fortune--2020-10-21--The blockchain industry faces a moment of truth as high-profile projects go live

In 2017, elite teams of computer visionaries raised large sums of money to pursue even larger ambitions. They announced plans to use blockchain technology to remake the Internet and disrupt powerful incumbents like cloud giant Amazon Web Services—even as the rest of the world, including many in the tech industry, puzzled over what they were talking about.
Three years later, these projects—with names like Polkadot, Filecoin and Dfinity—are reaching a critical juncture. They have built giant software networks with nodes around the globe, offering services like file storage and online contracts to anyone with a computer. But building it doesn’t mean anyone will come.
Even as Bitcoin enjoys another boom—the price of the original currency is nudging $12,000 and everyone from Square to Harvard University has been investing in it—the broader world of blockchain is still struggling to prove the technology is more than hype.
Dreams of a new Internet and a ‘world computer’
During the madcap cryptocurrency bubble of 2017, blockchain startups conducting Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) raised more money than those that turned to the traditional world of venture capital. The ICOs touted the promise of blockchain, a new type of distributed computing that creates a permanent, tamperproof record of transactions.
In many cases, the ICOs were pushed by hucksters who exploited a lack of regulation to sell digital tokens to a greedy, gullible public. The tokens in question represented equity in future blockchain projects but, in practice, were treated mostly as speculative investments. In many cases, the ICO issuers never built what they promised, and the tokens tied to the project became basically worthless.
The scams and subsequent law enforcement stings left a stench of disrepute on the broader crypto industry—one that has helped obscure the real progress made by ventures like Filecoin and Polkadot.
Unlike the slapdash nature of many blockchain projects launched in 2017, Polkadot has attracted elite computer scientists and its investors include funded by prominent venture capital firms, including Polychain Capital. The project is the brainchild of Gavin Wood, a Ph.D. programmer who cofounded Ethereum (the second most popular blockchain after Bitcoin) and has consulted for Microsoft.
Like Ethereum, Polkadot is a platform for activities ranging from application building to automated transactions known as smart contracts. Both blockchains aim to provide a secure record of all transactions that is visible to the public.
Wood believes Polkadot is a superior alternative to Ethereum that avoids the latter’s sluggish processing times, while offering an easy way to connect to other blockchains. In an interview with Fortune, Wood pointed to a high rate of developer participation—a metric many in the tech industry use as a proxy for a project’s popularity—as a sign Polkadot is taking off.
Meanwhile, Filecoin launched its so-called mainnet last week, more than three years after raising $205 million in an ICO and assembling a crack team of programmers and tech industry veterans. (A mainnet launch, which follows a “testnet” phase, is when a blockchain becomes accessible to the general public. )
Filecoin, which is likewise backed by blue chip VC firms, offers a decentralized form of computer storage. Instead of using cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, consumers and businesses can park their data on a network of computers linked with a blockchain. At the same time, anyone with spare computer space can rent it out for use by Filecoin’s storage clients in a process the project claims is totally secure for all involved.
Then there is Polkadot rival Dfinity, which touts itself as a “world computer” that can replace cloud computing services and applications offered by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. The company raised over $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz in early 2018 and also has a stable of top computer scientists. It recently unveiled something called the Sodium network, which provides the economic incentives and governance tools intended to make the world computer.
Unlike the other megaprojects, Dfinity has yet to issue the tokens that will let users operate its service. But TechCrunch reports the tokens are expected to be worth over $9 billion—which would make them the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, the tokens of Polkadot and Filecoin are already circulating, valuing the projects at around $3.5 billion and $470 million, respectively.
These projects, along with another mega-endeavor called Cosmos and the crypto-industry workhorse Ethereum, all employ different programming techniques. But they also offer many overlapping features and share a common ideal: replacing the web of today, and the companies that control it, with decentralized networks run on blockchain software. If what they promise comes to pass, many of us will come to use their version of the web—often dubbed Web 3.0—to do everything from online banking to social networking to payroll processing. What’s more, Web 3.0 boosters claim, all of this will be more secure and less expensive than the tools offered by the likes of Microsoft and Facebook.
The vision is audacious and is being backed by some of the smartest programmers and tech investors in the world. But for now, the number of participants in Web 3.0 is staggeringly small; three years in, the most successful new projects might boast 10,000 users (Facebook, in contrast, has nearly 3 billion users).
These tiny numbers don’t necessarily mean the second generation of blockchain projects won’t become mainstream. As crypto evangelists regularly point out, most people in 1994 didn’t see the point of the Internet, even though the underlying technology had been around for decades. But now that the likes of Filecoin and Polkadot are up and running, the window of time for blockchain to prove its usefulness may be shrinking.
The search for a killer app
Finding an impartial opinion on blockchain projects isn’t easy. Of the many financial and tech analysts that assess companies for a living (and offer their assessments to reporters), few understand the technology well enough to explain how they are faring—or even what they do in the first place. On the other hand, the people who are familiar with projects like Polkadot are often holding tokens they hope to flip or are simply buoyant about anything blockchain-related.
One exception is Wilson Withiam, a former premed student who is now an analyst at crypto research firm Messari. Withiam, who owns Ethereum but none of the tokens from the newer projects, acknowledges that the crypto community struggles to converse outside its own bubble—where insiders enjoy regaling each other on Twitter about a fantasy world without central governments.
“It’s a legit question, especially when many people have a crypto anarchist standpoint,” says Withiam. “We get lost in our own little crypto world sometimes. You try to talk to anyone outside of the industry, they look at you like you have three heads.”
In the case of the 2017 class of blockchain projects, Withiam says they all have thriving communities of developers, which is, he adds, critical to their viability. But he also notes that using these blockchains and the decentralized apps built on top of them remains an arcane experience for the average Internet user, and that mainstream adoption won’t happen until people can use them with the same ease as a web browser.
There’s also the question of why people would bother with these blockchain projects in the first place, especially when existing technology options are easy to use and inexpensive or free. Ditching monopolists like Facebook or Google might be appealing in theory, but few are likely to toss their Instagram or Google Drive account in the name of decentralization—a word that is a near-holy invocation among crypto types but irrelevant to the average computer user.
Withiam says the best chance for a breakout among the newer blockchains is in a niche like video games, which already have dedicated communities of tech-savvy users. He points to Flow—yet another blockchain project—that is being developed by a company called Dapper Labs, which is building partnerships with the likes of the NBA and the UFC. Withiam says an inflection point could also arrive if an industry giant like Blizzard Entertainment decided to use a tool like Flow.
Wood, the Polkadot founder, believes his megaproject is different because he has a track record of building actual products—rather than just theorizing about them. He claims a theory-over-product mindset has caused Ethereum to stall under the governance of his onetime cofounder, Vitalik Buterin, a 26-year-old savant who is the most influential figure in cryptocurrency.
“There’s no one who can deliver a product. Vitalik runs the show: He’s an ideator and dreamer but won’t deliver,” says Wood, adding that he and Buterin remain friends.
(In a Telegram message, Buterin rebutted Wood’s claims, pointing to Ethereum’s impending deployment of a new version of its blockchain called Beacon, and to a series of improvements related to privacy and transaction capacity. He also noted that Polkadot had benefited from theoretical breakthroughs developed in the Ethereum community, including the concept of “sharding”—a process where data is distributed across multiple locations to process it more efficiently.)
Such debates over which blockchain is superior are unlikely, however, to resonate with most average computer users, for whom the entire concept of blockchain is fuzzy to begin with. The point is not lost on Marvin Ammori, a lawyer who left a prominent perch as a public policy advocate in Washington, D.C., to become general counsel of Filecoin’s parent company, Protocol Labs.
“There’s a ton of hype in this market. There are a few projects seen as the best, most respectable projects, and those get even more hype,” says Ammori. “But until we’re changing the way the Internet works, we can’t make all these grandiose claims.”
Ammori is also aware of an incentive problem inherent in many blockchain projects. Unlike typical startups, which must scratch and claw to reach milestones that will unlock more funding, many blockchain firms raised tens or even hundreds of millions at their inception—meaning their executives can enjoy their wealth and coast for years without having to finish what they pledged to do. Ammori says that the risk of these perverse incentives is overstated and that the eye-popping numbers raised by some ventures—including Filecoin’s $205 million ICO—are not so meaningful given that many successful tech startups raise significantly more, albeit over a longer period of time.
Ammori also believes projects like Filecoin—which counts the Internet Archive and a growing number of small businesses among its users—will succeed because they disrupt middlemen, a formula that has worked for many other new technologies. He believes that, just as email proved to be a “killer app” that sparked mainstream adoption of the Internet, the blockchain world will soon deliver a must-have tool of its own.
“The [blockchain projects] don’t all have to succeed at once,” he notes. “Just as Facebook started with a handful of college dorms, all it takes is one use case to catch on.”
An earlier version of this story listed incorrect valuations for Filecoin and Polkadot, and misidentified one of Polkadot’s investors.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:


fortune--2020-10-21--In pursuit of ‘net zero,’ Spain’s Iberdrola bets big on America

Stimulus update : Pelosi says a deal could be near , but a vote may not come until after the @

Bilbao-based utilities and renewables giant Iberdrola’s buying spree will expand its reach farther into the U.S., the company said Wednesday, by acquiring Albuquerque-based PNM Resources for $4.3 billion.
The deal represents the growing might of a group of fast-moving, low-carbon utilities companies—increasingly coming from abroad—in the race to decarbonize America’s energy sector.
The deal folds PNM Resources—which serves homes in Texas and New Mexico and has 2,811 megawatts in capacity—into Avangrid, the much larger Northeast U.S. utilities and renewables company in which the Spanish Iberdrola holds a roughly 80% stake.
Avangrid has 7.1GW of power capacity, largely in wind and solar, and holds $32 billion in assets across 24 states, the company says on its website. It is split into two businesses: one an electric and natural-gas utilities company, the other a renewable capacity-and-operation business.
The deal is far from entirely renewable: PNM still has a stake in the coal sector, which it has pledged to phase out by 2031. But the company has also said it is targeting 100% emissions-free energy generation by 2040, which fits into Iberdrola’s broader goals to achieve net-zero emissions globally by 2050.
Iberdola has been hit by COVID-19 this year, denting demand for all forms of energy. But utilities, which tend to have a head start on decarbonization because they can directly rely on renewables, have fared relatively well in comparison to the legacy oil and gas giants, which have been roiled by a year of volatile oil demand because of global lockdowns and an ensuing financial crisis. The S&P 500 Utilities index, for example, is down 1.23% since the start of the year—while the S&P 500’s energy index is down more than 50%.
On Wednesday, Iberdrola said its nine-month net profit rose 4.7% since the start of the year, to €2.7 billion ($3.4 billion), but its revenue over the same period fell 8.4% as global energy demand fell. The company’s stock was down 1.37% on Wednesday but has fared well over the past 12 months, up more than 19%.
Investing big amid a downturn
The acquisition is just the latest in a buying spree orchestrated by Iberdrola’s chairman and CEO, Ignacio Gálan. The company has committed to investing €10 billion ($11.8 billion) expanding the business, including via M&A, through 2020, with 54% of the total invested in renewables. It has so far invested €6.6 billion ($7.8 billion) this year including the PNM deal, the company said on Wednesday. Iberdrola is also in the midst of a capacity construction boom, with 4,600MW of capacity installed over just the past 12 months and 7,600 under construction now, the company said.
Companies like Iberdrola are trying to gain an early edge as the market shifts toward low-carbon energy, a trend that has only gained pace amid the global pandemic.
The big players have a decidedly European accent: Long-running government policy support and generous subsidy programs have given the region and its companies a clear advantage in preparing for a “green” transition, executives in both the energy sector and ESG investing regularly say. An EU emphasis on a low-carbon recovery from the pandemic has only solidified that reality.
Europe-based companies such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Norway’s Equinor have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. They have also begun to map out how they will tilt their businesses away from fossil fuels and toward renewable capacity—a high-stakes race to acquire ready-to-run renewables projects in which companies like Iberdrola have a crucial head start.
It’s also not the only such company to push into the U.S. market. Ørsted is also expanding there, while Equinor-owned renewables and utility focused trader, Denmark’s Danske Commodities, has also opened trading offices in the U.S.
That’s not to say the local competition is a bunch of pushovers. In early October, Florida-based NextEra, the world’s largest solar and wind power generator, saw its stock market value overtake that of Exxon Mobil.


fortune--2020-10-21--U.K. drug trial will deliberately expose young people to coronavirus, despite ethical concerns

The U.K. is moving ahead with a controversial COVID-19 vaccine trial that will see healthy young people deliberately infected with the coronavirus.
The British government has committed to spending about $44 million on the so-called challenge trial, which is being run by Hvivo, a subsidiary of Irish pharmaceuticals research company Open Orphan, which specializes in conducting drug trials of this type.
The study will recruit healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30, the group of adults least likely to become seriously ill from COVID-19, and inoculate them with a coronavirus vaccine, before deliberately exposing them to the virus. If they fail to develop COVID-19 symptoms that will be strong evidence that the vaccine is effective.
But many bioethicists have severe misgivings about conducting challenge trials, especially in the case of a disease such as COVID-19 for which there are few proven treatments and no cure. Usually challenge trials are conducted in cases where there is one or more “rescue drugs” available that can save a volunteer from becoming gravely ill if the vaccine fails. In this case, researchers have said they plan to use Gilead’s remdesivir as the rescue drug, although a large World Health Organization study just concluded the drug has little impact on COVID-19 mortality.
Some virologists and bioethicists worry that a challenge trial won’t provide enough information about a vaccine’s efficacy to justify the risk. Challenge trials are usually used to produce evidence of whether a vaccine works faster than would normally be possible through a standard vaccine clinical trial, in which volunteers receive either the vaccine or a placebo, and the infection rates within the two groups are then compared over a series of months.
‘Harder to justify’
Challenge trials are more useful when the prevalence of a disease is too low to get a clear signal from a standard clinical trial in a reasonable period of time. That looked like it might have been the case with COVID-19 earlier in the year when strict lockdowns drove down infection rates in many parts of the world. But the resurgence of infections in the past two months means that the large-scale Phase III clinical trials already underway for a number of vaccine candidates are likely to yield results within the next few months.
This means the challenge trials, which are not scheduled to begin until January, may not actually help speed introduction of the initial set of vaccines. “It becomes a little bit harder to justify them, and we need to take a close look at the risks,” Seema Shah, a bioethicist at Lurie Children’s Hospital and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, told the science publication Nature.
Shah said the challenge trials might be more helpful for evaluating how well later generation vaccine candidates work compared with the initial ones, and also yielding better insights into how the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 works and how the immune system responds to it. She said that volunteers for the challenge trial need to be properly informed and not misled into believing they are helping to bring a vaccine to the world when that may not be the case.
Another concern is that volunteers in the U.K. study will be paid more than $5,000 for participating. Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University’s Langone medical center, who is in favor of conducting challenge trials owing to the extreme urgency of the global pandemic, has advised against paying volunteers because he worries the money may blind them to the risks.
Then there is the fact that the young volunteers who need to be recruited for a challenge trial are not representative of the population public health experts are most hoping to protect from infection with a vaccine, namely older people who are much more likely to become severely ill from COVID-19. “How is this really going to help us?” wonders John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
But some virologists think that because older people are underrepresented in conventional vaccine clinical trials too, those studies may also not provide much insight into whether a vaccine will work in older people. A challenge trial might provide useful data on immune responses that will help researchers extrapolate how old people might respond to a vaccine, Matt Memoli, a virologist at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is involved in preparing a possible U.S. human challenge trial, told Nature.
Moore said he worries that if any volunteers in the challenge trial do become seriously ill, it will have a chilling effect on recruiting volunteers for standard clinical trials for other vaccines. He also said it was unclear if the way in which the challenge trial will expose volunteers to the virus actually mimics natural infection closely enough to yield any valuable insights about a vaccine’s effectiveness.
How challenge trials work
In a challenge trial, the first step is to calibrate the virus dose the volunteers will be given. This is done by exposing unvaccinated volunteers to gradually greater virus doses until researchers find an amount that will consistently cause infection—but hopefully be low enough to avoid causing severe disease. In the U.K., about 90 volunteers will take part in the “virus characterization” portion of the trial, which is expected to take three months and will be conducted in a specialized biocontainment suite at London’s Royal Free Hospital. The strain of the virus being used is the one most commonly circulating in the U.K. and is being manufactured at a research facility in London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Once the right viral dose is found, then the actual vaccine trials will begin. The vaccine or vaccines to be tested will be chosen by the U.K. government’s vaccines task force. Those taking part in the study will have to be kept in quarantine for two to three weeks so that they don’t infect others during the trial.
Despite the ethical concerns, many think the challenge trials are worth the risk. Nir Eyal, a bioethicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, along with Pedro Rosa Dias and Ara Darzi, both economists at Imperial College London, have calculated that moving deployment of an effective coronavirus vaccine forward by just one month would save 720,000 human years worth of life and prevent 40 million human years’ worth of poverty, primarily in low-income countries.
It is logic like that which has provided inspiration for 1Day Sooner, a U.S.-based group that has been campaigning for human challenge trials and which says it has recruited almost 40,000 people globally—including 2,000 in the U.K.—willing to participate in them. Open Orphan and Hvivo say they are working with 1Day Sooner but are also running their own recruitment effort, ultimately looking to select about 500 people to take part in the trial.
The U.K. is not the only government backing human challenge trials, although it is the first to actually green-light such a study. The U.S.’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has funded a lab at Colorado State University in Fort Collins to produce two separate SARS-CoV-2 strains for use in a possible challenge trial. But the agency said it is awaiting data from the ongoing Phase III clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines already underway before deciding whether to proceed. Meanwhile Belgium has put $23.6 million behind creating specialized facilities to conduct challenge trials for a variety of diseases, including possibly COVID-19.


fortune--2020-10-21--How to bet on the presidential election—and why prediction markets might be better than polls

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
With less than two weeks until Election Day, Joe Biden’s heavy lead in the polls is not enough to convince many that President Trump is doomed to defeat. After all, the polls notoriously got it wrong four years ago when Trump shocked the world by beating Hillary Clinton, despite trailing Clinton in most polls for virtually the entire campaign.
Because of 2016, there has been heightened public interest in an alternative means of predicting which way the 2020 election may go. And many are choosing to follow the money: looking to political betting markets, as well as free-to-play prediction markets, for a better read on who will be the next President of the United States.
While betting on political elections remains illegal in all 50 states—and is subject to strict oversight by the federal Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—there is more interest than ever in betting on U.S. elections. Gambling companies based in the U.K., where political betting is legal, expect wagering on the 2020 election to break records set four years ago, while bookmakers in Las Vegas have speculated that the presidential election could prove a bigger market than the Super Bowl.
The current occupant of the White House—polarizing lightning rod of attention and opinion that he is—has undoubtedly played a major role in this heightened popularity. “I think Trump has definitely poured some gasoline on the political betting landscape,” says Brian Pempus, a betting industry expert at NJOnlineGambling.com, who cited how European bookmakers reported an exponential increase in election betting activity from 2012 to 2016.
“With politics, everyone already has an opinion and some skin in the game, as they call it,” Pempus notes. “It feels like a natural fit for gambling, and I know a lot of the legal sports books [in the U.S.] would be willing to offer it.”
The state of West Virginia even went so far as to legalize betting on elections for an extremely brief period in April—a move that saw sports books like FanDuel immediately seek to jump into the market. But the state quickly reversed its decision, citing existing election laws that ban the practice and scuppering any designs bookmakers may have had on accepting election bets.
“We certainly like the idea of being able to bring more people into our product—just as we’d like to offer Oscars betting, because there are lots of people who love to follow it,” says Cory Fox, FanDuel’s vice president of government affairs. The sports book was able to move quickly on offering presidential betting lines in West Virginia since its parent company, Irish gaming operator Flutter Entertainment (formerly Paddy Power Betfair), “has offered political betting for a number of years” in foreign markets, according to Fox.
There is at least one operator legally permitted to field wagers on political outcomes in the United States. PredictIt, a New Zealand–based online prediction market, was granted a rare no-action letter by the CFTC in 2014, thanks to an academic mandate that sees the website partnered with hundreds of universities and academic partners around the world. In August, the website—a self-described “stock market for politics”—reported record trading activity over speculation about who Joe Biden would select as his vice presidential nominee.
“This is the busiest time we’ve ever had in terms of eyes on the site and people wanting to participate,” says Will Jennings, PredictIt’s head of public engagement. The website now has between 110,000 to 120,000 “funded accounts,” including up to 1,000 highly active users “who treat this as a part-time to full-time job” in terms of their trading volume, Jennings says.
PredictIt remains highly regulated and constrained by the terms of its agreement with the CFTC: Users can’t trade more than $850 on an individual bet, and there can be no more than 5,000 traders with positions in a given “market” (i.e. the winner of the presidential election, the party that will control the U.S. Senate, etc.). But Jennings considers the growth of PredictIt’s platform, which allows traders to buy and sell “shares” in a given outcome, as part of a trend toward the “decentralization of punditry” when it comes to forecasting future events.
“Our media environment is too chaotic to keep up with. The world is getting more complex, and people are going to keep looking for better, more responsive ways to track risk,” he notes. With mainstream media sources surrounded by more public skepticism than ever, prediction markets are part of an emerging tendency to “trust the crowd” rather than relying on polling and other traditional means of gauging public opinion.
Jason Trost, founder and CEO of London-based betting exchange Smarkets, compared the effectiveness of prediction markets to Wikipedia and noted how crowdsourcing can prove an efficient, accurate means of gaining a perspective on events. “It’s fascinating how a diverse group of unrelated people can together very quickly synthesize information, and prediction markets are the same thing,” he says. “Different traders with different perspectives are coming together in real time.” (The most valuable “lifeline” on the popular quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, according to Trost, is the Ask the Audience poll.)
In the U.K., Smarkets has taken more than $11 million in wagers on the U.S. presidential election to date, and the company is able to parlay its betting data to offer probabilities on all sorts of U.S. political results. To that end, the company’s ambitions extend well beyond recreational gambling. “We are trying to turn event trading, including politics and sports, into an asset class,” Trost says, describing his vision for Smarkets as “a real-time, short-term insurance market” where investors can “hedge out [their] exposure” to various outcomes.
Smarkets has plenty of company vying to shape the future of political betting markets. New York–based BallStreet Trading, a free-to-play online prediction market primarily focused on live sports, has also offered odds on a wide variety of political outcomes—from events during the presidential debates to whether another round of economic stimulus measures will arrive before the election. BallStreet plans to offer up to a dozen unique political markets on Election Day, according to founder and CEO Scott San Emeterio, who also believes there’s an appetite for predictive election data beyond “conventional polling.”
“I think prediction markets have a way of cutting through the noise,” San Emeterio says, adding that it’s important to factor a given platform’s audience in evaluating the data being fed into it. (BallStreet’s traders, for instance, survey as leaning “more right,” according to San Emeterio, meaning “there’s obviously a bias” at play.) In another four years and beyond, he believes that “election wagering will be a much bigger part of the conversation”—particularly if the polls once again prove way wide of the market in predicting the winner of the presidential election.
“When you look at polling four years ago, it couldn’t have been more wrong,” he says. “If Trump wins again, then we’re asking the same questions.”
While polls may erroneously indicate that one candidate or issue tends to have more support than others, prediction markets work completely differently in reflecting the likelihood of a result occurring—providing an arguably more nuanced, open-ended perspective in an increasingly unpredictable political environment.
“Right now, according to our market, Biden has a 70% chance of winning,” Smarkets’ Trost noted last week. “But if Trump wins, it’s not that our market was wrong—it’s that Trump had a 30% chance to win, and it happened. It’s like a 30% chance of rain.”


fortune--2020-10-21--Snapchat cofounders share $2.7 billion windfall

Snap Inc.’s co-founders got richer by billions of dollars in just a few hours, after the company reported better-than-expected results as the coronavirus pandemic boosted usage of its app.
Shares soared as much as 25% to $35.57 in late New York trading Tuesday after the owner of the popular Snapchat mobile app said sales jumped 52% to $678.7 million in the third quarter, with 249 million daily active users. The gains lifted the fortunes of Snap’s co-founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, by $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, taking them to $6.9 billion and $7.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Spiegel has pocketed over $200 million from Snap stock sales during 2020, benefiting from the record prices. The sales were made between January and September as part of a trading plan adopted by Spiegel, according to SEC filings. Snap shares have climbed 74% this year.
Wealth accumulation in the tech world has been eye-popping during the pandemic as the shift of everything from work, shopping, schooling and entertainment online has boosted demand for digital services. Zoom Video Communication Inc.’s Eric Yuan added $6.6 billion to his net worth in just one day last month, and Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, saw his fortune swell by $75 billion in 2020 to $190 billion.
Snap, whose Snapchat is used to send photos and videos that disappear within seconds, said its net loss narrowed to $200 million, or 14 cents a share. The company posted profit of 1 cent a share excluding some costs, beating the 5 cent loss that analysts predicted. If the positive advertising trends continue, fourth-quarter revenue may jump 47% to 50% from the same period last year, Snap added.


fortune--2020-10-21--Introducing Fortune’s 2020 Most Powerful Women International list

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! Canada breaks its own banking glass ceiling, D.C. enacts new education requirements for childcare workers, and we unveil Fortune’s 2020 Most Powerful Women International list. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Meet the Most Powerful Women in the world. On Monday, Fortune published the 2020 Most Powerful Women list featuring female executives based in the United States. Today, we introduce you to the 50 most powerful women in business elsewhere in the world.
For this list too we shook up the methodology to reflect the unprecedented crises sweeping the globe this year—the pandemic, economic turmoil, and climate change. Fortune‘s MPW list was founded two decades ago on four metrics: the size and health of a woman’s business, the arc of her career, and her societal and cultural influence. This year we considered not just how much power a woman had amassed, but how she’s using it to shape the world around her.
The women at the very top of the list reflect that new criteria. At No. 1, GlaxoSmithKline CEO Emma Walmsley has directed many of her drug company’s resources to the fight against COVID-19 (all while keeping up her thriving pharma business). Ping An, the massive insurer No. 2 Jessica Tan co-leads, played a pivotal role in responding to China’s outbreak.
The women hail from 21 countries, and there are a whopping 17 newcomers on the list, many of whom were tapped to lead companies in the midst of turnaround efforts. Take our new No. 7, for instance. Martina Merz joined the supervisory board of Thyssenkrupp, the storied but troubled German conglomerate, in December 2018 and became interim CEO last October after the previous chief executive was ousted after 14 months. She won the job on a permanent basis in April after selling the group’s most profitable elevator business for $18.9 billion and capturing the support of shareholders who’d previously been at odds: the Krupp family foundation and activist investment funds.
Merz’s work continues, as does that of all the women on our list as they face a business climate unlike any other. You can learn more about what they’re up against—and what they’ve achieved so far—here.
Erika Fry and Claire Zillman
erika.fry@fortune.com, claire.zillman@fortune.com
@ErikaFry, @clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Clean-up job. Fortune's Phil Wahba profiles Linda Rendle, the new CEO of Clorox. Before she was named to the top job, Rendle developed a strategic plan for the company. Her foresight is coming in handy as the brand races to keep its flagship product on store shelves. Fortune
- College for childcare. Washington, D.C. now requires childcare workers to earn college degrees in an attempt to shift the workforce from being seen as babysitters to being treated as early childhood education professionals. Critics say the requirement places a burden on childcare workers, many of whom will have to take on debt without the prospect of higher wages. Washington Post
- Early divide. Women are more likely than men to say they plan to vote early rather than on Election Day, according to a NYT/Siena College poll. One possible explanation: men's lower level of concern about coronavirus. New York Times
- Whitman for Biden? Joe Biden's transition team is reportedly considering Meg Whitman, currently CEO of Quibi, as a possible Republican cabinet member. The once-common bipartisan olive branch appointment is likely to anger progressives; President Trump did not continue the tradition by naming a Democrat to any post. Politico
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Laurentian Bank of Canada named former Scotiabank EVP, global business payments Rania Llewellyn CEO; she will be the first woman to lead one of Canada's big banks. Valerie Jarrett joins Ralph Lauren's board of directors. Former Disney executive Salaam Coleman Smith joins Pinterest's board of directors. Claudia Eller will return as editor-in-chief of Variety; she was placed on leave after arguing with a critic of her newsroom's approach to diversity. She will now have a co-EIC, former business editor Cynthia Littleton. Mita Mallick, former head of diversity and cross cultural marketing at Unilever, joins Carta as head of equity, inclusion, and impact. Refinery29 promoted Chelsea Sanders to VP, brand innovation and strategic partnerships for Unbothered. Karen Mitchell Curran, Lisa Daniels, Deborah Ellinger, Tandra Jackson, and Mary Beth Vitale join the board of WomenCorporateDirectors Education and Development Foundation; the organization's new lead director and board chair is Camille Asaro.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Running start. The future of Kohl's will involve less fashion and more activewear, according to a new corporate plan the retailer unveiled after putting it on hold in March. "The Kohl’s store and brand is going to look and feel different," CEO Michelle Gass says. Fortune
- Rocky road. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is tackling election misinformation in the state. Her office will run digital campaigns attempting to help Colorado voters identify misinformation when they see it. New York Times
- Star power. How did Eva Longoria become one of Hollywood's fiercest activists—fighting for women, for Latinos, and appearing at the Democratic National Convention three elections in a row? This piece charts her rise as a leader in entertainment and beyond: Washington Post
ON MY RADAR
Even the most successful women pay a big price in the pandemic NPR
Vanity Fair Italy and Vanity Fair U.S. collaborate for the first time Condé Nast
'They just get it’: How women in MLB found support in a group text New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"I had to sing those songs or I was going to die."
-Linda Ronstadt on recording Mexican songs. Record executives had resisted her attempts to engage with her heritage in her music.


fortune--2020-10-22--This mining company is sitting on the world’s biggest deposit of gold

Polyus PJSC, Russia’s largest gold producer, said its untapped Sukhoi Log deposit in Siberia holds the world’s biggest reserves.
An audit showed Sukhoi Log has 40 million ounces of proven reserves as measured by international JORC standards, with an average gold content of 2.3 grams per ton, Chief Executive Officer Pavel Grachev said. That means the field—accounting for more than a quarter of Russian gold reserves—is bigger than Seabridge Gold Inc.’s KSM Project in Canada and Donlin Gold in Alaska.
“The estimate of the reserves is an important milestone in development of the field,” Grachev said in an interview in Moscow.
Sukhoi Log, located in the isolated Irkutsk region of Siberia, was discovered by Soviet geologists in 1961 and studied in the 1970s. The government had long considered offloading the deposit, and in 2017 sold the field in an auction to Polyus and a state partner, which the mining company later bought out.
Polyus said earlier this year that it would focus on smaller projects and reducing its debt ratio in the coming years before developing the field. The company plans to announce details on expected production and investment at Sukhoi Log once a pre-feasibility study is ready by year-end. It previously said that costs could reach $2.5 billion, with annual output totaling about 1.6 million ounces.
While developing giant deposits is typically a lengthy and costly process, the field may allow Polyus to boost annual output by at least 70%. Gold prices have rallied about 60% since the company purchased it, and reached a record in August as vast amounts of stimulus were pumped into economies to curb the damage from the coronavirus pandemic.
“We want to show that a project of this quality and scale can and should be carried out, taking into account the best environmental standards, despite the hard-to-reach location,” Grachev said.
More on Sukhoi Log:


fortune--2020-10-22--Target is setting up a reservations system to manage lines on peak holiday shopping days

While retailers typically love to see their stores mobbed—especially during the holidays—they are avoiding that like the plague this year.
Retailers from Walmart to Home Depot have been limiting the number of shoppers allowed at a time to facilitate social distancing. Target is taking that one step further by setting up an online reservation system to allow people to get dibs on a spot in a line before leaving their homes on busy shopping days in the holiday season, which is getting started in earnest now.
While Target has been one of retail’s big winners during the pandemic—comparable sales in the second quarter rose 24%, its best results ever—it has sought to manage crowds to avoid scaring away shoppers wary of COVID-19 and reducing staff exposure to the virus. Shoppers can visit target.com/line to see if there is a line at a store, and if so, secure a place in it. The retailer has given store workers tools to meter shopper traffic.
“As we get closer to the core holiday season, we want to make sure we’re being really proactive,” CEO Brian Cornell told reporters on a media call. “We want to make sure we are prepared in the event that there are any big lines in any individual store.”
Other tools Target is using include a new mobile payment option in its app that facilitates self-checkout without the need to touch the scanning device. Target has benefited enormously from the rollout of its curbside pickup service for online orders, where shoppers just drive up to a dedicated spot in the parking lot to retrieve their merchandise. Such orders rose eightfold last quarter over the year-earlier quarter. Target is now doubling the number of drive-up spots by adding 8,000 at its 1,900 or so stores.
As is the case with other retailers, Target has gotten off to an earlier start with its holiday deals, starting with a sales event that coincided with Amazon’s Prime Day. Walmart is opting for three separate, major sales events in November, rather than one big blowout around Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday to avoid overcrowding stores, a strategy followed by its close rival.
“We expect that guests will shop earlier, and it’s going to be an extended shopping season. We’re not expecting—and we’re not trying to drive—big shopping events like we have in the past,” said Cornell.


fortune--2020-10-22--Japan set to become the latest country targeting net-zero carbon emissions by 2050

According to Japanese media, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will use his first official policy address on Monday to set a target for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050—joining a growing list of governments targeting net zero and bringing the world’s fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The previous administration had said Japan would target an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, with vague notions of reaching complete carbon neutrality sometime thereafter. Suga’s new target will put Tokyo on track to match the EU and the U.K., both of which have pledged net-zero by 2050.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, , formally announced a bid to replace his boss Shinzo Abe, on Sept. 2, 2020. Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The 2050 deadline also sets Japan on a slightly shorter carbon-neutral course than the one China is on. Last month, President Xi Jinping announced China would hit net zero by 2060: the target deadline for “developing” economies.
On Wednesday, Boston Consulting Group reported it will cost Beijing $15 trillion over the next 30 years to meet Xi’s goal, or about 2% of the country’s annual GDP. It would also require China to wean itself completely off of coal by 2050.
Japan’s transition to net zero comes with its own complications. The world’s third largest economy is also the world’s fourth largest electricity consumer per capita. Once a pioneer in nuclear power, the Fukushima disaster of 2011 spooked Japan away from the clean energy. Nuclear production dropped 64% and was replaced primarily by imports of natural gas.
Japan’s mountainous island topography also makes it relatively unsuitable for generating solar and onshore wind energy. Renewables account for just 7.6% of Japan’s power consumption. Tokyo’s current power policy looks to boost that figure to 24% by 2030, while reducing reliance on fossil fuels to 56%. But overcoming the country’s natural disadvantages will require more investment than Tokyo is currently willing to make.
According to the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank, Japan lags far behind its peers in budgeting for a green recovery from the pandemic. Tokyo provided a massive $2.1 trillion stimulus package to the economy—amounting to 40% of GDP—but only allocated $103 million of it to a “green transition.” For comparison, South Korea issued stimulus equivalent to 12% of its GDP with $25 billion earmarked for sustainable development.
Suga’s announcement will be a welcome move if and when it comes Monday, but setting a target is the easy bit. Hopefully as more countries set similar goals, the means to get there will become clearer too.
More below.
Eamon Barrett
— eamon.barrett@fortune.com
CARBON COPY
Shale sale
Pioneer Natural Resources is buying Parsley Energy in a $4.5 billion U.S. oil merger, valuing Parsley at nearly 8% above its closing value Monday. As oil demand dries up amid the pandemic—perhaps never to fully return—mergers are vital for the survival of independent drillers.
Return to sea
The Philippines has resumed oil and gas explorations in the South China Sea, ending a six-year moratorium on exploration in the disputed waters. The moratorium was issued to ease tensions with China, which claims large swathes of the sea as its own, but political wrangling over the seas continues. In July, Manilla said it would give up its territorial dispute in exchange for priority access to Chinese-developed COVID-19 vaccines.
Reefer
HSBC and the Queensland government are buying “Reef Credits”—a new investment option that aims to protect the Great Barrier Reef. The tradeable credit system was spearheaded by Australian sustainable investment manager GreenCollar and pays landholders to ensure water quality.
Law makers
EU environment ministers are due to pass the draft European Climate Law on Friday, making the bloc’s commitment to carbon neutrality by 2050 legally binding. But Bloomberg reports the ministers will only sign a partial agreement, deferring on a key element that sets a stricter carbon emissions goal for 2030. That clause may not be signed until EU leaders meet at another summit in December.
Left to the future
In order to achieve global net zero carbon emissions by 2050, half of the reductions will rely on technology that doesn’t exist yet, says IEA head Fatih Birol in an interview with the FT. Carbon capture tech is one of the missing components. The other is hydrogen fuel, with Birol says enjoys “more universal support of all governments” than anything he has ever seen.
Above sea level
SpaceX is due to launch a satellite into orbit that can measures changes in sea level down to the millimeter. The satellite tech is a collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and will update maps of the oceans every 10 days.
Gold standard
Newmont, the world’s largest gold miner, plans to set a carbon emissions target consistent with the Paris Agreement—a first in the industry. The miner says it is currently creating a “zero emissions” mine in Canada that could serve as a blueprint for the rest of the company as it moves towards carbon neutrality.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
How one of the world’s biggest banks plans to tackle climate change by Daniel Pinto and Ashley Bacon
Dis-United States of electricity: Mapping America’s energy supplies by Nicolas Rapp and Brian O’Keefe
Facebook A.I. researchers push for a breakthrough in renewable energy storage by Jeremy Kahn
This electricity giant’s stock is booming as the corporate world gets serious about its ‘net zero’ goals by Katherine Dunn
In pursuit of ‘net zero,’ Spain’s Iberdrola bets big on America by Katherine Dunn
Tom Steyer thinks business is missing a big opportunity—and that Trump has done ‘nothing but whiff’ by Robert Hackett
CLOSING NUMBER
33%
According to estimates from Oxfam, only a third of financial donations pledged by rich nations to help developing economies deal with climate change are actually carried out. Oxfam reports that of an average $59.5 billion pledged between 2017 and 2018, as little as $19 billion was actually given as charity. Some 80% of climate finance was given as repayable loans.


fortune--2020-10-22--Some companies are thriving in the pandemic

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
A couple of stories on companies thriving during the pandemic for your consideration.
First, Clorox. COVID has been good to the company, as consumers scrambled for its disinfectant products. The famed wipes get snatched off shelves as quickly as they are put down, and I haven’t been able to find a bottle of my wife’s favorite Clorox/Tilex spray in six months. Sales in the quarter ended June 30 rose 22% from the previous year, and annual revenue hit $6.7 billion, up 8%. The company’s share price is up 42% since the first of the year. And the pollsters at Morning Consult put it at number six on their “Most Loved Brands” list, right after Netflix and before Amazon Prime.
How do you turn that pandemic-powered popularity into a perpetually better business? That’s the challenge that faces new CEO Linda Rendle. Fortune’s Phil Wahba does a deep dive into her challenge, available this morning here.
And second, Keurig Dr. Pepper. As the hot and cold drink businesses converge, this upstart is giving Coke and Pepsi a run for their money. In the 20-week period ended July 21, KDP grabbed 34.1% of the $1.4 billion increase in revenue for carbonated beverages, making it best-in-class at navigating the pandemic. And its ubiquitous coffee pods went through the roof. (We used more than a half dozen a day at my house while sheltering in place.)
KDP CEO Bob Gamgort told Fortune’s Shawn Tully that he hopes to thrive by embracing—rather than dreading—uncertainty. “Our rivals are rolling over and hoping the status quo returns,” he said. “It’s not returning.” You can read Tully’s piece here.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
European lockdowns
Ireland and the Czech Republic have become the first—and probably not the last—European countries to go back into national lockdown. The Irish government is being open about the fact that 150,000 people will likely lose their jobs as a result. The pandemic's second wave is hitting Europe hard, with 20 countries reporting record case numbers yesterday. Fortune
Asian outlook
The International Monetary Fund had been expecting Asia's pandemic-related economic contraction this year to be around 1.6%, but now it's updated that figure to a likely 2.2%. The IMF notes particularly sharp contractions in India, the Philippines and Malaysia—its forecast holds that India's economy will be decimated in the year ending March 31, 2021, with a contraction of 10.3%. CNBC
Airlines retreat
The IAG-owned airlines BA, Iberia and Vueling were going to run 40% of last year's schedule in the last quarter of this year, but the second wave of the pandemic hit bookings hard, so the carriers will now fly just 30% of last year's schedule in the quarter. IAG has also revealed losses of over €1 billion ($1.2 billion) last quarter. Financial Times
PayPal crypto
Big news in the cryptocurrency world: PayPal, one of the biggest beasts, will soon support virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin. As Fortune's David Z. Morris explains: "PayPal’s cryptocurrency service, at least at first, will be effectively limited to purchasing currencies through a third party, Paxos Crypto Brokerage, which will actually hold the private cryptographic keys controlling the crypto tokens." Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Farewell Quibi
We hardly knew you. "Our failure was not for lack of trying," said founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman to the smartphone-focused streaming service's unlucky employees and investors, as they announced its closure, a mere six months after launching. The duo decided to pull the plug now, so as to give investors as much of their capital back as possible, rather than dragging out the inevitable. Wall Street Journal
Deliberate infection
The U.K. is allowing a controversial COVID-19 vaccine trial to go ahead, where healthy young volunteers will be deliberately infected with the coronavirus. Many bioethicists have strong reservations about conducting these "challenge trials", though, especially where the relevant disease has no proven cure. In this case, the researchers say they will use Gilead's remdesivir as the "rescue drug"—but remdesivir does not have any significant impact on COVID-19 mortality. Fortune
Buckle up
If you're enjoying the market gyrations that are accompanying the deeply uncertain U.S. stimulus talks, you're going to love what comes next. As Fortune's Anne Sraders writes: "Market observers and strategists have been counseling clients on what a contested election might do to equities, and many dread what kind of volatility we’d see in the event of a dragged-out election decision. Some investors are also planning ahead, buying options and futures on a bet things will be volatile after Nov. 3." Fortune
Moon announcement
NASA has some exciting news to share about the Moon. It will announce "an exciting new discovery" on Monday, and whatever it is, it's something that "contributes to NASA’s efforts to learn about the Moon in support of deep space exploration." While on the subject of NASA, the agency has released some sweet footage of its OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft tagging the surface of asteroid Bennu, and it's also awarded the contract for lunar 4G (yes, really) to Finland's Nokia. Independent
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-10-22--National lockdowns return to Europe as COVID-19 numbers soar

Ireland and Czechia have become the first European countries to reenter national lockdown, as the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic begins to pummel the continent and small businesses stare bankruptcy in the face.
As of Thursday, people in Ireland have been urged to stay at home as much as possible for the next six weeks, venturing out to exercise only within a three-mile radius of their homes. Nonessential shops have to close, and restaurants and cafés can only be open for takeout and deliveries.
The Irish at least had a heads-up of a few days. The Czech lockdown was announced Wednesday: Until Nov. 3 at the earliest, nonessential shops must close, and “the free movement of persons throughout the Czech Republic is prohibited.”
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš apologized for the measures, which he acknowledged “will make life uncomfortable for businesses, employees, and our citizens.” He also apologized for having previously ruled out the possibility of a second lockdown “because I couldn’t imagine it happening.”
The rationale is clear. Czechia, also formally known as the Czech Republic, got off very lightly in the pandemic’s spring wave, with no more than several hundred daily cases at the time. On Wednesday, it recorded just shy of 15,000 new cases, and a daily death toll of 120; the worst day in the first wave saw just 18 losses.
Job losses
Ireland’s situation is different; so far, the second wave has been far less deadly than the first (with a peak daily death toll of 13 as compared with 214) but case numbers are mostly higher this time round, and there is a definite upward trend.
“We’re making a preemptive strike against the virus, acting before it’s too late,” said Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Monday, when the fresh lockdown was announced.
And nobody is trying to hide the economic fallout. Varadkar said around 150,000 people in Ireland would likely lose their jobs this week as a result of the new lockdown, which will cost the government around 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion). Ireland’s central bank chief, Gabriel Makhlouf, also said this week that the country is anticipating an economic “double whammy” from the coronavirus and the probable failure of the EU and the U.K. to agree a post-Brexit trade deal.
Across Europe, 55% of small- and medium-size businesses (SMEs) expect to go bust within the next year if their revenues do not improve, the consultancy McKinsey warned Thursday.
McKinsey surveyed over 2,200 SMEs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., and found 70% had lost revenues as a result of the pandemic, with Italian and Spanish firms being particularly badly hit. An average 14% of SMEs were having trouble staffing their operations, owing to workers being off sick or under quarantine. Just over a tenth expect to file for bankruptcy within six months.
Record number
Ireland and Czechia may be instituting the first national second-wave lockdowns in Europe, but other countries such as Italy, France, and the U.K. have brought in regional measures to tackle hotspots.
On Wednesday, 20 European countries—with the U.K., Italy, and Czechia topping the list—reported record infection numbers.
The arrival of the second wave has helped to depress markets in recent days, along with other factors such as the looming U.S. election and uncertainty over the viability of a new U.S. pandemic stimulus deal.
Also on Thursday, the airline giant IAG—owner of British Airways, Iberia, and Vueling—scaled back its schedules for the fourth quarter by around 25%. Having already lost 1 billion euros in the last quarter, it said demand was lower than it had hoped for.
“Recent overall bookings have not developed as previously expected due to additional measures implemented by many European governments in response to a second wave of COVID-19 infections, including an increase in local lockdowns and extension of quarantine requirements to travelers from an increasing number of countries,” said CFO Stephen Gunning in a statement.


fortune--2020-10-22--Participant who died in AstraZeneca trial had not been given vaccine

A participant who died during a trial of AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid-19 vaccine in Brazil hadn’t received the company’s shot, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
Brazil’s health authority Anvisa said it had been informed on Monday of the study volunteer’s death and had received a partial report from an international committee assessing the trial’s safety. That committee suggested the trial should continue, Anvisa said in a statement.
AstraZeneca, which is developing the vaccine with the University of Oxford, said it can’t comment on individual cases because of confidentiality and clinical trial rules. Oxford has no concerns about the safety of the vaccine trial after an independent and careful review, and Brazil’s regulators have recommended that it continue, university communications head Stephen Rouse said in statement.
AstraZeneca’s American depositary receipts fell as much as 3.3% in New York on Wednesday afternoon after word of the person’s death, but trimmed most of those losses in recent trading.
U.S. Trial Pause
A clinical trial of the vaccine in the U.S. has been on hold for more than a month. Studies were halted globally in September when a U.K. participant became ill, but have resumed in the U.K., Brazil, Japan, South Africa and India in recent weeks. While temporary pauses in vaccine studies are common, AstraZeneca and Oxford have faced pressure to disclose more information about the U.K. episode.
Japan’s Ministry of Health has requested details from AstraZeneca on the death in the Brazil trial, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said Thursday. The ministry continues to work with companies to ensure proper vaccine trials are taking place in Japan, he said.
Interruption of the U.S. trial raised concerns about the prospects of one of the world’s fastest-moving shots and highlighted the hurdles researchers face when developing a vaccine. Another vaccine maker, Johnson & Johnson, said earlier this month that it would pause its trial to investigate an illness in a study participant.
Both the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines are based on adenoviruses, cold germs that researchers have used in experimental therapies for decades, and the two paused trials have raised questions about the approach.
AstraZeneca told analysts in early October that it expected the U.S. study could resume this year and that global approval would be determined by results in tests outside the U.S.(Updates with comment from Japan’s Health Ministry in seventh paragraph.)
–With assistance from Riley Griffin and Lisa Du.


fortune--2020-10-22--Global stocks decline as stimulus talks drag on

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning. It’s shaping up to be another risk-off day as COVID cases spike, odds on a stimulus deal sink and election jitters intensify ahead of tonight’s big debate. Even Tesla’s knockout quarter is failing to lift tech stock futures.
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes are mostly in the red with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng the best of the bunch, clinging to 0.1% gain in afternoon trading.
are mostly in the red with the best of the bunch, clinging to gain in afternoon trading. Ant Group , aiming for a record-setting IPO , plans to set its Shanghai listing price next week (the Hong Kong leg hasn’t yet been determined), which means it will start trading just after Election Day.
, aiming for a , plans to set its Shanghai listing price next week (the Hong Kong leg hasn’t yet been determined), which means it will start trading just after Election Day. Shares in Cathay Pacific are down for a second straight day after the Hong Kong-based airline announced the layoffs of 8,500 positions and a big restructuring as the COVID crisis ravages its business.
Europe
The European bourses fell at the open. The Stoxx Europe 600 was down 0.6% two hours into the trading session.
fell at the open. The was down two hours into the trading session. A frightening number of Europe’s small and medium-sized businesses —more than half—fear they’ll go bust in the next year if revenues don’t pick up soon. The most precarious are in Spain, Italy and the U.K . An SME insolvency spike would decimate Europe’s labor market.
and —more than half—fear they’ll go bust in the next year if revenues don’t pick up soon. The most precarious are in and the . An SME insolvency spike would decimate Europe’s labor market. Speaking of grim stats… Spain (population: 47 million) is the first Western European country to top 1 million COVID cases. France and the U.K. are fast approaching that number as Europe’s second wave intensifies.
U.S.
U.S. futures point to another weak open. That’s after the stimulus trade fizzled on Wednesday afternoon. The Nasdaq has now closed in the red six out of the past seven sessions.
point to another weak open. That’s after the stimulus trade fizzled on Wednesday afternoon. The has now closed in the red six out of the past seven sessions. The on-again-off-again stimulus talks are adding all kinds of volatility to the markets these days. But there’s another cloud hanging over Washington that’s unnerving investors: Election Day uncertainty.
are adding all kinds of volatility to the markets these days. But there’s hanging over Washington that’s unnerving investors: Election Day uncertainty. Shares of Tesla were up 3.2% in pre-market trading after the EV maker posted big top- and bottom-line beats yesterday. Could a fifth straight profitable quarter be enough for S&P inclusion? A reminder: until now, Tesla’s profits haven’t come from selling cars.
Elsewhere
Gold is down, stuck around $1,920/ounce .
is down, stuck around . The dollar is up, climbing as equities fall.
is up, climbing as equities fall. Crude is flat, with Brent trading below $42/barrel.
***
Buzzworthy
V for Volatility
From peak to trough, the Dow fell 254 points yesterday. (Tuesday was even more volatile.) It could get worse.
On polls, politics and your portfolio
According to Jefferies, here are the sectors that stand to gain/lose from a Biden or Trump victory:
Stimulus, stimulus, stimulus
Two months before Christmas, American families are on the brink of an epic fiscal cliff. According to Goldman Sachs, 41% of households with student loans are skipping or reducing payments. A smaller number are staggering mortgage payments.
***
Postscript
It’s Thursday, which means all across the land there’s gnocchi on the menu.
School lunch menus are serious matters in Italy. There are certain dishes—think the dumpling shaped pasta, gnocchi (pronounced: nyy-OAK-ee)—that can only be served on Thursdays, thanks to some kitchen decree passed down a zillion years ago by the powerful nonne (grannies) lobby.
In a land of rule-breakers, nobody would dare question this.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I love gnocchi day.
Buon pranzo!
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's read
Bitcoin bulls. The price of Bitcoin surged yesterday to a two-month high after PayPal announced it would soon enable its users to buy the cryptocurrency on its app. The PayPal app will also work with Ether, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. This is leading to all kinds of bullish calls on how high the cryptocurrencies could soar in the coming weeks.
Cleaning up. 42-year-old Linda Rendl took over the reins as CEO last month of high-flying Clorox, up more than 40% YTD. Rendl spoke to Fortune's Phil Wahba about her plans to capitalize on staggering demand for the company's disinfectant products, and how this household mainstay became one of America's most beloved brands.
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a discount offer for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
Market candy
Quote of the day
With politics, everyone already has an opinion and some skin in the game, as they call it... It feels like a natural fit for gambling.
That's Brian Pempus, a betting industry expert at NJOnlineGambling.com, who explains to Fortune's Rey Mashayekhi why betting on the U.S. elections is poised to smash records this year.


fortune--2020-10-22--Tech veterans say pressure from social media users is key to shift business models and save society

Fourteen years ago, Roger McNamee was brought in by a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to help Facebook through a crisis. Successful in his mission, McNamee became both a trusted mentor of Zuckerberg’s over the next three years and a believer in Facebook and its capacity for good.
About a decade later, he began to feel quite differently about the social media platform.
“It was not until 2016 that I began to see things going on on Facebook that violated my values and caused me to realize something was really wrong,” says McNamee, a longtime tech investor and musician. “The Brexit referendum in the U.K. … was the first time when I realized that democracy was under threat. Because the business model, the culture, and the algorithms of Facebook could be used by bad people to harm innocent people or to undermine an election.”
On this episode of Fortune Brainstorm, a podcast about how technology is changing our lives, McNamee speaks with Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe about the danger social media poses to society and the path forward to ensuring that more damage is not done.
Specifically, McNamee takes issue with the platforms’ tendency to treat their user bases as if they are the product. That is, these companies make money by selling the attention of their users to third-party advertisers, which incentivizes social media platforms to behave in a troubling way, according to McNamee.
“The challenge we face today is that the business model of Internet platforms like Facebook, like Google, and like Twitter is based on grabbing our attention,” McNamee says. “And the way that they do that is to play on the elements of human psychology that we cannot resist, specifically, our sense of self-preservation, which is flight or fight. The content that does that best is hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.”
Sinan Aral, an MIT professor, agrees with McNamee, and he joins the podcast to discuss the current state of social media manipulation as well as why and how the incentive structure of these companies needs to be altered.
Without a financial impetus to change their practices, Aral argues, these platforms will never fully commit to policing themselves. Absent regulation, social media companies will keep engaging in behaviors that both grow their user bases and increase engagement with their products. Thus, either policymakers or the users themselves need to give the platforms reason to change, according to Aral, and he believes both parties recently have begun to do so.
“What’s happening now is that [social media platforms] are facing a backlash in the form of the #DeleteFacebook movement, followed by the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ movement, and the specter of real regulation coming down the pipe,” Aral says. “And they are recognizing that now they have an incentive to make changes in order to avoid some of the harmful outcomes that they might see from a backlash—either regulatory or mass exodus from social media.”
Toward the beginning of the episode, Lev-Ram and O’Keefe bring on Fortune tech reporter Danielle Abril to discuss what, if anything, social media companies learned from the 2016 election and whether or not misinformation will continue to plague the platforms in the lead-up to Election Day and beyond.
To hear more about how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among others, have played a part in the polarization of the U.S. and to what extent they appear willing to change, listen to the episode above.


fortune--2020-10-22--Investors in what could be world’s biggest IPO must  commit amid U.S. election uncertainty

Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co. is asking buyers of what could be the world’s biggest-ever initial public offering to commit to the deal just days before the U.S. presidential election.
The Chinese fintech giant will price the Shanghai portion of its dual listing on Oct. 27 and allow subscriptions on Oct. 29, it said in a prospectus published on Wednesday. The deadline for payments will be Nov. 2. Ant hasn’t yet spelled out dates for the Hong Kong leg of the IPO, but they’re expected to be similar.
While the company’s share sale is among the most hotly anticipated deals in years, the timeline will leave investors in a potentially precarious position: locked in during a pivotal week for global markets. Shares will almost certainly start trading only after the U.S. vote on Nov. 3, an event that could have big ramifications for both Ant’s overseas expansion plans and investor risk-appetite generally.
Ant won regulatory approval for its Shanghai listing on Wednesday, clearing the way for it to begin guaging investor demand for an IPO that could value the Hangzhou-based company at $280 billion or more. It’s planning to raise about $35 billion from the dual listing, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s record $29 billion sale last year, people familiar with the matter have said.
An Ant representative declined to comment.
The company will issue no more than 1.67 billion shares in China, equivalent to 5.5% of the total outstanding before the so-called greenshoe option, according to its prospectus on the Shanghai stock exchange. It will issue the same amount for its Hong Kong offering.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which was co-founded by Ma and currently owns about a third of Ant, has agreed to subscribe for 730 million of the company’s Shanghai shares, which will be listed under the ticker “688688,” according to the prospectus.
Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte, Temasek Holdings Plc and China’s $318 billion National Council for Social Security Fund are also planning to invest, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month.
That strong demand means Ant may fetch a valuation equivalent to Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. combined, despite concern that rising geopolitical risks could hamper the Chinese company’s international ambitions. Ant reported a 74% jump in gross profit to 69.5 billion yuan ($10.4 billion) from January to September, according to its prospectus.


fortune--2020-10-22--Former Apple design chief Jony Ive is working for Airbnb

Airbnb Inc. is hiring former Apple Inc. design chief Jony Ive and his new firm, LoveFrom, to work on projects with the home-sharing startup.
The San Francisco-based company, which is planning to go public later this year, on Wednesday said the multiyear deal will be a “special collaboration” that will see Ive and his firm help develop Airbnb’s internal design team. In a blog post announcing the move, Airbnb Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said he and Ive are longtime friends.
Airbnb has pushed design to differentiate itself in the online rental booking space. The company has its own typeface and highlights redesigns to its website and mobile apps. It also has a Backyard group within its Samara experimental product team that is developing homes. Ive’s expertise in product design could assist those efforts.
Subscribe to Business by Design , a weekly newsletter exploring design’s transformative influence on industry and enterprise.
At Apple, Ive was responsible for the design of several generations of the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch and was known as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s “spiritual partner.” He was also key in the design of Apple’s new Cupertino, California campus and redesigns to retail stores.
Ive has also pursued personal projects, designing traditional cameras, a diamond ring that sold for over $250,000, a modern desk, Christmas tree and bathroom appliances. Ive launched his new company, LoveFrom, with Marc Newson, another veteran designer who worked on a few projects at Apple.
Airbnb did not disclose the financial details of its agreement with Ive. He isn’t the first former Apple designer to partner with Airbnb. Miklu Silvanto, who worked under Ive at Apple for years, was the head of interaction and industrial design for Airbnb’s Samara group for about a year. He left in April.
Ive left Apple last year, and Airbnb is one of the first companies to say it’s working with him. Apple previously said it would continue collaborating with Ive via his new company. Angela Ahrendts, who also left Apple last year after running its retail operations, is on Airbnb’s board of directors.


fortune--2020-10-22--Ripple releases shortlist of 5 countries it might move to if U.S. regulation remains unclear

Ripple Labs Inc. has formed a shortlist of countries to move to should the blockchain payment services company leave the U.S. amid a lack of regulatory clarity there, its top executive said.
Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates are potential destinations, Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview.
“The common denominator between all of them is that their governments have created a clarity about how they would regulate different digital assets, different cryptocurrencies,” he said.
Subscribe to The Ledger for expert weekly analysis on fintech’s big stories, delivered free to your inbox.
Speaking in a separate interview with Bloomberg Television, Garlinghouse said U.S. authorities are unclear on the status of cryptocurrencies, with different opinions over whether they are a commodity, a currency, a property or a security.
“Regulation shouldn’t be a guessing game,” he said. “Ripple is definitely a proud U.S. company and we’d like to stay in the U.S. if that was possible, but we also need regulatory clarity in order for us to invest and grow the business.”
Garlinghouse said the coronavirus pandemic has given a “tailwind” to cryptocurrency markets because central banks have been printing fiat currency, which is “inflationary on some level.” A move away from cash is also helping, he said.
Ripple offers payments and settlement services through the virtual currency known as XRP and other platforms.


fortune--2020-10-22--Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro undercuts the Chinese COVID vaccine his country is betting on

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro blasted a Chinese coronavirus vaccine being tested in the country just a day after his health minister said it would be distributed nationwide.
Eduardo Pazuello, the third official leading the health ministry since the pandemic began, had announced a deal to purchase the Coronavac vaccine that’s being developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd. in partnership with Sao Paulo’s Butantan Institute — under the watch of Governor Joao Doria, one of Bolsonaro’s main political enemies.
The agreement prompted a flurry of negative comments from Bolsonaro’s more ideological supporters who oppose the purchase of a vaccine from China. On Wednesday morning, the president took to social media to publicly disavow the deal.
“The Brazilian people WON’T BE ANYONE’S GUINEA PIG,” he wrote on his Facebook and Twitter pages, adding that billions can’t be spent on medication that is still being tested. “My decision is to not acquire the aforementioned vaccine.”
The incident underscores Bolsonaro’s conflicted relationship with China, Brazil’s biggest trading parter. After heavily criticizing the Asian country during the campaign trail in 2018, he tried to warm up to Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a trip last year. But just a few months ago, lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, his son, blamed the coronavirus pandemic on the “Chinese dictatorship.” The president has also made his alliance with U.S. President Donald Trump a central part of his foreign policy.
Commenting earlier this week on a statement by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the U.S. and Brazil should reduce dependence on Chinese imports due to security concerns, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian emphasized that China and Brazil are “comprehensive strategic partners.”
“Since the beginning of this year, despite the negative impact of the epidemics, China-Brazil practical cooperation has continued to grow,” Zhao said.
The Coronavac episode provided Bolsonaro with an opportunity to hit two of his main targets at once. Calling it “Joao Doria’s Chinese vaccine,” the president said his government won’t buy any vaccine before the health ministry and regulator Anvisa approve it. Yet the federal government has already set aside 2 billion reais ($357 million) for a deal to produce a shot being developed by AstraZeneca in partnership with Oxford University, which is in a similar trial stage.
Later on Wednesday, Brazil’s health authority Anvisa said it had received information that a Brazilian participant in the AstraZeneca trial had died. A person familiar with the matter said the volunteer hadn’t received an actual dose of the vaccine, and the company said trials would continue.
Backtracking
The decision to sign a preliminary agreement to acquire 46 million doses of the Butantan-Sinovac vaccine was made during a meeting between Doria and Pazuello on Tuesday. The purchase would only be made after regulator Anvisa had approved the medication, according to a statement issued after the meeting.
After Bolsonaro’s intervention, Doria asked the president leave aside political fights and focus on the pandemic. Other governors weighed in, with leaders of the states of Ceara and Espirito Santo among those who used Twitter to say decisions on vaccines should not involve ideology or electoral issues.
Infected Minister
Bolsonaro and a handful of his ministers have already been infected with the virus. Pazuello confirmed Wednesday that he’s also tested positive for Covid-19.
Brazil’s response to the virus has been marred by infighting and a mish-mash of conflicting measures. Two of Bolsonaro’s health ministers exited this year over disagreements on his handling of the pandemic, including lockdown measures and the use of unproven treatments. Doria and Bolsonaro have also publicly bickered about everything from social distancing to the use of face masks and whether vaccines should be obligatory or not throughout the tumultuous year.
Municipal elections next month have added more tension to the public debate.
Coronavac
Earlier this week, the Sao Paulo government said that the phase III trial for Coronavac had shown the vaccine was the safest available thus-far, though it’s efficacy still needs to be proven.
Sinovac’s vaccine relies on an inactive version of the novel coronavirus to teach human immune systems to recognize and destroy the real thing. After completing early human testing in China, the company has launched the final phase of human testing in Brazil and Indonesia.
Brazil has been one of the hardest-hit countries by the virus, with the world’s third-most cases and second-most deaths.


fortune--2020-10-22--Gilead just got the first FDA coronavirus treatment approval, but there are still problems

Good afternoon, readers.
We’ve written extensively about the emerging therapeutics against the coronavirus. One of the earliest contenders was remdesivir, an antiviral from biotech giant Gilead. It’s not a save-all; but it did just score a coveted distinction as the first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved treatment to tackle COVID-19.
Up until this point, remdesivir (which will now carry the brand name Veklury) was under an “emergency use authorization” that can significantly cap its market reach. Now, according to the FDA, it’s been approved outright “for use in adult and pediatric patients 12 years of age and older and weighing at least 40 kilograms (about 88 pounds).”
“Previously authorized by the FDA for emergency use to treat COVID-19, Veklury is now the first and only approved COVID-19 treatment in the
United States.”
Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day reflected those comments in his own statements. “It is incredible to be in the position today, less than one year since the earliest case reports of the disease now known as COVID-19, of having an FDA-approved treatment in the U.S. that is available for all appropriate patients in need,” he said.
The practicality of how that will work out is a different issue. Gilead’s drug is meant for the sickest patients and those who have been hospitalized. While the approval presents progress, it’s going to take a lot more time to determine what this means for the health of Americans at large.
Gilead’s stock was up more than 3 percent after hours.
Read on for the day’s news, and see you next week.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Healthcare ransomware attacks are on the rise. When someone breaches your personal health information, it's, well, personal. In our digital age it's become a growing problem and according to a new study these kinds of attacks doubled in the third quarter of 2020. And, by the way, this is big money. "The average ransom fees demanded to return data files is $1 million to $5 million per hit. University of California San Francisco paid $1.14 million to ransomware attackers in June," according to the report, which also noted that healthcare organizations were the most willing to pay ransom due to the sensitivity of their consumer base. (Becker's Health IT)
INDICATIONS
Moderna hits a major COVID vaccine goal. Upstart biotech Moderna, a company which has no approved treatments yet remains one of the main contenders for a coronavirus vaccine, has reportedly completed enrollment for its candidate. This particular vaccine is one of the four most promising potential treatments along with those from companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. (CNN)
THE BIG PICTURE
What to watch out for in tonight's presidential debate... on health care. President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will face off in a few hours in the last debate of the election season. It's clear we have no idea how it will turn out. Such is the nature of our times. But health care may loom large, given the Trump administration's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the midst of a pandemic and a likely Supreme Court decision on that very issue in the next few months.
REQUIRED READING
76% of American CEos say they may shrink office space, by Lance Lambert
The troubles of misinfomation, by Sarah Kreps & Douglas Kriner
Brand loyalty is changing due to the pandemic, by Chris Morris


fortune--2020-10-22--Living with uncertainty: How leaders at American Airlines, Salesforce, Slack, and Diageo are moving

Living with uncertainty: How leaders at American Airlines, Salesforce, Slack, and Diageo are moving past crisis mode

Months into the pandemic, senior business leaders are trying to move their companies beyond crisis mode—which might be easier if they had a clearer end in sight.
“We’re past the real crisis mode, [but] we’ve just come to recognize that unevenness is going to be here to stay with us for quite some time,” Julie Hamilton, chief commercial officer at Diageo, said on Thursday. “We’re just going to have to live with uncertainty and unevenness, especially in a global business.”
Hamilton was one of several senior executives speaking at a Fortune Most Powerful Women virtual event on Thursday, focusing on how their companies have—and haven’t—moved past the first panicked weeks of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.
She was joined by at least one executive whose company is still reeling from the fallout: Alison Taylor, chief customer officer of American Airlines, which on Thursday said it had lost $2.4 billion in the third quarter (and $6.7 billion so far this year). American has also furloughed 19,000 employees this month, after its federal stimulus aid expired, including some on Taylor’s team.
“It’s been tough. But we needed to do it for the good of the other 130,000 [employees] who are left to run the airline,” she said, adding that American is hoping it can learn from “what has been the hardest crisis we’ve ever been through and hope will ever go through.”
Taylor says that the pandemic and its massive shutdown of air travel has made American “much quicker and more agile,” and has sped up its implementation of new technology, including passenger-screening biometrics and touchless kiosks for checking luggage. The airline installed more than 2,100 such kiosks in 295 airports in a three-week period this year, Taylor said—whereas “if we had done that last year, it probably would have taken many, many months.”
She was not the only executive to find silver linings—or outright positives—in the pandemic’s impact on her company. Christina Kosmowski, vice president and global head of customer success and services at Slack, says the messaging company saw its users increase by 30%, from 10 million to 13 million, over two weeks in March.
As employers across the nation sent workers home and switched to all-remote work, Slack reaped some benefits: “Many customers who have been lagging in their digital transformations are expediting that,” Kosmowski said, adding that Amazon alone added 1 million employees to Slack within a matter of weeks.
But the crisis has also permanently reshaped Slack’s expectations for its own employees and internal routines. Employees will be allowed to work remotely indefinitely, even after the pandemic, and Kosmowski says that Slack is rethinking its hiring practices and meeting culture.
“The office won’t be there to have meetings of five to 10 people. It will be there to do individual work or host large experiences, like internal conferences,” she said. “And if we were to have a meeting in the office, we would require everybody to call in from their individual computers on Zoom, so it won’t feel like people who are remote are at a disadvantage for not being in the room.”
The pandemic and its accelerated digital transformation are also creating a shift in the types of jobs and talent that companies need, said Stephanie Buscemi, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Salesforce.
Many companies, across industries, have been “understaffed and underserved on data scientists, decision science, and digitally-savvy marketers,” she said. “It’s not even new—they’ve known they need it for years—but now it’s a must-have…Everyone’s having to either hire or reskill workers really quickly.”
Still, Buscemi agreed with the other executives that, much as everyone would like to move on from the terrifying uncertainty of early 2020, executives will have to continue navigating “a crisis across many fronts.”
“It’s not only a health crisis; we still have a climate crisis; we have an economic crisis. Candidly, we have a leadership crisis going on,” she said. “Some things have been stabilized, and people are figuring out how to get back to work, [but] I don’t think we are out of the crisis.”


fortune--2020-10-22--Cybersecurity company McAfee shares fall in return to market

McAfee shares fell 6.5% in their trading debut after a $740 million initial public offering in a muted return to the public markets after a decade.
The cybersecurity software starting trading Thursday at $18.60, below its $20 IPO price. The shares never rose above $19.50 and closed at $18.70, giving it a market value of about $8.1 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings. McAfee and its existing investors sold 37 million shares after marketing them for $19 to $22 each.
McAfee CEO Peter Leav said in a phone interview that the company now sees 8,600 threats every minute as well as a 70% increase in mobile malware attempted attacks. The Covid-19 pandemic has also led to more cybercrime, with employees around the world working from home on often less-secure networks.
“Unfortunately what’s happening in the world is also benefiting the cyber criminals,” Leav said. “Cyber criminals are not just doing the traditional phishing expeditions, they’re using Covid as a lure.”
Big gains
Software IPOs are one of the biggest and best-performing segments on U.S. exchanges this year. Excluding McAfee, they have accounted for 11% of the $128 billion raised and have climbed 90% from their offer prices on a weighted average basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares to an average increase of 56% for all other listings, excluding special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.
Enterprise software maker Snowflake, which raised $3.86 billion including so-called greenshoe shares in September, is the biggest U.S. IPO this year for a company other than a SPAC. It also had one of the best trading debuts of 2020, rising 112% on its first day.
McAfee’s lackluster debut was proceeded by that of Datto, which gained only 0.4% in its trading debut Wednesday after raising $594 million.
Based in San Jose, Calif., McAfee was acquired by Intel in a 2010 deal. In 2016, Intel announced that it had signed an agreement to transfer a 51% stake in McAfee to the investment firm TPG for $1.1 billion. The transaction valued the spun-off company at $4.2 billion, including debt.
TPG, Intel
Current backers listed in McAfee’s prospectus include TPG, Intel, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte and the private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
For the 26 weeks ended June 27, McAfee had net income of $31 million on revenue of $1.4 billion, according to its filings. That compared with a loss of $146 million on revenue of $1.3 billion for the comparable period last year.
The offering was led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., TPG Capital BD, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. McAfee’s shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Select market under the symbol MCFE.


fortune--2020-10-22--From billion-dollar valuation to bust: Chinese tech unicorn now may be worth just over $1,000

Renrenche was one of China’s hottest tech unicorns backed by investors including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Now the car website could sell itself for a little over $1,000.
The Beijing-based startup—which had a pre-money valuation of $1.4 billion in a financing round just two years ago—has a preliminary plan to sell its major assets to 58.com Inc. for HK$10,000 ($1,290), according to people familiar with the matter. China’s online classified ad leader will take over Renrenche’s Hong Kong entity, while offering at least $4 million in loans to its mainland operations, said the people, asking not to be identified because the transaction is private. The parties have yet to finalize the deal and may not proceed with it, the people said.
A representative for Renrenche declined to comment but said the contents of an emailed query sent to the company was inaccurate, without elaborating.
The deal may help bail out the car trading platform, which ran into financing troubles amid the unraveling of China’s once-booming sharing economy. Founded in 2014, Renrenche connects users seeking to trade second-hand vehicles, taking a smaller cut than offline dealers. Its backers include ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, as well as venture firms like Shunwei Capital and Redpoint China. In 2018, it completed a $300 million investment round led by Goldman Sachs, according to a company statement.
But competition with rivals like Uxin Ltd. and Softbank Vision Fund-backed Guazi.com—coupled with business disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic—quickly dried up funding for Renrenche. One of its creditors, Argyle Street Management Ltd., is seeking a winding-up order in a court in the Cayman Islands, where Renrenche is registered, on the grounds that the company was unable to pay back roughly $15 million in debts, according to a court filing viewed by Bloomberg News.
That petition may complicate the transaction with 58.com. The deal was rejected by some investors but won key support from Tencent and Didi during a shareholder meeting last week, according to the people. Investors are still looking into other options to resolve Renrenche’s liquidity crisis, said the people.
Renrenche’s representative was responding to an email that included questions on the HK$10,000 offer by 58.com as well as the loans, and that the deal had won backing from Tencent and Didi. The representative didn’t specify what was inaccurate. 58.com didn’t respond to requests for comment, while spokespeople at Tencent and Didi declined to comment.
If the firesale goes through, it would mark one of the more spectacular startup failures since China’s internet boom kicked off a decade ago. Renrenche’s rapid fall echoed high-profile failures when mini-bubbles popped, like Mobike or Ofo in bike-sharing, but those have been rarities given sustained growth in smartphone and internet adoption.
58.com, often billed as China’s answer to Craigslist, also counts Tencent among its backers. In June, the online classified portal agreed to a buyout deal at about an $8.7 billion value, joining a slew of Chinese firms to ditch their U.S listings.


fortune--2020-10-22--When second stimulus checks could arrive if Congress reaches a deal

The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi look like they’re on the cusp of making an economic-aid deal that would send Americans a second round of $1,200 stimulus checks.
“I think we’re just about there,” Pelosi told reporters on Thursday after meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
If the White House and Democratic leaders reach a deal, they’d then face an uphill battle to convince Senate Republicans—who are less eager to pass a stimulus package in the $2 trillion ballpark—to support it. But even then, Pelosi said Thursday, she’s not sure it could be signed into law before the election.
Indeed, as Republican senators voice qualms with the current negotations, arguing that the White House is conceding too much per the Washington Post, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said only that he would bring a deal to the Senate floor “at some point,” which could very well come after the election.
If the last go-around is any indication, the first of the checks would start to be deposited within two weeks of the legislation passing. After the passage of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act on March 27, Americans started to receive their stimulus checks as early as the week of April 13.
Simply put: We’ve likely reached the point where stimulus checks wouldn’t go out until after the election.
White House officials have suggested that the distribution of the checks could be sped up given the system is already in place—but even that has its limits. Back in the spring, millions of Americans, including those on Social Security, saw their checks delayed until they provided additional information. Since this payment would be based on the same tax year, it’s unlikely more information will need to be verified—at least among those who received their first round of payments.
Both parties support sending a second round of stimulus checks, which would be nearly identical to the first round. The direct payments sent in the spring were worth as much as $1,200 for individuals or $2,400 for married couples, plus $500 for each qualifying child. That amount would decrease for adjusted gross income above $75,000 per individual or $150,000 per qualified couple. And the checks phase out for individuals earning above $99,000, head of household filers with one child above $146,500, and joint filers with no children at $198,000.
What’s holding up the next economic aid package? Earlier this week Democratic leaders were seeking an economic stimulus bill worth at least $2.2 trillion, while the White House was at $1.9 trillion. On Thursday, Pelosi said the two sides are closer now; however, she didn’t disclose the numbers.
Their main areas of disagreement—outside of the total package size—Pelosi said Thursday are on items like a steep increase in federal aid to state and local governments, which Democrats support, and COVID-19 lawsuit immunity for businesses, which Republicans support.