Tag: Tech

The Tech Chilly Warfare’s ‘Most Difficult Machine’ That’s Out of China’s Attain

Post author By
Post date July 5, 2021

SAN FRANCISCO — President Biden and many lawmakers in Washington are worried these days about computer chips and China’s ambitions with the foundational technology.

But a massive machine sold by a Dutch company has emerged as a key lever for policymakers — and illustrates how any country’s hopes of building a completely self-sufficient supply chain in semiconductor technology are unrealistic.

The machine is made by ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven. Its system uses a different kind of light to define ultrasmall circuitry on chips, packing more performance into the small slices of silicon. The tool, which took decades to develop and was introduced for high-volume manufacturing in 2017, costs more than $150 million. Shipping it to customers requires 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks and three Boeing 747s.

The complex machine is widely acknowledged as necessary for making the most advanced chips, an ability with geopolitical implications. The Trump administration successfully lobbied the Dutch government to block shipments of such a machine to China in 2019, and the Biden administration has shown no signs of reversing that stance.

Manufacturers can’t produce leading-edge chips without the system, and “it is only made by the Dutch firm ASML,” said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which has concluded that it would take China at least a decade to build its own similar equipment. “From China’s perspective, that is a frustrating thing.”

ASML’s machine has effectively turned into a choke point in the supply chain for chips, which act as the brains of computers and other digital devices. The tool’s three-continent development and production — using expertise and parts from Japan, the United States and Germany — is also a reminder of just how global that supply chain is, providing a reality check for any country that wants to leap ahead in semiconductors by itself.

That includes not only China but the United States, where Congress is debating plans to spend more than $50 billion to reduce reliance on foreign chip manufacturers. Many branches of the federal government, particularly the Pentagon, have been worried about the U.S. dependence on Taiwan’s leading chip manufacturer and the island’s proximity to China.

A study this spring by Boston Consulting Group and the Semiconductor Industry Association estimated that creating a self-sufficient chip supply chain would take at least $1 trillion and sharply increase prices for chips and products made with them.

That goal is “completely unrealistic” for anybody, said Willy Shih, a management professor at Harvard Business School who studies supply chains. ASML’s technology “is a great example of why you have global trade.”

The situation underscores the crucial role played by ASML, a once obscure company whose market value now exceeds $285 billion. It is “the most important company you never heard of,” said C.J. Muse, an analyst at Evercore ISI.

Created in 1984 by the electronics giant Philips and another toolmaker, Advanced Semiconductor Materials International, ASML became an independent company and by far the biggest supplier of chip-manufacturing equipment that involves a process called lithography.

Using lithography, manufacturers repeatedly project patterns of chip circuitry onto silicon wafers. The more tiny transistors and other components that can be added to an individual chip, the more powerful it becomes and the more data it can store. The pace of that miniaturization is known as Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the chip giant Intel.

In 1997, ASML began studying a shift to using extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, light. Such light has ultrasmall wavelengths that can create much tinier circuitry than is possible with conventional lithography. The company later decided to make machines based on the technology, an effort that has cost $8 billion since the late 1990s.

The development process quickly went global. ASML now assembles the advanced machines using mirrors from Germany and hardware developed in San Diego that generates light by blasting tin droplets with a laser. Key chemicals and components come from Japan.

Peter Wennink, ASML’s chief executive, said a lack of money in the company’s early years had led it to integrate inventions from specialty suppliers, creating what he calls a “collaborative knowledge network” that innovates quickly.

“We were forced to not do ourselves what other people do better,” he said.

ASML built on other international cooperation. In the early 1980s, researchers in the United States, Japan and Europe began considering the radical shift in light sources. The concept was taken up by a consortium that included Intel and two other U.S. chip makers, as well as Department of Energy labs.

ASML joined in 1999 after more than a year of negotiations, said Martin van den Brink, ASML’s president and chief technology officer. Other partners of the company included the Imec research center in Belgium and another U.S. consortium, Sematech. ASML later attracted big investments from Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to help fund development.

That development was made trickier by the quirks of extreme ultraviolet light. Lithography machines usually focus light through lenses to project circuit patterns on wafers. But the small EUV wavelengths are absorbed by glass, so lenses won’t work. Mirrors, another common tool to direct light, have the same problem. That meant the new lithography required mirrors with complex coatings that combined to better reflect the small wavelengths.

So ASML turned to Zeiss Group, a 175-year-old German optics company and longtime partner. Its contributions included a two-ton projection system to handle extreme ultraviolet light, with six specially shaped mirrors that are ground, polished and coated over several months in an elaborate robotic process that uses ion beams to remove defects.

Generating sufficient light to project images quickly also caused delays, Mr. van den Brink said. But Cymer, a San Diego company that ASML bought in 2013, eventually improved a system that directs pulses from a high-powered laser to hit droplets of tin 50,000 times a second — once to flatten them and a second time to vaporize them — to create intense light.

The new system also required redesigned components called photomasks, which act like stencils in projecting circuit designs, as well as new chemicals deposited on wafers that generate those images when exposed to light. Japanese companies now supply most of those products.

Since ASML introduced its commercial EUV model in 2017, customers have bought about 100 of them. Buyers include Samsung and TSMC, the biggest service producing chips designed by other companies. TSMC uses the tool to make the processors designed by Apple for its latest iPhones. Intel and IBM have said EUV is crucial to their plans.

“It’s definitely the most complicated machine humans have built,” said Darío Gil, a senior vice president at IBM.

Dutch restrictions on exporting such machines to China, which have been enforced since 2019, haven’t had much financial impact on ASML since it has a backlog of orders from other countries. But about 15 percent of the company’s sales come from selling older systems in China.

In a final report to Congress and Mr. Biden in March, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence proposed extending export controls to some other advanced ASML machines as well. The group, funded by Congress, seeks to limit artificial intelligence advances with military applications.

Mr. Hunt and other policy experts argued that since China was already using those machines, blocking additional sales would hurt ASML without much strategic benefit. So does the company.

“I hope common sense will prevail,” Mr. van den Brink said.

Tags Chinas, Cold, Complicated, Machine, Reach, Tech, Wars

World News

Home committee passes broad tech antitrust reforms

Post author By
Post date June 24, 2021

A House Committee passed a series of comprehensive cartel reforms on Thursday after around 23 hours of debate.

While the advancement of the six technology-oriented bills that will be debated by the House Judiciary Committee starting Wednesday is a victory for the bipartisan members who brought them in, the impact opened rifts within the parties that could ultimately affect the chances of the bills To become law.

Several lawmakers made it clear that they believed the rollout-to-markup process arrived prematurely in less than two weeks despite a lengthy investigation before the bills. Some said they were hoping for more changes before the legislation reaches parliament.

Nonetheless, the final stage of the debate offered some signs of optimism to those hoping to move the bills forward. Fresh from a break after the Fifth Act was passed after 5 a.m. on Thursday, lawmakers returned to the committee room at around 11:30 a.m. to discuss the Ending Platform Monopoles Act

The bill – sponsored by Antitrust Subcommittee Vice Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., And co-sponsored by Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas – would prevent dominant platforms from owning businesses that present conflicts of interest, such as through incentives preferring their own products to their service-dependent competitors.

The bill was one of the most aggressive in the package, including updates to merger filing fees for dominant platforms, a shift in the burden of proof for acquisitions, and a provision for attorneys general to have a say in the jurisdiction of their antitrust proceedings. It could essentially force the dissolution of companies like Amazon and Apple, both of which sell products or services on their own marketplaces that also serve third parties. Both stocks closed slightly lower for the day.

Despite the huge impact of the bill, it wasn’t the most controversial. The legislature has argued about the mandate for data portability under the Access Act for much longer than when it assessed potential security problems, for example.

Jayapal’s bill also sparked a lively debate. In the end, the vote was similar to the others (it was passed at 21:20, supported by Democrats and MPs Ken Buck, R-Colo. And Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., And against the Republicans supported by Rep. Greg. Stanton, D-Ariz., And the California Democrats Lou Correa, Zoe Lofgren and Eric Swalwell). Throughout the discussion, however, it was clear that many in the group broadly agreed with the principles of the bill, even though they felt it could use some fine-tuning.

“I’m telling you, I’m not 100% there to destroy big tech, but I’m close,” said Rep. Dan Bishop, RN.C. “And this is the calculation that, if done right, would be the vehicle to put that on the table.”

Although an amendment he proposed failed, Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, DR.I. and Jayapal expressed a willingness to work with Bishop to possibly include a reference to his idea in the bill. Bishop was essentially trying to bring antitrust cases to court by removing a regulatory move. Cicilline had called it “the most interesting change in markup,” although he didn’t endorse it, and Justice Committee chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio called it “the change.”

In a post-markup interview Thursday, Buck, the senior member of the antitrust subcommittee that supported the legislation, told CNBC he expected more work to be done before the bills move forward.

“I don’t think the bills will be down for a couple of months because of the August break, so I think the opportunity to work together is certainly there,” he said.

It is clear that even after such a long debate, there is still a lot of work to be done on the drafters of the bill. After the service was adjourned, bipartisan members of the California delegation issued a joint statement in committee urging further revision of the bill despite its approval by the committee. They also said committee members did not have enough time to properly review the bills before serving.

“The legislative text as debated is far from ready for Floor,” wrote Correa, Swalwell, Lofgren and Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., And Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “We urge sponsors of the bills to take the time necessary to commit to a comprehensive approach and to work with their bipartisan counterparts on this committee to address the concerns raised during the markup in order to further develop these bills.”

Responding to criticism from his colleagues who felt they did not have enough time to review the bills, Buck said that “it is a common objection” but that “the ideas in the bill have been summarized in reports written last October “.

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WATCH: How US Antitrust Law Works and What It Means for Big Tech

Tags Antitrust, Broad, committee, House, Passes, Reforms, Tech

Health

Taiwan Orders Some Tech Employees to Keep Indoors to Sort out an Outbreak

Post author By
Post date June 18, 2021

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Officials in a county in Taiwan face a storm of criticism after banning foreign workers from going outside to eradicate a cluster of coronavirus infections among workers at several technology manufacturers.

As part of the measures announced by authorities in the central Miaoli district last week, thousands of migrant workers, mostly from Vietnam and the Philippines, will be prevented from leaving their dormitories except to travel to and from their jobs in high-tech factories. Some workers expressed concerns that conditions in the cramped dormitories, where up to six people share a room, could further spread the virus.

Other workers who were in close contact with infected colleagues were confiscated in quarantine centers. In some of these facilities, activists said workers were served spoiled food or lack of running water.

The officials did not say how long the restrictions apply. At a press conference last week, Miaoli County Magistrate Hsu Yao-chang denied complaints from migrant workers.

“They tested positive and even died from the virus,” he said. “Why talk about human rights now?”

On Friday, Miaoli County reported 26 new infections, mostly among migrant workers, bringing the total number of confirmed cases related to the factories to more than 450, according to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. More than 300 packages were found at the hardest hit company, King Yuan Electronics, a semiconductor chip testing and packaging company.

Some workers said they understood the reasons for the restrictions, but argued that they were selecting foreign workers. Taiwanese workers, most of whom work as managers and supervisors in the factories, were allowed to come and go as they pleased, many foreign workers said.

“This is discrimination,” said John Ray Tallud, 29, a Filipino equipment engineer with King Yuan Electronics, in a telephone interview from his dormitory. “Local Taiwanese can go outside anytime.”

Throughout the pandemic, migrant workers were among the most vulnerable groups in the world. Singapore banned hundreds of thousands of low-paid foreign workers from leaving their dormitories for months after the major outbreaks last year. Rural laborers in the United States were considered indispensable and continued to work shoulder to shoulder in the fields, although many became infected.

Until recently, Taiwan was an exception – a covid-free island for most of the pandemic, with tight border controls making it difficult for companies to accept more migrant workers. As a result, union activists say the existing migrant workers – more than 700,000 workers, most from Southeast Asian countries – have gained bargaining power with their employers.

That changed with the recent outbreak. Advocates of migrant workers have criticized the Miaoli government for creating further fear and stigmatization of foreign workers. Many said the order exposed longstanding discrimination against workers who have become a vital, if largely invisible, pillar of the Taiwanese economy – especially its important high-tech industries.

“This is a clear case of injustice,” said Chang Cheng, founder of 4-Way Voice, a multilingual publication for migrant workers in Taiwan. “If we talk about Taiwan’s main industries, they couldn’t survive without these foreign workers.”

Tags indoors, Orders, outbreak, Stay, tackle, Taiwan, Tech, Workers

Politics

Trump spokesman Jason Miller leaving his position to affix tech start-up

Post author By
Post date June 14, 2021

Former senior senior advisor to President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign Jason Miller walks the halls of the U.S. Capitol on the first day of Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial on February 9, 2021 in Washington, DC

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Longtime advisor to former President Donald Trump and current spokesman Jason Miller is leaving his role, a source familiar with the plans told CNBC on Thursday.

Miller, who has worked for Trump since his 2016 presidential campaign, is leaving his full-time duties as former president’s spokesman to become CEO of a technology start-up, the source said without giving further details.

No start date or transition schedule has been announced, and no announcement is forthcoming, the source said.

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According to the source, however, the unnamed company owns a social media platform that Trump is “considering”.

Miller will be the first CEO of the tech company, which has had a platform in development since last year, the source said when asked for more information about the startup. Miller will nonetheless remain in Trump’s orbit and remain an ally of Trump’s team, the source said.

It is unclear who will fill the soon vacant position. Margo Martin, another Trump spokeswoman, referred CNBC to Miller for comment.

Miller’s departure comes a little over a week after Trump’s personal blog page, which was active for less than a month, was permanently closed.

This website was originally billed as a “communications platform” but in reality served only as a place for Trump to post statements that he was not allowed to share on more popular social media sites.

Miller told CNBC at the time that the blog “wasn’t going back” and that it was “just an aid to the wider effort we have and are working on.”

The spokesman also tweeted on June 2 that Trump will actually join another social media platform.

Miller had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and transition to president, and was originally supposed to be White House communications director for the new administration.

These plans were abandoned after allegations of an extramarital affair with former Trump campaigner AJ Delgado became public.

The Trump campaign in 2020 hired Miller for the final leg of the race that Trump lost to current President Joe Biden.

Tags Jason, join, Leaving, Miller, Role, spokesman, startup, Tech, Trump

World News

Dow ends day flat as financial comeback performs offset losses in tech

Post author By
Post date June 3, 2021

Trader on the New York Stock Exchange, June 2, 2021.

Source: NYSE

Cyclical stocks lifted the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its lows on Thursday and closed the session near the downside, while better-than-expected job data supported sentiment.

The blue-chip Dow closed just 23.34 points, or less than 0.1%, at 34,577.04 after losing 265 points from its session low. The S&P 500 lost 0.4% to 4,192.85 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1% to 13,614.51.

The S&P 500 benchmark is about 1% off its all-time high hit early last month, but it has remained at that level for about two weeks. The S&P 500 is up more than 11% so far this year.

Merck and Dow Inc. were the top two performers in the 30-stock benchmark, both up more than 2%. Consumer staples and utilities were the biggest winners among the 11 S&P 500 sectors, while consumer discretionary and technology weighed on the broader market, falling 1.2% and 0.9% respectively.

General Motors shares rose nearly 6.4% after the company announced it would hit its results for the first half of 2021 “significantly better” than its previous projections.

On the data front, private employment growth accelerated the fastest in nearly a year in May, as companies hired nearly a million workers, according to a report by payroll firm ADP on Thursday.

The total new hire was 978,000 for the month, a huge jump from 654,000 in April and the largest increase since June 2020. Economists polled by Dow Jones had searched for 680,000.

Meanwhile, initial jobless claims for the week ending May 29 were 385,000, up from a Dow Jones estimate of 393,000. It was also the first time jobless claims fell below 400,000 since the early days of the pandemic.

“With ADP kicking it out of the park and jobless claims breaking the 400,000 mark – a pandemic low – all eyes will be on the bigger picture of jobs tomorrow,” said Mike Loewengart, a managing director at E-Trade. “With all systems seemingly working on the job front, the economy is showing some very real signs that this is not just a comeback – a mode of expansion could be on the horizon.”

According to economists polled by Dow Jones, the market could be on hold ahead of the job report released on Friday, which is expected to show an additional 671,000 non-agricultural payrolls in May. The economy created 266,000 jobs in April.

Investors continued to watch the wild action in meme stocks, particularly theater chain AMC Entertainment. The stock plunged up to 30% after practically doubling in the previous session, but the stock reduced its losses after the cinema chain said it closed a stock offering a few hours ago that raised $ 587 million. The stock ended the day around 18% lower.

Other meme stocks also came under pressure on Thursday. Bed Bath & Beyond fell more than 27%. The SoFi Social 50 ETF (SFYF), which tracks the 50 most widely used US publicly traded stocks on SoFi’s retail brokerage platform, slumped more than 6%.

In memory of what happened earlier this year, the joint rally of retailers on Reddit sparked a short squeeze on AMC earlier this week. S3 Partners said short sellers betting against the stock lost $ 2.8 billion on Wednesday as stocks rose. So their losses since the beginning of the year amount to more than 5 billion US dollars, according to S3. If it continues to recover, short sellers are forced to buy back the stock to reduce their losses.

GameStop’s meme stock bubble earlier this year weighed a little on the market as investors feared there was too much speculative activity in the stock market. As losses in hedge funds, which bet against the stock increased, worries mounted about a decline in risk appetite on Wall Street that could hit the broader market. AMC’s recent surge so far didn’t seem to raise any similar concerns.

Tags Comeback, Day, Dow, Economic, Ends, flat, Losses, offset, Plays, Tech

Business

Mark Cuban, different buyers, put $250,000 in basketball tech firm GRIND

Post author By
Post date May 15, 2021

Mark Cuban, other investors, put $250,000 in basketball tech company GRIND

Thomas Fields, founder of GRIND Basketball.

Source: GRIND

The term has become popular in professional basketball, but Thomas Fields really “trusted” the process when he attracted money from investors, including Mark Cuban, to expand his business.

Fields is the founder of GRIND, a sporting goods company, and convinced the owner of Dallas Mavericks to get into the business. The 26-year-old Houston native received $ 250,000 for his appearance on “Shark Tank” for his portable shooting machine.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, days after his appearance on Shark Tank on May 7, Fields recalled the process of introducing GRIND into Mach 2020, days before the sport was suspended due to Covid-19.

“It literally took two weeks for the pandemic to hit,” Fields said. “After that, we worked in a Covid world, so we don’t even know what this non-Covid world looks like.”

Throw the sharks

In business terms, GRIND has done well during the pandemic. The basketball machine is set up for a single user and automatically returns the ball to the player, allowing 1,000 hits per hour.

Fields said the company had revenue of around $ 217,000 in the first five months from lockdowns and large gatherings banned. The product currently retails for $ 1,595, according to its website. Similar shooting machines sell for over $ 5,000 on Amazon.

And Fields notes that GRIND folds into a duffel bag in 90 seconds, weighs about 100 pounds, and describes the product as “affordable and accessible to any athlete who wants it”.

When asked about recent sales, Fields declined to disclose numbers, citing privacy concerns for his new partners. “Shark Tank” invited Fields to the show after six rounds of interviews. The last pitch took place in Las Vegas last September.

Mark Cuban on ABC’s “Shark Tank”

Jessica Brooks

His fiancée applied for the show before the company started. Fields said he watched pre-recorded episodes that air on CNBC and made notes. And while he was quarantined in Las Vegas before meeting the sharks, he continued to study the process of his one-off pitch.

“All I could do was practice,” Fields said, adding that he was in “run mode” when he arrived. He put up a cast including the Cuban, the new owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Alex Rodriguez, CNBC employee Kevin O’Leary, and businesswoman Barbara Corcoran. After the pitch he got two investors – Cuban and Corcoran – who took over 25% of the company.

“I love the product,” Cuban told CNBC in an email. “I ordered one while the show was filming.”

Fields added, “It was great going through this and after knowing that these two believed in me as an entrepreneur and loved the product, that was more than enough validation to say the company was going to be special.”

Batteries not included

Shortly after recapping the show, Fields remembered more about GRIND’s process. He pointed to 2017 when he was recovering from four ACL surgeries, one of the more extreme injuries in sports, especially basketball. At this point, Fields knew that making it into the National Basketball Association was not achievable.

Fields said he learned to weld thanks to a friend and started working on the concept of the GRIND machine. He raised early investors, but no one provided money. So he started working at Raising Cane’s, a popular fast food chain and local car wash, and saved nearly $ 25,000.

Fields said he had become a “self-taught mechanical engineer,” paid $ 300 a month, and worked on prototypes and proof of concept in his garage.

“Just perfect the machine and make it great,” recalled Fields.

Even Rodriguez welcomed Fields’ persistence on social media. “I got a lot of love, but in the end he was out,” Fields said of Rodriguez.

Today the shooting machines are made in Idaho and Fields has eight employees, including four engineers. GRIND also has an NBA team deal with the San Antonio Spurs, who use the machine for their youth camps.

“We targeted the Spurs because they have the best and largest youth organization in the NBA,” Fields said. “It was strategic and we didn’t partner with them because they were around.”

GRIND is working on a battery that can be added to the machine. This was one of the problems Cubans faced before investing. The machine uses an extension cord for power supply. Fields noted that Cuban told him the product was not portable because it still needed an electrical outlet.

“Ultimately, we don’t want customers running around with 100-foot extension cords,” Fields said. “We want them to be ready and to worry that they will be better.”

Nike and Peloton ambitions

Fields enters a competitive exercise equipment market. The sector is projected to reach $ 89.2 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research. GRIND also competes with the technology sector as companies like Apple sell subscriptions to exercise and fitness training.

“The way I see it, there is only so much software can do to an individual,” Fields said. “There’s so much hardware can do to a consumer too. I’ve always believed it brings the best of both worlds.

“I believe our hardware solves a real problem that no software can ever figure out – you can get your shots made and missed, pass the ball automatically, and allow you to shoot more than a thousand shots an hour. No software can. ” “”

Fields says he wants to build GRIND as a combination of Nike and Peloton.

“It is a perfect time for us to change the world of basketball through interactive sports equipment,” said Fields. “I think the future is bright for us. We’re much more than a shooting machine company.”

And now the process continues.

Tags basketball, Company, Cuban, Grind, investors, Mark, put, Tech

Business

Tech Shares Pull Markets Off Close to-File Highs: Stay Enterprise Updates

Post author By
Post date May 4, 2021

President Biden signing a law in March to extend the Paycheck Protection Program through May 31, with Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Isabel Guzman, the administrator of the Small Business Administration.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Four weeks before its scheduled end, the federal government’s signature aid effort for small business ravaged by the pandemic — the Paycheck Protection Program — ran out of funding on Wednesday afternoon and stopped accepting most new applications.

Congress allocated $292 billion to fund the program’s most recent round of loans. Nearly all of that money has now been exhausted, the Small Business Administration, which runs the program, told lenders and their trade groups on Wednesday.

While many had predicted that the program would run out of funds before its May 31 application deadline, the exact timing came as a surprise to many lenders.

“It is our understanding that lenders are now getting a message through the portal that loans cannot be originated,” the National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders, a trade group, wrote in an alert to its members Wednesday evening. “The P.P.P. general fund is closed to new applications.”

Some money — around $8 billion — is still available through a set-aside for community financial institutions, which generally focus on lending to businesses run by women, minorities and other underserved communities. Those lenders will be allowed to process applications until that money runs out, according to the trade group’s alert.

Representatives from the Small Business Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some money also remains available for lenders to finish processing pending applications, according to a lender who was on a call with S.B.A. officials on Wednesday.

Since its creation last year, the Paycheck Protection Program has disbursed $780 billion in forgivable loans to fund 10.7 million applications, according to the latest government data. Congress renewed the program in December’s relief bill, expanding the pool of eligible applicants and allowing the hardest-hit businesses to return for a second loan.

Lawmakers in March extended the program’s deadline to May, but they have shown little enthusiasm for adding significantly more money to its coffers. With vaccination rates increasing and pandemic restrictions easing, Congress’s focus on large-scale relief effort for small businesses has waned.

The government’s recent efforts have been focused on the most devastated industries. Two new grant programs run by the Small Business Administration — for businesses in the live-events and restaurant industries — began accepting applications in recent weeks, though no grants have yet been awarded.

Credit…Ethan Swope/Getty Images

Last May, Epic Games was making plans to circumvent Apple’s and Google’s app store rules and ultimately sue them in cases that could reshape the entire app economy and have profound ripple effects on antitrust investigations around the world.

Epic’s chief operating officer, Daniel Vogel, sent other executives an email raising a concern: Epic must persuade Apple and Google to give in to its demands for looser rules, he wrote, “without us looking like the baddies.”

Apple and Google, Mr. Vogel warned, “will treat this as an existential threat.” To prepare, Epic formed a public relations and marketing plan to get the public behind its campaign against the tech giants.

Apple seized on that plan in a federal courtroom in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, the second day of what is expected to be a three-week trial stemming from Epic’s claims that Apple relies on its control of its App Store to unfairly squeeze money out of other companies.

Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers of California’s Northern District, who will decide the case, also asked Epic’s chief executive, Tim Sweeney, a series of pointed questions about its potential consequences. She asked whether he had any understanding of the economics of other types of apps, including food, maps, GPS, weather, dating or instant messaging.

“So you don’t have any idea how what you are asking for would impact any of the developers who engage in those other categories of apps, is that right?” the judge asked.

“I personally do not,” Mr. Sweeney said, in his second day on the witness stand.

Apple’s lawyers argued that Epic had attacked App Store fees to shore up a slowing business. Gross revenue on Fortnite, Epic’s flagship video game, shrank in the last three quarters of 2019 compared with 2018, according to an Epic presentation to its board of directors about its plan to fight Apple. The presentation was disclosed in court on Tuesday, along with the executive’s emails.

Under questioning from Apple’s lawyers, Mr. Sweeney said Epic’s own game store was not expected to turn a profit until at least 2024.

Epic’s lawyers said the lawsuit was not just about Epic and Fortnite but about fairness for all apps that must use Apple’s App Store to reach consumers.

“Our contention in this case is that all apps are at issue,” said Katherine Forrest, a lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Epic is not asking for a payout if it wins the trial; it is seeking relief in the form of changes to App Store rules. Epic has asked Apple to allow app developers to use other methods to collect payments and open their own app stores within their apps.

Apple has countered that these demands would raise a world of new issues, including making iPhones less secure.

On Tuesday afternoon, Benjamin Simon, founder of Yoga Buddhi, which makes the Down Dog Yoga app, testified about his company’s problems with Apple’s policies. Mr. Simon said that he had to charge more for subscriptions on the App Store to make up for the 30 percent fee that Apple charged him, and that Apple’s rules prevented him from promoting inside his app a cheaper price that is available on the web.

Mr. Simon said Apple warned app developers against speaking out about its policies in guidelines for getting their apps approved. “‘If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps,’” he said. “That was in the guidelines.”

By: Ella Koeze·Data delayed at least 15 minutes·Source: FactSet

The S&P 500 retreated from near-record territory on Tuesday, led by a decline in big technology companies, but recovered its worst losses to end the day down 0.7 percent.

Apple, the largest company in the index, fell 3.5 percent, and several other large companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla — dropped by more than 1.5 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 1.9 percent.

Adding to the volatility on Tuesday were comments by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, who said higher interest rates might be needed to keep the economy from overheating as the Biden administration ramps up spending. Stock investors are wary of higher interest rates that would make equities less attractive and also could dampen corporate profits as the economy recovers from the pandemic.

Although the Treasury secretary has no role in interest rate setting and yields on government bonds, which tend to rise when interest rates are hiked, were little changed on Tuesday, the publication of Ms. Yellen’s comments helped pushed stock indexes lower.

“It may be that interest rates will have to rise somewhat to make sure that our economy doesn’t overheat, even though the additional spending is relatively small relative to the size of the economy,” Ms. Yellen said in prerecorded comments at an event hosted by The Atlantic when asked if the economy could handle the kind of robust spending that the Biden administration is proposing.

Analysts stressed that the market was due for breather. The S&P 500 rose more than 5.2 percent last month, notching a series of record highs, and even after Tuesday’s decline it remained up more than 10 percent in 2021.

The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 1.4 percent, while the FTSE 100 in Britain gave up earlier gains to drop about 0.7 percent.

Oil prices bucked the trend. Brent crude gained 2 percent, to $68.88 a barrel. It has not closed above $70 barrel since late 2018. West Texas Intermediate also rose sharply.

A chip maker’s troubles

Infineon, a big producer of semiconductors in Germany, reported “booming” demand for chips as it posted strong quarterly results. But the company warned of continuing supply chain problems and its shares fell.
“Demand greatly exceeds supply for the majority of applications,” said the chief executive, Reinhard Ploss, in a statement. Even though its plants are running at “full speed,” he continued, the company still faced supply chain bottlenecks. “We are doing everything we can to provide our customers with the best possible support in this situation.”

Saudi Aramco earnings

The world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, reported a 30 percent rise in net income in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago.
The company is joining other energy producers that reported strong earnings this quarter as oil prices continued their recovery from last year’s collapse.
“The momentum provided by the global economic recovery has strengthened energy markets,” Aramco’s chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, said in a statement. “Given the positive signs for energy demand in 2021, there are more reasons to be optimistic that better days are coming.”

Credit…Clay Enos/Netflix

In the clearest sign yet that theaters are softening their stance toward Netflix, Cinemark, the country’s third-largest chain, announced on Tuesday that it would show the streaming service’s upcoming zombie flick, “Army of the Dead” from director Zack Snyder, in more than 250 of its theaters on May 14, a week before the film will become available online.

The movie will also open in a smattering of regional chains like Harkins Theatres, Landmark Theatres and Alamo Drafthouse, bringing its total theater count to about 600 — the largest theatrical release yet for a Netflix film.

Last year, when the pandemic was raging and the majority of theater chains were closed, Netflix and Cinemark tested the release strategy in a handful of theaters with three Netflix films: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Midnight Sky” and “The Christmas Chronicles 2.” The results were encouraging enough for them to try a wider release at a time when the majority of the country’s theaters have reopened.

“Zack Snyder fans will love seeing the action in an immersive, cinematic environment with larger-than-life sight and sound technology,” Justin McDaniel, Cinemark’s senior vice president of global content strategy, said in a statement.

“We are thrilled to offer consumers the opportunity to watch this highly anticipated film in theaters and on Netflix,” Netflix’s head of distribution, Spencer Klein, said in a statement.

“Army of the Dead” stars Dave Bautista (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) and centers on a group of mercenaries who travel to Las Vegas to pull off a casino heist in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

While neither company would say whether this was part of a larger agreement involving more films, the two did say they “anticipate there will be more to come.”

The pandemic forced theaters and studios to re-evaluate how movies are distributed in theaters and on streaming platforms. Traditionally, theaters pushed for an exclusive 72-day window between when a film was released and when it could become available for at-home viewing, whether through streaming or video-on-demand services. But so many movies debuted in the home because of the pandemic, and audiences have become used to having that option, forcing Hollywood to adjust to a new reality.

Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Gap Inc., the retailer that owns its namesake chain, Banana Republic and Old Navy, said on Tuesday that it would sell its high-end Intermix string of stores and website to a private-equity firm as it focuses on its core brands.

Intermix, which has 31 stores, will be purchased by Altamont Capital Partners for an undisclosed price, according to a statement. Gap, which is based in San Francisco, acquired Intermix for $130 million at the end of 2012 with plans to expand it, though the chain stood apart from the rest of the retailer’s chains with its mix of established and emerging designer goods. Intermix had 32 boutiques at the time of the 2012 acquisition.

The exit follows Gap’s sale in April of Janie and Jack, an expensive children’s retailer with more than 100 locations, to Go Global Retail. Gap acquired Janie and Jack in 2019.

Sally Gilligan, head of strategy for Gap, said in the Tuesday release that the sales “demonstrate how we are prioritizing our strategic focus and resources behind the growth and potential of Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic and Athleta.”

Credit…Eric Gay/Associated Press

Two broad coalitions of companies and executives released letters on Tuesday calling for expanded voting access in Texas, wading into the debate over Republican legislators’ proposed new restrictions on balloting after weeks of relative silence.

One letter came from a group of large corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Unilever, Salesforce, Patagonia and Sodexo, as well as local companies and chambers of commerce, and represents the first major coordinated effort among businesses in Texas to take action against the voting proposals.

The letter, under the banner of a new group called Fair Elections Texas, stops short of criticizing the two voting bills that are now advancing through the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, but opposes “any changes that would restrict eligible voters’ access to the ballot.”

A separate letter, organized by a breakway faction of 100 executives from the Greater Houston Partnership, and also released on Tuesday , goes further. It directly criticizes the proposed legislation and equates the efforts with “voter suppression.”

Together, the letters signify a sudden shift in how the business community approaches the voting bills in Texas.

Corporations across the country find themselves at the center of a swirling partisan debate over voting rights. With Republicans in almost every state advancing legislation that would make it harder for some people to vote, companies are under pressure from both sides. Democratic activists, along with many mainstream business leaders, are calling on corporations to oppose the new laws. At the same time, a growing chorus of senior Republicans is telling corporate America to keep quiet.

Credit…Ints Kalnins/Reuters

Pandora, the world’s biggest jeweler by volume, said on Tuesday that it will no longer use mined diamonds for any new designs, and is switching to man-made stones produced in laboratories instead.

The Copenhagen-based company said it would release its first collection to use synthetic stones in Britain this year before turning to other markets in 2022. The range of rings, bangles and earrings will feature stones from 0.15 to 1 carat in size. Pandora’s chief executive, Alexander Lacik, said in a statement Tuesday that diamonds should be affordable as well as sustainable.

Lab-grown diamonds are physically, chemically and optically identical to mined diamonds, and proponents say that their production results in less environmental damage than traditional mining practices, and also doesn’t have the same associations with human rights abuses. Prices of man-made diamonds have fallen over the past two years after the miner De Beers started offering synthetic stones in 2018, and they are now up to 10 times cheaper than mined diamonds, according to a report by Bain & Company.

While mined diamonds went into about 50,000 Pandora pieces of jewelry out of a total of 85 million items made last year, meaning the shift required within the company supply chain will be negligible, the announcement by Pandora is the latest by a major industry player looking to address growing ethical concerns held by consumers about the jewelry business. The jeweler has already said it will only use recycled gold and silver beginning 2025.

Credit…Laura Morton for The New York Times

Twitter plans to acquire the subscription service Scroll, the social media company announced on Tuesday, as it expands its plans for subscription offerings. The two companies declined to disclose the deal terms.

Scroll charges its users a fee to block advertising on participating news websites, then distributes a cut of its earnings to its partner publishers, which include USA Today, Vox and The Atlantic. Publishers can earn up to 50 percent more from the service than they do from advertising, Scroll contends. Twitter plans to integrate the service into its platform, and use its technology to build other subscription services.

“People come to Twitter every day to discover and read about what’s happening,” Mike Park, Twitter’s vice president for product, said in a blog post announcing the deal. “If Twitter is where so much of this conversation lives, it should be easier and simpler to read the content that drives it.”

In recent months, Twitter has begun to add paid subscriptions, and announced plans to introduce other subscriber features in the future.

In January, Twitter acquired Revue, a newsletter provider, and said it would take a 5 percent cut of subscription revenue. In February, the company revealed plans to introduce “Super Follows,” a feature that would allow Twitter users to place some of their content behind a pay wall. And this week, Twitter said it planned to add a ticketing feature to its audio chat, Spaces, so that hosts can charge listeners for entry into their discussions.

Twitter plans to supplement its advertising revenue with revenue from subscriptions, and has raced to add content like newsletters and audio chats that it thinks audiences will pay for. Its acquisition of Scroll will add journalism to that list.

“For every other platform, journalism is dispensable. If journalism were to disappear tomorrow their business would carry on much as before,” Tony Haile, Scroll’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “Twitter is the only large platform whose success is deeply intertwined with a sustainable journalism ecosystem.”

Credit…Dado Ruvic/Reuters

On Tuesday, Pfizer announced that its Covid vaccine brought in $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of this year, nearly a quarter of its total revenue. The vaccine was, far and away, Pfizer’s biggest source of revenue, report Rebecca Robbins and Peter S. Goodman of The New York Times.

The company did not disclose the profits it derived from the vaccine, but it reiterated its previous prediction that its profit margins on the vaccine would be in the high 20 percent range. That would translate into roughly $900 million in pretax vaccine profits in the first quarter.

Pfizer has been widely credited with developing an unproven technology that has saved an untold number of lives.

But the company’s vaccine is disproportionately reaching the world’s rich — an outcome, so far at least, at odds with its chief executive’s pledge to ensure that poorer countries “have the same access as the rest of the world” to a vaccine that is highly effective at preventing Covid-19.

As of mid-April, wealthy countries had secured more than 87 percent of the more than 700 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines dispensed worldwide, while poor countries had received only 0.2 percent, according to the World Health Organization. In wealthy countries, roughly one in four people has received a vaccine. In poor countries, the figure is one in 500.

VideoCreditCredit…By Irene Suosalo

Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide writes that nearly four years after Amazon agreed to a huge deal to buy Whole Foods and a year into a pandemic that played into the tech giant’s strengths, it’s worth asking two questions: Is Amazon losing in groceries? And why has one of the world’s most ambitious and inventive companies mostly been a follower rather than a leader in one of the biggest spending categories for Americans?

Tags business, highs, Live, Markets, NearRecord, Pull, Stocks, Tech, Updates

Business

‘A Good Constructive Storm’: Bonkers {Dollars} for Large Tech

Post author By
Post date May 2, 2021

‘A Perfect Positive Storm’: Bonkers Dollars for Big Tech

In the great recession more than a decade ago, big tech companies like everyone else have reached a difficult point. Now they have become the undisputed winners of the pandemic economy.

The combined annual sales of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are around $ 1.2 trillion, more than 25 percent higher than what they saw at the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to earnings reported this week was recorded. In Less Than A Week These five giants make more sales than McDonald’s in a year.

The U.S. economy is returning from 2020 when it contracted for the first time since the financial crisis. But for the tech giants, the pandemic hit was hardly a slip-up. It’s a fantastic time to be a tech titan – as long as you watch the screaming politicians, the daily headlines about killing free speech or tax evasion, the problems faced by competitors and workers, and too many to count , ignoring legal investigations and lawsuits.

America’s tech superpowers don’t deserve bonkers despite the deadly coronavirus and its impact on the global economy. They have gotten even stronger because of the pandemic. It’s both logical and slightly insane.

The hugely successful last year also raises awkward questions for tech company bosses, the public, and elected officials who are already angry with the industry: Is what’s good for big tech good for America? Or do the tech superstars win while the rest of us lose?

Americans have more cash in their pockets thanks to government stimulus measures and pandemic savings, and tech giants are getting a significant stake. Their combined sales are approximately 5 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product.

Big Tech’s big money in the pandemic has an understandable root cause: we needed his services.

People loved Facebook’s apps for keeping in touch and talking, and companies wanted to pay Facebook and Google, which owns Alphabet, to find customers stuck at home. People preferred to buy diapers and lounge chairs on Amazon rather than risking their health in stores. Companies loaded software from Microsoft when their companies and employees went virtual. Apple’s laptops and iPads are becoming lifelines for office workers and school children.

Before the pandemic, America’s tech superpowers had an impact on how we communicated, worked, entertained, and shopped. Now they are practically inevitable. Investors bought big tech stocks to bet that these companies would be nearly invincible.

“They’ve been on their way up and for nearly a decade and the pandemic has been one of a kind,” said Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at New York University. “It was a perfect positive storm for them.”

Times were not so good for these companies in the final economic phase. During the 2007-2009 downturn, Microsoft sales declined slightly, and its share price fell 60 percent from Fall 2008 to March 2009, a low point for US stocks. Google and Amazon have each lost up to two-thirds of their market value.

Updated

May 2, 2021, 10:39 a.m. ET

A sign of how different this time around: Amazon’s sales are growing much faster in 2021 than in 2009, when the company was a fifteenth of its current size. Revenue in the first quarter rose 44 percent year over year, and Amazon’s pre-tax profit – which has never been more robust – more than doubled to $ 8.9 billion. Businesses are addicted to Amazon’s cloud computing services, which have seen sales grow 32 percent and customers can’t live without Amazon’s delivery. Investors love Amazon too. The company’s market value has nearly doubled to $ 1.8 trillion since early 2020.

For the other tech giants, it’s like their brief dive from a pandemic never happened. Advertising sales usually rise and fall with the economy. However, as other types of ad spend shrank as the U.S. economy contracted last year, ad sales for Google and Facebook rose. The growth was even better for them in the first three months of this year.

A year ago, analysts feared Apple could be crippled by the pandemic in China, which is the center of the company’s manufacturing activities and major consumer market. The fears did not last long. In the first three months of 2021, Apple’s iPhone sales grew the fastest since 2012. Sales in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong nearly doubled year over year.

The tech giants aren’t the only companies gathering in dark times. America’s big banks were in tears too. So do some of the younger tech companies like Snap and Zoom, makers of the video conferencing app preferred by the pandemic. The crisis forced all types of businesses to go digital quickly in order to be successful. Restaurants invested in online sales and delivery, and doctors were deeply involved in telemedicine.

However, the dictionary doesn’t have enough superlatives to describe what’s happening to the top five technology companies. It’s all a bit awkward, really. It’s rocket fuel for critics, including some regulators and lawmakers in Europe and the United States, who say the tech giants are crowding out newcomers and leaving everyone worse off.

Big tech companies face fierce competition that leads to better products and lower prices, but their bank statements might suggest otherwise. Facebook’s profit margins are now higher than they were before the pandemic.

Part of their success can be explained by the peculiarities of the pandemic economy. Some people and sectors are doing great while other families are lining up at food banks and companies like airlines begging for cash. In contrast to the stock market problems during the Great Recession, the stock indices in the USA have reached new highs.

The tech superstars also took advantage of this moment. Alphabet and Facebook have used the pandemic to limit less important areas such as advertising costs and travel and entertainment budgets. And the tech giants have generally increased spending in areas that expand their benefits.

Alphabet is now spending more on large-scale projects like building computer complexes than Exxon Mobil is spending on digging oil and gas. Amazon’s workforce has grown by more than 470,000 people since late 2019. This deepens the moat that separates the tech superstars from everyone else.

Big tech is emerging from the pandemic, lean, mean and ready for a US economy expected to come back to life in 2021. In the meantime, there are still long lines at food banks. Some American workers who lost their jobs last year may never get them back. Housing lawyers fear millions of people will be evicted from their homes. And being big tech is an invitation for everyone to hate you – but you have huge piles of money.

Tags Big, Bonkers, Dollars, perfect, Positive, Storm, Tech

Business

7 Republicans Swear Off Marketing campaign Cash From Large Tech: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date April 21, 2021

Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said last month that he would not accept money from the tech giants’ political action committees.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Joe Skipper/Reuters

A group of seven House Republicans said on Wednesday that they would no longer take donations from major tech companies or their top executives, a sign of the growing distance between some conservatives and big business.

The lawmakers said in a letter that the companies limited the reach of conservative voices, citing bans on the chat app Parler after it was used by participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and abused their market power.

“These monopolies have shown that personal liberty can be threatened by corporate tyranny just as much as by government tyranny,” they said in the letter. All but one of the lawmakers are members of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the antitrust questions confronting the tech companies.

The pledge was led by Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. Mr. Buck said last month that he would not accept money from the tech giants’ political action committees.

For years, lawmakers on the right have attacked Google, Twitter and Facebook, accusing the companies of unfairly removing content posted by conservatives. The lawmakers have also accused Amazon and Apple of stifling competition. In recent weeks, some conservatives have turned on other major businesses — traditionally their allies in efforts to deregulate the economy — that have opposed their positions on voting rights and other issues.

Five of the lawmakers received donations from the corporate political action committees of Google, Facebook and Amazon in the last election cycle. Representatives Chip Roy of Texas, Gregory Steube of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who signed the pledge, all received a combined $3,500 in donations. Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina (not Oklahoma, as previously reported here) received $1,000 from Amazon’s political committee.

But it is also possible that some of the lawmakers who signed the pledge will not have to turn any donations down in the near future. Amazon and Google froze donations to lawmakers who voted against certifying the election results after the Jan. 6 attack. Facebook paused all of its political donations.

Mr. Steube and Mr. Norman, as well as Representatives Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Burgess Owens of Utah, all objected to the results of the presidential election.

Mr. Bishop and Mr. Owens both signed the pledge even though they did not receive money from the firms’ political committees last election cycle.

Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

On Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase’s co-heads of investment banking, Jim Casey and Viswas Raghavan, announced policies aimed at improving working conditions amid record deal volume and an industrywide debate about banker burnout, especially in the junior ranks.

The country’s largest bank has tried similar moves before. Mr. Casey spoke with the DealBook newsletter about the company’s latest plan — and whether this one will stick.

Burnout became the buzz on Wall Street after a group of 13 anonymous first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs described how frequent 100-hour weeks were taking a toll on their mental and physical health.

To help alleviate that level of exhaustion among its own ranks, JPMorgan is bringing on more workers to help cope with heavy deal volume, which generated $3 billion in investment banking fees in the first quarter, up nearly 60 percent from the previous year. It has already hired 65 analysts and 22 associates this year and plans to add another 100 junior bankers and support staff, “if we can find them, as quickly as we can,” Mr. Casey said.

It’s also focused on managing its bankers’ hours better. JPMorgan will tell associates not to do marketing work on weekends. It will encourage all bankers to go home by 7 p.m. on weekdays and add more flexibility for personal time. It will force bankers to take at least three weeks’ vacation a year. It will require group heads to call two to three junior bankers every day to find out what’s working.

Some of these actions are similar to what JPMorgan rolled out in 2016, but “it wasn’t stringently enforced,” Mr. Casey said. Why not? “Laziness.”

This time, junior bankers’ hours and feedback will figure in senior managers’ performance evaluations and — crucially — compensation.

One thing the bank won’t be doing: offering one-time checks or free Peloton exercise bikes to staff after a big rush, like at some other banks. “It’s not a money problem,” Mr. Casey said. “If we just cut the junior bankers a check now,” he said, “then that would be the excuse that everybody says, ‘Well, OK, the problem is fixed.’ No, it’s not.”

And some other things won’t change. Banking is a client-service job, so managers sometimes have limited control over workloads and hours. “You might do 100 deals a year, but that client only does one deal every three years,” Mr. Casey said.

As to how the bank will measure the success of these policies, “ask me what our turnover ratio has gone to and I will tell you,” Mr. Casey said. What’s the target? “Lower.”

Credit…Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

American Airlines plans to bring back all of its pilots by the end of summer and start hiring new ones this fall, reflecting optimism across the industry that widespread vaccinations will encourage more people to book flights.

The airline expects to hire about 300 pilots this year and twice as many next year, Chip Long, American’s vice president of flight operations, said in a note to pilots on Wednesday. He added the airline planned to honor offers it made to new pilots but didn’t fulfill last year when the pandemic crushed demand for tickets.

United Airlines also said this month that it would restart pilot hiring and expected to make about 300 offers this year.

“The return to flying of so many of our pilots and the addition of hundreds more, the resumption of many old routes and the introduction of new destinations are hopeful signs, opportunities to look beyond the immediate and into a brighter future,” Mr. Long said.

A spokesman for the union that represents American’s pilots, the Allied Pilots Association, welcomed the news but said it should come with more scheduling certainty for its members.

“We have faith that we can get it done, but we have to have the tools to do it,” said the spokesman, Dennis Tajer, who is also a pilot at American.

Airlines have been heartened by the increase in bookings over the past month and are optimistic that even more people will fly this summer. American has said it expects this summer to offer more than 90 percent of the seats on domestic flights as it did in 2019 and 80 percent of the seats on international flights.

Still, the airline is expected to report a large loss for the first three months of the year when it announces quarterly results on Thursday morning.

Credit…Gili Benita for The New York Times

The past year has crushed independent restaurants across the country and brought a reality to their doors: Many were unprepared for a digital world.

Unlike other small retailers, restaurateurs could keep the tech low, with basic websites and maybe Instagram accounts with tantalizing, well-lit photos of their food. It meant businesses like BentoBox, which aims to help restaurants build more robust websites with e-commerce abilities, were a hard sell, Amy Haimerl reports for The New York Times.

For many, BentoBox’s services were a “nice to have,” not a necessity, the company’s founder, Krystle Mobayeni, said.

But the pandemic sent chefs and owners flocking to the firm as they suddenly needed to add to-go ordering, delivery scheduling, gift card sales and more to their websites. Before the pandemic the company, based in New York City, had about 4,800 clients, including the high-profile Manhattan restaurant Gramercy Tavern; today it has more than 7,000 restaurants on board and recently received a $28.8 million investment led by Goldman Sachs.

The moment opened a well of opportunity for other companies like it. Dozens of firms have either started or scaled up sharply as they found their services in urgent demand. Meanwhile, investors and venture capitalists have been sourcing deals in the “restaurant tech” sector — particularly seeking companies that bring the big chains’ advantages to independent restaurants.

Credit…Yves Herman/Reuters

The European Union on Wednesday unveiled strict regulations to govern the use of artificial intelligence. The rules have far-reaching implications for major technology companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft that have poured resources into developing artificial intelligence. “With these landmark rules, the E.U. is spearheading the development of new global norms to make sure A.I. can be trusted,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president who oversees digital policy for the 27-nation bloc, said in a statement.
Netflix reported the addition of four million new customers in the first quarter, below the six million it had forecast. The company expects to add only one million new customers for this current quarter ending in June. Netflix shares plummeted about 10 percent in after-hours trading.
Apple unveiled new products on Tuesday that showed how it continued to center its marketing pitch on consumer privacy, at the potential expense of other companies, while muscling into markets pioneered by much smaller competitors. Apple showed off a new high-end iPad and an iMac desktop computer based on new processors that Apple now makes itself. The company said it was redesigning its podcast app, which competes with companies like Spotify, to enable creators to charge for their shows. It revealed the AirTag, a $29 disc that attaches to key rings or wallets so they can be found if lost. And after its product show, Apple said that it planned to release iPhone software next week with a privacy feature that worries digital-advertising companies, most notably Facebook.

U.S. stocks rose on Wednesday, reversing some of the previous day’s drop. The sentiment in stock markets this week has shifted from the optimism that recently set record highs amid growing concerns about coronavirus variants that are leading to new outbreaks.

The S&P 500 ticked up 0.4 percent after falling 0.7 percent on Tuesday.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose about 0.5 percent after plunging 1.9 percent on Tuesday. That was the biggest one-day decline since December.

Oil prices fell, with futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, declining 1.2 percent to just below $62 a barrel.

Stocks

Netflix shares dropped nearly 8 percent after its latest earnings report. For the first quarter of 2021, Netflix said after markets closed on Tuesday that it added four million new customers, less than the six million it had forecast. It’s another sign that, although Netflix still dominates streaming, its rivals are starting to catch up.
As plans for a European Super League for soccer rapidly fell apart on Tuesday, shares in publicly traded football clubs that had joined the group dropped. Manchester United shares fell in New York, extending a 6 percent drop from the previous day. Shares in Juventus, an Italian club, tumbled more than 10 percent.

Economic data

Inflation in Britain rose less in March than economists predicted. The annual rate of price increases was 0.7 percent, data published Wednesday showed, up from 0.4 percent in February. The jump is notable, but it is less than the 0.8 percent analysts had predicted. As in the United States, policymakers and economists expect some of the increase to be temporary and explained by transitionary factors such as the steep drop in oil prices this time last year. Therefore, bets are that the central bank won’t reduce its monetary stimulus yet.

A growing number of retirees and those approaching retirement are in debt.

The share of households headed by someone 55 or older with debt — from credit cards, mortgages, medical bills and student loans — increased to 68.4 percent in 2019, from 53.8 percent in 1992, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. A survey at the end of 2020 by Clever, an online real estate service, found that on average, retirees had doubled their nonmortgage debt in 2020 — to $19,200.

Susan B. Garland reports for The New York Times on what to do if you’re in this position:

Consult a nonprofit credit counseling agency, which will review a client’s expenses and income sources and create a custom action plan. The initial budgeting session is often free, said Bruce McClary, senior vice president for communications at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. An action plan could include cutting unnecessary spending, such as selling a rarely used car and banking some proceeds for taxi fare.
Tap into senior-oriented government benefits, such as property tax relief, utility assistance and Medicare premium subsidies. The National Council on Aging operates a clearinghouse website for them, BenefitsCheckUp.org. “The average individual 65-plus on a fixed income is leaving $7,000 annually on the table” in unused benefits, said Ramsey Alwin, the council’s president.
Avoid using high-interest credit cards to fill income gaps. Medical bills typically charge little or no interest but turn into high-interest costs if placed on credit cards, said Melinda Opperman, president of Credit.org. Instead, she said, patients should call hospitals or other providers directly to work out an arrangement.
Avoid taking out home-equity loans or lines of credit to pay off credit cards or medical bills, said Rose Perkins, quality assurance manager for CCCSMD, a credit counseling service. Though tapping home equity carries a lower interest rate than a credit card, a homeowner could put a home at risk if a job loss, the death of a spouse or illness made it difficult to pay off the lender, she said.

Tags Big, Campaign, Live, Money, Republicans, Swear, Tech, Updates

Business

Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program snarled by tech glitches

Post author By
Post date April 10, 2021

The Anthem, a popular live music venue, is displaying a message of support on their marquee on April 3, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

It was literally a long, dark year at the Independent in San Francisco. The music and comedy shows that filled the venue’s stage and boosted the local economy have been halted since early March 2020. Apart from a few sales of goods, total sales have decreased by almost 100%.

“It’s been a devastating year for The Independent and our industry. We are the first to close and the last to reopen,” said Allen Scott, managing director of The Independent.

“All of these little clubs that really are the backbone of the live touring industry aren’t built to lose three, six – let alone twelve or 18 – months of money,” said Scott.

Owners like Scott have been eager to submit their applications to the Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, a $ 16 billion fund that aims to get the industry going until personal entertainment can resume . Music clubs, theaters, event organizers and more can access grants of up to $ 10 million based on 2019 gross revenues under the program initiated during Covid’s second aid package.

However, the SBA portal faced technical challenges on launch day and the application process is currently suspended.

The portal should be open on Thursday afternoon. However, when it closed at 4:15 p.m., no applications were filed. On Friday it was closed all day while the agency worked on solving the technical problems. Late on Friday, the SBA announced that the portal would be closed for the whole weekend.

“If a reopening date is set, we’ll provide updates in advance so applicants have time to prepare,” the agency said in a tweet late Friday.

When the portal opens, the funds will be distributed based on availability, the agency said.

“This decision was not taken lightly as we understand that this hard-hit industry must be quickly relieved,” SBA spokeswoman Andrea Roebker said in a statement on Thursday, adding that the agency is working on getting them back in as soon as possible To put into operation.

Earlier on Friday, the SBA said, it worked with its vendors to fix the technical problems it had identified.

At the moment the wait continues. Industry reps and owners, grateful for the lifeline, were frustrated with the mishaps and the delay in getting help out the door. The challenges were reminiscent of issues faced the first few days of the paycheck protection program launch last year. This program experienced delays in processing applications.

“We are grateful to the SBA for their hard work creating this program … There is a lot of confusion and fear around the process, but we are still hopeful. The application cannot come soon enough,” said Scott. “Our livelihood depends on it.”

The National Independent Venue Association was formed during the pandemic to advocate for relief. It now represents around 3,000 local venues and promoters across the country.

NIVA estimates that hundreds of venues have permanently closed their doors due to the pandemic. And more are threatened, as the shutdown could extend into summer and autumn. Supporting the struggling venues will be key to rebuilding the economy once things are open again, the group said.

“We’re part of the backbone of our local economy because for every dollar spent on a ticket at a small music venue, it generates $ 12 in economic activity for businesses in the area,” said Audrey Fix Schafer, a board member of the NIVA.

“If they want their communities to come back, they need this economic magnet of independent venues like ours once the full reopening is certain,” she said. The group projects these venues to have a direct annual economic impact of nearly $ 10 billion on local communities.

For many venues, opening with partial capacity is not “economically feasible” due to the high overhead costs, according to the group. National tour routing is also not expected to be in full swing until artists can fully tour in reopened locations.

As owners and operators await help, they are confident that music and theater lovers can return in person later this year, and the program will have ample funding to meet those in need.

Casey Lowdermilk, assistant general manager of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in downtown San Francisco, said the venue had grown to zero from 450 employees and 80 concerts a year.

“Hopefully this money will be enough and get to all the venues that need it in time,” Lowdermilk said. “And hopefully by June or July we will have a real track of when we can return to full capacity events that are indoor venues.”

Scott of the Independent is confident that once the opening is certain, the demand will be there.

“We are ready to come back to it,” he said. “People got cooped up. We had some leading indicators in the industry, some festivals that were on sale, and some tours that all stalled. … I’m very optimistic about demand out there. And we can’t wait to open our doors. “

– CNBC’s Whitney Ksiazek contributed to this report.

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