fortune--2020-10-07--COVID treatments like the experimental antibody therapeutic Trump received are making progress

Among the various experimental COVID-19 drugs and supplements that President Trump received during his stay at Walter Reed hospital, one of the most closely-watched is a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies being developed by Regeneron.
The company had released preliminary data suggesting that this approach, which combines lab-created antibodies in order to treat a variety of diseases, suggesting that it was successful in preventing serious hospitalization in patients who weren’t too far along in showing coronavirus symptoms.
On Wednesday, another company, the drug giant Eli Lilly, said that it had seen similar results using this method and is confident enough to seek Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA).
Similar to Regeneron’s claims and the clinical trial data it’s unveiled to date, Eli Lilly’s antibody cocktail was able to significantly reduce viral load (the amount of virus active) in patients who received the treatment within 11 days and significantly slashed the need for emergency room use or hospitalization. The experimental therapies are called LY-CoV555 and LY-CoV016, and they prevent the coronavirus from actually latching on to and infecting cells.
Lilly data looks like terrific news. Keeping people out of the hospital and ER is the real world benefit we are looking for. pic.twitter.com/n0BnQGUcLY — Brad Loncar (@bradloncar) October 7, 2020
With two consecutive drugs showing that the antibody cocktail method could be significantly effective, other companies may dig into that same approach.
However, these treatments are showing efficacy (and, importantly, a lack of serious side effects) in those with mild-to-moderate COVID cases. The seriously ill who are already hospitalized could be a different story.
Availability is a key detail that needs to be worked out since mass production of an antibody drug is far more complicated than creating simpler chemical treatments.
Lilly has previously said that it will be able to produce 100,000 doses of one of its antibody therapies in October since it had already considered manufacturing while creating the drug. Tens of thousands more doses of the combination therapy could be available later this year, the company said in an emailed press release.


fortune--2020-10-07--Facebook tightens rules on political posts and ads as the presidential election nears

Here ’ s when your second stimulus check could arrive if Congress passes more economic aid

Facebook is introducing new policies aimed at further protecting the 2020 U.S. presidential election from interference, with measures particularly targeted at political ads and calls for “poll watching.”
The social network said it plans to clamp down further on posts aimed at intimidating voters. President Trump and others have urged their supporters to go to polling places on Election Day to watch for signs of fraudulent voting—an action that many fear will lead to acts of intimidation and violence against would-be voters.
Facebook plans to remove any posts that include militarized language in an attempt to encourage poll watchers. Facebook says it will also remove posts that don’t use militarized language but that encourage poll watching as a way of suppressing voting. The policy will not apply to posts retroactively.
“As we head into the final days of this election, we know that we will see spikes in potentially violating content that may try to intimidate voters, or interfere with and suppress the vote,” said Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy. “That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in these areas.”
Facebook also will temporarily stop running all political ads after the polls close on Nov. 3, in addition to banning new political ads one week prior to the election. The company did not specify when it will resume allowing such, only saying it will notify advertisers when it does.
The news comes as Facebook tries to show users, politicians, and the public that it’s doing more to protect the 2020 election, after having allowed its platform to be manipulated in foreign attempts to influence the election in 2016. Meanwhile, posts that spread conspiracy theories and misinformation and attempted voter suppression have continued to plague the service in recent weeks—sometimes being amplified and disseminated by politicians with large followings.
Facebook said that between March and September it labeled more than 150 million posts for misinformation about the election, and added that it removed more than 120,000 posts for violating its voter interference policies on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook also said it removed 30 networks of bad actors on its services and had rejected ad submissions that were expected to run about 2.2 million times in the U.S.
The company also provided more information on how it plans to handle posts about the election results. Facebook said that after polls close, it plans to run a notification at the top of Facebook and Instagram directing users to its voter notification center, a tab with authoritative information about the vote-counting process. It will also direct users to that center via labels it plans to add to candidates’ posts.
If a candidate declares victory prematurely, Facebook said it will include an additional note in the labels reminding users that no winner has yet been determined. When a winner is declared by major media outlets, Facebook plans to display that candidate’s name in a notification at the top of Facebook and Instagram, even if the winner’s opponent contests the win. Facebook also plans to include the winner’s name within candidates’ posts.
“This is part of a multiyear marathon journey we’ve been on to understand risks across elections,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity. “It’s important for us to be ready.”


fortune--2020-10-07--AT&T looks to sell DirecTV as investors question its huge bet on content

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AT&T is reportedly putting its DirecTV business up for auction just five years after buying it. The move raises momentous questions: Does this signal the unwinding of AT&T’s hugely ambitious program to become a media titan, arguably the largest transformation underway at any Fortune 500 company? What other assets might go on the block? What’s ahead for one of America’s most widely held stocks?
DirecTV’s fate (AT&T declined to comment on it) is important because the company was a key element in former CEO Randall Stephenson’s plan for “controlling [AT&T’s] own destiny,” as he told Fortune last year. Several years ago he concluded that cell phones would become video-delivery vehicles, and in that environment AT&T needed “to own a big portfolio of premium content.” Buying DirecTV for $67 billion in 2015 brought AT&T the rights to a wide range of programming, but not enough of it. So in 2016 AT&T made a massive deal to buy Time Warner—HBO, Warner Bros., the Turner networks (TBS, TNT, CNN, others)—for $109 billion. The deal cleared antitrust approval early last year. AT&T became the most indebted nonfinancial company in America.
Investors were never convinced it was a wise idea. AT&T stock has never been as high as it was shortly before the Time Warner deal was announced. The S&P 500 is up 56% since then; AT&T is down 34%.
The centerpiece of AT&T’s strategy is a streaming service that was meant to be introduced in the fourth quarter of last year, but it missed that deadline. Disney+ and Apple TV went live months ahead of AT&T’s service, HBO Max, which arrived last May. Against those competitors as well as Netflix and Hulu, HBO Max attracted 4.1 million subscribers in its first month. For comparison, Disney+ signed up 10 million subscribers on its first day.
AT&T’s sagging share price caught the attention of an activist investor, Elliott Management. The firm bought $3.2 billion of stock and in September of last year sent the company a searing 23-page letter ripping the grand strategy and questioning Stephenson’s leadership. It said specifically that AT&T should consider divesting DirecTV.
Elliott has almost never commented on AT&T—it did not respond to a request for comment for this article—but certain events seem telling. Seven weeks after that scorching letter, and after intense negotiations with Elliott, AT&T announced a new plan in which it would sell unspecified assets and add two new directors to the board. As part of that plan, Stephenson said, “I will be here through 2020 to ensure that we hit the objectives we’ve laid out today.” He also said DirecTV “will be an important piece of our strategy over the next three years.”
The first statement proved untrue. Stephenson stepped down ahead of schedule on July 1, handing the job to a company veteran, John Stankey. With the second statement now also looking nugatory, you have to wonder if Elliott is the force behind these moves, as it appears to be, and if so, what changes might be next on its agenda.
For a strong clue, parse that 23-page letter. “AT&T has yet to articulate a clear strategic rationale for why AT&T needs to own Time Warner,” it says. Eleven pages later it says this: “Any assets that do not have a clear, strategic rationale for being part of AT&T should be considered for divestment.”
That italicized “any” seems significant.
It’s hard to believe that AT&T would unload Time Warner (renamed WarnerMedia), or even a large part of it, with the grand strategy just getting fully underway. But investors have lost confidence. The stock plunged with the rest of the market in March, then missed the boom that followed; it’s still where it was when the world was ending in mid-March. If investors don’t get on board soon, Elliott will have a powerful argument that it’s time for drastic measures.


fortune--2020-10-07--How digitalization could help American states and cities bounce back from the COVID recession

The Great Recession toppled world markets from New York to New Zealand between 2007 and 2009. Economic stability was promptly replaced by recession and austerity in financial capitals and small towns around the world.
In the United Kingdom, this dynamic sparked a nontraditional response in the face of budgetary constraints at every level of government: digitalization of citizen services that led directly to public sector revenue generation.
As the global economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic persists, it’s worth revisiting the U.K.’s experience with austerity last decade. British public spending on welfare programs, housing subsidies, and social services was cut by 30 billion pounds from 2010 to 2019, with per capita daily government spending dropping by 15% overall (compared to 2010) as of 2020. But U.K. public sector bodies were able to ward off national financial ruin and go beyond merely maintaining operations to meaningfully improving them.
In fact, I’d argue that steps taken by U.K. policymakers offer a potential road map for American states and cities facing similarly stark financial situations today. In particular, it’s worth examining the outcome of communities around the U.K. that opted for investments in technology in the face of austerity. Here are a few specific lessons from 2010 that could help in 2020:
Going online reduces headaches
Communities around the United States now face parallel public health and economic crises that call into focus public sector efficiency and quality. Millions of people around the country are experiencing financial, work, life, and societal conditions they haven’t dealt with before. Meanwhile, government buildings and city halls remain closed or limited in their ability to address the growing needs of citizens applying for unemployment, signing up for social services, or simply renewing a driver’s license.
As we saw in the U.K. over the last decade, investing in technology that enables web, mobile, social media, and digital access can help reduce costs associated with delivering government services while actually improving their quality—not just maintaining whatever level existed before a crisis. For example, the local government of Milton Keynes, a community of more than 260,000 people outside London, saved £900,000 in 2018 following the town’s successful digitalization of application and associated processes. Committing to a comprehensive channel shift in government services from mostly in-person to heavily digital can help local and state governments in the U.S. efficiently, cost effectively, and safely serve constituents well into the future too.
Prepare for confusion
A key lesson for U.S. states and local governments from the U.K.’s experience is that it’s important to understand the value of providing access to government services in multiple ways (online, video calls, social media, mobile, in-person). In order to successfully digitize government services for multichannel delivery, every person involved on the agency side of things needs to be informed, engaged, and at least somewhat aware of how things work. Once a citizen submits an online application for unemployment, for instance, agency workers need to be on standby to guide the process and address any information discrepancies or other issues that stand in the way of acceptance and benefits delivery. To realize the full benefit of multichannel, agencies should streamline back-end logistics into a single workflow so that no matter how a request comes in (phone, online, mail), the response process is identical and intuitive.
As the U.K. learned over the past decade, it’s not enough to make quality digital resources available to communities. Agencies also need to broadcast the availability of multichannel options to citizens directly in order to convey value and drive broader community awareness of their existence. At the same time, agencies need to build a support infrastructure that handles issues and requests on the back end as well as it handles successfully providing digital services to people in need of them.
Trust the ROI
Here in the U.S., austerity is coming to city and state budgets—likely before the ink dries on next year’s budget proposals. But that doesn’t mean that budget-constrained state and local governments have to submit to the inevitability of financial or operational decline. As the U.K. learned over the past decade, while the federal government played an important policy role in digitalization, it was local councils and governments that helped bring digital government services home for many financially stressed U.K. citizens—and that work continues today. In fact, technology investments made during austerity helped some of the most effective U.K. communities clearly convey pandemic guidelines and mobilize support for following them.
As a result, American state and local government leaders can, and should, study the U.K.’s digitalization experience to understand how municipalities, from Wrexham to Weymouth, brought citizen services and forums online to connect with communities in more dynamic and revenue-generating ways, like moving parking passes and permit application processes online. Undoubtedly, a key takeaway will be this: Short-term investments in technologies, platforms, and digital capabilities will outfit public sector agencies for long-term citizen engagement, community mobilization, and economic resilience. If 2008 has taught us anything, it’s worth a shot.
Bob Ainsbury is chief product officer of Granicus, a provider of cloud-based citizen engagement technologies and services.


fortune--2020-10-07--What it’s like to open a new restaurant during a pandemic

As even a cursory glance at unemployment figures and business closures around the country will show, 2020 has to be the worst year in the history of modern restaurants.
Imagine still trying to open a restaurant this year in the face of all that.
But given how long it takes to open a restaurant in the first place—let alone reopen one during a pandemic after a multi-month shutdown—there might not be much choice for some owners except to press on. Investments have been made, contracts and leases signed, and opening and reopening (even if only for takeout, delivery, and perhaps outdoor dining) are the only paths to recouping any losses sustained during the shutdown.
“The restaurant and bar industry has become the villain of COVID-spreading, and I think that is unfair,” says Linden Pride, co-owner, with his wife, Nathalie Hudson, of two restaurants in New York City. “Just as precautions can be taken in any social interaction, our industry is going above and beyond in how we are enforcing safety practices to ensure the health of our guests and staff. We are one of the largest sectors of employment in New York City, and our industry needs support if we’re going to get through this time.”
For those restaurant owners who move to reopen indoor dining, they could be facing an uphill battle. Not just in reduced capacity, so reduced checks per table each night, but also in getting diners to want to indulge in dining indoors at all. A CDC study in September found that people who had contracted COVID were twice as likely to say they had dined at a restaurant in the preceding two weeks. And a poll from YouGov and reservations service SevenRooms found in late August that more than one in four Americans have said they will not feel comfortable dining out until there is a vaccine.
The ambiance of Dante West Village is inspired by the great cafés and eateries of northern Italy, notably in Turin and Milan. Giada Paoloni
Planned as a second iteration of the wildly popular Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village, right near New York University, Dante West Village was originally set to open in March as a more traditional restaurant space with the same European vibe as its sister spot. But the early spring opening was delayed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and economic shutdown. So the managers pushed back the soft grand opening to July for exclusively outdoor dining.
“When we finally opened for outdoor dining, we were making adjustments daily, then weekly, as the city was sporadically disseminating information. We were trying to figure out exactly what the guidelines were and then go above and beyond to make sure our guests and staff felt extremely safe when dining,” Pride explains. That included constructing table dividers, enforcing temperature checks, placing hand sanitizer on each table, and more.
Embellished glass dividers separate diners at the New York City restaurant. Giada Paoloni
But opening or reopening in July also meant having to deal with increasingly chaotic weather on the Eastern Seaboard, from extreme heat to sudden torrential thunderstorms. Pride says he never had so many weather apps on his phone before. “I was going crazy checking multiple times a day, praying it wouldn’t rain,” he recalls. “Thankfully, we are surrounded by an incredible community who continued to support us, rain or shine.”
Now, with the reopening of indoor dining in New York City on Sept. 30, at 25% capacity for the foreseeable future, the restaurant acknowledges it has a whole new, additional battle to face as the eatery welcomes guests into its dining room for the first time.
Menu items include grilled eggplant salad, roasted branzino, and fresh oysters when in season. Giada Paoloni
Dante West Village is a seafood-driven restaurant, focused around a wood-fired grill and charcoal oven. The Mediterranean-inspired menu takes cues from coastal cuisines of both northern Spain and southern Italy, and the drinks menu focuses on two internationally popular drinks: the spritz and the martini.
Set on the corner of Hudson and Perry streets in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, the mint green–colored establishment hosts outdoor seating along both sides of the facade, with curated glass dividers embellished with witty cocktail hour–inspired phrases. Inside, plush green velvet banquettes complement the hand-carved marble bar, vintage lighting, and bespoke wallpaper.
The decor of Dante West Village is inspired by the original Greenwich Village location, with its pressed tin ceiling and vintage photographs on the walls. Giada Paoloni
In accordance with current New York state and city guidelines as of this publishing date, the restaurant has implemented 25% capacity for indoor dining, which equates to just 18 people. The team also installed an HVAC filtration system and created custom frames to create barriers in between tables to promote social distancing. Additionally, all guests undergo temperature checks prior to dining indoors (the staff also undergoes daily temperature checks at the start of each shift), and Pride says the host keeps a log of all guests dining indoors for contact tracing purposes.
“In our experience with New York diners, we’ve found that there is a consensus of wanting to get it done ‘right,’ and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Pride says. “We are excited to welcome guests for indoor dining, and I feel very good about it. We’d love to see it increase to 50% or more as long as we’re able to ensure social distancing. I believe that increasing indoor dining capacity to 50%, as well as making outdoor dining permanent, is the only way the restaurant and bar industry will make it through this time.”
Launched by the owners of the current World’s Best Bar titleholder, Caffe Dante, the new West Village location embraces a Mediterranean-inspired menu with dishes prepared in a wood-fired grill and charcoal oven. Giada Paoloni
Already a neighborhood hotspot popular with locals and celebrities alike, typically generating a wait list and a consistent (but distanced) crowd on Friday and Saturday nights, Dante West Village will continue outdoor dining through the winter, utilizing heaters and setting out blankets for guests. The bar program also just launched its “Fall Into Dante” autumnal drinking menu, featuring hot cocktails suited for the colder weather.
“We will be doing everything we can to survive so that we can make guests comfortable, continue to employ our staff, offer health insurance to our employees, and serve our local community while adhering to guidelines put in place by local and state ordinances,” Pride says.


fortune--2020-10-07--What to know about tonight’s VP debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris

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COVID-19 continues to ravage the White House and Capitol Hill, and yet, the band plays on. Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris will attempt to bring some normalcy back to the chaotic world of election politics Wednesday evening by participating in the first and only 2020 vice presidential debate at the University of Utah.
Of course, normal doesn’t mean much anymore.
The feasibility of the debate was unclear in the days leading up to it, and safety negotiations were hammered out between parties up until the last minute following President Donald Trump’s diagnosis of COVID-19, subsequent hospitalization, and the quick spread of the deadly virus to White House and Capitol Hill staff. Pence has so far tested negative, but he was exposed to a number of senior staff officials and senators who tested positive for the illness. In photos near these officials, Pence was seen not wearing a mask.
Pence’s doctor said in a letter Tuesday that he does “not need to quarantine” and has been “encouraged to go about his normal activities.”
Harris and Pence will sit 13 feet apart from each other at desks separated by plexiglass dividers. The debate’s moderator, Susan Page, USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, will also sit 13 feet away from the candidates. There will be fewer than 100 guests in attendance, and they will all be tested for the virus and required to wear a mask. High-quality MERV 13 air filters have been installed in the hall.
The debate will largely follow the format of last month’s presidential standoff, with nine topics to be covered for 10 minutes each, but that’s about all the two debates will have in common. While the debate between Joe Biden and Trump exploded into theatrics—name-calling, interruptions, and little actual policy talk—tonight’s events are expected to be more subdued.
After the negative public reaction to the presidential debate, both VP candidates will likely avoid making the same errors. NBC News reported that Pence has been preparing with Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, to figure out ways to attack Harris “without opening himself up to criticism that he is acting in a disrespectful or sexist way.” Harris, meanwhile, has been prepping with former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has been acting as Pence in practice debates.
Harris’s aides have made clear that she won’t invoke the “Will you shut up, man?” tone that Biden used onstage last week. She will be seen differently and scrutinized more harshly simply because she isn’t a white man.
“If she pushes back too hard, she risks being perceived as an angry Black woman. If she doesn’t push back too hard, she seems weak or meek. If she brings up a strong point passionately, she runs the risk of being called too shrill,” said Tina Tchen, a former Obama aide and president and CEO of Time’s Up. “She’s been labeled as too ambitious, although I’m sure she has the same ambitions as Mike Pence. That is exactly the additional burden women candidates and women of color are under in a setting like this.”
Ahead of the debates, Time’s Up commissioned Edelman Data & Intelligence to analyze media coverage of Harris following her VP announcement compared with coverage of Mike Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016. They found an extreme difference.
According to Time’s Up, one-fourth of all coverage of Harris included what they considered racist and sexist stereotyping. That ranges from things as overt as calling her an “angry black woman” to suggesting “birther” conspiracy theories. About two-thirds of all coverage mentioned Harris’s race or gender while only 5% of coverage mentioned Pence’s. That’s something she’ll be aware of while prepping for tonight’s debate.
But Harris, said Tchen, will likely avoid painting Pence as a misogynist onstage this evening. “For women who are in public life or in the business world, when these things happen they tend to straighten up, go high, and let it roll off their backs,” she said. “When you are the target of those kinds of statements it’s difficult for to call it out without looking like a whiner or complainer. It’s difficult for women of either party to be able to call it out.” Instead, Tchen hopes that organizations like hers can do the job for Harris, allowing Harris to focus on policy.
Tonight’s debate will be available live on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC. MSNBC and Fox News will also offer coverage. The debate will be available to view on C-SPAN and C-SPAN’s YouTube channel. Most coverage will begin at 8 p.m. ET, and the debate itself will run from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. ET.


fortune--2020-10-07--Petco rebrands, bans shock collars in health and wellness push

The COVID-19 pandemic that has led to a surge in pet adoptions and spending on our furry mascots has also made the pet care field so crowded that it’s even more difficult for retailers like Petco to stand out from the pack.
To that end, the big box pet products chain announced on Tuesday it was rebranding itself as “Petco, The Health + Wellness Co” from “Petco Animal Supplies,” doubling down on its years-long bet that a bigger healthcare push for pets would help it ward off online giant Chewy’s meteoric growth and keep traditional rivals like PetSmart and even Walmart at bay.
As part of its rebranding, Petco, which operates some 1,500 stores, or pet care centers as it prefers they be called, also said it would expand its full-service in-store veterinarian clinics, taking the number from 100 to 140 locations by January, with many more to come. And it just launched a $228 a year vet service membership program that offers perks like unlimited vet visits and nail trims for dogs.
Moreover, to bolster its image as a store focused on animal well-being, Petco said it would stop selling shock collars, a category that, at $10 million a year, generates a small sliver of its sales but creates controversy.
The pivot is tacit acknowledgment by the $4.5 billion-a-year company that much of its offering, such as leashes and kibble, has become commoditized. So its growth—as it reportedly considers an initial public offering—will come from new areas of business, above all vet services and healthier pet products.
“We’re transitioning from being a company that asks, ‘Can I help you put that big bag of dog food into your cart?’ into a full health and wellness company,” Petco CEO Ron Coughlin tells Fortune.
This rebranding is a logical extension of the moves Petco has been making for a few years to underscore its health cred. In 2019, Petco said it would stop selling food with artificial ingredients, a move that cost it $100 million in sales and one akin to the CVS decision in 2014 to stop selling cigarettes and change its name to CVS Health.
And as detailed in a Fortune feature in May, Petco has vastly expanded its fresh food offering to animals, which is more profitable at a time of declining prices for most standard pet food. Petco has ramped up its human-grade pet food offering as it looks to capitalize on pet owners’ growing propensity to spend on their pets as they would on a human in a trend industry insiders call the “humanization” of pets.
It’s easy to understand the allure of this focus on health, from premium food to services to medication. The American Pet Products Associations expects U.S. consumers to spend $30.2 billion on vet care and products this year, comparable to what they spend on food, but growing faster as a category. Case in point: Packaged Facts, a research firm, estimated in November (pre-pandemic) that spending on pet medication, which reached $9 billion in 2018, would increase by 33% by 2022. And Chewy, for one, has made moves on that market with its online pharmacy.
What’s more, Coughlin sees a “white space” in the market since neither Chewy nor Amazon have physical spaces to offer vet services. Meanwhile, archival PetSmart has hosted clinics under the Banfield Pet Hospital brand name in many of its stores for decades since 1994, and collects rent, but it has sold off much of its stake in that business to Mars in recent years. Yet at the same time, newer competitors see the opportunity in vet services too: Walmart is opening vet clinics at 1,000 stores by 2023, while Tractor Supply operates some clinics too.
Growth push ahead of potential IPO
The push comes at a time when Petco, owned by CVC Capital Partners and a Canadian pension fund, is enjoying a renaissance after several difficult years: Petco has enjoyed seven straight quarters of comparable sales growth. But that recovery is fragile: Chewy reported sales rose 47% last quarter, and Coughlin won’t say whether Petco had continued to win market share after the pandemic started despite its own online surge.
What’s more, the pressure is on to grow, as the company’s private equity owners are reportedly mulling listing Petco on the stock market four years after buying it, according to a Bloomberg report last month. Petco declined to comment on the IPO speculation.
The vet clinic push is also of a piece with Petco’s efforts to reinvent its stores, many of which had started to look like glorified warehouses over the years. The company has embarked on a multi-year program to remodel many of its stores with touches like wood shelf panels and signage, a Treatery stand for baked goods for dogs, a dog wash station, and generally more room for services like grooming and, of course, vet services. Some 40% of the space in many remodeled Petcos is devoted to services, which generate more than 10% of sales and continues to grow quickly.
“No one else serves customers in this holistic way, from training to food, grooming and vet care,” says Coughlin. He likes to compare newer Petco stores to being a blend of Whole Foods and CVS, but for animals.
That, he is betting, will keep Petco in good stead well after the pandemic recedes. A Bank of America survey published last week found that 37% of Americans had adopted a pet since the pandemic started in March. (Some 68% of U.S. households have at least one pet.)
And with travel spending down and eating out more, the pet industry will likely continue to flourish for years.
“Where’s that money going? It’s going to taking better care of Fluffy,” says Coughlin. And his job is to make sure that care takes place at Petco.


fortune--2020-10-07--Big Tech’s time is up

Big Tech’s time is up

House Democrats struck Big Tech with a broadside on Tuesday.
A congressional committee took four gleaming Goliaths to task—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, and Facebook—in a damning report that accuses the companies of abusing their market power to stifle competition and unfairly reap profits. The 449-page document, which you can read in full here, is the culmination of a 16-month antitrust investigation by a House Judiciary subcommittee.
The findings are hardly a surprise. Anyone who has watched these tech giants romp and stomp and squash underfoot all who would interfere with their frenzied dance to riches will see them as a belated acknowledgment of reality. As the reports’ authors observe: “Companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”
These latter-day Rockefellers and Vanderbilts have been calling the shots for years. It’s no secret that Google and Facebook utterly dominate the digital advertising market. Facebook is, in particular, notorious for its attempts to copy and crush rivals, like Snapchat and now TikTok. Amazon’s turbo-capitalist ambitions can barely be contained. As for Apple, well, look no further than the mounting backlash from developers, led by Fortnite maker Epic Games, over the Cupertino colossuses’s highway robbery—I mean, App Store payments policy.
Now what to do about the abuses? The report recommends reviving antitrust enforcement. It seeks to bolster the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s power to block corporate mergers and acquisitions. And it proposes allowing people to pack up their user data and port it wherever they like.
Not everyone is on board with the conclusions. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) disagreed with key portions, especially ones relating to “structural separations.” He called these a “thinly veiled call to break up Big Tech firms” in a draft response, Reuters reported. For another acute dissection of the report’s shortcomings, I recommend this thread by Alex Stapp, director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank that, in spite of its name, leans centrist.
The regulatory reckoning has proponents though. “I suddenly feel waves of hope,” commented Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor and former 2014 New York gubernatorial candidate. “This is powerful, deeply studied, serious, and is what Congress is supposed to do.”
The reckoning has begun.
Robert Hackett
Twitter: @rhhackett
robert.hackett@fortune.com
THREATS
Not falling far from the tree. Mark your calendar for Oct. 13. That's the date Apple set for its next product event. Expect four redesigned iPhones to debut, including ones with 5G wireless capability, better cameras, and faster processors. The product show will be Apple's second of the year after last month's release of new iPads and Apple Watches.
The not-so wonderful wizard of QAnon. Citigroup has sacked an IT manager based in N.J., one Jason Gelinas, who operated a digital hub for QAnon, a baseless conspiracy movement. The axing comes a month after Gelinas has been put on administrative leave. "Our code of conduct includes specific policies that employees are required to adhere to, and when breaches are identified, the firm takes action," a Citi spokesperson said. Read this bonkers Bloomberg Businessweek feature for more.
You can't handle the truth. Facebook stepped up its frequently half-hearted misinformation sweeps this week. After three years of letting QAnon run amok on its website, the media giant labeled the group a "militarized social movement" and put in place a ban. The company also struck down a post by President Trump that claimed, falsely, the seasonal flu is more dangerous than the coronavirus.
A cooler water cooler? Following LinkedIn's rollout of "stories," an ephemeral video feature, Slack is broadening its scope too. The workplace chat app is adding the ability for people at different companies to direct message each other early next year. Also coming: spam-fighting check marks that designate "verified" organizations.
For whom the Nobel tolls. The Nobel Committee has awarded the developers of CRISPR gene-editing technology with the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The recipients are Emmanuelle Charpentier at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin and Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley. The two scientists' work on DNA-alteration techniques has set the stage for a biotechnology boom that has already begun to yield new medical treatments (and controversies).
When it comes to IoT, maybe abstinence is the best policy.
ACCESS GRANTED
Just how sick is President Trump? The White House's reticence to reveal details has everyone wondering—including spies. Politico warns the uncertainty around POTUS's health offers foreign adversaries an opportunity to spread disinformation.
"As the White House brushes aside questions about just how serious the president’s bout with the lethal virus really got, America’s enemies are poised to fill the information void, former and current U.S. national security officials are warning.
Their fear: Foreign adversaries are working overtime to glean insight into the true state of Trump’s health and potentially use it as leverage to make mischief and sow doubt about the stability of the U.S. government—for example, using doctored photos or audio of a pale or hoarse Trump to make him seem sicker than his team is letting on, and paint America as unable to handle the pandemic."
FORTUNE RECON
Why it feels like we’re in a recession—even though we aren’t by Geoff Colvin
Ripple threatens to leave U.S. over crypto regulation by Jeff John Roberts
Trump kills hope of more stimulus checks as approval rating on the economy falls by Lee Clifford
Which A.I. planet do you live on? By Jeremy Kahn
Black Friday traffic could fall as much as 25% amid earlier deals, COVID anxiety by Phil Wahba
Atom looks to capitalize on the stock market craze by Robert Hackett
Which COVID-19 vaccine works best? A new lab network promises an answer by Jeremy Kahn
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access.Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
ONE MORE THING
Is any technology more crucial for navigating the modern world than GPS? Distressingly, the seemingly indispensable marvel of geolocation relies entirely on a mere 30 satellites orbiting earth. Backup systems would no doubt be wise; in this article, the BBC explores alternative systems, including a world-spanning network of radio transmitters (eLoran), space junk-tracking telescopes (Skymark), and inertial sensors (quantum accelerometry).


fortune--2020-10-07--Boris Johnson wants young Brits to buy homes—even if that means banks have to lend like it’s 2006

To revive the coronavirus-stricken British economy, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed giving a boost to the country’s favorite asset: homes.
Johnson, addressing his Conservative Party’s annual conference on Tuesday, said it was time for the government to press ahead with a plan—first broached in the party’s 2019 manifesto—that would help first-time buyers to purchase a home with just a 5% down payment.
The government would help cover a portion of the lender’s losses if the borrower defaulted. It’s part of Johnson’s plan to create what he calls “Generation Buy” among young Britons.
“We believe this policy could create 2 million more owner-occupiers, the biggest expansion of home ownership since the 1980s,” Johnson said.
Home ownership for young families
It is true that levels of U.K. home ownership have been slipping. Those between the ages of 35 and 44 are now three times more likely to be in private rented accommodation than they were two decades ago, with only 50% of people in this age group having a mortgage today, compared to 68% in 1997, according to a report earlier this year from the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics. Those between 24 and 34 are twice as likely to be renters now as they were then.
But Johnson’s plan is sounding alarm bells among some banks and housing charities who worry that it represents a return to dangerous lending practices that U.K. regulators have been trying to stamp out since the 2008 financial crisis.
Eric Leenders, managing director of personal finance at banking trade body UK Finance, told the Financial Times that “firms have a duty to lend responsibly and consider the affordability of the mortgage in the long term, helping customers to avoid the risks associated with negative equity.”
Meanwhile, Polly Neate, chief executive officer of the U.K. housing charity Shelter, accused the Prime Minister of selling “pipe dreams,” given that the average house price is now more than eight times the average U.K. salary.
A pedestrian walks past terraced houses in Bath, U.K., on Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2020. U.K. house prices rose at their strongest annual pace since 2016 last month as Britons’ changing work patterns and a tax reduction on purchases fanned a resurgence. Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Prime Minister’s plans to loosen affordability standards seemingly flies in the face of what British regulators have been trying to accomplish over the past decade.
In 2007, almost half of the mortgage products available in the U.K. allowed loan-to-value ratios up to 95%. Three years later, in the depths of the financial crisis, the number fell to just 1.2% of the market, as banks naturally pulled back on lending.
But in 2014 the Bank of England grew alarmed that high levels of mortgage debt, combined with rapidly rising house prices, were feeding a risky asset bubble in residential real estate—much like the 2008 collapse in the U.S. that helped trigger the global financial crisis. That year house prices galloped ahead at close to 9% annually, approaching their pre-crisis pace in September 2007.
In response, the bank imposed rules that only 15% of a lender’s mortgages could be issued with loan-to-income ratios higher than 4.5. The U.K. banking regulator also imposed tougher requirements on the amount of capital banks had to hold in reserve to cover potential losses on high loan-to-value mortgages.
Banks cut down on the amount of high loan-to-value mortgages they would underwrite. Some stopped offering mortgages with loan-to-value ratios above 85% altogether. The average loan-to-value ratio of a mortgage that was above the median level—which is 71% in 2019—is now 88.4%, down slightly from 90.6% back in 2006, according to the Bank of England.
A big piece of Britain’s wealth
It not hard to see why Johnson wants to get more buyers into the property market. It’s an easy way to stimulate some economic activity and goose household wealth during a time when most other areas of the economy have been flattened by the pandemic and looming uncertainty over Brexit.
Property wealth accounts for 35% of all household wealth in the U.K., second only to the value of pensions, and its contribution has increased 5% since 2014, according to ONS data.
And property values have never been higher. In September, the average house price in the U.K. hit an all-time high of £226,129 ($293,000), while in London the average house price is now a record £480,857 ($623,000) in September, 57% above 2007 levels. Meanwhile, new mortgage approvals are the most they’ve been in 13 years, according to the Bank of England.
Johnson’s latest promise of 95% mortgages is just one part of a strategy his government has pursued to pour rocket fuel on the already hot property market.
In July, Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s chancellor of the exchequer, announced a one-year holiday on stamp duty—a tax homebuyers pay on most residential property purchases—for houses worth up to £500,000 and a reduction in the rate, to 5% from 8%, for properties between £500,000 and £925,000. The cuts helped spur a massive jump in the number of people looking to buy as soon as lockdown restrictions were lifted in July, with the number of buyers in the market up 38% from the same period in 2019 and, by one estimate, one in every seven houses in the country finding a buyer within a week of being listed.
But it remains to be seen whether deliberately using the housing market to help make Britons feel wealthier and more financially secure in otherwise grim economic times is such a good idea.
At the end of the September, the Bank of England voiced concern about big U.K. banks not properly scoring the risk of residential mortgages and not reserving enough capital to cover potential losses. Some banks were assigning “inappropriately low” measures of risk to home loans, the BOE’s Prudential Regulation Authority said. The finding is adding to concerns about the stability of a financial sector that already is facing a potential tidal wave of $99 billion in bad debt due to the pandemic.
As a result, it is considering tightening reserve requirements. “It is imperative that risk weights are calculated and set prudently to ensure individual firms have sufficient capital for the risks they are exposed to,” the BOE said in the proposal published Wednesday. Bloomberg reported that some banks were applying an average risk rate of just 10% to mortgages in their own risk models, compared to 35% in the model the banking regulator uses.
After all, as some affordable housing advocates point out, getting a mortgage is one thing. Being able to pay for it is quite another.
“You have to question whether the Prime Minister is in touch with reality,” Shelter’s Neate said. “He is talking about giant mortgages at a time when more than 320,000 private renters have fallen behind on their rent as a result of COVID-19.”


fortune--2020-10-07--House lawmakers call for greater antitrust crackdowns on Big Tech

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
After a 16-month investigation into the tech giants, Democratic lawmakers have released a sprawling report on Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, accusing the companies of anti-competitive behavior.
“To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons,” the report reads.
The Democratic majority recommended “structural separations and prohibitions” that would prevent dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business, which may allude to potential divestments.
It’s unclear the level of bipartisan support the recommendations will receive. Republican Congressman Ken Buck wrote in a draft response to the report that he also worried about Big Tech’s acquisition sprees, but disagreed with the “thinly veiled call to break up Big Tech firms.”
Why am I talking about it in a newsletter about dealmaking?
Well, the dominance of the Apples and Googles have pushed many startups away from the consumer tech space for fear of going head-to-head with the giants. These platforms are also now a gate through which many startups and small businesses must pass by if they hope to reach their audiences. And don’t forget: They also acquire and invest in startups—for better or for worse.
GREYCROFT RAISES $680 MILLION: The venture firm with investments in Bird and Bumble raised $680 million across two funds—$310 million for early-stage bets and $368 million for growth-stage companies, much of which was raised in the middle of the pandemic.
Greycroft cofounder and partner Ian Sigalow told me what he was interested in investing in (the connected home and telehealth) as well as what the sentiment was among limited partners. While the two funds are the firm’s largest yet, Sigalow says that in the broader landscape, some LPs have become conservative about investing as a result of the pandemic. In particular, Sigalow pointed to hospital systems.
“A lot of hospital systems have been particularly hurt because they effectively closed elective procedures for two quarters.” Sigalow said. “So a lot of hospital systems have just looked at their endowments and pension plans and said we can’t allocate this year because we don’t know what our liquidity requirements are going to be.”
Earlier in the pandemic, LPs I spoke to held a common suspicion: New venture capital funds would struggle to raise funding as LPs piled solely into ones they already had relationships with. Sigalow’s experience matches this. Onboarding newer LPs, he said, is trickier. “In some cases, they even flew out during COVID to meet us, because it was in their bylaws that they have to have an in-person meeting.”
It’s a hard time for folks trying to raise their first or even second fund.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Acesso Digital Tecnologia da Informação S.A., a Brazil-based software company, raised R$580 million ($108 million) in Series B funding. General Atlantic and SoftBank invested.
- A2 Biotherapeutics, an Agoura Hills, Calif.-based biotech developing therapies for solid tumor cancer patients, raised $71.5 million in Series B funding. Investors include The Column Group, Vida Ventures, Samsara BioCapital, Nextech Invest, Casdin Capital, Euclidean Capital, UC Investments and Hartford HealthCare Endowment.
- Chargebee, a San Francisco-based billings and compliance startup, raised $55 million in Series F funding. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Steadview Capital and Tiger Global Management.
- Onapsis, a Boston-based cybersecurity and compliance company, raised $55 million in Series D funding. Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec led the round and was joined by investors including NightDragon, .406 Ventures, LLR Partners and Arsenal Venture Partners.
- Walden Biosciences, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech focused on kidney disease, raised $51 million in Series A funding. Arch Venture Partners and UCB Ventures led the round.
- Envisics, a Milton Keynes, U.K.-based maker of holographic technologies for augmented reality head-up displays in cars, raised $50 million. Investors include Hyundai Mobis, General Motors Ventures, SAIC Motors and Van Tuyl Companies.
- Newlight Technologies, a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based maker of an ocean-degradable biopolymer, raised $45 million in Series F funding. Valedor Partners led the round.
- Cerebral, a San Francisco-based online mental health management platform, raised $35 million in Series A funding. Oak HC/FT led the round and was joined by investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Gaingels, and Air Angels.
- Shogun, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based e-commerce experience platform, raised a $35 million in Series B funding. Accel led the round and was joined by investors including Initialized Capital, VMG Partners, and Y Combinator.
- Illusive Networks, a New York and Tel Aviv-based provider of cybersecurity solutions, raised $24 million in B1 funding. Investors inlcuded Spring Lake Equity Partners, Marker, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Cisco, Microsoft, and Citi.
- Thirdverse, a Tokyo-based virtual reality game development platform, raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. JAFCO led the round and was joined by investors including Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures, and Incubate Fund.
- Hometree, a London-based Insurtech, raised £7 million in funding. Anthemis led the round and was joined by investors including DN Capital and Literacy Capital.
- NormShield, a Boston-based cyber risk rating company, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Moore Strategic Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Glasswing Ventures and Data Point Capital.
- Atom Finance, a startup that delivers markets-oriented information, raised $6 million in funding. Greycroft and General Catalyst were the investors. Read more.
- Good Buy Gear, a Denver-based online marketplace for second-hand baby, toddler and kid gear, raised $6 million in Series A funding. Revolution Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Access Venture Partners and Relay Ventures.
- Veritonic, a New York-based audio intelligence platform, raised $3.2 million in funding. Greycroft led the round and was joined by investors including Lerer Hippeau and Audible.
- Zira, a San Francisco-based automated management platform for shift-based workforces, raised $3.1 million in seed funding. General Catalyst and Abstract Ventures led the round.
- Nivelo, a New York-based payments fraud and cybersecurity monitoring startup, raised $2.5 million in seed funding. FirstMark Capital, Barclays and Anthemis co-led the round.
- Skillshare, a New York-based online learning platform, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Adobe.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- TPG and Onex Corp. plan to bid on Donlen, bankrupt Hertz Global Holdings’ car leasing business. The bid could value the asset at $1 billion, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- A unit of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority plans to invest 55.1 billion rupees ($750 million) in Reliance Retail Ventures, the retail arm of Reliance. Read more.
- Gridiron Capital invested in Cubii, a maker of a stationary exercise peddler. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- MidOcean Partners made a majority investment in InterVision Systems, an IT services company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Monte Nido & Affiliates, a portfolio company of Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, acquired Rosewood Ranch, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based operator of eating disorder treatment facilities. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Pritzker Private Capital recapped Energy Distribution Partners, a distributor of propane and light fuels in North America. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Susquehanna Private Capital acquired Brandywine Coach Works, a CHadds Ford, Pa.-based auto repair operator. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Veolia acquired a 29.9% stake in Suez, a waste and water treatment company, from Engie SA. The deal values Suez at about €11.3 billion.
- Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has agreed to acquire Myrtle Consulting Group, a Houston-based industrial operations consulting firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
SPACS
- Momentus, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based space infrastructure company, plans to go public via merger with Stable Road Acquisition, a SPAC, in a deal valued at $1.2 billion.
F+FS
- NewRoad Capital Partners raised $176 million in capital commitments for NewRoad Fund III.
PEOPLE
- CAVU Venture Partners named Alexandre Cohen as a partner.
PEOPLE
- Shamrock Capital named Michael Wilkins as a Partner.
- Downing Ventures named Joe Raffa as a Venture Partner.


fortune--2020-10-07--How we’re ending deforestation in Mars’ palm oil supply chain

Palm oil. In our snacks, our shampoo, our household products.
A ubiquitous raw material—used in half of the world’s packaged goods—that is driving deforestation and putting at risk the human rights of many.
Can one of the most controversial ingredients on the planet be used sustainably?
The answer to date has been no. While there’s been some progress by global businesses to stop deforestation in their palm oil supply chains, forest area has continued to decline globally in the last several years. According to Global Forest Watch data, the past four years have been the highest on record for tropical forest area loss. What’s more, recent scientific reports have made it clear that protecting and restoring natural ecosystems is an integral part of addressing climate change and limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
These challenges have been further heightened by the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed the systemic vulnerabilities of global communities and the fragile health of our planet.
While at face value, the simple solution may be to stop using palm oil altogether, it’s important to recognize this would mean walking away from the farmers whose livelihoods depend on the ingredient and pivoting toward something else that may in fact drive even more deforestation.
Like many global businesses, we at Mars have been working tirelessly to try to solve the complex issues of deforestation and human rights challenges in the palm oil supply chain over the past decade. We have tried—and witnessed from our peers across the industry—the different approaches to address deforestation, with varying degrees of success.
Getting our hands around this issue is not only critical for the health of our planet, but also the health of our business. Consumers are now buying products not only because of the product and price, but also because they’re interested in the company behind the brand. Issues such as deforestation are a direct threat to our business—as well as a threat to society and the planet overall—which is why it’s crucial we take action now.
It’s become increasingly clear that in order to effectively tackle societal and environmental issues—such as deforestation associated with palm oil—we need to entirely redesign and transform global business supply chains.
This demands closer partnership with suppliers and other stakeholders to deploy sufficient monitoring and verification of their supply chains to ensure that no deforestation is occurring.
That’s exactly what we are trying to do at Mars. A year ago, we were sourcing from over 1,500 palm mills around the world—a number disproportionately complex to the nature of our operations and ambition. I asked our team: If Mars is purchasing 0.1% of the world’s palm oil, shouldn’t we only be sourcing from a handful of mills?
We went with a new approach: radical simplification.
By drastically simplifying our entire palm oil supply chain, we’re reducing the number of mills we source from and bringing that number down to less than 100 by next year.
As a result of the simplification, as well as a rigorous process of ongoing mapping, monitoring, and supply chain management, we now have a deforestation-free palm oil supply chain.
And we’ve discovered that a pipeline redesigned for the planet and people can also be more efficient for business. For example, by partnering with UniFuji to supply our Asia-Pacific business, we have now reduced operations from 780 mills to just one, with palm being grown in one plantation, processed through just one mill and one refinery before reaching Mars. As a result, the palm that’s delivered is fresher, requires less processing, and reduces our processing costs.
This shows that making radical changes throughout our supply chains can benefit the health of the planet, farmers and workers, and our business. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Beyond fixing our own supply chain, we believe it’s also critical to play a role in driving systemic change by requiring that our suppliers not only sell us clean palm oil, but also only sell clean material to all their customers.
If enough companies follow this path and begin to pressure their suppliers for action, we can reach a tipping point to drive industrywide transformation that will protect the health of our planet.
The world is demanding that global businesses take bold action to rebuild a better, more equitable society, and to put sustainability at the heart of their operations. It’s time for us all to step up to the challenge.
Barry Parkin is chief sustainability and procurement officer at Mars.


fortune--2020-10-07--Slack keeps up with the coronavirus pandemic through new updates like corporate DMs

Slack’s popular corporate messaging app is getting several new updates to help the wave of companies frantically shifting to accommodate employees now working from home.
The workplace software company announced the new tools on Wednesday as part of its Frontiers user conference, which like many other recent tech events, is now online owing to the impact of COVID-19.
As Slack chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua explained in an earlier interview with Fortune, Slack’s internal research concluded that overall, “people are pretty positive about” working from their homes.
However, she added, “We are finding that people have an increased feeling of loneliness and isolation,” underscoring the challenges companies face dealing with workers who may be struggling with mental health and grief in the coronavirus pandemic.
Arguably the biggest update Slack is making to its chat app is giving employees the ability to send workers outside their organizations direct messages, or DMs. With the new feature, which will debut in early 2021, a worker at Company A can send another employee at Company B a request to chat in a direct message, as long as both of their employers are connected in some way, such as through a partnership or customer relationship.
When the person at Company A sends the DM request to the worker at Company B, a new chat will appear that’s hosted on the Slack account of Company B.
To accompany the new corporate DM feature, Slack is also debuting a feature for corporate IT managers so they can preapprove certain Slack channels to allow people from other organizations to participate in channels deemed appropriate for third-party employees to chat about work projects.
“We assume it’s someone you already know,” Yehoshua said. “We want to be careful on not allowing spam on the forum.”
The company also plans to debut in 2021 its verified organization feature, which will let people know via a check mark that they are communicating with people from other companies deemed appropriate by their management.
Slack is also debuting new features to make it easier for companies to better integrate their various workplace tools within Slack. It’s part of a larger initiative by Slack to make its app work better with other enterprise apps.
Although not part of the company’s new updates, Yehoshua also said that Slack is trying to simplify the process of onboarding new employees to Slack, so companies can more easily get their workers up to speed with the program as they shift to work-from-home environments.
Additionally, Slack said that it’s thinking of new ideas to make its chat app more attractive to users, although such ideas won’t necessarily be debuting anytime soon.
Yehoshua said Slack is intrigued by the possibility of users being able to send short video or audio clips to each other as a way to more quickly discuss or brainstorm ideas without having to commit to a formal video call. The point is to reduce the number of online video calls people may have to make each day, now that they are working from home.
“Zoom fatigue is real,” Yehoshua said.
While Slack is not currently planning on debuting short video or audio messaging features, the company is an investor in the startup Loom, which is developing similar corporate messaging tools.


fortune--2020-10-07--U.S. companies have more female CFOs than ever before

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Eileen Murray settles with Bridgewater, Michelle Obama has a final pitch for the Biden-Harris campaign, and the number of female CFOs reaches a record. Have a lovely Wednesday.
– A CFO record. The Broadsheet has been tracking the record number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 this year, but there’s another all-time high to report: The number of female CFOs.
According to data from executive recruiter Crist Kolder Associates, there are 90 female CFOs at S&P 500 and Fortune 500 firms, surpassing the previous peak of 89 in 2018, Bloomberg reports. Recent female CFO appointments include Ann Gugino at Papa John’s, Gina Goetter at Harley-Davidson and Amy O’Keefe at WW International.
Tom Kolder, president of Crist Kolder, told Bloomberg the trend reflects the fierce competition for finance jobs; firms are looking deeper into their finance bench, where more women are present.
Once in the role, women have an impressive track record. A study by S&P Global Market Intelligence last year found that in the first 24 months of a woman taking over as CFO, companies on average saw a 6% uptick in profits and an 8% better stock return , compared to performance under male predecessors.
Still, being CFO is not a common stepping stone for the CEO role. In fact, over the last eight years, no more than 7% of sitting CEOs came directly from the CFO role, according to Crist Kolder.
It’s a trend I talked to Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar about last year. She was a rare CFO to make the jump, having been Square’s chief financial officer before taking her current chief executive position. As to why that move is so rare, Friar said the mindsets of the jobs are vastly different; a CFO must provide discipline, while a CEO is often required to take risks.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- First person. On two recent political issues, Sen. Tammy Duckworth drew on her personal experience to make a decision. First, she pushed through Congress legislation requiring all airports to have lactation rooms for breastfeeding mothers—after traveling without access to such a space. Second, she wrote to her Senate colleagues about having her children through IVF—and how she believes Amy Coney Barrett would threaten access to the fertility procedure. Duckworth discusses the issues in an interview here: Fortune
- The mystery of MacKenzie. Curious about MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos)? The world's most intriguing philanthropist won't give an interview, but this story features the insights of her friends, former coworkers, former teachers, and more: Marker
- Final countdown. In a new "closing argument" message for the Biden-Harris campaign, Michelle Obama says that President Trump is "stoking fears about Black and brown Americans." She calls his actions "morally wrong" and "racist." CNN
- Water under the bridge. Eileen Murray reached a settlement with Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund where she served as co-CEO. Murray sued the firm for gender discrimination and unequal pay (the sum in dispute was between $20 and $100 million). Neither side disclosed the details of the settlement. Financial Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Stella Bugbee stepped down as editor-in-chief of The Cut and will become editor-at-large for New York magazine. Andrea Wishom, former EVP for Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, joins Nextdoor's board of directors. Wunderman Thompson hired Ezinne (Kwubiri) Okoro, former head of inclusion and diversity for H&M in North America, as its chief inclusion, equity, and diversity officer. Tia hired Kathleen Jordan as SVP of medical affairs and Jessica Horwitz as VP of virtual care and clinical operations. ACME Capital promoted Aike (Tiffany) Ho to principal. Amplitude hired former Tenable CMO Jennifer Johnson as chief marketing and strategy officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Good for the globe. Good news from Kristalina Georgieva: the global economic picture is "less dire" than it appeared in June. The International Monetary Fund managing director updated the organization's forecast. Wall Street Journal
- Genius grants. This year's MacArthur Genius Grant winners include women doing fascinating work, from authors Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jacqueline Woodson to biologist Polina V. Lishko. The National Book Foundation also announced finalists for its annual award, which will include a posthumous tribute to former Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy.
- Behind the wall. The Wall of Moms protest movement in Portland, Oregon drew lots of attention—but went wrong in one key way, participants now tell Fortune's Brooke Henderson. The effort overshadowed activist work by Black mothers that far predated the group. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
On Zoom, nobody knows you're pregnant The Cut
Who is Susan Page? Meet the moderator for the vice presidential debate LA Times
There's never been a story like Britney Spears's The Atlantic
PARTING WORDS
"A lot of people as they get older get more protected and terrified. My desire is to keep throwing myself into things."
-Nicole Kidman in a New York Times interview


fortune--2020-10-07--Uber Eats wants to deliver flowers and pet supplies, too

The latest update to Uber Eats’ app will make one thing obvious to consumers: Uber Eats wants to expand beyond delivering pizza, tacos, and noodles to also delivering flowers, pet supplies, convenience items, and unique finds from local shops.
“This is Eats entering its next chapter of maturity,” said Daniel Danker, head of product for Uber Eats. “This is Uber Eats becoming the place for instant access to local commerce.”
In addition to featuring shops of all kinds, Uber Eats is rolling out new features that provide consumers with custom home pages based on their purchase history and preferences and give them more information about local eateries, such as their ratings or whether they allow for pickup. Users will also be able to order from multiple restaurants or couple a food order with the purchase of other items and receive everything within the same delivery.
The change comes as more consumers turn to delivery services like Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber to avoid contracting the coronavirus inside restaurants and stores. As a result, businesses like Uber Eats and rival DoorDash have quickly accelerated. Meanwhile, Uber’s core ride-hailing business is still suffering as people stay home and are more hesitant to ride in another person’s car.
The update also follows Uber’s agreement to acquire rival Postmates for $2.65 billion in August. In its announcement of the deal, Uber called Postmates “an early pioneer of ‘delivery-as-a-service,’” which complements Uber’s efforts to expand its delivery service to other categories. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also recently told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street how he views the expansion into new delivery categories.
“We think there’s a huge market—anything that you want from your local business or your local market, sent to your home inside of 30 minutes,” he said.
As part of the update, users will now be able to see the ratings of nearby restaurants, which locales they’ve ordered from, and top eats—all of which will be marked with icons—on a map. They’ll be able to see what other people are ordering near them and to easily reorder their favorite items. In addition, Uber Eats will offer users a list of “hidden gems” or curated local merchants within their neighborhoods.
On the merchant side of the app, stores and restaurants can now quickly see which orders are coming from return or regular customers, enabling them to easily implement loyalty programs or add last-minute freebies. They can also do things like remind regular customers that they’re one burrito away from a free burrito, for example.
Danker said the pandemic helped Uber Eats accelerate its plans by nearly four years. Uber Eats already has more than 10,000 grocery and convenience stores on its service, and Uber recently moved 100 engineers from other parts of the business to work on the app. Eats, which generated $1.2 billion in revenue during the second quarter, is now as large as Uber’s ride-hailing service was back in 2017, Danker said. Danker also believes consumers are creating a new expectation for delivery, which he thinks will continue well beyond the pandemic.
“At least initially, every single time you open the app, you’re going to be presented with grocery options, pharma, and other types of options that will start training people that this even exists,” he said. “But what will happen over time is people open the app because they want one of those things, not because they want food delivery.”


fortune--2020-10-08--China has a global image problem

China has a global image problem

This is the web version of Eastworld, Fortune’s newsletter focused on business and technology in Asia. Subscribe here to get future editions in your inbox.
A new report by the Pew Research Center finds that China has won global recognition as an economic superpower.
The report, based on a survey of public opinion in 14 major democracies, observes that, in those nations, a median of 48% of respondents identified China not just as a leading economy but the leading economy in the world. The U.S. finished a distant second; across the 14 nations, the median of those polled who picked the U.S. as the world’s top economy was just 35%.
One might think Pew’s discovery would be a source of pride in China, where leaders of the Communist Party have long vowed to restore their nation to its rightful place on the global stage and reverse a “Century of Humiliation.” But I doubt the Pew report will get much attention in China’s state-controlled press. Its headline conclusion is not flattering for Beijing.
Pew researchers found that a majority of respondents in all 14 of the democracies surveyed hold unfavorable views of China. Moreover, as Fortune‘s Eamon Barrett reported yesterday, “in nine of those countries—Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, Spain and Canada—negative perceptions of China have surged to their highest levels since the Center began polling on the topic a decade ago.”
China’s global image problem isn’t new; hostility towards China has been rising steadily for years. What is new is the scope and scale of the backlash—and the speed with which it is growing.
Among Pew’s most notable findings is that, in many Western nations, negative views of China have increased dramatically over the past three years. Between 2017 and 2020, anti-China sentiment jumped from 37% to 74% in the United Kingdom; from 47% to 73% in the U.S.; from 40% to 73% in Canada; and from 53% to 71% in Germany.
China fares no better in Asia, where negative opinions of the nation rose from 32% to 81% in Australia and from 47% to 73% in South Korea. In Japan, the percentage of respondents who say they view China unfavorably has declined from its 2013 peak of 93%, but remains at 86%—the highest negative rating for China among the 14 major democracies.
What accounts for this stark decline in global trust in China? Pew researchers don’t attempt a definitive explanation. The report does note, however, that the free fall in China’s favorability ratings parallels a drop in in confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping, and this year may reflect global discontent with China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
“Assessments of China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak are generally much more negative” than those given to other nations or global institutions like the World Health Organization or the European Union, the report observes. (Xi may take cold comfort in the fact that in the 13 democracies other than the U.S., he is viewed more favorably than President Donald Trump, a point Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris mentioned at the debate Wednesday night.)
Today’s Financial Times, meanwhile, features a detailed assessment of how China lost the hearts and minds of a narrower demographic: American elites. Washington correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo opens with a look at the case of Joe Biden who, as vice president, played host to Xi on his 2012 visit to the U.S. just before ascending to China’s presidency. By all accounts, Biden was charmed, and praised Xi for his willingness to break the mould of a traditional Communist Party leader.
“This is a guy who wants to feel it and taste it,” Biden said at the time. “He’s prepared to show another side of the Chinese leadership.”
Fast forward to 2020 and candidate Biden has changed his tune. “This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic—with a small d—bone in his body,” he said in Februrary. “This is a guy who is a thug.”
Sevastopulo solicits comment from U.S. foreign policy experts across the political spectrum, who all describe a common disillusionment with China in general and Xi in particular.
“American elite and popular opinion has fundamentally changed,” former Obama administration White House Asia advisor Evan Medeiros says. “We have moved from balancing co-operation and competition, to competition and confrontation.”
The piece suggests that Biden, should he win in November, will stake out a China policy that is no less hawkish than that of his predecessor. Tom Donilon, Obama’s former national security adviser, argues the key difference between how Trump and Biden deal with China, is that Biden will work more closely than Trump with “like-minded allies” to increase pressure on China.
That’s an unsettling prospect for Beijing, which fumed quietly Tuesday while U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rallied support from the Quad countries, a group of close U.S. allies including Japan, India, and Australia, for creation of a security bulwark against Chinese aggression in Asia.
China Vice Foreign Minister Luo Zhaouhui last month denounced the grouping as “an anti-China front line, also known as a ‘mini-NATO‘” that “reflected the Cold War mentality of the US.”
This week’s Eastworld Spotlight features a conversation with Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute of Political Economics. His “U.S.-China phase one trade tracker” is widely regarded as the most authoritative scorecard of China’s progress in fulfilling terms of the deal it struck with the White House in January to increase purchases of U.S. goods. Chad also offers keen insights into possible changes to U.S. trade strategy in the event of a Biden victory.
More Eastworld news below!
Clay Chandler
clay.chandler@fortune.com
This edition of Eastworld was curated and produced by Grady McGregor. Reach him at grady.mcgregor@fortune.com.
Eastworld news
A more civil debate
Wednesday evening’s vice presidential debate featured a longer discussion on the U.S.’s policy towards China than last week’s presidential debate. Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris said Trump’s “approach to China has resulted in the loss of American lives, American jobs, and America’s standing,” railing against Trump’s trade war and decision to pull U.S. health officials from Wuhan before the pandemic. Vice President Mike Pence commended Trump for “standing up to China.” And, if Trump wins, he said, “we’re going to level the playing field and we’re going to hold China accountable for what they did with coronavirus.” Nikkei Asian Review
Beijing vs. the Light-house
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has gone from one of the most hawkish voices in Washington, D.C., to one of the most conciliatory. Until recently, Lighthizer helped spearhead Trump’s trade war against China, the culmination of years spent criticizing China’s trade practices as a congressional staffer and trade lawyer. Now Lighthizer is battling even more hawkish voices in the Trump administration as he tries to hold together the phase one trade agreement China and the U.S. signed in January. He also reportedly opposes a recent U.S. state department push to broker a trade pact with Taiwan, a move that would likely upset Beijing. New York Times
A sealed city
In a sweeping, on-the-ground look into Wuhan, the New Yorker’s Peter Hessler visits the city where COVID-19 first broke out, providing a portrait of those who faced the initial chaos and tragedies of the global pandemic. Hessler navigates a city that has largely defeated the virus, yet he is unsparing in critiquing China’s efforts to cover up information in the initial days of the outbreak. Unfortunately, he writes, much of the information about Wuhan's early experience in the pandemic remains shrouded in secrecy. “For the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city,” Hessler writes. New Yorker
The (not yet) Hawaii of China
China has long sought to turn Hainan, a beach island in southern China, into its own version of Hawaii. But for all of Beijing’s financial support, the island has largely failed to live up to its potential. In 2018, just 1.2% of the island's 76 million tourists were foreigners, and experts say the island remains hard to navigate without speaking Chinese; the restaurants and hotels fail to compete with places like Thailand. Chinese military presence on the island means foreigners cannot fly into Hainan’s international airport and visitors are restricted in where they can stay and take photos. South China Morning Post
Coronavirus by country
Myanmar
Almost all of the Myanmar's nearly 22,000 COVID-19 cases Myanmar have come within the last month. This unique curve is largely explained by the country's testing issues. In the spring, Myanmar could only test hundreds of people per day. By summer, its capacity ramped up to several thousand per day, at which point officials believed the first wave of the virus had run its course. Now, Myanmar is routinely recording daily highs in cases and the country has one of the highest positive testing rates in the world. In response to the burgeoning second wave, Myanmar is enforcing stay-at-home orders in Yangon City and Rakhine state, two of the hardest hit areas, but testing centers are reaching their breaking points. Frontier Magazine
Markets and movers
Google India – Google announced that it will delay implementing a policy requiring app developers to use its platform for online payments in India until 2022. Google’s new policy, which will go into effect globally in September 2021, caused an uproar against Google in India’s tech community. Fortune
MiniSo – The Chinese retailer, backed by tech giant Tencent, is aiming to raise $562.4 million in an upcoming U.S. IPO. The company, which sells a variety of household and consumer goods, may be valued at upwards of $10 billion in its debut later this year. Reuters
Ant Group – The Trump administration may impose restrictions on the Chinese financial technology giant over national security concerns. Officials are still discussing if and how the U.S. may limit the Alibaba-backed company, but such a move may dampen Ant Group’s sky-high expectations of its blockbuster debut in a dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai later this year. Bloomberg
Air Asia – AirAsia X, the long-haul arm of Malaysian airliner AirAsia, says it is attempting to restructure $15.3 billion of debt due to sustaining heavy losses during the pandemic. Malaysia’s other major airline, Malayasian Airways, is in a similarly critical state and is carrying out its own restructuring plan. Reuters
Final figure
50%
Southeast Asia may benefit from a boom in producing notebook computers, according to the Taiwanese thinktank Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute. At the moment, Southeast Asia only produces a small fraction of the world’s notebook computers, but the report says that by 2030 countries like Thailand and Vietnam will account for half of the world’s production. This growth will largely be driven as manufacturers move away from China, which currently produces roughly 90% of the world’s notebook computers, as manufactures look to find cheaper labor and avoid getting caught in tensions between the U.S. and China. Financial Times


fortune--2020-10-08--This analyst says the U.S.-China trade deal targets were always ‘too aspirational’

President Donald Trump has called the “phase one” trade pact he struck with China on January 15 “one of the greatest trade deals ever made.”
It’s an ambitious agreement that calls for a partial rollback of tariffs on goods the U.S. imports from China in exchange for a pledge from China to increase its U.S. purchases by $200 billion this year and next compared what it bought in 2017. Trump has touted the accord as a centerpiece of his plan to revive the American economy. He frames it as a momentous victory for American farmers and manufacturers that will boost U.S. exports of everything from soybeans to liquefied natural gas, and a first step in a longer negotiation that will tackle disagreements about structural aspects of the world’s two largest economies to head off a superpower showdown.
So far, however, the agreement remains a long way from delivering on those promises. Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimates Chinese purchases from the U.S. have fulfilled only a third of the county’s 2020 import goal. The global pandemic and resulting slump in the two economies can be blamed for part of the shortfall. But Bown, whose “U.S.-China phase one trade tracker” is widely hailed as the most authoritative benchmark of China’s progress in meeting its trade deal commitments, argues that even from the beginning, the $200 billion target was “a bit too aspirational.”
“Two-hundred billion is a nice round number if you’re a president out there on the campaign trail,” he observes. “But when you look into [the trade data], these were just sort of astronomical numbers that I don’t think many folks thought that China was going to be able to reach.”
In an interview with Fortune’s Clay Chandler in an Eastworld Spotlight conversation on Tuesday, Bown talked about the evolution of the U.S.-China trade deal, China’s progress in meeting its targets, and how even an imperfect trade deal has benefits for both countries. He also discussed how a Biden administration might change U.S. trade relations with China. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fortune: We want to talk about your U.S.-China “trade tracker” and where things stand with the phase one trade deal. But maybe first we should remind readers how we got here.
Chad Bown: Beginning in early 2018, you had a Trump administration that started levying rounds after rounds of tariffs, ultimately covering more than $350 billion worth of U.S. imports from China with tariffs. China [in retaliation], imposed tariffs on tens of billions of dollars, not one for one, but lots and lots of tariffs on lots of lots of American exports. Towards the end of 2019, recognizing that there is a U.S. election happening in November 2020, the Trump administration essentially said, “Let’s get a deal; let’s see what we can get at this stage so that we’ll have a relatively calm year heading into the election.” And so they kind of took what they could in an agreement with China that they announced the details of in January of 2020, [and] it went into effect in February of 2020. [And the deal] did not, by far, resolve any of the issues of the trade war.
But for political purposes, the really big part of the deal from President Trump’s perspective was the claim that China would buy $200 billion of additional [goods] on top of what they were already buying. It’s a really really big number, it’s an additional $200 billion split over 2020 and 2021. One of the concerns historically is that China has not been buying enough American exports, but these numbers were a bit too aspirational. $200 billion is a nice round number if you’re a president out there on the campaign trail. But when you look into it, these were just sort of astronomical numbers that I don’t think many folks thought China was going to be able to reach.
So what does the trade tracker tell us? Where is China in terms of its progress in meeting the phase one targets?
Energy is sort of nowhere close… [and] that’s not surprising. If you remember back to the early part of 2020 when the pandemic hit, people stopped moving around, people stopped demanding oil, and oil prices basically went to zero. The way the agreement was written, it was written in value terms. So even if Americans had extracted every barrel of oil they had and China had agreed to buy all of it, when the value is priced at zero, [what] shows up in the trade data is zero. So that hasn’t done well so far in 2020, but that might have been expected given what happened.
Manufacturing has actually done reasonably okay compared to everything else. But that was being driven by some products that could disappear… like high-tech products [and] semiconductors. The Trump administration has been rolling out a series of export controls for national security reasons; this is wrapped up with the concerns over Huawei. So the very same products that so far have been doing okay in the manufacturing part of the deal, they are threatened to be taken away.
The last part, and the most politically salient part, of course, is agriculture. Soybeans dominate American agriculture, it’s a $12, $13, $14 billion dollar a year set of exports to China. That’s what [the Trump administration] really hoped would grow in this deal. And so far the data isn’t too optimistic; [China’s agricultural purchases are] less than 50% of the way on a pro-rated basis to where we would have expected. A lot of those crops [are going to] get pulled out of the ground in September and October, and start going off to China in the weeks after that. So agriculture may end up doing okay.
How is the trade deal affecting the U.S.-China relationship?
The overall U.S.-China relationship has deteriorated so badly over the course of 2020 with the pandemic, with other non-trade related events like Hong Kong, and what’s going on with the Uighurs. The trade agreement is the one positive thing—even though it’s not living up to the numbers—that is holding together any sort of semblance of a U.S.-China relationship at this stage. So I think almost ironically, having a trade agreement is preventing things perhaps from getting worse.
That being said, I think it has also contributed to the fact that things have gotten worse. [It has] effectively taken the pressure off the Trump administration to continue to engage with China in a proactive way on trade. And other folks within the Trump administration, who may have a very different perspective toward China may be having a bigger influence on overall U.S. policy right now. So it’s kind of a mixed bag in terms of what this trade agreement means for the U.S.-China relationship at the moment.
Do you anticipate a shift in U.S. economic policy towards China under a Biden administration?
I don’t think there would be a radical shift, except perhaps in the way that they choose to engage on some of the issues with China. They would be more likely, for example, to work with allies and not just go off on a sort of unilateral trade war by themselves. [A Biden administration might] work with Europe, with Japan, with countries that have common concerns with the United States on a lot of these key trade issues [with China].
What kind of challenges will a new administration face?
I think a new administration ultimately has a lot of amends to make with those allies. [The Trump administration] has been imposing tariffs on Europe and Japan, whether it’s steel and aluminum, threatening to do so on cars, starting fights wherever it could. I think an initial sign to watch for from a Biden administration is its approach to those allies. Would they seek to get rid of those kinds of tariffs? Would they overtly make amends and sort of negotiate resolutions to a lot of the fights that the Trump administration may have started, or other ones that [the Trump administration] hadn’t been able to resolve during their time in office? I think if you see that, that would be signs [saying], “We do that first and then we can work together on the areas of common concern that we have with how China is engaging in the trading system.”
This interview is part of Eastworld Spotlight, a series of conversations on matters of business, tech, and finance with executives, experts, entrepreneurs, and investors in Asia. Subscribe to Fortune’s Eastworld newsletter to get them in your inbox.


fortune--2020-10-08--The world’s fossil fuel giants are missing global targets on climate change

The world’s leading fossil fuel companies are all failing the UN’s climate goals, according to research published Wednesday by the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI). The research institute, formed of a partnership between the London School of Economics and global asset managers, was founded to assess and assist corporations as the world transitions to a zero-carbon economy.
For its latest assessment, TPI researchers analyzed the “carbon management” levels at 59 of the world’s largest publicly listed oil, gas and coal companies—projecting the impact of each entity’s carbon emissions against benchmarks set by the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement seeks to cap global warming to an average of 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The report from TPI shows that none of the 59 fossil fuel giants assessed are on track to meet the goal.
“Investors have witnessed a flurry of significant climate announcements by fossil fuel majors this year, so it is striking this independent research still shows those commitments do not yet align with limiting climate change to 2°C,” says TPI co-chair Adam Matthews.
Seven fossil fuel giants—Glencore, Anglo American, Shell, Repsol, Total, Eni and Equinor—are in line with the reduction targets set by their home governments, at least. But the targets those seven are following are still wider than the 2°C standard, allowing for a future where temperatures rise 3.2°C.
For all its bluster about investing in renewables and downsizing its business, BP is notably absent from the seven. French multinational Total, which (like BP) has set a target of being carbon neutral by 2050, is there. As is Dutch heavyweight Shell is also pledging to go net-zero, but hasn’t set a date.
Interestingly, all seven of those firms that have fallen in line with local climate goals are European. According to Matthews, U.S. fossil fuel giants have “yet to take meaningful action” to reduce emissions. In fact, Bloomberg reports that ExxonMobil planned to increase carbon emissions 17% by 2025 in order to increase production.
Those increases might not happen now that the pandemic has slashed oil demand—but the attitude that emissions growth is still a viable option seems to remain.
More below
Eamon Barrett
— Eamon.Barrett@fortune.com
CARBON COPY
Wheeze
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to power every home in the U.K. with renewable energy by 2030—specifically, energy generated by offshore wind farms. Such a task would require $50 billion in investment and the installation of one new turbine every weekday for the next decade. The FT says that the government “does not appear to have grasped the scale of the task,” which would be par for the course.
New dawn
Solar and wind giant NextEra surpassed ExxonMobil in market value last week, as its market cap reached $138.6 billion on Friday. The world’s largest renewable energy producer is now looking to acquire North Carolina-based utility Duke Energy Corp. Duke, which has a market value of $61 billion, rebuffed the offer. But, reportedly, NextEra remains interested.
Shale holders
According to the Wall Street Journal, the median pay for CEOs at major U.S. oil and gas drillers rose for four consecutive years from 2015, peaking at $13 million last year. Over the same period, returns to shareholders dropped 35%. Taken as a group, the shale CEOs received larger raises in 2019 than peers in all but two of the 11 major industries analyzed, the Journal says.
Fungal growth
Executives from Adidas, Lululemon, Kering and Stella McCartney all said they will partner with California-based Bolt Threads to manufacture garments made from the start-ups mushroom-based leather, Mylo. The fabric is derived from mycelium—the threadlike roots that connect vast fungal blooms.
Clean break
Nicolai Tangen, the new chief executive of Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, wants the fund to sell out of investments that are performing badly in ESG. The fund—formed from the profits of Norway’s oil rigs—sold out of 42 companies in 2019, mostly for using or producing coal but also for breaching expectations on human rights, anti-corruption and other ESG standards.
Piper
Poland has slapped a $7.6 billion antitrust fine on Russia’s oil giant Gazprom, which is currently constructing a pipeline feeding gas from Russia, under the Baltic Sea and into Germany. The pipeline is heavily opposed by Poland and the U.S., which has said it will sanction any company that works on the line. Both countries believe the pipeline will make Europe too reliant on Russia for energy.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Getting involved in diversity and inclusion is optional. That’s a problem by Julia Taylor Kennedy and Pooja Jain-Link
5 years in, damages from the VW emissions cheating scandal are still rolling in by Geoff Colvin
The oil and gas industry has lost more than 100,000 jobs this year by Katherine Dunn
Sustainability: If your company has a great record, make sure investors hear about it by Lindsay Singleton and Josh Goulding
How we’re ending deforestation in Mars’ palm oil supply chain by Barry Parkin
CLOSING NUMBER
14 million tons
According to Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, there is roughly 14 million tons of microplastics adrift in the deep ocean—more than double the mass of plastic estimated to be floating on the ocean surface. Microplastics are what plastic debris becomes as it breaks down—particles too small to see but that contaminate the food chain with toxins.