Graphcore Gifted $200m in Series D Round

Bristol, UK based chipmaker Graphcore has received $200m in Series D funding from the likes of Microsoft and BMW (iVentures arm, based in Mountain View, San Francisco and Munich).

"Patient capital" provider, Sofina was also involved (whose current Chairman is Sir David Verey, CBE, ex Lazard). This investment values the company at $1.7bn. (Note that Sequoia invested $50m at Series C).

Founders are Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles.

Nigel has been CEO of two VC-backed companies before founding Graphcore, one of which was XMOS in which Graphcore was incubated prior to spin-out. Simon is co-founder and CTO, and has founded and exited two fabless semiconductor companies, Element14 and Icera for a combined value of $1bn. Prior to that he headed microprocessor design at ST Micro.

CNNs (convolutional) and RNNs (recurrent neural networks) are among the skills being hired for in their new round of expansion as well as knowledge of PyTorch and Horovod. Horovod uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to distribute machine learning load across multiple GPUs.

RNNs have been used to analyze temporal dynamical behaviour such as handwriting recognition and speech recognition.

Apple's Big DC Plans - $10bn over 5 Years

Apple is investing big in US DCs.

This includes plans to build a 133 acre campus in Austin, Texas and another build-out in Waukee, Dallas County, Iowa. Tax breaks are helping incentivise investment.

Existing capacity in Maiden, North Carolina; Mesa, Arizona and Sparks, Nevada will be expanded.

Outside of the US, back in July 2017, Apple announced it was building a second DC in Denmark, after their initial one in Viborg (166,000 square metres), with go-live in Q2 2019, shortly after Facebook a similar announcement in January. The DC will be located in Aabenraa in Southern Denmark near the border with Germany and will be powered 100% from renewable energy from day one. The Danish Foreign Ministry was said to have worked with Apple for three years in line with its Invest in Denmark program prior to its investment.

Apple's additional DC capacity will be used to power the iTunes store, Maps, iMessage and Siri.

Interserve PLC in Rescue Talks with Creditors

Interserve, one of the UK's largest providers of public services, has seen its shares plunge by 70%.

Better VPNs - LC's StackPath Drives to the Edge

Three-year old startup StackPath founded by Lance Crosby (who sold his previous business, SoftLayer, to IBM in 2013 for $2bn) provides "edge computing infrastructure as a service" - or what he describes as a "secure platform at the edge".

StackPath started its initial play by acquiring rack space in 45 locations (colocation data centers) and is now advancing into cell towers as its founder pivots the company towards 5G. It fills out its real estate with space-efficient custom hardware (packing in as much compute, network, memory and storage as feasible to stick within 10kW per rack). Rack switches are made by the company itself, combining "merchant silicon" (i.e. off the shelf components) with StackPath's network operating system. Arista 7500 series switches are used in some cases, manufactured by Santa-Clara based Arista Networks, led by President and CEO Jayshree Ullal.

Clubbing together with technology experts such as Vapor IO (who combine cell tower and data center technology), Edge Micro (co-founded by Mike Hagan, who previously launched Schneider Electric's colocation and cloud division) and BitBox (owned by Compass Datacenters), Crosby is looking at the next phase of expansion. MEC, or mobile edge computing, is a term which has been used to describe this nascent sub-sector of the TMT world.

StackPath emerged from stealth in 2016 and has made six acquisitions since then, adding Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS mitigation and VPN - in other words, software components that can plug into its integrated hardware-software edge platform.

A corporate VPN that is fast, secure and sensitive to the needs of mobile workers is envisioned as a potential use case (allowing workers to connect to the servers at the base of the nearest cell tower).

Another target application is software or data distribution as part of a CDN (content delivery network) - a company can send a software patch in one location and have it delivered via StackPath infrastructure efficiently and securely in each target location. Media, gaming and security are also industries where StackPath is aiming to build client base.

Lance is looking to to accomplish all this at low cost to the customer. For example, 50 VMs could potentially cost $2,500.

Former UBS-owned entity GAM Restructures

Swiss fund manager GAM founded in 1983 by Gilbert de Botton, and later acquired by UBS in 1999, who sold it to Julius Baer, is executing on a restructuring plan put in place by David Jacob, interim Chief Executive, a dual UK-US citizen, who replaces Alexander Friedman, a former Chief Investment Officer at UBS Wealth Management with an MBA from Columbia. This involves consolidating various teams, including bringing European equities into a single team. In fixed income, four strategic areas have been identified - emerging markets, global credit, structured credit and global strategic bonds. Blackrock owns just over 3% of GAM.

New CEO Larry Culp Cuts GE's Dividend to 1 cent per share

Larry Culp cut GE's dividend to 1 cent per share from its quarterly level of 12c per share, saving GE around $3.9bn a year. Despite the loss of dividend shares rose.

Larry Culp is known for his "hands-on" approach, having cut his teeth from the age of 37 as CEO of Danaher. He has a BA from Washington College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is the first outsider to lead GE, ousting former incumbent John Flannery (who was a 30 year veteran of GE taking the reigns from Jeff Immelt). On Larry's appointment, shares surged 10%.

GE's debt, complexity of corporate structure and bad deals have contributed to its troubles. This has wiped off half a trillion dollars of market value over the past 18 years (its market value peaked in 2000). GE Power is one of its worst performing divisions reporting a 33% decline in Q3 sales. Renewable energy generation is taking away some of its business.

A bright spot in GE's business is GE Aviation, where sales have climbed 12%, in which the company builds jet and turboprop engines (engines that drive aircraft propellers). The division also has a Digital subdivision which offers products in the cloud aimed e.g. at aircraft maintenance records (AVRAD).

IBM to Buy Red Hat for $34bn in "Software for the Cloud" Transaction - Cops 5% Loss on Stock Price, RH up 45%

IBM (NYSE:IBM, Beta 0.87, PE 20x) has confirmed it will pay $190 per share for Red Hat (NYSE:RHT, PE 77x - clearly will push up as people buy up the target), a 60% premium to the current stock price. IBM shares traded down 5% mid afternoon New York time, with some bounce back towards the close, and a traded volume of around 17.5 million (average volume is around 2m).

In terms of approvals, IBM already has the approval from the Boards of Directors of IBM and Red Hat. Shareholder and regulatory approvals are remaining now.

Key management include

• IBM CEO Virginia (Ginni) Rometty (a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering graduate from Northwestern)
• IBM CFO James Kavanaugh (appointed January 2018), also oversees Transformation and Operations. He has an MBA from Ohio State and joined IBM in 1996 from AT&T.
• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst (a Computer Science and Economics graduate from Rice in Houston) who began his career at the Boston Consulting Group. He was also COO of Delta Air Lines for 6 years overseeing all aspects of Operations from Sales to Strategy.
• Red Hat CTO Chris Wright,  who has spent time working deep in the Linux kernel.

The focus of the acquisition is software for the cloud (Dell EMC was bigger at $67bn but that was both hardware and software).  This will allow IBM to tap into a market where they estimate 80 percent of business workloads have "yet to move to the cloud". Linux, containers, Kubernetes and multi-cloud management are all on the cards in the new world of IBM. "Open hybrid cloud" is the mantra of the deal.

The acquisition is designed to be free cash flow and gross margin accretive within 12 months. IBM has also expressed commitment to growing its dividend and maintaining strong investment grade credit ratings. It will target a leverage profile consistent with mid to high single A credit rating.

Jim Whitehurst stated that Red Hat is the leading open-source software business, with growth in 66 consecutive quarters, and could leverage IBM's scale and infrastructure and depth in customer relationships to continue its growth journey. He also mentioned that Red Hat and IBM have partnered over 20 years. Ginni Rometty stated "this lifts all boats for IBM" and that the deal prepares IBM for the "second chapter of the Cloud".

Micron Bets Big on AI to Boost Chip Sales with $100m Venture Fund

Nasdaq-traded Micron Technology (MU, non dividend paying, Beta of 2.27) is betting $100m that AI will ramp up demand for its memory chips. Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO, and former co-founder of SanDisk, spoke highly of the big opportunities ahead which will increasingly require better "memory and storage technologies" to galvanise the operation of neural networks at the heart of machine learning applications. Micron's premise is that machine learning workloads (training process) require six times more DRAM per server and double the SSD capacity than a standard cloud server. The memory bottleneck additionally requires investment in the much touted HBM or high bandwidth memory - Micron's offering in this space takes the shape of hybrid memory cubes (HMC). Samsung and Hynix ("Innovation from Within") are the current market leaders in HBM.

KKR Bids to Grow Portfolio of Tech

KKR has bid A$1.75bn to takover MYOB Group (MYO.AX) which if successful would make it KKR's biggest acquisition in Australia and go a long way to growing its portfolio of tech businesses. MYOB said its board was studying the non-binding offer.

Australia Mortgage Lenders Bought up by US Private Equity Firms

KKR, Blackstone and Cerberus are all in on the game.

Unraveling of Swiss Banking Secrecy Laws

The Federal Tax Administration (FTA) has for the first time shared data on 2 million accounts under the framework of the new AEOI (Automatic Exchange of Information), relevant to EU states as well as a further nine states and territories (states e.g. Australia, Canada, South Korea, territories e.g. Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey).

Honeywell Launches Cyber Consulting Wing to Address Customer Skills Gap

Honeywell has launched CyberVantage (TM) a cyber service for its Industrial Internet of Things customers. This includes penetration testing to identify and eliminate security weaknesses.

Announcing the move at an annual customer conference in Madrid, Honeywell Process Solutions, which is focused on process industries, said it was an "imperative" and "logical" step to take.

Process industries are concerned with processing bulk resources into other products and include the chemical and petrochemical industries.

Mike Spear is Honeywell's global operations director for Industrial Cybersecurity.

Technology partners include Intel Security which includes the McAfee business purchased by Intel in February 2011. Relevant related institutions include ICS-CERT, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, part of the NCCIC (National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center).

Cryptocurrencies are Commodities

A ruling by Judge Rya Zobel in September 2018 has determined cryptocurrencies are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act. The ruling involved an allegedly illegal cryptocurrency called My Big Coin (MBC).

Bringing Hardcore Tech In House - Apple Consumes PMIC Supplier

Apple is buying a portion of Dialog Semiconductor for $300m, a manufacturer of power management ICs (PMICs) taking control of its Swindon site as well as offices in Livorno, Italy and Nabern (where Daimler also have a research facility) and Neuaubing in Germany.

For this price, Apple will also acquire Dialog's patents and also take on its chip engineering workforce.  Apple will also prepay $300m to Dialog for products to be delivered over the next 3 years, creating an outlay of $600m for Apple.

Apple's hardware chief Johny Srouji, who reports to CEO Tim Cook, praised Dialog's "deep expertise in chip development" and alluded to their engineers having a long track record supporting Apple from the early days of the iPhone.

Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development on the A4, the first Apple-designed System on a Chip, having previously held senior positions at Intel and IBM. He has Bachelors and Masters from Technion which has close links with Intel.

The announcement caused Dialog's shares to surge 30% given the certainty the deal places over its future. The uncertainty (which at one point led to a 20% drop in the share price) was triggered by both Dialog's dependence on Apple (from whom it gets 75% of its revenue), and Apple's decision to drop Imagination Technologies in favour of developing its GPUs in-house, creating anxiety amongst suppliers (Imagination threatened legal action against Apple before being bought out by Canyon Bridge).

Dr Jalal Bagherli, who joined Dialog as CEO in 2005 (and has also worked as CEO of Alphamosaic, a Cambridge startup building video processing chips for mobile, sold to Broadcom in 2004 for $123m), and has a PhD in Electronics from Kent University, said the deal was "in the best interests of employees and shareholders".

Dialog's financial advisors were Qatalyst Partners (the advisory firm led by George Boutros and Frank Quatrrone) and legal counsel Linklaters.

Dialog's competitors in the Smartphone PMIC market are Qualcomm (with about 40% market share), TI (20% market share),  Maxim and formerly ST-Ericsson.

World Bank Buffers Up On Batteries in $5bn Power Play

The World Bank has announced at the UN General Assembly that it is creating a $1bn buffer of loan money to dish out for battery financing in the developing world. It is also seeking partners to provide an additional $4bn of financing ($3bn from public and private sector and $1bn from channels such as the Clean Technology Fund - whose biggest donors are the UK, US and Japan).

The KPI is to finance 17.5 GWh of battery storage capacity by 2025. This will be expanding the current capacity in developing countries today of 4.5 GWh.

Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, stated "Batteries are critical to decarbonizing the world's power systems". They allow storage of renewable energy and reduce dependence on power from the grid. Banks of batteries can allow the creation of mini-grids supporting remote communities, something the World Bank is already financing.

The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, predicts 40% growth in energy storage over the next nine or ten years.

Amazon Markets ACK to OEMS Targeting Home Automation

Amazon is marketing a board with chip and antenna to OEMs looking to integrate with Alexa in the home automation space. They call it the ACK. The cost of the chip will be only a few dollars. This puts Amazon in the driving seat of home automation, alongside the likes of Google (which purchased Nest Labs in 2014), Apple and Microsoft. Hamilton Beach and Proctor and Gamble are partnering with Amazon on this. The value of Amazon's offering is not in the chips themselves, but in binding consumers to their platform, and owning the data generated off of it.

"Simply Not Good Enough" - $234 billion ML scandal at Danske Bank focuses on Estonian branch where red flags were raised in 2014, IT Partly Blamed

The money laundering scandal at Danske Bank (literally "Danish Bank", whose motto is "Making More Possible") led to the resignation of Thomas Borgen, CEO. Denmark's business minister, Rasmus Jarlov, expressed his disappointment, with the remark "simply not good enough". Shares fell by 8% as the bank admitted a "significant part of the payments" were suspicious. A whistleblower raised concerns in the Estonian branch as early as 2014 but this was not properly investigated and information was not shared with the board. Prior to resigning, Borgen had been cutting costs and shifting the bank's focus to wealthier clients to compete with Nordea, the Nordic region's biggest bank. IT has been partly blamed, with a decision not to integrate the Danske Bank Group platform into the Estonian subsidiary, evading AML procedures as well as transaction and risk monitoring.

Don't Blame Brexit is War Cry from LMH Grad Dom Raab

Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab (who took over from David Davis in July 2018), is chastising companies for blaming bad performance on Brexit. This is particularly in light of John Lewis' reported 99% drop in first half profits. Sir Richard Mayfield, Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, said "these are challenging times in retail". Dominic studied at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Richard (real first name Andrew) has an MBA from Cranfield.

Auto-Ethernet Extravaganza - NXP Swallows OmniPHY

The world's largest supplier of automotive chips, NXP Semiconductors, has announced its acquisition of OmniPHY, a networking IP startup, for better bandwidth on its Ethernet solutions, for an undisclosed sum. This will complement NXP's existing products based on standards like CAN, LIN and FlexRay.

OmniPHY has been a regular on the conference trail showcasing its Automotive IP solutions and support for cars becoming "Servers on Wheels". The suffix PHY comes from the IEEE shortform for a physical layer communication protocol.

Alexander Tan is NXP's Vice President of Automotive Ethernet Solutions since May 2017, based in San Jose, California, and has Ethernet experience from Fairfield County-founded National Semiconductor (now acquired by Texas Instruments) and other firms.

CAN standard (Controller Area Network) is a vehicle bus standard that allows microcontrollers to communicate, via a message-based protocol, in applications without a host computer. Development on the CAN bus started in 1983 at Bosch, with the first chips produced by Intel and Philips. The first production vehicle to employ this technology was the Mercedes-Benz W140 in 1991.

LIN (Local Interconnect Network) is a cheaper to implement version of CAN. It was created in the 1990s by the LIN Consortium founded by five automakers (BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz).

Arg Peso Crisis As Pres Macri Invokes Austerity as Leliq Rate Rises to 60%, Brazil Struggling

Argentina has announced sweeping reforms to kill the budget deficit in the wake of the peso crisis and to create conditions to enable a $50bn funding opportunity from the IMF. 2018 has seen the peso slide to 50% of its value against the dollar. The raising of USD interest rates has made it harder for certain countries, Argentina included, to pay its dollar-denominated debts. Argentina's central bank  (BCRA - Banco Central de la Republica Argentina) also raised its benchmark Leliq rate to 60% at the end of August to stablise the currency. With the Turkish lira down 44% against the dollar talk of an emerging market contagion is worrying investors. The Brazilian real is the third-worst performing EM currency down 20% against the dollar.

JP Morgan Hiring Technologists to "Potentially Transform Financial Services"

JP Morgan has taken a bet on machine learning hiring Manuela Veloso, head of CMU's machine learning department, in May.

Nvidia Q2 2018 Profits Up 40% But Competitors Crank up the Heat with Custom Silicon

Stellar Performance

Nvidia announced Q2 revenues of $3.12 billion a rise of 40% from 2017. Performance gains came from the gaming segment comprising graphics chips bundled with personal computers. Data center business grew 83% with demand from Google and Amazon for running computations in the cloud. Disappointing was the fall in demand for digital currency chips, leading to revenue decline of 54% from last year.

Competition from "Custom Silicon"

Competition may come from a number of areas. Google and Baidu are investing in custom silicon, with Google's hardware projects run by former Motorola president, Rick Osterloh. For machine learning specifically, Google has a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to run neural networks at scale. In the automotive client space, Nvidia's autonomous driving chipset, Xavier, is under threat as Tesla aims to adopt its own machine learning silicon.

Traditional Competitors

Advanced Micro Devices is planning to release graphics chips for machine learning based on 7nm technology next year. Intel is also wanting to up its game, hiring AMD chief architect, Raja Koduri, to head up its graphics card business set to deliver product in two years.  Nvidia will likely respond by upping the stakes in research and development. Expenses could run to $870m in Q3.

Keeping it Real

Nvidia's Jensen Huang presents at the SIGGRAPH Graphics Technology Conference (GTC). This builds real-time awareness of the company's latest product innovations and drives fan following.

Capacity Constraints in MLCC Market poised to Grow by $2bn over Next Five Years

The $5.5bn market for MLCCs (multi-layer ceramic capacitors) is poised to grow to $7.4bn over the next five years, but capacity shortages prevail amongst the top three manufacturers who supply 60% of the market. Samsung Electro-Mechanics has said it will halt new orders and Murata is expanding manufacturing by 10%. The third major player is Taiyo Yuden. Customers are considering alternatives such as tantalum-based polymer electrolytic capacitors (KO-CAPS).

SoftBank Profits from Flipkart

SoftBank's sale of its 20% stake in Flipkart to Walmart has boosted profits by $2.2bn, for the quarter ended June 30, 2018. This is a feather in the cap of SoftBank's $100bn Vision Fund. SoftBank expects to pay a deferred tax of $645K on the gain.

The Cobalt Rush

Mining companies (such as Canadian FirstCobalt)  are looking at sites in Idaho, Montana and Alaska in search of cobalt, a key component of lithium ion batteries used in electronic devices and electric cars (consumption of which is expected to rise 8%-10% per year). 

The DRC (capital city Kinshasa) is currently the largest producer of cobalt. Australia is the other big producer.

Having new sources of the mineral will diversify cobalt consumers' geopolitical risk. There is currently research (e.g. at UCB) into batteries that do not require large amounts of cobalt (Materials Science and Engineering). 

The Cobalt Institute exists to promote sustainable and responsible use of cobalt.

BP Buys $10.5bn US Shale Assets

Bob Dudley, CEO of BP, called the deal a "transformational acquisition" for its "Lower 48" business and is the largest investment BP has made since the Deepwater Horizon incident, where it was lumbered with a $65bn clean up bill (shares fell 1.7% on the announcement). BP is buying the assets from Australian BHP Billiton (who in turn acquired the assets from its acquisition of Petrohawk Energy Corporation in 2011, initially known as Beta Oil and Gas).

"US Consumer" credited for JP's 8.3bn USD Q2 2018 Profits

This is an 18% increase from 2017 and just shy of its record $8.7bn profit in Q1. Dimon said "consumer and business sentiment is high" in the US. There are concerns about "flattening of the yield curve", with the Fed raising short-term rates, but keeping long-term rates more or less stable, which could be a precursor to economic slowdown. Citi also posted strong results but Wells Fargo came in below expectations.

Chevron to Follow Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips in putting North Sea assets up for sale

Chevron's various platforms including Alba and Britannia are included in the plans. Chevron was one of the first companies to drill in the North Sea in 1964, however they have been lately turning more towards shale extraction, including exploitation of Texas' Permian basin. Mike Wirth leads the company as CEO, having joined Chevron as a design engineer.

Qatar Said to be Buying New York's Plaza Hotel for $600m

The Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue (Central Park South) in midtown Manhattan, which opened its doors in 1907, is currently 75% owned by Sahara India with the remainder owned by Kingdom Holdings.
It is down the road from the Ritz-Carlton Central Park.

Qatar's Katara Hospitality is said to be buying full ownership, would add an iconic American hotel to its collection. Katara's investments include 50% holding in The Savoy and an investment in The Connaught in London.

Microsoft Grabs Github for $7.5bn

Github is used by more than 28 million developers representing 1.8m organizations. The purchase price values each user at just under $270 each. The business will now be led by Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin, another Microsoft (2016) acquisition.

Israel Investing $275m in Digital Health

Israel has approved a plan to spend 1 billion shekels ($275m) to digitize health records for its 9 million citizens to aid in drug discovery in partnership with SAP.

Shared Workspace Provider WeWork in Expansion Drive

WeWork, a provider of co-working and office space, is looking to expand, having recently taken over its Chinese rival, Naked Hub (founded in China in 2007) for an estimated $400m. WeWork's co-working spaces provide fast Internet, 24/7 building access, daily cleaning, mail handling, printers and more. SoftBank reportedly invested $300m in WeWork in March 2017; by August 2017 this was reported as $4.4bn investment from SoftBank and its related Vision Fund which includes other investors. $1.4bn was earmarked for expansion in China, Japan and Southeast Asia. WeWork's CEO Adam Neumann articulated the company's vision as attempting to "humanize" the way people work.

Spotify Readies for $20bn Listing under Ticker SPOT

Founder Daniel Ek comments, and expresses his intent to "build, plan and imagine for the long term". Swedish start-up Spotify had 71m subscribers in 2017 a number that is expected to be higher in 2018.

Facebook WhatsApp Data Sharing Plan Blocked

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is coming into force in May. 

Facebook is currently not compliant and the UK Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has prohibited data sharing, forcing Facebook to put a priority on achieving GPDR compliance.

The ICO's French equivalent is in the process of conducting similar action.

So far the ICO's largest fine was the penalty of £400,000 on TalkTalk for failing to protect customer data from cyber attack.

Unilever Selects Legal Base of Rotterdam over London

Historically and inherently Anglo-Dutch, Unilever was formed from the merger of Dutch Margarine Unie and British soap maker Lever Brothers in 1930. Unilever is now looking to simplify its corporate structure and base its legal headquarters in Rotterdam, following a review of its dual-head structure triggered in 2017 by a $143bn takeover attempt by Kraft Heinz. Chief Executive Paul Polman said "This is not about Brexit".

IP Week set to start in London on Tuesday 20 February 2018

IP Week is set to start in London at the InterContinental Park Lane. Talks will be given by engineer and SMU (Dallas) MBA Bob Dudley, Group Chief Executive of BP (who succeeded Tony Hayward in October 2010), HE Suhail Al Mazrouei, the UAE Minister of Energy and Industry and Shell CFO Jessica Uhl (UCB and Insead). IP Week is hosted by the Energy Institute.

Twitter Posts its First Profit - A Whopping $91m for Q4 2017

This compares with a loss of $167m from the same period a year ago.

Japan's Nikkei 225 Closes Down 4.7%, European Markets Down 3% and Recovers 1%

The sell off was driven by strong US data - followed by remarks that the stock market was at its peak.

PwC Role under the Radar in Carillion Crisis

PwC has been given the role of special manager to the Government's Official Receiver in the wake of the Carillion crisis. However, PwC is also an adviser to the Cabinet Office on outsourcing, and an adviser to the Carillion pension scheme. (The Cabinet Office is a ministerial department that supports the Prime Minister). Philip Green, CBE, is Chairman of Carillion.

BP pays out $3bn compensation in 2017 instead of $2bn for Deepwater Horizon

The increase was due to a court ruling tying compensation to revenues. The revelation led to a 2.65% dent in the share price of the British oil giant. The total compensation bill stands at $65bn.

PWC Banned from Audit Activities in India

SEBI, the Indian markets regulator, will enforce the ban from 31 March 2018. The ban comes about due to PWC's involvement in auditing Ramalinga Raju's Satyam Computers. 40% of PWC's India business is auditing.

UK's Colman's Leaving Norwich Base for Burton-on-Trent in the West Midlands and Germany

The move was triggered by Britvic moving production out of the city of Norwich. Colman's (owned by Unilever) shares the same site as Britvic.

Expensive Patches Needed to Combat Microprocessor Security Flaws

Speculative execution, where chips do computations before they may even be needed, has been blamed for the latest publicised flaws (January 2018). Intel, AMD and ARM chips are all affected. Spectre and Meltdown are the names given to the most recent flaws.