crypto houses every ten feet, bitcoin-themed pizza stalls and advertising from previous years.”
“I think regulated transparent infrastructure like ours is well-suited for this environment,” Jeremy Allaire, Circle co-founder and CEO which issues the stablecoin USDC told Yahoo Finance.
Circle, one of the few crypto firms present for the week, did offer some optimism. Though not regulated as a bank and having shuttered plans to go public via SPAC last year, it is still aiming to be a public company at some point in the future, Allaire said.
In the meantime, it represents 31% of crypto’s $136 billion stablecoin market, which many consider being essential to the industry’s less speculative future.
As Allaire told us, Circle carries a money transmitter license in almost every state. Its stablecoin “has actually grown since the FTX collapse,” by $2 billion since the beginning of November according to DeFillama.
Yet critics were not scarce at Davos.
For them, and more than 9 million retail and institutional investors waiting to get back their funds in bankruptcy, FTX’s collapse still looms as a shadow over the space.
“FTX and SBF are not an exception — they’re a rule,” Nouriel Roubini, the NYU professor known as “Dr. Doom” for his dire views on global trends, said on Yahoo Finance Live.
“Literally 99% of crypto is a scam. A criminal activity. A total real-bubble Ponzi scheme that is going bust,” Roubini added. The Economist went on to underline the reputational damage industry firms are facing as a general loss of trust.
In November, Bitcoin hit a low not seen for two years of $15,682 as FTX careened towards chapter 11. Two weeks later BlockFi followed.
The next month, Sam Bankman-Fried, a figure many believed to be one of the industry’s biggest stars, was extradited from a Bahamas prison to New York to face 8 charges of fraud.
While its total market cap has recovered above $1 trillion dollars as of last week, industry trading venues are far from regaining trust.
Instead, those companies have had to let go of thousands of workers. With Genesis’ long-awaited bankruptcy filing Friday, there are at minimum 10 million people who’ve lost their crypto for trusting a crypto firm with their funds.
Meanwhile, others in attendance such as IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn would not trash crypto but also refrained from commenting on digital assets themselves.
“I’m bullish on blockchain, and crypto, I really don’t have a view,” Cohn told our on-the-ground team, echoing a popular middle-ground view.
Of course, even when major companies separate cryptocurrencies in favor of investing in their own private blockchain platforms, the end product hasn’t always worked.
In late November, IBM, which has bet on blockchain since 2016, discontinued its global blockchain-enabled platform, TradeLens, launched with Maersk two years prior.
The technology platform, which digitized and secured shipping container tracking across the world was “viable” Maresk said.
But it didn’t achieve “the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business,” the company added.
“All of these three things, web3, blockchain, and the metaverse, are all going to happen,” Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella said offering a partial vote of confidence broadly of crypto to WEF attendees.
“But you need to have the killer apps, what is the use case that gets broad adoption, what is the ChatGPT moment for blockchain?”
Nadella was referring to the AI tool launched in November that has quickly racked up users and become the most interesting thing in tech. The executive told news outlet Semafor Tuesday it was in talks to invest as much as $10 billion into ChatGPT owner, OpenAI.
Is the crypto market’s collapse through last year holding the industry back from finding its coveted ChatGPT moment? Absolutely and not as much as it might seem.
An annual report from venture capital firm Electric Capital, shows despite crypto’s seemingly rough 2022, it has more monthly active developers than it did during its bull market.
Based on multiple years of data, Electric Capital finds every cycle crypto software developer activity tends to be less susceptible to market fluctuations, making their engagement levels a more important barometer than the industry’s Davos attendance for where things might be headed.
It found that in the fourteen years since Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto — who essentially spun up the industry working without pay — the industry’s open source full-time developers has risen from 1 to 23,343 and activity has expanded well beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum (28% of the total).
We’ll have to wait and see where those thousands of developers plan to take crypto next. In the meantime, their activity in addition to crypto’s less exciting price charts and its shrinking advertisements at Davos, the Bahamas’ Baha Mar resort, or any other place might be exactly what the industry needs to move beyond such a difficult moment.
“You can’t get rich fast in crypto right now. And that’s actually good,” Chainalysis’ Michael Gronager told us, decked in an overcoat before the snowy Swiss Alps.
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Greta Thunberg to lead climate march on last day of talks at Davos
Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunbergand other prominent climate activists including Vanessa Nakate and Helena Neubauer are holding a climate march on the final day of panels at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Thunberg met with the chief of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, on the sidelines of the convention on Thursday and slammed corporate elites for their inaction.
Leaders at Davos are “fuelling the destruction of the planet” by investing in fossil fuels and prioritising short-term profits over people affected by the climate crisis, she said.
The activists brought a ‘cease and desist’ letter calling on the heads of fossil fuel companies to stop all new oil and natural gas projects, it was signed by nearly 900,000 people.
Today’s proceeding will be the last of this year’s talks at the World Economic Forum, under the theme ‘Cooperation in a Fragmented World’.
The convention has brought together hundreds of world leaders and industry experts for special addresses, panel discussions and separate meetings.
Click on the image above to watch the march live.
What were the highlights of Thursday’s sessions?
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FBI Director Christopher Wray said he’s “deeply concerned” about China’s artificial intelligence programme, and said the country’s AI initiatives “are not constrained by the rule of law” and are “built on top of massive troves of intellectual property and sensitive data that they’ve stolen over the years.”
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Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said he still believes it’s possible to resolve his country’s differences with Turkey by speaking with Turkey’s president, stressing the neighbours will not go to war.
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Keir Starmer, the UK opposition leader said the UK needs a strategy for renewables. Starmer said new investment in the oil and gas industry is not the answer as the UK must move towards the goal of net zero emissions and reduce dependency on oil and gas.
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Grant Shapps, the UK Business Minister, discussed how governments and companies can work together to shape the next generation of industrial strategies and warned that US President Joe Biden’s green subsidy programme is “dangerous”.
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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelesnkyy attended a breakfast briefing on the sidelines of the gathering in which he bemoaned a “lack of specific weaponry” and said that to win the war, “we cannot just do it with motivation and morale.”
Who can viewers expect to see on the final day of meetings in Davos on Friday?
- Maria Leptin, the President of the European Research Council; Mikuláš Bek, the Czech Minister for European Affairs; Tanja Fajon, the Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia; Christine Lagarde, the President, of the European Central Bank; Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund; author, Christoph Keller; Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians and Børge Brende, the President of the World Economic Forum in Geneva.
- Euronews’ Sasha Vakulina, Meabh McMahon, Fay Doulgkeri and David Walsh have been on the ground in Davos and are covering all the latest developments.
Davos 2023: Cowed crypto crowd feel winter freeze at WEF
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 19 (Reuters) – In the snow and ice on the main drag in Davos, the impact of the crypto winter is plain for WEF attendees to see.
Last May, the dressed-up shop fronts that line both sides of the Promenade street running through the Swiss ski resort were dominated by crypto firms, rolling in bitcoin.
Now there are just a handful and the executives who have made it to Davos have swapped their hoodies for blazers, despite sub-zero temperatures outside.
Some of those from the digital industry which have set up shop on the fringes of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting were quick to distance themselves from cryptocurrencies.
“I hope there’s an increased focus on utility value and practical applications of the technology, and less focus on retail investors chasing meme coins,” Jeremy Allaire, CEO of USDC stablecoin issuer Circle, said.
“There was a lot of nonsense,” Allaire told the Reuters Global Markets Forum.
Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan believes last year’s plunge in digital assets allows investors to focus on the true value of the technology.
“We’re at the right place now in terms of crypto,” he said.
Executives in Davos said they are now all about blockchain technology, proper controls and regulation, and the promise of disruption that it holds for financial services and beyond.
“We are an infrastructure, plumbing play. We build infrastructure today for digital assets, which is crypto. Tomorrow it will be different assets,” said Dmitry Tokarev, chief executive of Copper, which provides custody services.
“I would question some of the stuff that I saw, ‘What is the return on that?'” Tokarev added, referring to the big presence of crypto companies at the last WEF meeting, which was unusually held in May as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have been always ignoring the noise. All our partners were here last year. They are here this year,” Tokarev added.
The world of digital assets has changed drastically since May, with the value of the crypto market plummeting and some of the major crypto companies going under as investors pulled back from riskier assets in the face of rising interest rates.
The market capitalization of crypto currencies has shrunk by $1.4 trillion, a third of its value from peaks hit in late 2021 and some of the best-known crypto firms are under stress or have gone under, including the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
“There is a place for trading use cases but they cannot be the singular focus, we need to move to more real use cases and put attention there,” said Denelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation, which supports the Stellar blockchain.
‘DODGED A BULLET’
While interest remains in the technology, the conversation is turning to responsibility.
Colm Kelleher, chairman of Swiss bank UBS (UBSG.S), told a WEF panel that blockchain technology will help reduce costs for banks. But he said the industry needed to figure out the basics, such as anti-money laundering controls.
“We kind of dodged a bullet,” Kelleher said, noting that the collapse in the value of crypto currencies had not caused systemic problems. “We did have investors who did want to invest in coinage. And we had to draw a line on what was suitable for those investors,” he added.
Yat Siu, co-founder of Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming developer Animoca Brands, was supportive of the firms in Davos.
“These are companies with serious cash positions and revenue generating companies,” Siu said. “They’re billion dollar enterprises.”
Crypto is trying to establish its presence, SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci said, adding “there’s nothing more establishment than the World Economic Forum.” Scaramucci maintains a bullish stance on crypto despite losses last year.
Back on the Davos Promenade, some signs of crypto’s lost swagger endure.
Parked right outside a pavilion promoting blockchain early in the week was a bright orange Mercedes.
On the hood, instead of the carmaker’s insignia was a copper-colored symbol for bitcoin.
The tires carried a slogan in white: “In Bitcoin we trust”.
For daily Davos updates in your inbox sign up for the Reuters Daily Briefing here
Additional reporting by Lananh Nguyen in Davos, Stefania Spezzati and Lisa Mattackal; Editing by Alexander Smith
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Davos 2023: Greta Thunberg accuses energy firms of throwing people ‘under the bus’
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Greta Thunberg called on the global energy industry and its financiers to end all fossil fuel investments on Thursday at a high-profile meeting in Davos with the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
During a round-table discussion with Fatih Birol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, activists said they had presented a “cease and desist” letter to CEOs calling for a stop to new oil, gas and coal extraction.
“As long as they can get away with it they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus,” Thunberg warned.
The oil and gas industry, which has been accused by activists of hijacking the climate change debate in the Swiss ski resort, has said that it needs to be part of the energy transition as fossil fuels will continue to play a major role in the energy mix as the world shift to a low-carbon economy.
Thunberg, who was detained by police in Germany earlier this week during a demonstration at a coal mine, joined with fellow activists Helena Gualinga from Ecuador, Vanessa Nakate from Uganda and Luisa Neubauer from Germany to discuss the tackle the big issues with Birol.
Birol, whose agency makes policy recommendations on energy, thanked the activists for meeting him, but insisted that the transition had to include a mix of stakeholders, especially in the face of the global energy security crisis.
The IEA chief, who earlier on Thursday met with some of the biggest names in the oil and gas industry in Davos, said there was no reason to justify investments in new oil fields because of the energy crunch, saying by the time these became operational the climate crisis would be worse.
He also said he was less pessimistic than the climate activists about the shift to clean energy.
“We can have slight legitimate optimism,” he said, adding: “Last year the amount of renewables coming to the market was record high.”
But he admitted that the transition was not happening fast enough and warned that emerging and developing countries risked being left behind if advanced economies did not support the transition.
‘REAL MONEY’
The United Nation’s climate conference, held in Egypt last year, established a loss and damage fund to compensate countries most impacted by climate change events.
Nakate, who held a solitary protest outside the Ugandan parliament for several months in 2019, said the fund “is still an empty bucket with no money at all.”
“There is a need for real money for loss and damage”.
In 2019, the then 16-year-old Thunberg took part in the main WEF meeting, famously telling leaders that “our house is on fire”. She returned to Davos the following year.
But she refused to participate as an official delegate this year as the event returned to its usual January slot.
Asked why she did not want to advocate for change from the inside, Thunberg said there were already activists doing that.
“I think it should be people on the frontlines and not privileged people like me,” she said. “I don’t think the changes we need are very likely to come from the inside. They are more likely to come from the bottom up.”
The activists later walked together through the snowy streets of Davos, where many of the shops have temporarily been turned into “pavilions” sponsored by companies or countries.
For daily Davos updates in your inbox sign up for the Reuters Daily Briefing here.
Writing by Leela de Kretser; Editing by Alexander Smith
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
European Central Bank member says market is mispricing rate hikes, expects more to come
Klaas Knot, president of De Nederlandsche Bank spoke with CNBC in Davos.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
DAVOS, Switzerland — The European Central Bank will not stop with one single 50 basis point hike at its next rate-setting meetings, a board member told CNBC Thursday.
“It will not stop after a single 50 basis point hike, that’s for sure,” Klaas Knot, who serves as the governor of the Dutch central bank, said regarding the ECB’s upcoming moves.
The European Central Bank raised rates four times throughout 2022, bringing its deposit rate to 2%. The central bank in December said it would be increasing rates further in 2023 to address sky-high inflation.
Recent data has shown a slowdown in headline inflation, even if it remains well above the ECB’s 2% target.
December inflation came in at 9.2% in the euro zone, according to preliminary numbers. This was the second consecutive monthly drop in price rises across the euro zone. However, Knot doesn’t think all of the recent data is “encouraging.”
“What we have seen thus far is data that is not encouraging from our end,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“We have seen one more inflation reading where there were no signs of abating of [the] underlying inflationary pressures. So we have to do what we’ll have to do, and core inflation has not yet turned the corner in the euro area and that means the market developments I have seen in, let’s say, last two weeks or so are not entirely welcomed from my perspective. I don’t think they are compatible actually with a timely return of inflation toward 2%,” Knot said.
Market players are expecting the ECB to raise rates at its next meeting in February. The wider question is whether the central bank gets too aggressive with its policy tightening and restricts economic growth. However, Know has made it clear that there will be at least two more rate hikes.
“Most of the ground that we have to cover, we will cover at a constant pace of multiple 50 basis points hikes,” he said.
“Where that sort of pace of 50 basis points hikes is going to end I cannot say beforehand, but it is very clear that our president has used the plural in her wordings, I am using the plural here. So it will not stop after a single 50 bps hike, that’s for sure.”
$1.4 trillion wipeout hits crypto industry at WEF
Along the Davos Promenade in 2023 there were fewer crypto companies than in previous years after the market crash. Circle, the company behind the stablecoin USDC, was one the few present.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
DAVOS, Switzerland — Over the past few years at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the number of cryptocurrency industry attendees has boomed.
But after a near $1.4 trillion wipeout in 2022, the crypto industry is being a bit more reserved with how it splashes the cash and several companies spotted last year are not in attendance. 2022 was marked by failed crypto projects, liquidity issues and bankruptcies, topped off by the collapse of major exchange FTX.
When the World Economic Forum was held last May, bitcoin was hovering around $30,000, after having already fallen more than 50% from its all-time high hit in November 2021. More pain followed with bitcoin dipping as low as $15,480.
The Promenade is the main street in Davos where companies and governments take over shops and cafes for the week. Last year, crypto firms from all walks of life took over the place. But since the market slide, there are far fewer crypto firms with flashy store fronts at Davos.
One shop selling non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has disappeared. Prices of NFTs, which are digital collectibles, also plunged last year. What’s left are companies that survived the bear market and that are looking to expand their businesses.
“It’s very clear that the speculation period is drawing to a close and every company that you see featured … is really focused on real-world use cases,” said Teana Baker-Taylor, vice-president of policy and regulatory strategy at Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin.
A stablecoin is a type of digital currency that is supposed to be pegged one-to-one with a fiat currency. USDC is pegged to the U.S. dollar. Circle says it is backed with real-world assets such as U.S. Treasurys so that one USDC can be redeemed for $1.
Casper Labs, a company that has built a blockchain designed to be used by businesses, is running a space on the Promenade called the Blockchain Lab. Casper Labs was also present last year in Davos.
Cliff Sarkin, chief of strategic relations at Casper Labs, said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that the crypto market has bottomed.
“So we’re over a year into the bear market, so I think the shock of that is settled in and for those of us that have been in the space for years … we feel like this is the time to build,” Sarkin told CNBC.
He added that the crypto firms that have remained at Davos are “substantiative projects” and “the real deals” versus things like NFTs.
There were also those in traditional finance who welcomed fewer crypto firms.
Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, was asked during an event hosted by the Swiss bank what he would like to see in Davos this year. He said he had seen it already: “It’s less crypto on the main street.”
The mysterious case of the orange bitcoin car
On Monday, a flashy bright orange Mercedes-Benz car was parked outside of the Blockchain Hub on the Promenade.
The orange Mercedes was parked along the Promenade in Davos. Nobody in the vicinity saw who parked it there. The license plate says “Kuna” on it, which is the name of a Ukrainian cryptocurrency exchange.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
A coin that represented a bitcoin was placed where the Mercedes-Benz logo would usually be. On the tires and the licenses plate, the words “in crypto we trust” were printed. The license plate had the Ukrainian flag on it and the name Kuna, which is the company behind a cryptocurrency exchange of the same name.
Kuna also set up the “reserve fund of Ukraine” after the war with Russia began where people could donate crypto to Ukraine.
People in the vicinity that CNBC spoke to could not verify who parked the car there.
However, two crypto executives who spoke to CNBC did not welcome the orange car, particularly after the market crash and the excesses of the industry were exposed. One remarked that the presence of such a car was not helpful for the industry’s reputation which took a hit last year.
CNBC reached out to Semen Kaploushenko, CEO of the Kuna exchange, via LinkedIn, but is yet to receive a response.
CNBC also reached out to the Blockchain Association of Ukraine which Kuna founder Michael Chobanian is the president of, but is yet to receive a response.
The license plate and tyres had the words “in crypto we trust” printed on them.
CNBC | Arjun Kharpal
Prices have not peaked yet, says Unilever CEO
Unilever CEO Alan Jope photographed at the World Economic Forum in May 2022.
Hollie Adams | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The CEO of consumer goods giant Unilever said Tuesday that prices would likely continue to rise in the near term, adding that his firm had a playbook for high inflation thanks to its business dealings in markets like Argentina and Turkey.
Speaking to CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Alan Jope talked about how his firm was managing its operations in the current climate.
“For the last 18 months we’ve seen extraordinary input cost pressure … it runs across petrochemical derived products, agricultural derived products, energy, transport, logistics,” he said.
“It’s been feeding through for quite some time now and we’ve been accelerating the rate of price increases that we’ve had to put into the market,” he added.
“So far, the consumer response in terms of volume softness has been very muted, the consumer has been very resilient,” Jope said.
“We do see the prospect of higher volume elasticity as winter energy costs hit, as households’ savings levels come down and that buffer goes away and as prices continue to rise,” he said.
Last October, Unilever published its third-quarter results for 2022, with the firm reporting price growth of 12.5%.
Jope was asked if he foresaw any moderation when it came to inflationary pressures. “It’s very hard to predict the future of commodity markets,” he replied.
“Even if you press the oil major CEOs, they’ll be a little cagey on giving an outlook on energy prices.”
Unilever’s view, he said, was that “we know for sure there’s more inflationary pressure coming through in our input costs.”
“We might be, at the moment, around peak inflation, but probably not peak prices,” he went on to state.
“There’s further pricing to come through, but the rate of price increases is probably peaking around now.”
Unilever has a global footprint and owns brands including Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum and Wall’s.
During his interview with CNBC, Jope touched upon the international dimension of his business and how the experience of operating in a range of markets was steering it through the current climate.
“Nobody running a business at the moment has really lived through global inflation, it’s a long time since we’ve had global inflation,” he said.
“But we’re used to high levels of inflation from doing business in places like Argentina, or Turkey, or parts of Southeast Asia,” he added.
“So we do have a playbook, and the playbook is that it’s important to protect the shape of the P&L by landing price.”
“And so it’s not that we’ve taken more price, we just started acting earlier than many of our peers, and the guidance that we’ve been getting from our investors is they support that and feel that that’s an appropriate action.”
This, Jope explained, was “something we have learned from being in these high inflationary markets, though … much of that inflation is currency weakness, historically.”
“But now those markets are having to deal with the combination of commodity pressure and currency weakness. So our instinct is to act quickly when costs start coming through.”