fortune--2020-06-23--Dear white people: The work takes time

Dear white people: The work takes time

Clarrissa and Leonard Egerton seem like lovely people. They own Frugal Bookstore, whose motto is “Changing Minds, One Book At A Time.” Frugal is the first, and currently only, Black-owned bookstore in Boston, and they are beloved.
But now Clarrissa and Leonard Egerton are besieged.
In a recent email to customers, they describe a crush of orders designed to change minds — 20,000 requests for anti-racism books in a matter of days. Some 75% of the orders are for the same ten titles, all of which are in such demand that they’ve disappeared from bookseller shelves across the country. All are being reprinted now.
For the most part, customers are understanding. But quite a few want to speak to the Egerton’s manager.
“We are also receiving a number of disheartening emails asking us to cancel orders and refund payments, criticisms about how slow we are and that we have poor customer service because we have not answered an email,” they write in the email. “We have hired a fulfillment company to assist us with catching up, you will receive your orders. We humbly ask that you PLEASE bear with us!”
Bradley Babendir, a Cambridge-based writer, posted about the customer backlash, including screenshots of the company’s latest update. “[I]f you want to support a black-owned business, part of that is not being a dick,” he tweeted. It’s a sign of the times. “[It] feels indicative of the way people are wrongly thinking about anti-racism, like, ‘if i only had this book i would be an anti-racist but until then i am cursed.’ just read a different book in the mean time there are lots of books,” Babendir added.
There are lots of books. There are not a lot of people like Clarrissa and Leonard Egerton. Such a conundrum.
As I ponder the plight of the Egertons, lovely people whose early prospects during the still-ongoing pandemic became so dire that it took a generous GoFundMe campaign to keep them afloat, I am thinking about the thousands of Black employees across corporate America who now have a crush of unfillable orders on their desks for things that they are not prepared to provide related to anti-racism work.
“I’m just not into the performance — the half-assed apologies, ‘I see you’ messages, or tactfully deployed emojis that only serve to help the sender feel as if they’ve done their part,” writes The Only Black Guy in the Office, a regular anonymous column on Medium. “I guess now Black lives finally matter, thanks to these racially ambiguous prayer hands! I don’t need you to reach out to say how much you’re showing up, just for you to go back to your regular M.O. once this movement is no longer trending. Let your actions speak. Contribute to overthrowing this racist-ass system.”
I am also thinking about the thousands of Black and brown employees and their worthy allies who are prepared to weigh in with data, projects, and anti-racism initiatives already in progress — and who are finding their budgets cut or work otherwise ignored by a leadership suddenly hellbent on scrubbing the stale racist residue from all the curtains without their help.
I know these people — who have typically undertaken this important anti-racism work using their personal time and with little funding or support — because they write to me all the time. And now, they’re telling everyone.
Fortune’s Working While Black project is a trove of difficult truths about what it’s like for Black talent in corporate life.
“We — Black people — are NOT a monolithic group of people, so STOP treating us that way. One does NOT speak for all. Do the work to unlearn the ways that are currently ingrained into the fabric of who you are,” Adrienne G., 51, writes. “READ books [Editor’s note: patiently wait for them to arrive, please.] “LEARN from those that are doing the anti-bias, anti-Black work. Stop asking Black people how you can not be racist or anti-Black, that’s YOUR job to figure out.”
Now, Imma quote myself from my June 9 column on how to add anti-racism reading to your life in a way that’s sustainable: “I offer this word of caution for any white person who is frantically trying to put all of this material on their to-do lists. I appreciate you, but I’m worried that the urgency you may be feeling is more related to your personal discomfort, and not entirely a desire to be part of the solution. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel this way. But part of the work is staying in the discomfort long enough to examine it. If you rush, it won’t stick. If you do too much, you’ll burn out.”
You’ll also destroy the spirits of Black booksellers who want to help you. (But these Twitter comments to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How To Be An Antiracist, will bring you joy.)
So here’s another piece of advice for corporate leaders, from me and Adrienne G.
Find the people in your organization who have already been working on these issues, even informally. They understand your culture. Listen to them. Embrace their data and findings and projects and find ways to amplify them. Give them credit and opportunities to lead and contribute, if they choose. And by all means, fund and support their work. They quite likely hold the pieces of the puzzle you’re looking for.
And Lord have mercy, please protect them from the newly woke masses looking for instant redemption. After all, that’s what a good manager is supposed to do.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Racing and racism in the heartland of Alabama The latest dispatch from homegrown Alabama reporter Stephanie McCrummen centers on a NASCAR-loving town grappling with the sport's ban of the Confederate flag. To some in Heflin — some 30 miles from the storied Talladega Superspeedway where Bubba Wallace raced on Monday after finding a noose in his garage —the flag ban is “nonsense,” as 54-year-old Lonnie Miles says. He adds that he has plenty of Black friends. "They know if they need anything, all they have to do is ask me," Miles says. "Only thing I don’t like is blacks and whites mixing, but I keep that to myself.” Other scenes with varying characters play out in the local church and general store. A frustrating but revealing read.
The Washington Post
Madison Avenue promises diversity and inclusion results. It's not the first time With ongoing dialogue about systemic racism continuing, many agencies within the advertising industry are pledging to fix their employee diversity numbers. Black ad executives say they've heard this story before. “This was the elephant in the room 10 years ago; it was the elephant in the room five years ago,” Steve Stoute, founder of the ad agency Translation, told the Wall Street Journal. The difference now, many hope, will be explicit commitments held accountable by the public release of data. An early example: Employees identifying as Black or African American represented 2.6% of senior and executive-level managers at publicly-traded firm IPG in 2019, and 1.8% at Dentsu Aegis U.S. in 2020, the companies disclosed.
The Wall Street Journal
The water bill is coming due and millions of Americans are at risk According to this chilling analysis from the Guardian, water and sewage costs in some 12 U.S. cities rose 80% between the years 2010-2018. Now, with wage losses due to coronavirus-related work stoppages, millions of Americans are now at risk of not being able to pay their water bills. “More people are in trouble, and the poorest of the poor are in big trouble,” said utilities analyst Roger Colton, who conducted the analysis for the Guardian. “The data shows that we’ve got an affordability problem in an overwhelming number of cities nationwide that didn’t exist a decade ago, or even two or three years ago in some cities.”
The Guardian
USA Today checks in with 31 Black teens turning 18 this year, about the boy who won’t be Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy killed by police for holding a toy gun, would have turned 18 this year. In this heart-wrenching package, his peers talk about justice, anger, and feeling like targets as they prepare for the next step in their newly adult lives. “I can’t just get mad all the time because I’m seeing that,” says Haleem Stevens who was only able to watch the video of Ahmaud Arbery getting gunned down by white men once. “I understand that’s going to happen now. I’m trying to change it. I’m worried about how many people will die before I’m able to change it.” Stevens, who wants to be a lawyer, is set to enroll at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey this fall. And don’t miss this necessary interview with Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, who says she goes to dark places when other Black boys and young men are killed by police. "I'm sick mentally, physically, emotionally," she said. "It's just messed up."
USA Today
On background
This is not Ben & Jerry’s first time at the activist rodeo While the ice cream-maker got well-deserved props for its strong anti-racism statement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the company is not new at any of this. Ben & Jerry’s has had social activism and a double bottom line from its inception, Chris Miller, the company’s head of activism tells Fortune’s Beth Kowitt in this fascinating Q&A. “There are moments when it feels like it’s important simply to go on record—to stand and be counted,” he said. “The events of the past couple of weeks brought us to a place where we felt like we, as a company, had to go on record and talk about these issues of white supremacy, police brutality, and structural racism. Thoughts and prayers and messages of unity are not really sufficient anymore.”
Fortune
Whatever happened to the racist white people in those historical civil rights photos? I’ve wondered this myself. Do those pictures of Uncle Jimmy smiling in the foreground of a lynching, or Cousin Thelma spitting at an integrating student, ever make it into a family album somewhere? Photographer and writer Johnny Silvercloud answered his own question by positing that after the passage of civil rights legislation, those old racists simply went silent, turning off the public spigot of their anger and indignation. Their ghosts pop up in odd ways, he says, like when a millionaire peacefully takes a knee in protest. It’s an action that Martin Luther King would have approved of, and yet Colin Kaepernick continues to drive otherwise mellow people crazy. “I highly doubt that the white faces in the first Civil Rights Era just automatically let go of their racist ideologies,” he writes. “White supremacy — racism in America — had to adapt, and it did.” He got that right. (Disturbing photos ahead if you click through.)
Afrosapiophile
Clinical trials lack racial and ethnic diversity The editors of Scientific American are blunt: It’s unethical and risky to ignore racial and ethnic minorities, they say. The numbers are equally stark. While 40 percent of Americans belong to an ethnic or racial “minority,” clinical trials are typically 80 to 90 percent white. “The symptoms of conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, as well as the contributing factors, vary across lines of ethnicity, as they do between the sexes,” they explain. Without a diverse group to study, it’s impossible to know if a drug will work, or worsen if there will be problematic side effects. A Congressional remedy, the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, required the agency to include more women and people of color in their studies. That was 1993. But a 2014 study showed that only 2 percent of more than 10,000 cancer trials conducted by the National Cancer Institute focused on a racial or ethnic population.
Scientific American
How the discovery of the Tuskegee study impacted the health of Black men The health community has another problem to solve for. The full name of the study was the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a forty-year experiment of neglect in the name of science that has become synonymous with racist medical mistreatment. In a paper accepted by the Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics, two researchers have found that the news of the study had a devastating effect. “We find that the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older Black men,” say the authors. As a result, life expectancy for Black men who lost faith in the medical system fell by 1.5 years. It accounted for some 35% of the life expectancy gap between Black and white men in 1980. (Subscription required.)
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.
Today's mood board
Dance like there's no one watching. Play like there's an audience of 2,300 plants staring solely at you in admiration rather than looking at their phones.


fortune--2020-06-23--Twitter flags another Trump tweet. This time it’s for threatening potential protesters

One of the world ’ s richest families is fighting over a letter dividing their $ 11.2 billion fortune

Twitter has hidden a tweet from President Donald Trump for violating the company’s policies regarding threats of harm.
“There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President,” Trump tweeted, referring to an area in Seattle occupied by protesters where police are not operating. “If they try they will be met with serious force!”
There will never be an “Autonomous Zone” in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be met with serious force! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020
That threat to use force against protesters was what violated the company’s rules, a spokesperson confirmed. The tweet is still up, though it’s hidden and users must click to reveal it.
After years of inaction against the U.S. president’s tweets, which are often controversial, Twitter has started to take more aggressive action in recent weeks. In late May the company flagged two Trump posts for sharing misleading information about mail-in ballots, and then shortly after highlighted a similar tweet for violating the company’s rules against glorifying violence.


fortune--2020-06-23--Everything to know about Apple’s new Mac chips

After years of rumors, Apple this week announced that it will phase out Intel chips from its Mac line of laptop and desktop computers. Instead, future iMacs, MacBooks, and other products will come with chips designed by Apple, similar to those the company already uses in iPhones and iPads which are based on an architecture licensed from SoftBank’s ARM unit.
Why is Apple dumping Intel?
Intel still dominates the chip market for laptops and desktops, but it has struggled for the past few years to significantly improve the performance of those chips. Apple reportedly was forced to delay introducing an updated MacBook Air laptop because of Intel’s stumbles.
At Apple’s WWDC event for developers on Monday, Apple senior vice president Johny Srouji, who oversees hardware technologies, offered several reasons for the switch to “Apple silicon.”
With the new chips, Apple computers will have “a much higher level of performance,” he said, and at the same time, will use less energy, which translates into longer laptop battery life. Apple will also be able to customize the chips to improve machine learning, encryption, and other tasks. Finally, software for the new Macs will be more compatible with iPhones and iPads.
While Intel has struggled to improve chip performance, that hasn’t been the case at Apple. The latest iPhone processor is 100 times as fast as the original from 2007, while graphics processing on the iPad has increased 1,000-fold since it was introduced, Srouji said. “Now we’re bringing all of that expertise and that same focus and disciplined approach to the Mac,” he added.
Who will make the new chips?
Building a manufacturing plant to make cutting-edge chips can cost $10 billion and take several years. But Apple doesn’t intend to manufacture its own chips. Instead, as it has done with mobile processors, the company will contract with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the only companies that can match or exceed Intel’s chip manufacturing prowess.
When will Macs with Apple chips go on sale?
At the WWDC, Apple said it would release its first computer with homegrown chips later this year. But it didn’t offer any more specifics, such as the exact timing, pricing, or performance of those computers. And Apple said it still plans in the near future to debut computers that run on Intel chips and that those computers will be supported for years to come. In fact, it will be two years before the company stops making computers with Intel chips.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, citing sources at companies in Apple’s Asian supply chain, said the first non-Intel computers for consumers and businesses will be a 13-inch MacBook Pro notebook and a new 24-inch iMac, to be released at the end of this year or early in 2021.
To help developers prepare for the switch, Apple is offering to rent them a Mac mini that’s been altered to include an Apple-designed chip that’s used in recent iPads. Developers must pay $500 and return the hardware after the change in chips is complete.
Will current apps run on the new Macs?
As it did years ago when switching to Intel processors, Apple said it will include a software translation tool on new Macs that will be able to run programs written for older Macs. The software, called Rosetta 2, will work automatically, so that users don’t need to take any additional steps. However, apps running on such software typically perform more slowly or have more bugs than apps running on Apple’s native hardware.
What other apps will be compatible?
The reason Apple announced its chip switch at the WWDC before having any Mac computers with the new processors to sell was so that developers could prepare. Converting most apps should take only a matter of days, said Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi, who oversees software engineering.
Apple said it has already converted all of its own software, even high-end programs like the Final Cut video-editing app. Also, popular programs from major developers Adobe and Microsoft can already run on new Macs, Apple said. And the new chips will be able to run all apps written for iPhones and iPads immediately, as well.


fortune--2020-06-23--What is Fastly? Analysts say the best-performing tech stock during the pandemic may still have room

What is Fastly? Analysts say the best-performing tech stock during the pandemic may still have room to run

Zoom has been dethroned.
While the videoconferencing company we’ve no doubt all used in the past three months has seen a massive 159% rally since its Feb. 19 market peak, Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has gained over 222% in the same time frame—and now clinches the title of the best-performing work-from-home stock during the pandemic.
For most people, Credit Suisse’s Brad Zelnick argues, Fastly “was lost in the shuffle a little bit.” But now, it’s certainly “come to the forefront.”
Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN) company that helps users view digital content more quickly. The company also provides security, video delivery, and so-called edge computing services. Some of its biggest customers? Heavy hitters like Slack, Airbnb, Spotify, and Stripe, to name a few.
Add in a new CEO, Joshua Bixby (who took the helm in February), and a follow-on stock sale of 6 million shares in May, and it’s certainly been an eventful few months for Fastly.
Many firms (like Zoom) are benefiting from the shift to working from home—a trend many analysts and experts expect will have a lasting impact even after employees return to their offices. Meanwhile, shelter-in-place orders have led people to spend more time in front of screens, to shop online, and to digest more streaming and video content.
Against that backdrop, Fastly’s outperformance isn’t a surprise for those like D.A. Davidson’s Rishi Jaluria. But Jaluria, who has the highest price target on the Street for the stock, suggests Fastly is unique because it has two tailwinds going for it: “It can benefit in multiple ways: It’s not purely work from home; it’s not purely shelter in place; it kind of has areas that benefit on both sides,” he tells Fortune.
The company is reaping gains from the surge of online traffic and from work-from-home staples like messaging app Slack and GitHub. And Jaluria, for one, doesn’t think these “behavioral changes you get from work from home are reversible now.”
Meanwhile, with e-commerce giants like Wayfair and Shopify as customers, Fastly has been able to ride the surge in online shopping along with its customers—so there are “multiple ways they benefit, not just one or the other,” Jaluria notes.
It hasn’t hurt that Fastly also reported a strong first quarter in May, as revenue popped 38% from the year-ago quarter. The company also raised earnings guidance for the year from $265 million to as much as $290 million (although Jaluria, for one, thinks they might raise estimates still more). Yet the company has thus far been conservative about how long the benefits of work from home and the pandemic may last. Management has projected the benefits of work from home (and the surge in traffic) may start dying down by the end of the second quarter (in the next couple weeks).
But analysts note the pandemic is likely long from over and suggest that conservatism opens up the possibility of a surprise to the upside.
“We always talk about what’s happening with COVID is accelerating existing trends. I think that’s exactly what’s happening with Fastly,” Jaluria argues. “This isn’t a temporary thing, and as things ease up, that benefit goes away. I think these are longer-lasting benefits that Fastly should benefit from.”
Other analysts like Credit Suisse’s Zelnick think there’s a bigger picture to Fastly’s momentum that isn’t tied to the pandemic: edge computing. In layman’s terms, edge computing is essentially data computing that is done closer to the end user, and content delivery is “further distributed and pushed out closer and closer to the end user of these applications,” Zelnick explains. It’s this “broader edge computing and this broader architectural shift that’s happening [that] is going to benefit Fastly for many years to come, not just during a time of pandemic,” he contends. And in light of the rise of 5G and the Internet of things, Jaluria suggests Fastly may be well positioned.
Yet Fastly certainly isn’t alone as a content delivery network, and other competitors like Cloudflare and Akamai have also seen a boost in the past few months, all boasting market caps much larger than Fastly’s $7.6 billion. And as far as valuations go, much like Zoom, Fastly doesn’t come cheap, and Zelnick points out valuations in the software space are historically elevated. Meanwhile, a faster return to normalcy from the pandemic and potential decrease in traffic could hurt the business as well, and analysts point out barriers to entry in the space aren’t all that high.
But those like Jaluria and Zelnick note Fastly is a favorite among software developers, and more important, Zelnick argues, the company is “leveraged to the future state architecture for digital experiences and mobile and web applications for many, many years to come.”
Fastly gained another 6% Tuesday and was trading at roughly $77 a share in intraday trading, but some analysts see even more room to run for the stock. “If you were to ask me a month ago if I thought Zoom’s run-up was sustainable, I would have said, ‘No, this is insane,’” Jaluria says. But “do I think [Fastly’s stock] can continue working as long as they continue to execute as well as they have been? Yes.”


fortune--2020-06-23--Adult film star Ron Jeremy charged with raping three women and sexually assaulting a fourth

Adult film star Ron Jeremy was charged with raping three women and sexually assaulting a fourth, Los Angeles County prosecutors said Tuesday.
Jeremy, 67, whose real name is Ron Jeremy Hyatt, was charged with three counts each of forcible rape and forcible penetration by a foreign object and one count each of forcible oral copulation and sexual battery.
If Jeremy is convicted, the charges could lead to a sentence of 90 years in prison.
He is scheduled to be arraigned later Tuesday. Prosecutors say they will ask for bail of $6.6 million. Emails seeking comment from Jeremy sent to several of his representatives were not immediately returned.
Prosecutors allege Jeremy raped a 25-year-old woman at a West Hollywood home in May 2014, sexually assaulted a 33-year-old woman and a 46-year-old woman in separate incidents at a West Hollywood bar in 2017, and raped a 30-year-old woman at the same bar in July of last year.
Another allegation from 2016, was declined by prosecutors because of insufficient evidence.
Jeremy, nicknamed “The Hedgehog,” is among the best known and most prolific actors in the industry’s history, with thousands of credits to his name.
In recent years he has made a career of appearing in more mainstream entertainment, including music videos and reality television shows like “The Surreal Life.”


fortune--2020-06-23--Jimmy Kimmel apologizes for blackface impressions of Karl Malone

Jimmy Kimmel apologized Tuesday for his 1990s blackface impressions of NBA player Karl Malone and other Black celebrities but said his delay in addressing the subject came in part to avoid handing a victory to his foes.
“I apologize to those who were genuinely hurt or offended by the makeup I wore or the words I spoke,” the ABC late-night star said in a statement.
It’s part of the entertainment world’s continuing reckoning triggered by the protests against police treatment of Black Americans. On Monday, four episodes of the comedy “30 Rock” were pulled from circulation because they featured characters performing in blackface.
Kimmel’s impersonation of Malone, which he started on radio and then brought to television on Comedy Central, was frequently criticized by Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, among others.
Kimmel said he had long been reluctant to address the subject, “as I knew doing so would be celebrated as a victory by those who equate apologies with weakness and cheer for leaders who use prejudice to divide us.
“That delay was a mistake,” he said.
“30 Rock” aired on NBC from 2006 to 2013, but episodes are still being shown in television syndication and on streaming services including Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes and Peacock.
Show creator Tina Fey, who also starred as Liz Lemon in the series about the backstage world of a television show, said in a note to distributors that “I understand now that ‘intent’ is not a free pass for white people to use these images.”
“I apologize for the pain they have caused,” Fey wrote. “Going forward, no comedy-loving kid really needs to stumble on these tropes and be stung by their ugliness.”
Other examples of how the Black Lives Matter protests have impacted entertainment include cancellation of the long-running TV show “Cops” and temporary removal of “Gone With the Wind” from the HBO Max service.
Two of the four eliminated “30 Rock” episodes originally aired in 2010, with the others first shown in 2008 and 2010. They include the East Coast version of an episode first shown live. Series regular Jane Krakowski and guest star Jon Hamm appeared in blackface.
The 2012 episode with Hamm also included “Tonight” show host Jimmy Fallon as a guest. Fallon, who did not appear in such makeup on “30 Rock,” apologized last month after online circulation of an earlier “Saturday Night Live” skit where he wore blackface to impersonate Chris Rock.


fortune--2020-06-24--China wants U.S. soybeans checked for coronavirus, further complicating the trade deal with Trump

As would-be travelers from the U.S. to Europe may soon learn , local pandemic decisions can have global effects

More food shipped to China will now have to be cleared for COVID-19.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that soybean importers asked exporters in the U.S., Brazil, and Canada to sign a letter guaranteeing that their cargo is not contaminated with the coronavirus. U.S. soybean exporters told Reuters that they had yet to reply to China’s request, though Sergio Mendes, director general of the Brazilian export grain association Anec, said that his group was preparing a response. Still, Mendes said that COVID-19 contamination of soybeans would be nearly impossible given the automation of the soybean ship-loading process and the beans’ weeks-long journey to China.
“We would be guaranteeing the unimaginable,” Mendes told Reuters.
The report follows weeks of rising fears in China that imported food—meat, mainly—may lead to further outbreaks of COVID-19. And the new demands on soybeans specifically risk adding another layer of complexity to China’s promise to purchase more U.S. soybeans as part of the trade deal.
How we got here
Beijing is China’s most recent coronavirus hotspot, with more than 200 people testing positive for COVID-19 since the city reported a locally transmitted case on June 11. The city had claimed to be free of COVID-19 for the preceding two months.
The outbreak now appears to be largely contained. Chinese public health officials traced its origin to the Xinfadi food market in southern Beijing, where investigators found COVID-19 particulates on cutting boards for imported salmon and other meats.
At the time of the discovery, health officials said it was unlikely that the virus spread from imported frozen foods, but still possible given that COVID-19 particles can stay alive longer at colder temperatures.
Last week, Hong Kong University epidemiologist Ben Cowling told Fortune that it is more likely the virus spread via humans who shopped at the market or handled the food, rather than by goods shipped across the ocean in refrigerated containers.
In any event, China has since halted imports of meat from a Tyson Foods plant in Arkansas that suffered a coronavirus outbreak among its workers. China has also asked other frozen meat exporters to sign declarations that their products are coronavirus-free and launched a nationwide campaign to inspect food imports for the coronavirus.
Inspecting frozen meat for the coronavirus is one thing; doing the same for soybeans is another, says Darin Friedrichs, senior commodity analyst at FCStone in Shanghai.
It’s implausible that soybean shipments could carry the coronavirus across an ocean, he says.
“There’s no human interaction with soybeans,” Friedrichs says. “They get taken by truck to a grain elevator, then machinery moves it to a train or a barge, then machinery moves it onto a boat.”
The soybeans then sit on a cargo ship at air temperatures for three to six weeks on their way to China, according to Friedrichs.
According to a study published in The Lancet medical journal on April 2, the longest COVID-19 could survive on a surface at room temperature is seven days.
Anxiety over soybeans is likely “indicative of how much emphasis is being put on preventing reemergence of COVID-19 in China,” says Friedrichs. “[For] local officials, it’s better to err on the side of being overly cautious rather than not cautious enough.”
A trade challenge
China’s increased scrutiny of soybean imports may present an additional challenge to resolving the U.S.-China trade war.
On Jan. 15, China and the U.S. agreed to a phase 1 trade deal, in which China agreed to purchase $36.5 billion worth of agricultural products from the U.S. in 2020.
China’s import of U.S. soybeans was crucial to meeting the goal. The crop accounted for 52% of all U.S. agricultural exports to China before the trade war started in 2017; trade in it plummeted as Washington and Beijing exchanged tariffs. The January deal was expected to jump-start soybean exports to China to levels exceeding pre–trade war highs.
Then the coronavirus hit, slowing China’s soybean purchases, as economic lockdowns disrupted global supply chains. Through April 2020, China had purchased only $6.3 billion worth of agricultural products from the U.S., putting it well behind the pace needed to meet its target for this year, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Despite the slow clip of purchases and escalating tensions between the two countries, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on June 18 that China was committed to honoring its phase 1 obligations. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the deal remains “fully intact.” Yet his administration has publicly expressed frustration at the unhurried pace of China’s purchases—and that was before China requested the additional step of soybean coronavirus checks.


fortune--2020-06-24--Here’s how the coronavirus crisis has affected female founders

One might expect female founders to be particularly hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Many are balancing running their companies with being the primary caretaker of young children. Others lead consumer-focused businesses that have been heavily impacted by the economic fallout from the virus. And all are likely to have entered the crisis with less venture funding than their male counterparts. But despite all those factors, new survey data suggests that, in some ways, women-run startups may actually be better positioned to make it through the economic downturn than those of their peers.
A survey of 111 U.S.-based women-run companies conducted by Female Founders Fund found that 20% of these businesses reported increased revenue projections for the next year. An April survey by Startup Genome of about 1,000 global startups found that 12% of respondents were experiencing that same kind of growth. The surveys aren’t apples-to-apples, but the comparison suggests women-run businesses are, to some degree, concentrated in categories poised to benefit from the global crisis.
The female-founded companies reporting increased revenue are all in the wellness and home categories, according to Female Founders Fund’s survey. They include sexual wellness brands, makers of home hair-care and fitness products, and sellers of “alternative adult beverages.”
The Female Founders Fund survey also found that fewer companies had laid off or furloughed employees than Startup Genome’s survey reported: 46% of Female Founders Fund survey respondents cut headcount costs through layoffs, furloughs, or salary reductions, and 51 companies out of the total 111 laid off or furloughed employees. Seventy-four percent of Startup Genome survey respondents had terminated workers.
The Female Founders Fund overview of this category of companies provides insight into the state of these startups—and whether or not the broader effort to put a representative portion of venture capital funding behind businesses founded by women, and especially women of color, will suffer because of the coronavirus crisis. (The firm 500 Startups has conducted a similar survey.)
Of the 111 companies Female Founders Fund queried, 44% are considered Series A stage, with the rest split between pre-seed, seed, and growth stage businesses. Unsurprisingly, about two-thirds of companies report decreased revenue projections for 2020; 50% of those expecting a drop say they’ve cut projections by more than half.
A top concern for female founders right now is extending their companies’ financial runway. Most expect to face difficulty raising capital in the next 18 months, and 40% of respondents in the Series A or later stages have committed to holding off on fundraising until after the second quarter of 2021. Right now, half of female-founded companies have a year of runway ahead of them, and another 22% report 18 months of costs covered.
Female Founders Fund has advised its portfolio companies to cut marketing and headcount costs in order extend their runway to between a year and 18 months out, said founding partner Anu Duggal. But as founders have made those decisions, she says, “everyone was curious as to what everyone else was doing.”
Some founders have successfully raised capital during the pandemic; 14% closed a round since U.S. shutdowns began in March, and 27% closed a round at some point this year.
While survey respondents were anonymous, Female Founders Fund’s portfolio of just over 40 companies includes the direct-to-consumer razor brand Billie, the astrology app Co-Star, the social network for mothers Peanut, and the wedding registry platform Zola. In accompanying comments, one respondent identified as the founder of a direct-to-consumer brand reported “shifting from a ‘growth-at-all-costs’ strategy to modest growth with a clear path to profitability” as a result of the crisis. Another founder of an apparel brand said she has covered her overhead costs through mask sales, which have brought in $30,000 a month.


fortune--2020-06-24--As would-be travelers from the U.S. to Europe may soon learn, local pandemic decisions can have glob

As would-be travelers from the U.S. to Europe may soon learn, local pandemic decisions can have global effects

Travelers are hiding their coronavirus infections—and airlines can do little about it

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.
Could Americans be banned from entering the European Union when it opens its borders to most of the world next week? That’s a distinct possibility, according to plans being discussed today among EU ambassadors.
When the EU’s external borders open July 1, the idea is that people will only be allowed to enter from countries that have an infection rate below the EU average. According to Politico, only 50 countries or so would qualify under that condition, including China. The U.S. and Brazil, for example, would not.
The EU average is around 16 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The current U.S. figure is 107, while Brazil has 190 cases per 100,000, according to the New York Times, which also says the diplomats will issue their recommendation early next week.
Now, it’s important to remember that the U.S. has also closed its borders to European visitors since March—when the EU rather than the U.S. was the virus’s main playground—and has made no firm commitment to letting them back in anytime soon. So there may be an element of reciprocity involved here.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that the U.S. is currently a coronavirus epicenter, and the situation there is worsening. Most U.S. states have rising case numbers, with early re-openers such as Georgia, Florida and Texas being badly hit. California, the most populous state, is seeing record-breaking infection figures. Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the numbers are the product of increased testing, as opposed to a resurgence that could reasonably be linked to states’ keenness to reopen as quickly as possible.
The pandemic is certainly not over in Europe, either. A massive outbreak at a meat-processing plant in the town of Gütersloh this week led to Germany’s first re-imposition of a serious lockdown, albeit local rather than wider, and Serbian tennis ace Novak Djokovic arguably contributed to the infection of several players—including himself—by bullishly organizing a competition in Belgrade while most observers warned this was a risky move.
But broadly speaking, the fact remains that Europe has managed to restart its economies without causing a huge uptick in infections. There is no clear consensus as to why this is, but Europeans’ behavioral changes and general caution in the lifting of restrictions are likely factors.
Europe would suffer if it continues to shut out Americans. As London Capital Group research chief Jasper Lawler said in a Wednesday note, a drop in European markets early today was caused by that potential move. “Blocking U.S. travellers would heighten the risks for travel and hospitality industries that badly need every tourist dollar possible,” he wrote.
But at the very least, the possibility demonstrates that state and federal decisions about tackling the pandemic can have global implications.
More news below.
David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Dell and VMware
Dell might unload its 81%, $50 billion stake in cloud-software giant VMware—or buy the rest of it. Dell is exploring its options because it is itself only worth $36 billion or so, and the differential suggests the market is more interested in the VMware stake than it is in Dell's own PC and storage business. A separation could highlight the value of each business, while helping to reduce Dell's $48 billion debt load. Wall Street Journal
Election holiday
Twitter will give employees (and contract workers) a paid day off on U.S. Election Day in November—and in other countries for their election days, if they take place during working hours. Twitter previously allowed up to two hours of paid time off on Election Day, but that might not cut it in a year of (presumably) social distancing in voting queues. CNN
Facebook blow
Germany's federal supreme court has upheld a ban on Facebook's combination of user data across its various properties—something Facebook gets users' consent to do, but those users don't have any choice if they want to continue using the services. The ban was originally instated last year by Germany's antitrust authority, which took the novel step of seeing data collection as a competition issue, rather than a pure data-protection issue. The ban was suspended by a higher regional court in August, allowing Facebook to continue the practice until its appeal is decided—the suspension has now been overturned, but Facebook says there will be "no immediate changes" for its German users. Deutsche Welle
R.I.P. Segway
The Segway will cease production next month, ending what was once a dream of a revolution in personal transport. Dean Kamen's invention only ever sold 140,000 units in its almost two decades of production, becoming mostly notable for carrying tour groups around cities such as Berlin, and security guards around malls. Although the sort-of-iconic original product is now terminal, the Segway company lives on (under the umbrella of China's Ninebot) as a producer of electric scooters, hoverboard and other personal transportation devices. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Olympus cameras
Olympus is selling its 84-year-old camera business to a private equity firm, Japan Industrial Partners. Olympus is, along with Panasonic, one of the main players in the Micro Four Thirds cameras-and-lenses ecosystem, which provides a lighter, more compact alternative to the big cameras sold by Canon and Nikon. But the business has been losing Olympus money for three years now, so the hope is that new operations under JIP will bring it back to sustainability. ePhotozine
Environmental regulations
The Trump administration has been accelerating its drive to weaken environmental regulations during the coronavirus crisis—partly to boost economic activity in the short term, but also to get the changes in early enough to stop the Democrats easily overturning them, should they win big in November. Financial Times
Attracting entrepreneurs
Players in the U.K. tech sector are leaping on the opportunity provided by the U.S. suspending foreign work visas. "If you've been affected by the ridiculous decision to suspend H1-B in the U.S., take a look at the U.K. Global Talent Visa," tweeted Balderton Capital's James Wisein a message retweeted and endorsed by various venture capitalists, founders and policymakers. CNBC
Supporting innovation
Congress should help maintain the U.S.'s current innovation momentum—apparent in the scramble to fight COVID-19—with not only tax credits cut also "systemic changes at a deeper level to come out of this crisis with an eye toward sustainable growth, and the ability to weather the next storm," according to Alliantgroup SVP Rich Lazio, writing for Fortune. "Let’s embrace the abnormal and dive headfirst into an era of constant change where our country has repeatedly proved to be a force to be reckoned with." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-06-24--Coronavirus fears are beginning to crash the great stock markets party

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning. Asia and Europe are mostly lower as the global coronavirus case load continues to spike, particularly in parts of Asia and the Americas. U.S. futures have swung decidedly lower, too. That’s despite encouraging economic data and renewed talk of a new round of stimulus goodies.
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The Asia indexes are mixed in afternoon trade. Hong Kong and Tokyo were down slightly; Shanghai was up.
and were down slightly; was up. Tokyo has reported its highest number of new coronavirus cases since May 5. The problem is “clusters in workplaces,” officials say.
has reported its of new coronavirus cases since May 5. The problem is “clusters in workplaces,” officials say. Bad reception. Apple’s China iPhone sales fell in May, after a strong rebound in April, suggesting the retail picture in the vital market is still choppy.
Europe
The European bourses sank in early trade. Germany’s Dax was off 2% , erasing yesterday’s gains.
sank in early trade. Germany’s was off , erasing yesterday’s gains. The E.U. is set to selectively reopen its external borders on July 1. So far, the U.S. does not make the list of approved visitors, according to the New York Times, as it’s failing to control the coronavirus “scourge.”
is set to selectively on So far, the U.S. does not make the list of approved visitors, according to the New York Times, as it’s failing to control the coronavirus “scourge.” The pubs, that mainstay of English life, are set to reopen July 4 as the country continues to ease lockdown measures in a bid to revive the economy. But pub-goers, PM Boris Johnson urges, must use “common sense” to keep infections at bay. Common sense, was something in short supply at my old local off Upper Street a good hour or so before closing, I recall.
U.S.
The Dow , S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures point to a negative open. The Nasdaq, at an all-time high, is going for nine straight. It’s looking iffy.
, and futures point to a negative open. The Nasdaq, at an all-time high, is going for nine straight. It’s looking iffy. The U.S. economy will exit recession by year-end, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says, adding a new stimulus package is gaining momentum. The White House and House Democrats want something passed before Election Day .
by year-end, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says, adding a new stimulus package is gaining momentum. The White House and House Democrats want something passed before . Cloud stocks are flying—just ask investors in Fastly. To cash in on the mania, Dell Technologies is considering a spinoff for its roughly $50 billion stake in VMware, the Journal reports.
Elsewhere
Gold is up.
is up. The dollar is up, too.
is up, too. Crude is falling, with Brent hovering just above $42/barrel.
Surprise!
Pandemic forecasting is a fool’s errand. Economists go into the exercise knowing full well their predictions of the future will be wrong—either by a lot, or by a little less than a lot.
As new data come in, they tweak their models, and tweak it again. But, we find, there’s still little consensus on how bad things will get, or, crucially, when a recovery will begin. Does Secretary Mnuchin have any unique insight into the economy when he testified yesterday that the U.S. should emerge from recession by year-end? Or do we listen to the Fed, which, only a week earlier, said, forget about 2020?
In a pandemic, it’s probably wise not to put too much weight into any one forecast. Something like the Citi Economic Surprise index would be a better indicator. What’s the surprise index? It’s a measure of how much the official economic data comes in above or below the aggregate of economists’ forecasts. Here’s what you need to know about the index: a positive reading means the data is surprising to the upside—that is, the actual numbers are better than all those forecasted numbers.
The surprise index has—surprise!—not only turned positive, but it’s at a record high. In fact, we’ve gone from a record-low (the economic warning signs were worse than expected) at the end of April, to a record-high this week. That’s leading analysts at BofA, for one, to conclude the U.S. is on the upward “V” of what will be an “ultra-short” recession, and that corporate earnings will pick up dramatically in the short term. That’s closer to Mnuchin’s optimistic call yesterday than the Fed’s gloomy call last week.
Here’s their longer take:
And this is what the index looks like, courtesy of Raymond James. Cast your eye to the bottom right where you can see the vertiginous drop and then a rocket-launch rebound.
In the past two days, we’ve had some data points that suggest the global economy is undoubtedly beginning to rebound, and rebound strongly. Yesterday, it was PMI numbers. “The big picture is that the economy is now on the road to recovery following the coronavirus lockdowns,” Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, was quoted saying in the WSJ yesterday. Last week, it was surprisingly strong retail sales in the U.S. and Britain.
Taken together, it’s beginning to read: the economy is recovering at a faster rate than predicted.
Not sure if that’s enough to justify these lofty stock prices, but the macro picture is looking better.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
A note from my Fortune colleagues on a timely new initiative:
Many companies are speaking out against racial injustices right now. But how do they fare in their own workplaces? Black employees in the corporate world, we want to hear from you: Please submit your anonymous thoughts and anecdotes here. https://bit.ly/WorkingWhileBlack
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
Trading floor. The New York Stock Exchange made Wall Street history earlier this year when it shut down in-person trading in March, a nearly 150-year first. A lot has happened in those three months, including a resurgence in IPOs. John Tuttle, vice chairman and chief commercial officer of the NYSE, spoke to Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram about what investors need to know about the reopening, plus about direct listings and how the NYSE is handling the shift to WFH and the BLM movement.
The "everything is expensive" rally. Indicator after indicator shows that stocks, at these levels, are expensive. Historically expensive. So why is it that investors can't get enough of them at these prices?
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a discount offer for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
12%
The fallout from the Wirecard scandal runs deep, with an ever-growing queue of creditors and potential litigants. That includes the investors who bought into a €900 million tranche of Wirecard's convertible bonds. The debt was originally purchased by SoftBank, then repackaged and sold on by Credit Suisse. Yesterday, those bonds were trading at 12% of their original value, according to the Wall Street Journal, falling about as much in a year as the Wirecard share price in recent days.


fortune--2020-06-24--Travelers are hiding their coronavirus infections—and airlines can do little about it

People infected with coronavirus were allowed to board aircraft and travel to Hong Kong in recent days, highlighting the challenge of controlling the pandemic at the same time governments seek the safest ways to reopen borders.
Hong Kong’s health authority said one infected passenger arrived Sunday from Manila on a Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. flight, and another was on a Cathay Dragon flight from Kuala Lumpur. Both were diagnosed with Covid-19 before they traveled. It also said 45 passengers on Emirates flights from Dubai over the weekend either were confirmed or probable cases. The airline only restarted flights to Hong Kong this month.
The infections underscore the risk of peeling back restrictions while the global pace of infections keeps accelerating. Airlines worldwide, largely propped up by government bailouts, have been lobbying to get their planes back in the air as they face more than $84 billion in losses this year.
The International Air Transport Association, which represents almost 300 airlines, in May recommended steps to protect passengers and crew from infection, such as temperature checks at the airport and wearing face masks on the plane.
But the Hong Kong cases show that infected passengers can bypass voluntary requirements, and there’s little airlines can do.
“Taking temperatures and having passengers wear masks on flights are steps we can do to ensure the virus doesn’t spread,” Korean Air Lines Co. said in a statement. “For measures to be put in place to ensure infected passengers don’t fly, it has to be done by the authorities and it’s not something an airline like us can do on our own.”
IATA last week outlined recommendations for Covid-19 testing, saying it ideally would be done before arriving at the airport and within 24 hours of travel. If testing is required during the travel process, it should be done at departure, and governments would need to mutually recognize test results, IATA said.
Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection said the 30 new cases on Monday and 16 on Tuesday all had a travel history during the incubation period. The passenger flying on Cathay Flight 906 from Manila, a 58-year-old man, tested positive in the Philippines on Saturday, the day before he arrived.
Cathay said it learned about the passenger from health authorities after the plane landed. The airline is following “prescribed procedures in conducting disinfection of aircraft and informing the operating crew and employees,” as well as helping to trace those who were in close contact with the man.
A spokesman for the Philippine Immigration Bureau said it wasn’t the agency’s job to check health clearances.
“We only check the passport and boarding” pass, spokesman Melvin Mabulac said.
The passenger on Cathay Dragon Flight 734 was a 39-year-old woman returning from India via Malaysia, Hong Kong’s health department said Tuesday. After landing, she declared she’d tested positive and had been treated for the virus in India last month.
The Centre for Health Protection, which advises against all non-essential travel outside Hong Kong, said it is in contact with authorities in the Philippines and India to obtain more information about the cases.
The Hong Kong arrivals aren’t likely to be isolated cases. While some countries, including Australia, have said their borders are likely to be effectively closed for the rest of the year, others — including members of the European Union — are working on allowing more international flights.
Biogen Inc. said in March it fired a female worker who returned to China from Massachusetts without disclosing her infection. Local media said the 37-year-old took a large dose of anti-fever medication before she boarded to hide her illness.
JetBlue Airways Corp. banned a passenger who flew from New York to Florida and notified the crew after landing that he had tested positive for coronavirus, CNN said in March.


fortune--2020-06-24--Chinese developer of coronavirus vaccine secures approval for final stage of human trials

A Chinese state-owned vaccine developer secured regulatory approval to test its coronavirus shots in the United Arab Emirates, making it one of the first among a slew of global efforts to get the greenlight for the final stage of human trials.
Beijing-based China National Biotec Group Co. was awarded approval on Tuesday to conduct Phase III trials for its Covid-19 vaccines in the Middle Eastern country, the company said in a statement posted on its official WeChat account.
CNBG said it will partner with Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence and cloud computing firm G42 to carry out the trial and local production of the vaccine. It didn’t disclose details such as the timing or the number of people it plans to enroll for testing.
The world’s fast-developing vaccine programs are moving into the final stage of testing before they are approved for inoculation for the general public. Pharmaceutical companies across the globe are racing to be first to find an effective shot against the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 9.2 million people and killed over 476,000.
CNBG is the first Chinese vaccine developer to proceed toward a Phase III trial to test whether the two shots it developed are effective against the pathogen.
Chinese companies have had to look for places with active virus outbreaks to complete the final stage of human testing, which requires thousands of people. The low number of cases in China has made it unfeasible for them to conduct such trials at home. The U.A.E. is still adding hundreds of cases a day, with a total of more than 45,000 infections.
Chinese biotech CanSino Biologics Inc. was approved last month to conduct human testing for the vaccine it co-developed with the Chinese military in Canada, but will need to re-do early safety studies before going into the Phase III trial. Beijing-based Sinovac Biotech Ltd. has partnered with Instituto Butantan to roll out testing of its shot on 9,000 people in the hot spot of Brazil, but has not yet won approval to proceed.
Vaccine candidates from companies outside of China are also headed for Phase III trials. A shot co-developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc will be tested among 2,000 people in Brazil starting as early as this month. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna Inc. is set to begin testing its shot next month in a 30,000-person trial in the U.S.
The two shots developed by CNBG have already been tested among some 2,000 people in phase I and II trials conducted in China. One of the vaccines has been found to be generally safe, while data from the other one will be revealed on June 28. The shots were already administered on more than 1,000 employees, including senior executives of CNBG and its parent company.
Employees of Chinese state-run companies are said to have also been offered voluntary shots of the CNBG vaccines if they are traveling for work overseas or if they live in high-risk areas in Beijing, which has recently seen a fresh virus outbreak.


fortune--2020-06-24--Japan already had an army of contract tracers when the coronavirus hit

The virus might have been new, but for Yuko Koizumi the work was still the same.
In Kawasaki, a city just south of Tokyo, nearly 300 people had tested positive for the coronavirus by early June. But Koizumi was unperturbed. As head of infectious disease response for the city’s network of seven public health centers, she was able to draw on a familiar strategy used in past pandemics and seasonal outbreaks: trace infection routes via close contacts, check on recuperating patients, and arrange treatment where needed.
It’s a playbook that may have made all the difference in Japan’s unorthodox, though largely successful, virus response.
Kawasaki’s seven public health centers are part of a web of over 450 such institutions across Japan which played a crucial role in limiting the nation’s outbreak. The centers meant Japan already had an army of trained contact tracers when the virus struck, and may provide a model for other countries as they look to build systems that will future-proof them for the next pandemic.
Experts contend that the existence of these centers, which implement and execute central public health policy from giving elderly diet advice to investigating child abuse, are one of the key reasons Japan was able to avoid an explosion in coronavirus cases.
“I don’t think I would have been able to do it if it wasn’t something I already knew how to handle,” Koizumi said. “We also already had a team of people that could communicate and work together.”
Center staff played a crucial role in quick contact tracing, serving as early gatekeepers when the first cases of the disease in Japan were identified in January. They asked people infected with the virus to detail their movements, share personal information and disclose the details of people they had met to trace who needed to be tested and isolated.
While largely unknown outside of the medical community prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, trained contact tracers are now recognized to be the cornerstone of a successful virus response, used effectively in nations from South Korea to Germany.
A cluster of eight cases had appeared in a local hospital in Kawasaki when Bloomberg News spoke with Koizumi earlier this month.
“It’s already under control,” she said, four days after the cluster was reported. “The day after cases emerged, the local center sent staff to the hospital to figure out close contacts and advise on how to disinfect the necessary areas.”
Communal Glue
Unlike in some Asian cities such as Hong Kong, where authorities have published detailed accounts of the workplaces, residences and restaurants and bars visited by infected people to get others to come forward for testing, officials in Japan have studiously avoided publicly identifying businesses or even regions hit.
With privacy paramount, public health center workers have been able to conduct tracing while maintaining the anonymity of their patients.
“People trust the public health center and will share any kind of information with them,” said Haruka Sakamoto, a public health researcher at the University of Tokyo. “They understand the characteristics of the community.”
The public health centers perform a myriad of functions in local neighborhoods, serving as a communal glue of sorts. In addition to infectious disease response, they oversee a wide range of health concerns, from advising the elderly on diet and exercise and conducting health checkups on newborns, to issuing licenses for bars and restaurants and investigating cases of child abuse or food poisoning.
That in-built connection to the community helped with the initial coronavirus response, which involved tracking the disease and informing citizens of the right precautions to take. Even now, the work of contact tracing, arranging tests, and identifying clusters is still being done across the centers as the country continues to re-open.
At the Chitose public health center in Hokkaido, workers are now fielding around 30 to 40 calls a day, down from more than 100 at the peak in early May, said Reiko Kano, a public health nurse at the center with over two decades of experience.
“Trust is very important, especially if you’re suddenly just getting a call from someone,” said Kano. “You have to think about your final goal, and be very careful about protecting privacy and personal information while also realizing there are certain things you have to ask. There’s a balance you need to strike.”
Tuberculosis Strategy
Japan’s public health centers trace their roots back to a program in the 1930s to fight tuberculosis, a disease that, like Covid-19, requires a trace-and-track response, said Toshio Takatorige, a public health professor at Kansai University in Osaka. In contrast, public health systems in western nations stem from an earlier fight against cholera in the 19th century, he said — a very different type of pandemic that can be solved by improving water and sewage systems.
“The tuberculosis problem was more serious than coronavirus is now,” Takatorige said. It was also a serious issue for the Imperial Army, ensuring a well-funded response. To this day, containing TB remains one of the public health centers’ core functions, with Japan having one of the higher rates among OECD nations.
Similarly, experience with past epidemics — Hong Kong’s bruising encounter with SARS in 2003, South Korea’s 2015 struggle with MERS — has helped other Asian countries also weather the pandemic better than western nations.
“For tuberculosis, you need to follow up for two years — the coronavirus tracing time period isn’t as long,” Takatorige said. “The public health centers carry out the tuberculosis strategy on a daily basis, so comparatively the coronavirus response is easy.”
Public health centers have also provided data that was integral to Japan’s understanding of the virus, Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of infectious diseases at Tohoku University and member of a panel of experts advising the Japanese government on its virus response, said at a press conference on June 1.
Declining Funding
The centers themselves are far from flashy or high-tech. Contact tracing breaks down when there are too many cases at once, as happened in Japan in April. The centers lack a centralized system to share information and use faxes to report individual infections, slowing the transmission of vital information and adding to an already heavy workload.
Funding for the public health center system has also dwindled in recent years, causing the number of centers to fall by nearly half in the last 30 years, according to a professional group for public health center directors in Japan. This has overloaded denser cities in particular, which have also been worst hit by the coronavirus.
But the centers may now be cherished anew, as other nations struggle to assemble contract-tracing operations amid the pandemic.
“Things like how to ask questions, it’s all on-the-job training,” said Nobuhiko Okabe, the director general of Kawasaki City’s Institute for Public Health who is also a member of the government’s expert panel. “You need people who are used to it. It’s not something you can do just by increasing the number of people.”
A 41-year-old man who contracted the coronavirus in Tokyo in April told Bloomberg News that staff from the local public health center called him without fail every day while self-isolating at home — asking him to describe his conditions, and providing advice on when was appropriate for him to leave the house after his symptoms subsided. The man, who declined to be identified for privacy reasons, was also asked to log his temperature and condition on a website daily, as well as questioned over who he may have been in close contact with.
“Everyone is captivated by potential treatments and vaccines, because if they’re successful there will be money for pharmaceutical companies,” said Takatorige, the public health professor in Osaka. “No one thinks about the system that’s already a part of daily life.”


fortune--2020-06-25--Working from home means softer toilet paper—and a significant toll on the environment

The coronavirus pandemic is changing political polling as we know it

With Americans spending a lot of time at home these days, more money is being spent on soft toilet paper. That may be bad news for the environment.
The kind of cushy tissue that was sold out earlier in the pandemic uses material that comes primarily from clear-cutting forests, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Office buildings, on the other hand, tend to use recycled fibers in their toilet paper, the group said.
“The side-effect of one crisis shouldn’t exacerbate another,” said Shelley Vinyard, an environment expert with the NRDC, which released a report Wednesday on the climate impact of toilet paper. “There’s no real reason why office tissue has to be made with recycled and the consumer tissue has to be made with virgin fiber.”
Nearly 60% of at-home toilet paper in the U.S. comes from so-called virgin material, which is sourced from Canada’s northern forests. The NRDC for years has highlighted the impact of tissue that uses non-recycled content.
In the latest study, the group handed out F grades to brands from Procter & Gamble Co., Georgia-Pacific, and Kimberly-Clark Corp.—the three largest U.S. manufacturers of toilet paper—for the environmental impact of their products.
P&G said via email that its popular Charmin brand is “sourced from responsibly-managed forests,” and that at least one tree is regrown for every one the company uses. A Georgia-Pacific representative referred to an earlier statement that said the company is committed to sustainability and that Canada in particular has regulations in place to help minimize the risk of deforestation.
‘Complex challenges’
Kimberly-Clark has committed to reducing the use of virgin wood fiber from natural forests in its tissue products by 50% by 2025, said Terry Balluck, a company spokesperson. “We understand the point of view of the NRDC, and we remain committed to the ongoing dialogue with them on the complex challenges presented in their report.”
The heavy reliance on virgin fibers is releasing an “enormous Pandora’s box” of carbon emissions, said Jennifer Skene, a co-author of the NRDC report along with Vinyard. Logging in the Canadian boreal forests region, which stretches from the Yukon to Newfoundland, emits 26 million metric tons every year, the report estimates, an amount which is equivalent to the emissions produced by 5.5 million passenger vehicles.
As tissue remains one of the fastest-growing sectors in the paper industry, investments in virgin fibers will likely continue in years to come, according to the NRDC, which is headquartered in New York.


fortune--2020-06-24--Photo finish: Crashing sales force Olympus to sell iconic camera business

Sometimes the vicissitudes of capitalism force companies to exit the businesses for which they’re best known. Olympus, once a leading light in the photography industry, is now joining that list.
On Wednesday the company said it planned to quit its 84-year-old camera business. The imaging giant, known for its once-pervasive digital cameras, agreed to sell off the declining unit by year’s end. Japan Industrial Partners, a private equity firm best known for buying Sony’s struggling Vaio computer line in 2014, agreed to purchase the business.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A glance at Olympus’s financial statements provides all the rationale for the divestiture; as at rival manufacturers, camera sales have plummeted over the past decade. For the fiscal year ended March 31, Olympus’s camera unit declined 10% versus the year prior to ¥43.6 billion, or $407 million. The unit’s sales have collapsed by three-quarters from a decade ago, when the company brought in ¥175 billion, or $1.63 billion.
In 2007, Apple’s iPhone debut rang the camera industry’s death knell, though many people didn’t realize it at the time. As smartphones have improved their lenses, software, and image quality since, people have substituted them for stand-alone cameras. The floor fell out from underneath camera makers; digital cameras sales have fallen 87% since 2010.
The coronavirus pandemic hastened Olympus’s laggard camera unit’s decline. On June 17, the company noted that the spread of COVID-19 put revenues “on a downward trend.” No doubt the headwinds contributed to Olympus’s decision to sell.
The deal represents a win for ValueAct Capital, an activist investor that took a 5.5% stake in Olympus in 2018. The San Francisco fund had been agitating for Olympus to improve its financial performance, including by installing a new CEO, Yasuo Takeuchi, in 2019.
When rumors floated that Olympus might be exploring a sale of its camera business in the fall, the company first appeared to deny the reports. But Takeuchi confirmed the possibility of a spinoff to Bloomberg in November.
If the deal goes through, Olympus will concentrate on its remaining businesses, such as surgical equipment and medical devices like endoscopes. The company’s stock jumped as much as 7%, to $19, on the news.
Olympus’s exit follows similar ones by Kodak and Polaroid, two other iconic camera makers that called it quits on the business, preferring to license their brands instead.
Canon, Sony, and Nikon continue to slug it out.


fortune--2020-06-24--How Trump’s misguided H-1B visa ban will devastate our economy

This week, the Trump administration issued a new executive order suspending employment-based visas used by more than half-a-million foreign workers each year, including the H-1B skilled-worker program relied upon by our nation’s tech industry. This policy won’t simply make life harder for immigrants—it will have devastating consequences for the economy, robbing U.S. businesses of skilled, tech-savvy workers, hampering economic growth, and stifling job creation as we push through the coronavirus downturn.
As an immigrant and the cofounder of a startup that has raised $70 million to help new Americans participate fully in our economy, I’m dismayed by the President’s shortsightedness. The business and technology communities have spoken out clearly, time and again, about the need for a smarter approach to immigration. My company, Nova Credit, recently drafted an open letter signed by more than 230 business leaders, including top current and former executives at JPMorgan Chase, Lending Club, PayPal, and Verizon, asking Congress to ensure immigrants are treated fairly in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.
We did so because we know that immigration isn’t a zero-sum game. Foreign workers don’t take jobs from Americans, but rather give businesses like ours the talent and skilled labor we need to keep growing and create jobs and prosperity for everyone.
The Trump administration claims its policies are meant to protect U.S. workers, but the true impact will be a catastrophic loss of jobs and innovation. Our workforce is aging, so we need immigrants to keep our economy firing—especially in the skilled positions that fuel growth and create jobs for American workers. According to New American Economy, every H-1B visa that’s issued generates 1.83 new jobs over the following seven years. With 85,000 H-1B visas currently issued per year, that means even just a one-year freeze would cost the U.S. a total of 155,550 jobs.
The new executive order also halts the issuance of L visas, which let businesses move workers from one branch to another and are vital to the running of multinational companies. It bars many workers from entering on H-2B visas, which are widely used by the hospitality sector and other seasonal businesses wrestling with chronic labor shortages. And it bars the entry of skilled workers’ spouses under H-4 visas—a pointlessly cruel move that will separate loved ones and have an outsize toll on immigrant women.
The J visa program, used by students and professionals, is also on the chopping block, and the administration is likely to follow up by targeting the Optional Professional Training program that allows students to work temporarily for U.S. companies after graduation. Both the J and OPT programs are major drivers of innovation that create jobs for everyone. Reducing OPT numbers by just 60%—a far more restrained approach than the administration favors—would reduce GDP by a quarter-percent by 2028, and wipe out 443,000 jobs, including 255,000 now held by American-born workers.
The long-term toll would be even worse, because the foreign students and skilled workers of today are the startup founders and CEOs of tomorrow. SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once used H-1B visas to live and work in the U.S. In total, the U.S. has 3.1 million immigrant entrepreneurs, according to New American Economy, and immigrant-run businesses employ 8 million people. Without immigrant founders, the Fortune 500 would be only the Fortune 277, because almost 45% of our country’s biggest companies were founded by new Americans and their children.
My own story speaks to the contributions made by immigrants. I was born in the U.K. to Greek parents, educated in a French school, and worked in East Africa before coming to the U.S. for an MBA at Stanford. Because I was able to use the OPT program and other employment-based visas to stay in the U.S. after graduating, I went on to cofound Nova Credit, which now employs 55 people and helps thousands of immigrants a year to access financial services like loans and credit cards.
We’ll need exactly that kind of imagination, energy, and optimism as we work to revitalize our economy—and that means we can’t afford to sideline or scare off our immigrant workers. The pandemic doesn’t care about paperwork or politics: It’s affecting us all. But nobody benefits if we force hardworking immigrants to abandon their dreams and return to their home countries—or to more welcoming countries such as Canada—and rob ourselves of their talent, their innovation, and their entrepreneurialism.
Americans should reject the administration’s misguided effort to exclude skilled immigrants. It’s time for all Americans—and especially our leaders in D.C.—to put politics aside, do what’s right for the U.S. economy, and work to ensure that bright, ambitious immigrants know they’ll always be welcome in the home of the free.
Nicky Goulimis is COO of Nova Credit.


fortune--2020-06-24--The coronavirus pandemic is changing political polling as we know it

Working from home means softer toilet paper—and a significant toll on the environment

Primary Tuesday in New York, Kentucky, and Virginia was a quiet one. There were no crowded victory parties or subdued concession speeches. There weren’t even many winners or losers. Instead of exit polls and vote tallying, reporters told viewers that they would likely have to wait another week for results in big-name races because of an increase in mail-in voting.
This is election night in the age of COVID-19 and a likely sign of what’s to come on Nov. 3.
Presidential pollsters, meanwhile, are scrambling to recalibrate their methods in the wake of unprecedented campaign and new voting standards. A lot is riding on the accuracy of polling this election cycle, especially after the fumbles of 2016, and research institutions are feeling the pressure. They fear that misrepresenting the outcome in November could lead to a further decay in public trust in news institutions and research organizations.
Polling has also become big business: Political polls can easily cost $20,000 to $40,000 each and help advertise and draw in big business for companies like Gallup, which then make hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate partners.
But this election presents an unprecedented challenge in accurate reporting. Pollsters worry that long lines at a smaller number of polling stations and an increase in early voting and vote-by-mail ballots will skew the exit polls that ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News often use to predict and call elections for candidates.
Those major news institutions are members of a group called the National Election Pool, run by Edison Research. The group has been the only one to conduct national exit polls in the U.S. since 2004. Fox News and the Associated Press were part of the group until 2016; now the two organizations conduct polling online, but they don’t talk to people in person. Edison Research told Fortune that the company typically conducts 100,000 in-person interviews with people as they leave the polls as well as some in-person interviews at early polling sites and phone interviews with absentee voters.
But when voters are forced to wait in lines for hours to cast their votes, as we’ve now seen happen in primaries around the country, they’ll be disinclined to stick around and answer questions from exit pollsters, said Trent D. Buskirk, the Novak Family professor of data science and chair of applied statistics and operations research at Bowling Green State University. Combine that with large groups of people staying home and voting by mail, or voting early over a number of days, and exit polls could be “more varied in their estimation,” he said.
Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump say that they are more likely to resume their usual activities in the next three months than Democrats, meaning they may be the ones turning out to the polls, skewing exit polls further to the right, noted Buskirk, who also served as a chair at the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Election projections, which factor in exit polls and the demographic data of likely voters, may be further askew if they don’t revise their calculations to account for specific regions that have been hard hit by COVID-19, said Buskirk, especially in regions where voting by mail isn’t widely available or where applications for a mail ballot aren’t sent to every voter.
A middle-aged black Democrat who has voted in every election since he was 18 would typically be included in projection models as a very likely voter for Biden, for example, but if he lives in a county that has been locked down because of the pandemic, he may not go to the polls despite what the models predict.
“Some of these likely voter models may actually miss the market,” said Buskirk. “They don’t incorporate some of the more geographically specific information about how corona is actually impacting people’s lives.”
It’s possible, he said, that a state like Ohio could be projected on the news to go to Trump on election night only to have the results show that vice president and presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden is the winner two weeks later.
“The problem, really, is not who wins the election because obviously the person who wins the election is going to win the election by the proper count and not because Fox News calls it,” said Buskirk. “The problem is really the public perception of the polls.”
In order to get things right for the 2020 election, new models that incorporate more nuanced geographic health factors will have to be built, he said.
“I’ve been doing this since 1988, and by far this is the year with the most last-minute changes in terms of dates and procedures and how votes are being reported,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president at Edison Research. “I expect a lot of change between now and Nov. 3. Many election officials frankly don’t even know what procedures they’re going to have in place yet.”
Lenski says that Edison will use June and July primaries as testing grounds to make sure that it has protections in place to conduct surveying during a pandemic and to readjust its current models. The company will likely end up increasing the number of people contacted by phone to ask about vote-by-mail results and the number of exit surveys it conducts in early voting while decreasing Election Day exit polls.
Exit polls, said Lenski, will still probably be used to reflect the composition and thoughts of the electorate, but the process of any projection is “just going to be more cautious this year.” Typically exit polling data is used only to project landslide elections anyway, he said.
But a lot is riding on the accuracy of these polls. If exit polls are wrong, public faith in news intuitions, polling, and elections will erode, said Buskirk. It also makes it difficult for polling to remain accurate, as untrusting Americans will be less receptive to picking up the phone and answering survey questions. When a candidate is predicted to be winning by a landslide, voter turnout is also often lower; for that reason, some candidates even prefer to appear to be in tight races.
Generally speaking, the polling industry can be slow to adapt, said Chris Jackson, who heads up public polling at multinational market research company Ipsos.
“We tend to be conservative and do things that are tested and work a certain way,” he said. An environment that’s volatile and chaotic makes it particularly hard to take a current poll and forecast it forward to accurately predict what will happen in November.
“I think anyone saying they know what’s going to happen in November is really misleading themselves or their peers,” he told Fortune. “And we’re very much aware and concerned about how different voting rules or laws may actually impact who shows up.”
There are certain patterns of voting that have held up for decades and which have been used to inform predictions, said Jackson. Older people tend to vote more often than younger people; people who are more educated and affluent show up to vote more than those who are less so; women vote more than men; white Americans show up to vote more than black Americans, who show up to vote more than Hispanic-Americans.
But do social movements or widespread vote-by-mail change that?
“We have no idea,” said Jackson. “There are some examples we can look at in Colorado or Washington but on a national scale, no idea.”
The confusion comes as polling companies work to repair damaged reputations that came from the 2016 presidential elections, where survey results clearly missed their mark. At the end of the day, polls cost tens of thousands of dollars to create and are big business. Another disastrous election cycle could upend the industry.
Jackson says Ipsos is looking at a number of ways to make sure its surveys are more accurate. The company is changing how it weighs education, building sensitivity analysis into data, and making sure all subpopulations are being represented in correct proportions. Ipsos is also implementing control models to look at unemployment levels and GDP to see if they match what poll results indicate.
But Ipsos hasn’t yet implemented any changes around how voting will change this year.
“We’re thinking a lot about that,” said Jackson. “We haven’t changed the way we’re doing our polling yet, but we’re very much aware and concerned about how different voting rules or laws may actually impact who shows up.”
Eran Ben-Porath, executive vice president of Public Opinion Research at SSRS, a research and polling company, told Fortune that experts are still trying to figure out how to adapt exit polls to this new reality.
“There’s a lot of discussion about that, and there’s going to be a lot of conditioning to the idea that it’s reasonable that we won’t know the election results in certain tight states for a while,” he said. “People tend to be restless on election night and want to know the results, but there’s a more than decent chance that election night will leave us with more than a few questions.” Predicting elections before a significant number of votes have been counted is bad business, he said.
In terms of predictive polling, Jackson warns that Joe Biden’s 10-point lead over Trump may not indicate much either. “It’s really impossible to forecast any of what we’re seeing right now forward because people are moving so quickly on a lot of these issues,” he said. He also called attention to undecided voters, who tended to vote in favor of Trump in 2016.
The latest Quinnipiac poll, for example, put Biden eight points ahead of Trump, but if the voters who are still undecided are factored in as voting for Trump, that lead narrows to three points, which is within the margin of error. If voters who say they’ll be voting for another candidate are also swayed in Trump’s direction, then Biden and Trump are in a dead heat. In volatile times, Jackson noted, it’s more difficult for pollsters to predict where undecided voters may end up.
Biden’s lagging decision on a vice presidential pick also makes it difficult for pollsters to project, said Buskirk. He expects to see a shift in numbers once a VP announcement is made, likely before August.
Still, Americans have been stuck at home, and that typically translates into good news for pollsters. Buskirk says that since the pandemic reached the United States, he’s seen a 150% to 200% increase in survey response rates. This change increases accuracy and also gives those conducting polls a better return on investment.
“We’ve had an easier time doing interviews since the shutdown started because people are home. They’re not going to work or going out,” said Jackson. “They can answer the phone and have free time and are willing to talk to us. It’s made it easier to do our jobs.”
People are bored and want to connect with others, said Ben-Porath. But he noted that they’re also excited to talk about what they see happening in their country. “There’s interest in participating right now because these are interesting times,” he said.


fortune--2020-06-24--AOC deftly deployed digital spending to trounce Wall Street-backed rival

So far, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is passing her first reelection campaign with flying colors.
The woman they call AOC trounced her challengers in yesterday’s New York congressional primary elections, winning more than 70% of the vote in securing the Democratic nomination for the state’s 14th congressional district (representing parts of the east Bronx and northwest Queens).
The 30-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, whose youth and progressive politics have made her a rising star in the Democratic Party, defeated a notable challenge from former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, who positioned herself as a moderate, pro-business alternative to the incumbent.
But Caruso-Cabrera could only muster less than 20% of the vote, despite reportedly turning to Wall Street heavyweights like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman for fundraising.
Still, as the New York Times notes, Caruso-Cabrera’s $2 million war chest was no match for Ocasio-Cortez, who has raised more than $10 million since the start of the current election cycle—the fifth most among all congressional candidates in that time.
Arguably as important as the amount that Ocasio-Cortez has raised is how her campaign has deployed those funds: with a heavy dose of digital advertising. AOC has spent $3.6 million to date on Facebook ads during the current election cycle, according to the Times, including $2.4 million this year alone. By comparison, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the second-biggest digital advertiser among current House members, has spent only $620,000 online this year.
With digital advertising widely considered a key reason why the Trump campaign was able to deliver a shocking victory in the 2016 presidential election, the rest of the political establishment has sought to catch up. AOC is no exception; in addition to heavy online advertising expenditures, her enviable social media presence (she’s one of the most-followed members of Congress on Twitter) is capable of rallying a vocal base of progressive supporters online.
It has proved enough to secure her district’s Democratic nomination for the second time running, and shown that her 2018 upset of longtime congressman Joe Crowley—which launched her into the national political conversation—was no fluke.
“Wall Street CEOs, from Goldman Sachs to Blackstone, poured in millions to defeat our grassroots campaign tonight,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Tuesday evening. “But their money couldn’t buy a movement.”


fortune--2020-06-24--‘Companies have no choice.’ The pandemic is forcing business to digitize

The novel coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on much of the world. But it might result in at least one positive outcome for companies that have been slow to digitize: a forced acceleration of that transformation.
“Companies have no choice,” Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, a company that provides online tools to software developers, told Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky during a Fortune Brainstorm Tech virtual conversation on Wednesday. “When you are locked down, your only way to engage with a brand is through the Internet.”
Tejada joined Jim McKelvey, cofounder of mobile payments company Square and author of The Innovation Stack, for a discussion about how innovation can thrive during a crisis.
“I think if you’re going to do something unique, starting in a crisis is a real advantage,” said McKelvey, who also recently published a graphic novel titled The Birth of Banking (his first published work was a textbook on the art of glassblowing). “Crises tend to open the mind to what’s possible. If everything is working, you’ll just do what’s always worked.”
McKelvey and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square, started the company at the height of the last financial downturn in 2009. McKelvey said it was a great time to launch a new idea. “We had access to people we wouldn’t have had during boom times,” the entrepreneur said. “A lot of them were unemployed.”
McKelvey noted the vast amounts of startup capital “sloshing” around—despite the broader economic picture. But the pandemic is likely making it harder for founders who don’t have existing clout with venture capitalists to get in front of investors, not to mention exacerbating diversity and inclusion problems for companies. As one participant of Wednesday’s event, venture capitalist Kamran Ansari from Greycroft Capital, added: “The deals I’m seeing happening are for companies we’ve invested in before or for entrepreneurs we knew before.”
While access to capital may be an issue, especially for founders who are not part of existing networks, McKelvey is convinced that new innovations will come out of the current crisis. “What builds world-changing companies is duress,” he said.
Duress is also leading companies to embrace change. Tejada, who is on the board of Estée Lauder, said a significant portion of the cosmetics giant’s revenue has always been through brick-and-mortar sales—but that’s now changing. “They’ve seen growth in their online business as a result of [digital platforms] being the only way to engage with customers,” she said.
Unlike Estée Lauder, PagerDuty has been an all-digital (and cloud-based) product from the get-go. But Tejada’s San Francisco company had a mostly in-office corporate culture—until the pandemic hit, anyway. “If you asked me how long it would take to transition my company to being fully remote, I would have said several quarters,” the chief executive said. “We did it in 24 hours.”


fortune--2020-06-24--FuboTV’s deal with Disney makes it a force in sports streaming

FuboTV, the New York City–based Internet TV provider that gained prominence as a hub for international soccer, is expanding its reach in the sports world.
Starting later this summer FuboTV will stream all ESPN channels, primetime broadcaster ABC, and college sports channels SEC Network and ACC Network, FuboTV’s parent company FaceBank Group announced on Wednesday. The new channels come thanks to a distribution deal with Disney, which owns all of them (not to mention FX, the Disney Channel, Freeform, National Geographic, and others, to which FuboTV subscribers will also gain access).
FuboTV had long built itself up as a destination for sports fans, widening its offerings back in 2017 to include games and related content from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. But a licensing deal with ESPN, the leading sports network, had eluded FuboTV—subscribers missed out on Monday Night Football on ESPN or primetime NBA games on ABC, among other nationally televised offerings. In 2018, FuboTV cofounder and CEO David Gandler said Disney would be “a fantastic partner.” At the time Disney was gearing up to launch its own streaming service, Disney+, and was in no rush to lower its licensing fees.
Now, Gandler says, “With the addition to our lineup of the ESPN suite of channels, we continue to make good on our promise to sports fans to be the undisputed home of professional and college sports.”
He has a point. With the Disney deal complete, FuboTV now has America’s most popular sport, the NFL, fully covered—ESPN, CBS, Fox, NBC, the NFL Network, and NFL RedZone are all available on the streamer.
FuboTV subscribers will also get access to more MLB, NHL, and NBA games, all of which are nationally televised on ESPN, ESPN 2, and sometimes on ABC (in the NBA’s case). The platform also has a plethora of options for college sports and strengthened its original selling point with ESPN and ESPN Deportes broadcasting U.S. and international soccer.
FuboTV isn’t the only Internet TV service that offers sports—or even ESPN and ABC. Competitors Sling, YouTube TV, and Hulu with Live TV (which Disney has a controlling stake in) each enjoy licenses that compete for viewers’ attention. But unlike the others, FuboTV positioned itself as sports-first from the start. That’s more clear than ever with the addition of ESPN and ABC.