Starbucks Schultz: Make money generously and speak upright; global central banks are busy buying gold

Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1622

Starbucks Schultz: Make money generously and speak upright

On March 20, Howard Schultz, who was nearly 70 years old, stepped down as Starbucks CEO for the third time. In the next month, he did two things to pave the way for his successor.

One was at the end of March, he went to Washington to face the Senate questioning, for two hours, tit for tat. The second is last Sunday, I came to Beijing to meet Peking University students, Chinese employees, and maybe even some people who are more difficult to meet, tell about my enthusiasm, and emphasize that Starbucks’ firm investment in this place will continue.

In Washington, Schultz faced leftist political leader Bernie Sanders and his Democratic allies. To get an idea of just how polarized this hearing will be, you need only glance at the agenda headline “No Corporation Above the Law: Starbucks’ Illegal Union Obstruction Must End.”

In Beijing, Schultz was treated differently. Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management played the welcome subtitles. The auditorium was full of 300 people, and another 100 people stood and listened to him for more than an hour. On the second day, in the banquet hall of the World Trade Hotel, more than 1,000 Chinese partners of Starbucks came to the scene with green aprons, and more than 10,000 partners connected via remote video. Schultz walked through it, like a star attending a meeting, and the employees were so excited that they wept when they spoke.

Two places, two atmospheres, both reflect how much the world has changed.

In 1994, then U.S. President Clinton invited Schultz to the White House as a guest, praising Starbucks as a representative of a responsible enterprise, providing ordinary employees with benefits such as medical insurance and bursaries. At that time, Starbucks had just been listed for two years, and it had launched a grassroots employee stock ownership plan, allowing each Starbucks employee to receive options at a low price after working for two years. At that time, the media interviewed a 28-year-old barista. She sold some stocks and kept some, worth more than 2,000 US dollars. If she did keep the stock until she was 55, it could sell for more than $1 million.

Barista is a profession with almost zero threshold, and the income in the United States has long been close to the minimum wage of each state. All-employee shareholding is unprecedented in the American catering and retail industry. It has allowed Starbucks employees in the growth period to obtain considerable returns. Schultz became the benchmark for good American bosses at that time.

However, in the past 20 years, “big company” has gradually become a negative term in the United States.

In early 1999, the first store in China opened. There were speeches, dragon and lion dances, and foreign media reports, but Schultz was not there, and no other Starbucks executives were present. This is an authorized store. A Taiwanese businessman brought a barista trained in Seattle and imported all the materials for opening the store, from coffee beans to paper cups.

Starbucks came to a place without coffee culture, and there was no long line at the door like KFC and Pizza Hut. Even after two or three years, Starbucks clerks will still kindly remind consumers that the cheapest espresso on the price tag is very small and only has one sip.

Now, China is an important driving force for Starbucks to continue to grow. Starbucks has opened more than 6,000 stores here, with an average of 3 new stores opened a day. There are 10,000 store chains in China, but no consumer retail brand plans to open 10,000 directly-operated stores like Starbucks.

The world has changed too much, but Schultz has not changed at all. He is confident and firm. He believes that he is fair enough to his employees and that he deserves all his wealth.

People who are high-ranking and rich and want to get in touch with the public often choose some clothes that ordinary people can afford to get closer. Li Ka-shing showed Citizen to the camera several times, and Clinton took office wearing a Timex worth tens of dollars. But Schultz, who had seriously considered running for the US president, never made such modifications. He usually wears decent formal clothes in public and wears a Rolex Triple-Date Chronograph with a public price of more than 80,000 US dollars.

During a hearing late last month, one senator commented, “You’re a billionaire and they’re your employees. There’s a huge inequality of power between the two sides, so people want to unionize.” Schultz didn’t hesitate for a moment, “About ‘Billionaires’ let’s get this straight. Yes, I have billions. I earned it, no one gave it to me. I keep sharing it with Starbucks employees. That’s why you guys keep posting me like this’ Billionaire’ label, that’s unfair.”

At the hearing, he calculated that the average salary of Starbucks employees today is $17.50 per hour, plus other incentives, $27 per hour. “That’s more than the minimum wage in every single one of you.”

After crossing 12 time zones, he came to a safe space where he had to register in advance and face recognition when entering and leaving. On another occasion, Schultz continued to export values—his, and Starbucks’.

At Peking University, he quoted the comment of business writer Warren Bennis, “Leaders are not born, they are made.” Excellent leaders must have intelligence and emotional intelligence, but more importantly, they need to have strong curiosity.

At a time when entrepreneurs are becoming more cautious about talking about values, more and more convinced that too much is too much to say, Schultz said: “The only textbook we try to use is the Starbucks values and what we can do to make our partners feel pride.”

For the success of Starbucks, Schultz is most willing to say “fragile balance”. On the one hand, it needs to create profits and fulfill its responsibilities to public shareholders. On the other hand, it needs to maintain a business conscience and hope to provide opportunities for “partners”. Share the profits with them. Only in this way can we “build a great and lasting company”.

Today, young people in both places are increasingly tired of the previous generation of successful people setting themselves up as role models. They attribute the self-made success of the previous generation to good opportunities and unconsolidated class. Young people on Twitter already have a short name for this, “boomer”, and the high-frequency word that appears on Weibo is “capital”. Schultz never took care of such emotional changes. He still did what he wanted to do and said what he wanted to say.

Making money in such an upright manner, and speaking in an upright manner, is almost becoming a luxury item today. (Huang Junjie)

Global central banks are busy buying gold

Under the influence of various factors such as foreign debt, currency credit and exchange rate risks, the global central bank’s gold reserves increased to the highest level since November 1974 in October last year. It is also the 14th consecutive year since the financial crisis in 2008 that global central banks have purchased gold. It also pushed gold prices closer to an all-time high of around $2,090 an ounce set in 2020 last month.

Central banks’ demand for gold purchases ran through the entire year of last year, and large-scale gold purchases mainly occurred in the fourth quarter. The single-quarter net purchases of 417 tons accounted for 36% of the annual total. According to a survey conducted by the World Gold Council in October last year, a quarter of the central bank officials surveyed intend to increase their gold holdings in the next 12 months.

The gold reserves of the People’s Bank of China have also increased net since November last year, and this trend has been maintained for five months, with a cumulative net increase of 3.86 million ounces. According to data from the People’s Bank of China, as of the end of March this year, its gold reserves were about 66.5 million ounces (about 1,885 tons).

Based on the current New York Mercantile Exchange gold price conversion (1990 US dollars per ounce), the Chinese central bank’s gold reserves are valued at more than 132.3 billion US dollars.

Since 2000, the People’s Bank of China has made six major moves to increase its holdings of gold on a large scale, which occurred in:

In December 2001, it increased by 3.41 million ounces, accumulatively holding 16.08 million ounces;
In December 2002, it increased by 3.21 million ounces, accumulatively holding 19.29 million ounces;
In April 2009, it increased by 14.6 million ounces, accumulatively holding 33.89 million ounces;
From July 2015 to October 2016, an increase of 25.35 million ounces was held, accumulatively holding 59.24 million ounces;
From December 2018 to September 2019, an increase of 3.4 million ounces, with a cumulative holding of 62.64 million ounces;
From November 2022 to March 2023, the holdings have increased by 3.86 million ounces, with a cumulative holding of 66.5 million ounces.

The research teams of Industrial Securities, Minsheng Securities and Zheshang Securities have discussed the reasons for the increase in central bank gold reserves from the central bank and macro perspectives. After the U.S. dollar was decoupled from gold prices in 1971, central banks around the world began to abandon gold holdings and kept adding foreign bonds to seek a reasonable allocation of central bank assets. Until the financial crisis in 2008, global gold reserves showed a unilateral downward trend.

In response to the financial crisis, major central banks around the world implemented quantitative easing, which in turn pushed the central bank to re-emphasize the role of gold in stabilizing the purchasing power, and the central bank’s gold reserves bottomed out and rebounded. A similar situation happened again in 2020.

In the past two years, most of the top five gold purchases by central banks in the world are from developing countries. Last year, the top five gold purchases were Turkey, China, Egypt, Qatar and Uzbekistan. However, in terms of reserve scale, the proportion of developed countries is still much higher than that of developing countries. (Gong Fangyi)

Chile plans to nationalize lithium mines. What did other resource-advanced countries do before?

Chilean President Gabriel Boric said on Thursday that he plans to nationalize the country’s lithium industry and create a fully state-owned company to produce lithium metal used in electric vehicle batteries. “This is our best opportunity to transition to a sustainable and advanced economy and we cannot waste it,” he said in a televised address. Previously, Bolivia and Mexico had nationalized lithium mines.

Latin America is the region with the richest lithium resources in the world. According to data from the US Geological Survey in May 2022, Chile accounts for 11% of the world’s lithium reserves, and the lithium triangle (Chile, Bolivia, Argentina) together accounts for 56%. Lithium resources in Latin America are also relatively easier to mine. For example, the lithium triangle mainly extracts lithium from the brine under the salt marsh, which is one-third lower than the mining cost of hard rock mines in Australia.

Although Latin America is rich in resources, most of them have been controlled by foreign companies in history. Take Mexico as an example. In the 1920s, Mexico was the second largest oil producer in the world, but 90% of the production was in the hands of Shell and Mobil, and almost all the profits were taken by foreign companies. In 1938, Mexico announced the nationalization of oil, taking 17 foreign companies as state-owned, and on this basis, established a national oil company to fully control resource ownership, development rights, and management rights.

In the 1960s and 1970s, more Latin American countries promoted the nationalization of resources through redemption and equity participation. Mexico has gradually nationalized mining companies such as sulfur and copper through equity participation, and Jamaica has acquired more than half of the shares of several companies and recovered bauxite mines leased to US companies. Relatively radical ones include Brazil’s abolition of mining contracts and restrictions on the outflow of foreign capital profits, and Chile’s nationalization of copper mining companies and payment of compensation.

So far, lithium resource countries in Latin America have not attempted to nationalize foreign-invested lithium mines on a large scale. Bolivia, which has the largest reserves, proposed the nationalization of lithium in 2008. In 2010, it terminated the lithium mining contract signed with the US company FMC. Currently, only state-owned enterprises are allowed to develop it, but it has not yet been put into production.

Mexico will pass the new “Mining Law” in 2022, making it clear that the exploration, mining and use of lithium will be controlled by the state, and no concessions or licenses will be granted to third parties. However, private companies still have the opportunity to participate in lithium development through cooperation with the government . Moreover, contracts such as concession rights before the new law came into effect will not be affected.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric also said that existing contracts would not be terminated, but hoped that lithium miners would be open to government involvement during the contract period. Future contracts will be government-controlled and public-private partnerships. (Lin Guangying)

More than 60% of the projects in this YC incubator are related to generative AI

Lu Qi is one of the most influential people in China on AI entrepreneurship. He has served as executive vice president of Yahoo, executive vice president of Microsoft, president and chief operating officer of Baidu Group. During his tenure at Baidu, he implemented the “All in AI” artificial intelligence first strategy, and established Baidu’s intelligent driving business group to strengthen research and development. Human driving technology. In addition to being in charge of the fund “Qiji Forum” founded by himself, Lu Qi is still the dean of the global research institute of the startup incubator Y Combinator (“YC”), and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the current president of YC. The two have known each other for more than 18 years. In 2019, Altman also invited Qi Lu to join YC several times.

Last week, Lu Qi shared offline in Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places. He said that the total financing amount of the generative AI track last year exceeded 1.37 billion US dollars, which is almost equivalent to the sum of the previous 5 years, while YC has three points in this issue. The second project is related to generative AI; I can no longer keep up with the speed of the era of large models, and there are too many papers, codes and information. The main points of excerpts from his speech are as follows:

The key technologies of OpenAI along the way:

GPT-1, the first use of pre-training methods to achieve efficient language understanding training;
GPT-2, which mainly uses transfer learning technology, can efficiently apply pre-training information in various tasks to further improve language understanding ability;
DALL·E, go to another mode;
GPT-3, mainly focusing on generalization (small sample) ability;
GPT-3.5, instruction following and fine-tuning are the biggest breakthroughs;
GPT-4, start engineering;
ChatGPT Plugins, began to be ecological.

Why can ChatGPT accumulate 100 million active users in two months?

It encapsulates all common sense;
It has a strong enough learning and reasoning ability. GPT-3 ability is between high school students and college students, GPT-4 can enter Stanford, and the ranking is very high;
Its field is wide enough, its knowledge is deep enough, and it is easy to use.
ChatGPT has practical value for everyone, covers the cognitive tasks of most professionals, and realizes the alignment of natural language and code, and the scalability is good enough;
The threshold becomes lower, and the fixed cost in the initial stage is no longer unattainable. Although it is still very expensive (tens of thousands of GPUs to train for several months), it is not so outrageously expensive-Google can do it, Microsoft can do it, several large Chinese companies can do it, and startups can do it with financing.

How will the big model develop?

First there will be more large models, more complete modalities and more complete knowledge;
A lot of alignment work to do. Make the alignment of natural language with codes, mathematical formulas, and forms stable enough for most people to accept; and more modal access and alignment such as graphics;
Security and regulatory issues are currently the biggest headaches for OpenAI-Sam Altman is spending a lot of energy in the United States to get society to recognize this technology. At present, OpenAI is slowing down the speed of advancement. Every time a new version is promoted, enough time is left for users to generate enough feedback and find potential risk points;
Every industry will have structural impacts and face systemic restructuring. Lawyers, developers, designers, code farmers, researchers, some are more in demand, some are cost reduction. Especially core industries such as science, education and medical care (the three industries that OpenAI has been most concerned about for a long time).

What are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?

Handling information. There is much more that can be done;
Model. Everything has to be redone, the big model first, and the equipment and containers have to be redone. The cloud, the intermediate infrastructure, the underlying hardware, including the core foundation of digital development, especially the open source system, have a lot of opportunities in a real sense;
third generation system. Namely robotics, automation, autonomous systems. Son and Musk both see this opportunity today;
biocomputing. Metaverse and Web 3 are a bit cold today, but in the long run they can truly bring value to mankind (but Lu Qi didn’t say why).
The base layer is the best business. This era is very similar to the “gold rush era” – at that time, if you go to California to pan for gold, a lot of people will “die”, but people who sell spoons and shovels can always make money.

A few tips for entrepreneurs:

Don’t be exaggerated, don’t be hot;
At this stage, we must be diligent in learning. At present, the AI big model is in the early stage of ultra-high-speed development, with multi-dimensionality, complexity, professionalism, and uncertainty. It is strongly recommended to spend time learning;
It is necessary to think deeply, the big model will have an impact on all aspects of the start-up company; think about what to do, what the big model really is, and which dimensions are essentially related to the entrepreneurial direction;
After thinking clearly, take decisive and planned action.

Interested readers can obtain the complete PPT of Lu Qi’s speech through the following link: https://ift.tt/IDakzLc, extraction code: dmmf . (Qiu Hao)

Here’s what to watch for this week’s earnings reports from big U.S. tech companies

This week, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta released their financial reports together. Under their “promotion”, the total market value of the companies that released their quarterly reports this week accounted for 42% of the total S&P 500 index constituent companies.

If nothing else, artificial intelligence will be the focus of discussion at the performance meeting of the executives of these four Internet technology companies. What we have noticed so far is:

Microsoft’s integration progress of OpenAI products, especially GPT. Previously, Microsoft announced that its Office service will be connected to CoPilot, an assistance service based on GPT-4; self-developed chip progress.
Google’s big model go-to-market progress. Previously, Google released the chat robot Bard and the large model PaLM-E. Google is currently using Bard to improve its original search engine and develop a new search engine with artificial intelligence capabilities. With 562 billion parameters, PaLM-E is currently the largest visual language model.
Amazon focuses more on providing low-level technical tools. In April, Amazon released its generative AI-based series of products and services for the first time, including the large-scale model Titan, cloud service Bedrock, generative AI code development service COdeWhisperer, and generative AI instance EC2 Inf2 instance.
Meta launched LLaMA, SAM and other large models. The large language model LLaMA has 175 billion parameters, and researchers can obtain access rights upon application for non-commercial use. The large image segmentation model SAM can more accurately segment any object in the picture.

In addition to artificial intelligence, the other main businesses of the four companies are also worthy of attention.

Microsoft:

In the productivity and business process business, CoPilot may bring new opportunities for the continued growth of Office products and services revenue.
The market share of the Azure cloud computing business is increasing, but growth is slowing. In the fourth quarter of last year, Azure’s revenue was US$14.7 billion, with a market share of 23%, but the year-on-year growth rate fell from 35% in the previous quarter to 31%, which continued to slow down for four consecutive quarters.
Personal computing business revenue continued to decline year-over-year, and the Windows-related PC business has peaked.

Alphabet:

The advertising business was affected by factors such as the reduction of customer budgets, and the revenue in the fourth quarter of last year fell by 3.6% year-on-year.
Google is cutting costs by laying off workers. In February, Google announced that it would lay off 12,000 employees worldwide.

Amazon:

Growth in online retail business slowed down. Online retail is still Amazon’s main business, accounting for more than 40% of net sales. However, the net sales of this business in 2022 will be US$220.004 billion, a decrease of about US$2 billion compared to 2021.
AWS cloud computing business will drive overall growth. In 2022, AWS cloud computing business revenue will be 80.1 billion US dollars, and its growth value will account for about 40% of the company’s annual new revenue.
Amazon has announced layoffs twice, with a total of 27,000 layoffs this year. The scope of its layoffs includes retail, hardware equipment, cloud computing and other business departments.

Meta:

The problems faced by the advertising business are similar to those faced by Google.
How much will the company’s profits be eroded by the loss of $13.7 billion in metaverse business in 2022.
Zuckerberg called 2023 the year of efficiency. Meta had previously laid off 11,000 employees, and announced another 10,000 layoffs in March. (Intern Chang Junfei)

Know it later丨The first IPO of a liquor company in Hong Kong, with a valuation of 30 billion Hong Kong dollars

There are at least 5 IPOs for A shares this week.

Millison: A manufacturer of aluminum alloy precision die-casting parts for the communications and automotive sectors. Overseas sales account for more than 30% of revenue, and the customer concentration is relatively high, with the top five customers accounting for 70% of revenue. It plans to raise about 820 million yuan. It broke intraday and closed down 8%.
Jingsheng Co., Ltd.: a manufacturer of crystal growth equipment, the main products are semiconductor-grade monocrystalline silicon furnaces, silicon carbide or sapphire single crystal furnaces, etc. During the reporting period, its research and development expense ratio was higher than the average level of companies in the same industry. It plans to raise about 480 million yuan, closing up 30%.
Zhongyu Technology: A manufacturer of polymer material hoses for fluid transmission. The main products are high-pressure, high-flow and ordinary light-duty delivery hoses. Inventory balance is relatively high, accounting for 40% of current assets. It plans to raise about 330 million yuan. It broke intraday and closed up 0%.
Rongqi Technology: the production, sales and technical services of intelligent equipment, mainly for the detection and assembly process in intelligent manufacturing. The company is the core supplier of wireless charging module testing equipment in the Apple industry chain. It plans to raise 300 million yuan.
Minstar: The first aramid paper manufacturer in China. Aramid paper is a high-performance new material, which is widely used in the fields of electric power, aerospace, national defense and military industry. The company has the second largest market share in the world, second only to DuPont of the United States. It plans to raise 298 million yuan.

Hong Kong stocks have at least 2 IPOs this week.

Zhenjiu Lidu: Mainly engaged in sauce-flavored sub-high-end baijiu, it will become the “No. 1 baijiu stock in Hong Kong”. It ranks 14th among all liquor companies in China by revenue in 2021, with a market share of 0.8%. KKR affiliates are the second largest shareholder. The accumulated advertising expenditure in three years is nearly 1.6 billion Hong Kong dollars, the gross profit is far lower than that of peers, and there is a phenomenon of channel price inversion. It plans to raise approximately HK$6 billion.
Mays Health: Provides medical marketing solutions and an online physician platform. As of December last year, the company’s platform had about 2.9 million registered physician users, much lower than that of its listed competitor, Yimaidong. Tencent participated in multiple rounds of investment. It plans to raise approximately HK$570 million. (Intern Meng Xiaohan)

A record 11.58 million college students will graduate this year

On April 24, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security held a press conference for the first quarter of 2023 to introduce the progress of human resources and social security work in the first quarter of 2023.

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security stated that it will implement the “2023 Youth Employment and Entrepreneurship Promotion Plan for College Graduates and Others” and the “Three Supports and One Support Plan” to promote the employment and entrepreneurship of ordinary college graduates. As of mid-April, 4.2 million jobs were provided in the spring special joint recruitment in large and medium-sized cities. According to the Ministry of Education, the number of ordinary college graduates is expected to be 11.58 million in 2023, breaking the record again.

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security’s press conference also mentioned the following figures:

From January to March, 2.97 million new urban jobs were created, a year-on-year increase of 120,000;
In March, the national surveyed urban unemployment rate was 5.3%, a year-on-year decrease of 0.5 percentage points;
From January to March, the total income of the three social insurance funds was 2.04 trillion yuan, and the total expenditure was 1.7 trillion yuan;
As of the end of March, the number of people participating in basic pension insurance, unemployment insurance, and work-related injury insurance nationwide was 1.052 billion, 237 million, and 289 million, respectively, and the number of participants in the personal pension system was 33.24 million. (Intern Fu Xiaoyu)

OTHER NEWS

This year’s “May Day” air ticket orders and prices are higher than before the epidemic.

The Civil Aviation Data Analysis System (CADAS) released a calculation report. It is estimated that from April 27 to May 4, the average daily passenger throughput will be 3.8 million, an increase of 4.3% compared with the same period in 2019; among them, the domestic throughput will reach 115% before the epidemic. But international/regional throughput was about one-third before the pandemic. In addition, according to Qunar data, as of April 17, the number of air tickets booked in advance during the May Day period exceeded that of the same period in 2019, and the average price paid for air tickets increased by nearly 50% compared with 2019.

“May 1st” hotel price increases, the highest increase of 591%.

The hotel market during the May Day holiday saw a wave of price increases driven by tourism consumption. According to “Stan Amoy Air Tickets”, some hotel prices rose by as much as 591% (Qinhuangdao Lavande Hotel rose to 1099 yuan/night; we checked on an OTA platform The deluxe twin room is 1030 yuan per night, and other room types as low as 479 yuan have been shown to be full). In addition to price increases, some hotels and homestays have also breached contracts, hoping that consumers will take the initiative to cancel orders. According to Ctrip, during the May Day period, the popularity of hotel searches in China increased by nearly 200% compared with the same period in 2019. In Zibo, which became popular on social media because of its barbecue, the local government issued a document requiring that hotel prices not exceed 50% before and after the May Day holiday.

The United States increased its imports from other Asian low-cost regions, and China accounted for 50.7%.

According to Kearney, a consulting firm, the US’s total imports from low-cost Asian regions will increase by 11% year-on-year in 2022, and China’s share will be 50.7%. The 14 low-cost regions include Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and more. China accounted for 70% in 2013, and then fell slowly as labor costs rose, falling to 65% in 2018, and 59%, 56.2%, 53.5%, and 50.7% from 2019 to 2021, respectively.

The Ningde era believes that the drop in lithium prices will not lead to a significant impairment.

Ningde Times stated that in response to the impact of the drop in the price of lithium battery raw materials, a provision for inventory decline has been made by the end of 2022, and inventory is controlled from the top to maintain a reasonable level of profitability, and there is no possibility of significant impairment. The sharp drop in lithium prices mainly occurred this year, and the current quotation is 178,500 yuan/ton, which is 60% lower than that at the end of last year. The cost of sales of Ningde era is close to 80%, and the provision for inventory decline in 2022 will total 2.533 billion yuan, which is less than 1% of its annual revenue of more than 320 billion yuan.

China is the only overseas market where IKEA has a complete industrial chain.

IKEA has been purchasing in mainland China since the 1970s, and opened its first store in Shanghai in January 1998. According to IKEA’s introduction, China is the only market where it has all the functions of product design, testing, production, procurement, warehousing and distribution, retail and shopping centers, except for its headquarters in Sweden. The IKEA China Annual Exhibition will be held from April 28th to May 15th at the Jing’an store in Shanghai.

Only the Wuhan store is left open in Hutou Bureau, and several e-commerce flagship stores have been closed.

As of April 21, Hutou’s e-commerce flagship stores such as Tmall, Douyin, Pinduoduo, Vipshop, and Dewu have all been closed. According to Nanduwan Finance and Economics, Jiang Bo, the former head of Hutou Bureau’s e-commerce, said that due to the impact of the headquarters’ debts, last year’s e-commerce GMV was about 100 million yuan, and it began to make profits in the second half of the year. According to Red Meal.com, currently only 7 offline stores in Wuhan are open. Stores in Changsha, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and other places have all indicated that they are temporarily closed, and some have been completely closed. At present, the parent company of Hutou Bureau is listed as a dishonest executor, and the founder Hu Ting is also restricted from high consumption. Earlier this month, “LatePost” reported the beginning and end of the crisis of Tiger Head Bureau.

In anticipation of recovery, Chinese buyers increased their purchases of high-end fashion brands.

According to fashion wholesale platform Joor, from February 1 to March 16 this year (the order period for autumn and winter series), the total purchase volume of Chinese retailers increased by 60% year-on-year, and the average order value increased by nearly 30% year-on-year. Among them, European brands are the most popular. Among the 750 retailers counted, Lane Crawford is the largest retail department store, and 87% are small and medium-sized buyers. Some retailers also said that last year’s inventory had not been sold out, and they were still relatively cautious this year and adjusted their brand mix.

Netease sued Blizzard to refund 300 million yuan in arrears, including refunds for players who paid in advance.

It is reported that NetEase recently sued Blizzard Entertainment in Shanghai, demanding a refund of 300 million yuan in arrears. Among them, NetEase once applied for a refund of more than 100 million yuan for 1.12 million players who paid in full in advance after the suspension of Blizzard’s national server. In addition, this lawsuit also involves Blizzard had asked NetEase to pay a huge deposit in advance for several games. Blizzard has not yet developed the games and has not refunded the deposit.

In November last year, Activision Blizzard announced that it would terminate its 14-year agency cooperation with NetEase in China, including Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch and many other games. A few days before the suspension of the national service in January this year, Blizzard had hoped that NetEase would extend the contract for 6 months, but was rejected.

Both revenue and net profit of Mango Super Media will decline in 2022.

Both revenue and net profit of Mango Super Media will decline in 2022, and the core business of advertising and members will not perform well. Mango Super Media’s advertising business revenue fell by 26.77% year-on-year. Compared with the 31.15% decline in the first half of last year, the downward trend has been controlled to a certain extent, but the growth rate of its membership is slowing down, and the unit membership income is also continuing to decline. Some analysts believe that the main reason for the poor business performance is the decline in the word-of-mouth of the core programs and the decrease in the number of investment invitations.

Tencent said that the NXS project against “Yuan Shen” is still progressing normally.

Tencent stated that the news about the suspension of its NXS project research and development is not true, and the project is still advancing normally. It is reported that Tencent’s Tianmei Studio has suspended the development of the NSX game project that is benchmarked against “Yuanshin”. The main reason is that the development of the latest game engine UE5 is too difficult and the progress is not as expected. People familiar with the matter said that under the background of cost reduction and efficiency increase, projects that are uncertain will be suspended first.

Japan’s lunar module plans to land on the moon this week, or become the world’s first private enterprise to land on the moon.

Japanese space start-up ispace’s lunar module is scheduled to land on the moon in the early hours of April 26. The lunar module was launched by SpaceX at the end of last year and has been flying in space for 4 months, but the most difficult thing is landing, because the moon has almost no atmosphere, and parachutes cannot be used, and the landing speed needs to be accurately grasped. Both Israel and India had failed before, and there is a high probability that the probe hit the moon. At present, only the Soviet Union, the United States, and China have successfully landed on the lunar module.

Arm plans to develop the chip itself.

According to media reports, Arm plans to cooperate with chip manufacturers to develop and produce its own chips. Recently, Intel’s foundry service division has announced relevant cooperation with Arm. In the past, Arm was located upstream in chip design, providing design solutions for companies such as Qualcomm, Apple, and MediaTek. It only made money through technology licensing fees and royalties, and developing chips by itself meant competing with customers. Arm has also been rumored to increase the price of licensing fees sharply before, and the industry speculates that these actions are related to its parent company Softbank’s desire to increase Arm’s valuation before and after listing.

Apple is worried that no one will use the VR helmet, and plans to launch a bunch of applications first.

Veteran tech journalist Mark Gurman says Apple plans to offer as many VR apps as possible in preparation for the upcoming headset, which is due out in June. The list of new features is long and includes: most of the native apps already on the iPad, Wellness, a meditation-focused app, a new portal for immersive sports viewing, Fitness+, a virtual fitness app, the ability to use a headset as an external computer monitor, the ability to present virtual Avatars for virtual conference rooms and more. In addition, Apple will use an external battery to reduce the weight of the device itself. Users can put a battery that is about the same size as an iPhone (but thicker) in their pockets, connect a VR headset, and the external battery lasts for about two hours.

Morgan Stanley CEO thinks the Silicon Valley Bank incident is very different from the 2008 crisis.

James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, said in an interview that the Silicon Valley Bank incident is completely different from the 2008 crisis because of its poor management of duration and interest rate risks, and it is not a systemic crisis. The system can remain stable and healthy. Previously, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital, both said that the Silicon Valley Bank incident would not be the beginning of a wave of bank failures like the 2008 financial crisis.

Individual investors in U.S. stocks traded near record levels in the first quarter.

According to Vanda Research, in the first three months of this year, individual investors (retail investors) net purchased US$77.7 billion in stocks and ETFs (exchange-traded funds) on US exchanges, about five times that of 2017-2019 Q1, only Behind the 2021 and 2022 first quarter. Retail trading volumes peaked in February and slowed after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, becoming an important source of support for U.S. stocks in 2023. But individual investors are increasingly favoring diversified funds over riskier single-stock or futures markets.

Procter & Gamble continued to fight declining sales by raising prices.

Procter & Gamble’s net sales in the first quarter of 2023 increased by 4% year-on-year, mainly driven by price increases. The company’s prices have increased by 10% year-on-year for two consecutive quarters; at the same time, sales have declined year-on-year for four consecutive quarters, but the decline has narrowed from 6% in the fourth quarter of last year to 3%. The company said that the decline in sales was smaller than expected, believed that global consumption had stabilized, and raised its sales forecast for 2023. China is P&G’s second largest market. The company believes the Chinese market is slowly recovering, but “hasn’t seen the return of Chinese consumers to travel retail” in terms of transaction volume, and has had a significant negative impact on SK-II’s business.

Deloitte will cut 1,200 jobs in the United States, mainly affecting the risk and financial consulting department.

On Friday, Deloitte notified employees that it would cut 1,200 jobs in the US, or 1.5%, mainly affecting the risk and financial advisory division, which accounted for 3% of the department’s total headcount, because it was affected by the downturn in merger and acquisition activity. Deloitte’s U.S. workforce expanded by 25 percent last year. Not long ago, KPMG and Ernst & Young also announced layoffs in the US consulting business, accounting for 2% and 5% respectively.

Olive oil prices have rallied to record highs amid a prolonged drought in the world’s largest producer and exporter.

Olive oil prices in Spain have soared 60% in half a year to record levels (around 5.4 euros per kilo) due to the prolonged drought in southern Europe. Spain is the origin of more than half of the world’s olive oil, accounting for 92 percent of China’s imports, and production has halved to about 780,000 tons in the past 12 months. Market participants are generally pessimistic about this year’s output. March-June is the time for olive trees to bloom, but this March was the second driest month of the century, and the first two weeks of April saw near record low rainfall, which will seriously affect the harvest in October.

Valentino’s sales rose 10% last year to 1.42 billion euros.

The company attributes this to a shift in its business model, with its direct sales channel up 21 percent last year and its wholesale channel down 6 percent. Valentino currently accounts for 62% of direct retail sales, up from 54% in 2019. In terms of regions, the markets in Europe, North America, and the Middle East grew significantly, while the Greater China region was more affected by the epidemic.

Barbie maker Mattel will help users trade digital collectibles.

Mattel Creations, a digital collection platform owned by American toy manufacturer Mattel, will launch a P2P (person-to-person) trading market on April 27, through which owners of Mattel’s digital collections will display, trade and sell their assets. On launch day, digital collectibles from the fifth series of Hot Wheels Garage Toys will be available at the same time. Mattel, which owns a series of toy brands including Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels car models, launched its digital collection platform Mattel Creations in November last year.

LVMH Group became the first European listed company with a market capitalization of US$500 billion.

LVMH Group’s market value has exceeded 500 billion US dollars, becoming the first European company to reach this milestone. LVMH is the 10th most valuable company in the world thanks to soaring first-quarter sales and a stronger euro. Along with the rising market value is the personal wealth of President Bernard Arnault, whose assets are currently close to 212 billion US dollars.

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