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You’ll Never See The World The Same Way Again
Alibaba (BABA +1.1%) will provide a $144M spending subsidy to bolster a March online shopping festival.
The company hopes to counter the depressed consumer spending in China stemming from the coronavirus outbreak.
Last month, Alibaba warned that the extended Lunar New Year holiday had caused issues for merchants and that businesses relying on physical goods would take sales hits this quarter.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has removed tens of thousands of third-party items due to coronavirus-related price gouging.
The items include cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer.
Walmart has a similar problem with third-party sellers on its site. The company says it’s monitoring the situation and removing products with unusually high prices.
Digital Realty (DLR -5%) is officially opening a new Dublin data center ahead of what it predicts will be a multibillion-euro tech boom for the area.
The Clonshaugh center, a €70M investment, follows on a €200M investment in the Dublin market.
A study the company commissioned focuses on the key growth drivers of AI, Internet of Things, blockchain and 5G – which added about €1.23B to Dublin’s economy in 2019.
It predicts that over the next decade, that will grow to €6.37B, with contributions from 5G set to increase by about 1,000% (from €30M to €1.12B), AI increasing about 46% and IoT contributing another 22%.
PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) sees some signs of stabilization as factories reopen in China even as it observes slowness in volumes in the region, with particular exposure in Hong Kong, Morgan Stanley analyst James Faucette writes in recapping the bank’s TMT conference.
PYPL, now down 0.4%, had declined as much as 3.0% earlier.
While PayPal’s cross-border business has been affected by the coronavirus outbreak, it has had limited exposure to the travel vertical, which may lessen some of the impact, the company’s CEO Dan Shulman said at the conference, according to Faucette’s note.
In a separate note on the conference, KBW’s Sanjay Sakhrani writes that the coronavirus situation “remains very dynamic and companies have limited visibility to make judgment calls” on how the disease’s impact will play out.
M&A was a key theme at the meeting as ” incumbent players remain on the scout for technology innovations, new service/product capabilities to expand addressable growth opportunity, and/or opportunities to scale into new geographies,” Sakhrani wrote.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) told employees in Seattle to avoid coming into their offices for the rest of the month after an employee tested positive and Washington state emerged as one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus.
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) also confirmed that a contractor at at its Seattle office was been diagnosed with the disease and it would close that location until March 9.
Hours after the first coronavirus death was reported outside Washington state – an elderly person in California – CA Governor Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency.
New York Governor Cuomo confirmed five new cases, saying, “This is literally like trying to stop air.”
The U.S. House passed a bill allocating more than $8B in emergency funds to combat the spread of the deadly virus, including $3B in vaccine research and $2.2B in prevention and preparedness efforts. The IMF also announced a $50B aid package to combat the disease and called for an all-out offensive to counteract the epidemic.
Vice President Mike Pence plans to meet with face mask maker 3M (NYSE:MMM) in Minneapolis today to discuss supply chain issues.
The European Commission warned that both Italy and France are at risk of slipping into recession.
Visa (NYSE:V) is cutting costs and American Express (NYSE:AXP) reported a material slowdown in Asia travel spending as the coronavirus starts taking a bite out of revenue at the two companies. Mastercard (NYSE:MA) is deciding whether to implement expense cuts, but doesn’t have enough clarity yet on the severity and duration of the problem.
