Category: business

Revenue dropped to $122.1 million. Analysts polled by Bloomberg expected revenue of $123.25 million in the second quarter. Net quarterly loss of $1.062 billion compared with a loss of $299.3 million in the same quarter of last year. The quarterly loss is almost exactly twice the company’s revenue in the last 12 months. As of June 30, the carrying value of the company’s 129,699 Bitcoins was $1.988 billion, the company said, reflecting the cumulative impairment loss of $1.989 billion. The cumulative amount is now more than Bitcoin on the company’s balance sheet. “MicroStrategy’s original strategy and consulting business needs full-time attention,” said Henry Elder, head of decentralized finance at Wave Financial. “Now Michael can focus on what he does best, promoting Bitcoin. And the company can focus on making more money to buy more Bitcoin. They are basically doubling down.”

Addition to the SEC’s HFCAA list doesn’t mean that Alibaba will immediately be removed from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Instead, the notice marks the company’s first “non-inspection” year; Alibaba is only actually in danger of delisting if it hands in two more consecutive annual reports that run afoul of the HFCAA. The report that landed the company under scrutiny covered Alibaba’s fiscal year ending on March 31, 2022. Companies on the provisional HFCAA list have 15 business days to dispute addition to the list. Along with Alibaba’s inclusion last week, pet company Boqii, Cheetah Mobile, ecommerce platform MOGU, manufacturing business Highway Holdings and logistics company Novagant Corp — all from China or Hong Kong — were added.

The carousel of anti-union posters went up Friday and cycles between approximately seven different slides, each actively discouraging workers from signing a union card. “It’s on a constant loop while people punch in and punch out of their shifts,” [one employee] said, “[when] they go on their breaks, or they go on their lunch. Any time that we’re going to be up towards the front.”

Amazon has been known to post signage meant to discourage unionization at other facilities. As Vice reported in March, workers at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York were treated to an array of posters with circumspect slogans like “Is union life for me?” and “Will the [Amazon Labor Union]’s voice replace mine?” The signage at ALB1 appears to represent the most forceful tack the company has taken in expressing its disdain for an organized workforce. The company also has a track record of breaking labor laws and frustrating organizing efforts: firing or otherwise retaliating against workers, preventing workers from handing out pamphlets, and interfering with a union election. Behind closed doors, the company also planned a smear campaign against a prominent organizer.

But now the Associated Press reports “Amazon is barring off-duty warehouse workers from the company’s facilities, a move organizers say can hamper union drives.”
Under the policy shared with workers on Amazon’s internal app, employees are barred from accessing buildings or other working areas on their scheduled days off, and before or after their shifts. An Amazon spokesperson said the policy does not prohibit off-duty employees from engaging their co-workers in “non-working areas” outside the company’s buildings.

“There’s nothing more important than the safety of our employees and the physical security of our buildings,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said….

The notice of the new policy, dated Thursday, says the off-duty rule “will not be enforced discriminatorily” against employees seeking to unionize. But organizers say the policy itself will hinder their efforts to garner support from co-workers during campaigns.
The article notes Amazon told employees their move was instead motivated partly by a need to, in an emergency situation, know exactly which employees were still in the building.

The kicker is that Intel plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalized foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, the industry’s other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. This new strategy by Intel is called IDM 2.0, and it means the chipmaker will have to juggle two somewhat conflicting objectives:

– taking foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants;

– and using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia. “Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores the tentative position Intel is in,” concludes the report.

Airbnb said that since it implemented its policy in August 2020, it has seen a 44% year-over-year drop in the rate of party reports. “The temporary ban has proved effective, and today we are officially codifying the ban as our policy,” the company said in a blog post. Airbnb said guests who attempt to violate its rules will face consequences varying from account suspension to full removal from the platform. In 2021, for example, more than 6,600 guests were suspended from Airbnb for violating its party ban.

The proposed overhaul would be the biggest change to Wall Street’s rules since 2005 and would affect nearly every corner of the market, from commission-free brokerages to market makers and exchanges. The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services on Friday called for the SEC, along with other regulators, to do more to protect the markets from similar events….

The U.S. House Financial Services Committee on Friday urged Congress to adopt legislation mandating the SEC study how its rules need to change to address new technological developments, such as digital engagement practices and social media-driven market activity.

“The boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over,” Lightspeed, which has backed companies including social network Snap and crypto exchange FTX, wrote in a dispatch for startup executives that was posted on Medium, a publishing platform, this month. The investors’ admonitions are a departure from the growth-above-all mantra for startups in recent years, and come as the venture market is showing signs of sputtering. Funding for global startups — at around $58 billion in commitments midway through the second quarter — is on pace to drop by about one-fifth in the period compared with the previous quarter, according to analytics firm CB Insights. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down about 25% from its all-time high in November, and SoftBank Group, which has poured more than $100 billion into investments, this month reported a $26.2 billion loss in the first quarter as valuations plummeted in its portfolio of tech companies.

The headlines kept coming…. (“Wells Fargo Hit With ‘Unprecedented’ Punishment Over Fake Accounts…” “Wells Fargo Employee Informed the Bank of Fake Customer Accounts in 2006”)

But this week the New York Times reported a new allegation — involving fake job interviews:

Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong.” Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.

Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank’s wealth management unit to interview “diverse” candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate.

Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it…