Europe Imports Record Russian LNG in H1 2026

Data from Kpler suggests Europe has imported 9.89 million tons of LNG from Russia's Yamal LNG field in H1 2026.

Microsoft Fiscal Year Results, 18% Revenue Growth, 41% Growth in Azure

Annual revenue $331bn (+18%), MS Cloud $214bn (+27%), Azure $100bn+ (+41%). Models and copilots are a big future focus.

China Engineering out of Dutch Dependency in SemiCons

China has developed its own "immersion deep ultraviolet" (DUV) lithography machines.  Immersion DUV machines are used in the chip manufacturing process - controlled by one company, Holland's ASML ("Changing the World One Nanometre at a Time").

Multiverse Computing Bags Series C

Multiverse Computing has bagged 500m EUR in its Series C capital raise, seven years after its 2019 founding. This is a 2bn EUR valuation - making it Europe's newest unicorn!

The company specialises in AI model compression, using quantum computing-derived techniques to implement LLMs with reduced cost and energy consumption.

The funding round was led by Forgepoint Capital ("Backing Founders of the Digital Future"), BNPP SIVF and Bullhound Capital.

e-SAF to compete with conventional SAF

e-SAF (electrolytic sustainable aviation fuel) is produced using electricity and is not constrained by biological feedstocks. It is more expensive than bio-feedstock-derived SAF.

Commodities price reporting agency Argus has recently launched the first methanol-to-jet cost indices (weekly calculated prices) for nine major production locations.

This has followed the approval by ASTM International, a US standards organization, for methanol-to-jet as a valid process for making e-SAF (electrolytic SAF), clearing the path for airlines to use it in their decarbonisation programs.

Methanol is an organic chemical compound (also known as methyl alcohol) and is the simplest aliphatic compound (chemical compounds containing carbon that are not aromatic compounds).

Data Companies and MCP

Data businesses are embracing MCP but motivations vary, as well as monetisation strategy.  

Research firm Asymmetrix has done a survey to gain insights into those questions. 

In their "MCP Adoption Survey" they found:

1) 96% of Data and Analytics providers surveyed have adopted or are adopting MCP - almost a full house. Asymmetrix refers to this state as being "MCP Positive"

2) Motivations - 36% new distribution channel, 32% client requests, 17% competitive pressure (doing it because others are doing it), and 17% other

On pricing MCP they found:

1) 30% customer dependent, 28% bundled with existing subscription at no cost, 25% available as a premium or add-on tier, 17% usage based pricing

As cost of tokens fluctuate, pricing programs are likely to evolve as players learn to manage token costs.

MCP is fundamentally a disintermediation technology which makes its widespread adoption (including intended adoption) amongst the distintermediated quite staggering.

Bloomberg has also published some learnings on building MCP integrations in financial services.

WTI Front Futures (Sept) Rise to 88.73

September WTI is trading at $88.73 per barrel (CL,U6) a day-on-day change of 2.9%, gaining 26% so far in July. Reports of vessels turning around in the Red Sea have heightened supply concerns.

Ollama Raises Series B

Ollama raised $65m Series B led by Theory Ventures taking total funding to $88m.  

Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, GTMFund and others participated. 

Microsoft Offloads Game Studios (including Double Fine, Compulsion)

Microsoft's Xbox division is undergoing a major restructure, starting with dispensing game studios currently under its aegis.  

Already in 2024, Xbox cut more than 2000 positions and closed four studios, before acquiring Activision-Blizzard, makers of Call of Duty. 

The hardware cost pressures from AI have also made Xbox hardware development challenging. 1600 roles have now been eliminated at Xbox in the latest round of cuts.

Asha Sharma, Xbox's new Chief Executive, warned of major changes back in June.  She is the former Chief Operating Officer of Instacart.

On the studios side, Double Fine, acquired in 2019, moves back to independent ownership. It has declared its thanks for "seven great years together" as part of Microsoft. Compulsion also leaves Microsoft. 

Both firms retain their original IP.

Warburg Pincus Sell's Tech Driven Spanish Private Bank

Warburg Pincus has sold Singular Bank, a tech-driven private bank, created from Self Bank, which Warburg Pincus acquired in 2019.  

The sale was to an ING (specifically ING Spain)-led consortium.

Self Bank was rebranded during Warburg's ownership and transformed to pivot to private banking.

Javier Marin Romano, former CEO of Banco Santander, has led Singular since its inception and continues to do so post-acquisition.

Porton Down Gets £580m Investment

The UK is investing £580m in its DSTL's Porton Down (in the UK county of Wiltshire). This includes a new lab for biological threats named after NATO co-founder Ernest Bevin.  There is also a £1.6bn set-aside for founders in defence technology up to 2030.

Rokos to Enter the CLO Market as Issuer

Chris Rokos' hedge fund is preparing to launch a business issuing Collaterlatized Loan Obligations (CLOs) in the US, a $1.3 trillion market. The business will be built from scratch.

Flutter is Moving off the London Stock Exchange

Flutter is pivoting its listing to New York - delisting its London listing on 31 July 2026.

Anthropic Builds Out Formidable Talent Bench

The number of ex-builders at Anthropic is increasing. These folks are working on models and the chips for training.  Names include:

Andrej Karpathy (of course, founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI lead)

Rahul Patil (ex Stripe CTO)

Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram and former CTO)

Peter Bailis (former CTO, Workday)

Clive Chan (Ex OpenAI hardware lead)

In Silicon Valley lingo - talent density is on the up.

Tate & Lyle to be Acquired by Ingredion (£2.7bn Price Tag)

Legendary sugar producer Tate & Lyle is to be acquired by Ingredion.

Tate & Lyle's revenue in 2026 was £2bn; with adjusted EBITDA at £415m; giving an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% (better than Ingredion's at 17.5%). Part of their strategy is targeting Asia for growth.

The name Ingredion was given in 2012 as the new identity of the then "Corn Products International" focused on corn-refining.

Meta Keystroke Logging Evokes 1984

Meta announced a new tool in April to log employee keystrokes and mouseclicks to train its AI models. The tool is known as the MCI or Model Capability Initiative and Meta added that the data "was not used for any other purpose" and there are "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content". The initiative is being led by Stephane Kasriel in Meta's Superintelligence unit. The MCI is reportedly rolled out to US employees currently, with limitations around GDPR impacting potential global rollout.

Sequoia All-In on Late Stage AI

Sequoia has raised its biggest fund ever in 2026 at $7bn.  They are after AI firms that have a proven model but lack capital to scale. It's a shift in focus to execution and distribution versus early stage innovation.

Sixth Street Invests in Kpler (Frees Five Arrows)

Sixth Street has invested $1bn in physical data and analytics intelligence firm Kpler enabling Five Arrows to exit their stake.   

Valuation is $3.85bn.

Kpler was founded in Brussels in 2014 and specialises in real-time data. It acquired Spire's maritime data business for $241m.

Kpler is based in London, has over 700 employees, and Mark Cunningham is CEO.

Vanguard S&P 500 ETF Tops $1tr in Asssts

The VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) has reached $1tr ahead of rival ETFs from State Street and iShares.

Stablecoin Transaction Volume Exceeded ACH Volume as of Feb 2026

According to NY-based analytics firm Artemis (which offers a "Bloomberg-style" terminal for crypto), stablecoin volume exceeded US Automated Clearing House volume for the first time in Feb 2026 (stablecoins: $7.2 trillion versus ACH network volume of $6.8 trillion).

Automated Clearing Houses are a backbone of the payments industry. The first automated clearing house was BACS (Bankers' Automated Clearing System) which started processing payments in April 1968. It operated from the start on a net settlement basis (to minimise the number of individual exchanges).

However, stablecoins don't use the ACH network and instead trade on crypto exchanges (centralised exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance), decentralised exchanges (Uniswap, Curve, Maverick) which settle on-chain using the native settlement mechanism of the relevant blockchain and brokers/OTC desks.

Despite the threat of stablecoins, ACHs still have an effective monopoly over salary payments.

Growth Slows in Evergreen Private Equity Funds

Analysis by RA Stanger has shown a slowdown in growth for evergreen PE and VC funds typified by offerings from industry giants Ares and KKR.

Evergreen funds are also known as open-ended or perpetual funds. They allow periodic subscriptions and redemptions, typically monthly or quarterly.

Traditional PE/VC funds are closed-ended, have a defined 10-15 year life and return capital at the end.

An article from With Intelligence citing historical growth in evergreen funds can be found here.

NWE Jet Fuel Soars, 13,000 flights cancelled in May

Following US and Israel strikes on Iran in March, jet fuel (priced in $ per tonne) has risen from roughly $750 to more than $1500 per tonne. 

Istanbul and Chicago O'Hare have been the most impacted in terms of cancellations (according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium). This is partly due to Turkish Airlines being hard hit by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Lufthansa has also cancelled many flights. 

The 13,000 cancellations represents 1% of global flights.

The UK imports around 65% of the jet fuel it uses.

The IEA has warned Europe will face jet fuel shortages by June.

Anthropic Reaches Deeper into Finance with PE backed services arm

Anthropic has reached deeper into workflow with a new venture embedding its technology into Enterprise Services.  Both Anthropic and OpenAI signed deals with private equity to embed their engineers (in Palantir-style forward-deployed fashion) into thousands of PE-backed portfolio companies - TPG, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital are the partners in this initiative. $5.5bn in capital has been committed.

Fitch Solutions Acquires TREPP

Fitch Solutions has acquired Trepp, Inc (specialist data provider for commercial real estate and structured finance, named after its founder, Richard Trepp) from DMGT (owned by Jersey-domiciled RCHL, Rothermere Continuation Holdings Limited, 75% controlled by Jonathan Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere) for $1bn. Sellers were advised by Centerview Partners and Goldman Sachs.

Ares Defies Private Credit Jitters

Ares, a leading global alternative investment manager, reported Q1 fundraising of around $30bn, a positive indication of investor appetite for private credit (a multi-trillion dollar sector).  

Ares' AuM is $644bn. It seeks to surpass $750bn by 2028. 

In February, Ares acquired systematic fixed-income manager BlueCove, creating a $5.5bn asset boost to the business.

Ares only earns fees on deployed capital - if capital is uninvested no fees are earned. $32bn of capital was deployed in Q1 increasing fee income. Fee income is up 26% from a year ago.

China Blocks $2bn Purchase of Manus by Meta

Manus is an agentic AI startup. Meta wanted to acquire Manus to leapfrog ahead in AI. Although Manus was incorporated in Singapore, its owners hail from China.

UK Banks to be Briefed on Anthropic's Mythos Cyberthreat

The Bank of England, UK National Cyber Security Centre, HM Treasury and FCA will brief banks, insurers and exchanges in the UK on the cyber implications of Anthropic's new (non-publicly released) AI model, Mythos, which was revealed in April.  

The briefing will include CEOs of the UK's eight largest banks, two insurers and four financial infra providers. 

The model can exploit new-found vulnerabilities autonomously when instructed to do so. Bruce Schneier has observed this is "very much a PR play by Anthropic". It is curious that Anthropic seem to have not built in any guardrails against offensive security.

Bezos Bets Big on Physical AI

Jeff Bezos' Physical AI project, Project Prometheus, is nearing the end of a $10bn funding round.

HawkEye 360 Seeks IPO under ticker HAWK

2015-Herndon-founded satellite data firm HawkEye has now 30 satellites in orbit harvesting data for radio frequency (RF) signals intelligence. 

"Adjusted" EBITDA of just under $25m on a revenue number of almost $118m gives them a 21% adjusted EBITDA margin in FY2025. Revenue growth in FY25 was 74%.

HawkEye "democratises" RF signals intelligence data, previously the domain of state actors.  This is one category of satellite data; others include optical data (photographs) and thermal imaging data.

RF signals are emitted from a multitude of sources including mobile devices, jammers, beacons, drones and missile systems. HawkEye captures, geolocates and classifies signals from orbit. 

In December 2025, they acquired Signal Analysis Incorporated, a signal processing defence specialist.

There are a few direct competitors, with firms like Vantor and Satellogic specializing in optical, and Hydrosat and SatVus specializing in thermal data.  France based Unseenlabs (founded 2015) maintains a nanosatellite constellation using RF emissions to locate vessels at sea, which have disabled their AIS transponders - and hence is focused more exclusively on the maritime space.

Man Group Misses Analyst Estimates

FTSE-250 global alternative investment manager, Man Group,  has had a share-fall of 7% following reports that a client pulled $6.1bn from one strategy in the first quarter.

AuM has been flat at $228.7bn missing analyst consensus expectations of $233bn.  

Good performance in several funds have helped to stem outflows (which are at their highest since 2024 - which experienced two quarters of net outflows).

A net $1.6bn of funds have been redeemed in Q1 2026.

Nymex Front Crude Drops 14% on Ceasefire

Nymex K26 is now at $97 a barrel, with the curve in backwardation.

Moody's Leads the RiskTech 100, Followed by SAS

Chartis RiskTech100 list puts Moody's at the top, followed by SAS.  Both have customer satisfaction scores of around 66%. FIS is third.

Other dimensions include Functionality, Core Technology, Strategy, Market Presence and Innovation.

The RiskTech100 has a 2026 overall ranking, category winners (e.g. AI for Banking where SAS wins, FRAML - or "Fraud and Anti Money Laundering" - where Nasdaq wins) and "Ones to Watch" (LikeZero in operational control and governance).

Blue Owl Hit with $5.4bn Redemption Requests

The private credit firm Blue Owl has capped withdrawals following investors trying to pull more than 40% from a single fund. The US Treasury has called in regulators to discuss private credit risks.

SpaceX reportedly confidentially filing for IPO

May Delivery WTI Rises to $108 Per Barrel

 CLK6 has risen 8% to $108.22 with 135K contracts traded.

Mistral's $830m Debt Raise for Europe Data Centres

Mistral ("Frontier AI. In your hands"), a French AI startup led by ex-DeepMind Arthur Mensch, which has a "Donkey Kong room" in its Paris office, and not to be confused with Mistral Group (UK bus and coach provider), has raised money from a consortium of banks to run a new data center powered by Nvidia chips. A non-exhaustive list of banks involved include HSBC Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas ("The bank for a changing world") and Credit Agricole CIB.

Decacorns

A decacorn is a privately held startup valued at more than $10bn - an extremely rate tier above "unicorn" status.  It is used in the venture capital world to denote exceptional scale, investor confidence and global growth potential.

Freight Fraud in Focus as KitKat Laments Loss of 400,000 chocolate bars

A truck carrying 400,000 chocolate bars has gone missing between production and distribution facilities in Europe. Happening a week before Easter, this has led to Nestlé issuing a warning that this could "lead to a shortage of KitKat on shelves". Concerns that such cargo crimes will be accelerated by AI has been expressed by global non-profit TAPA EMEA (Transported Asset Protection Association).

UK spread-better IG could move to the US

UK spread-better IG, which joined the FTSE100 recently, has launched a strategic review of its domicile.

Brent at $104, WTI at $97.55

Front month Brent (May 2026, K26) is at $104 a barrel, with the rest of the curve in backwardation (June 2026, J26, at 99.58).  Nymex WTI (April 2026, J26) is at 97.55 and is also in backwardation.

While 76K contracts traded on the most liquid WTI futures (second from front-month) no liquidity was seen on the corresponding options contracts.

Google Acquires Wiz for $32bn

Google has acquired Wiz, a cloud security company founded in 2020 that works across multiple cloud environments led by Assaf Rappaport (who previously founded Adallom, a cloud access security broker sold to Microsoft for around $320m). 

Wiz frames itself as "A new operating model for AI-era security".

Google was advised by Bank of America and Freshfields.  Wiz was advised by a slew of investment banks, including Barclays, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Bank of America has expanded its technology banking team, including hiring Jason Rowe of Goldman Sachs and others from JP Morgan and Centerview Partners (Gary Kirkham).

McKinsey's AI System Hacked by Startup Codewall

Red-team security startup Codewall has an AI agent which hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform (called Lilli, rolled out in July 2023)  gaining full read-write access to their chatbot in under two hours.  The technique used was SQL injection.

Agentic Commerce Gets Lift from Santander and MasterCard PoC

Santander and Mastercard have completed an agentic payment, billed as Europe's first agentic commerce transaction within a regulated banking environment. It was conducted using Mastercard Agent Pay.

Agentic commerce is an emerging ecommerce category.

The grand vision is to allow purchases to be conducted using Mastercard's payment rails within conversational interfaces.

Oil Prices up 12.5% from Previous Day on Iran Conflict

Brent crude is currently trading at $104.47 a barrel and WTI at $99.6 putting the Brent-TI spread almost $5 premium Brent over WTI in face of the Iran conflict.

Murban crude (trading on ICE Futures Abu Dhabi , or IFAD) is even higher at $113 a barrel. 

ICE's plans to launch IFAD were disclosed in November 2019 with ICE partnering with ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) and nine large energy traders, including BP, Shell, PetroChina and GS Caltex.

Axel Springer's Leap to buy Telegraph Media Group

European media firm Axel Springer is buying TMG (Telegraph Media Group), owner of Telegraph brands including the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, for £575m (beating a previous attempt by DMGT to acquire TMG for £500m). Matias Dopfner committed to "preserve the distinctive character and legacy" of his latest acquisition. Part of the strategy will be to expand the Telegraph's reach to the US. This is Axel's largest acquisition since 2021 when it acquired Politico for roughly $1bn.

Private Credit in Check as Blackstone Faces Withdrawals

Blackstone, the New York based investment behemoth, faced surging withdrawals in Q1 2026 from BCRED, its flagship $82bn fund. 

Clients pulled $3.7bn though new commitments came in at $2bn, leaving net withdrawals at $1.7bn (a 2% net reduction).

BCRED is the largest fund of its kind that doesn't trade on the market. This is the first quarter it has faced withdrawals. 

Wall Street was also jittery Friday from the collapse of UK mortgage lender Market Financial Solutions Ltd. (MFS)This builds on concerns arising since the collapse of First Brands. Jefferies stock has been hit this year due to exposure to both businesses.

Private credit is a $2tr industry which has grown rapidly over the past decade. Questions over valuation and transparency have hit recently, culminating in impact to BCRED.

AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company" - Dorsey

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's technology firm Block (formerly known as Square) is cutting almost half of its workforce in the wake of AI (reducing its headcount by almost 4,000).

Stock price surged by 20%-24% in wake of the announcement, reflecting confidence in the restructuring.

Sidebar - Square is now part of Block's portfolio of products, which include Cash App, Clear Pay and Tidal - the latter which portrays as a premium music streaming service competing with Spotify.

Dorsey predicts more change to companies is on the way - and added "I think most companies are late" (to to the realisation of AI's impact).

Some pundits have accused Dorsey of "AI washing" - using AI as a cover for managerial failures including over-hiring - citing the restructuring of Twitter by Musk as a case in point. Others have pointed to "crypto winter" with Bitcoin losing a quarter of its value since the start of the year.

Block's investor relations website can be found here.  Its stock price history can be found here.

Ellison backed Paramount in Pole Position for $111bn Takeover for Warner Bros

Warner Bros was put up for sale last year. 

In light of Paramount's new bid, Netflix has dropped out of the bidding race citing the transaction was a "nice to have" not a "must have" at all costs. 

Rob Bonta, California Attorney General (the State's "top legal boss"), warned the transaction was "not a done deal".

HSBC targeting cost savings of £1.5bn in 2026 and increasing bonuses by 10%

The cost saving drive is being led by CEO Georges Elhedery who stepped into the job in 2024. These savings may be achieved 6 months ahead of schedule.  

£2.9bn of bonuses were paid to staff in 2025, with the CEO taking home £11.4m in total compensation.  

HSBC's pay committee said it intends to give the CEO the maximum long-term incentive award at 600% of salary for 2026-2028. 

However profits were down 7% year-on-year for 2025, suggesting a focus on costs rather than revenues.

Anthropic's Series G Raises $30bn led by GIC and Coatue

The raise values Anthropic at $380bn post money (accounting for the fresh capital). Co-leaders of the round were DE Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX. But many other funds put up money too. Money will go into frontier research, product development and infrastructure expansion.

Qualcomm Investing in Indian Startups

Technology pioneer Qualcomm has announced it will invest up to $150m though Qualcomm Ventures to support India based startups focused on AI in areas like robotics, automotive, IoT and mobile.

Schroders agrees to Takeover by TIAA's asset manager Nuveen for £9.9bn

Nuveen LLC, an American asset manager (led by CEO William Huffman, a former CEO of Northern Trust Global Investments for 17 years), which manages assets on behalf of TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (led by Thasunda Brown Duckett), which has a century long focus on retirement security, has agreed to buy Schroders (led by Group Chief Executive Richard Oldfield) for almost ten billion GBP (1GBP=1.37USD, around the same level it was five years ago).

Wealth and Etrading Stocks Now Hit by AI Fears

AI advice and AI advice driven execution is a wake-up call to wealth managers charging high fees. 

In the US, Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW) fell by 8% as news of AI platform Altruist's new product, that unleashes AI-powered tax planning within its Hazel platform caused a stir amongst investors. 

In the UK, IG Index dropped 3%, CMC Markets dropped 3.5% and AJ Bell dropped 6.27%.

Energy Exchange ElectronX Now Offers Hourly Hedging on ERCOT

ElectronX ("Precision Trading for Power Volatility") has announced a new product suite for US regulated power contracts.

They are providing hourly "bounded" futures and binary options on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) markets, where the "bounding" refers to predefined floor and ceiling prices, limiting gains and losses (contract sizes are for 1MWh for specific hubs and specific hours).

The capping of payoff means there is no need for daily variation margin for the exchange to manage risk. 

These contracts enable smarter (potentially AI-oriented) management of intraday volatility as reported by The AI Journal.

NatWest Acquires Evelyn Partners

The acquisition increases NatWest's exposure to a high growth, capital light segment (private banking and wealth management).

Evelyn Partners has a 180 year history and oversees £69bn in Assets under Management and Administration ("AUMA"), with an AUMA CAGR greater than 7%. This is a massive addition to NatWest.

Anthropic Announcement Wipes Value Off Data Stocks

Data stocks took a beating with news of new functionality released in Claude Cowork for legal research. 

Claude is the invention of Anthropic, the AI company founded in 2021 by ex Open AI employees, including San Francisco-born Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.

Big investors in Anthropic include Amazon, who invested $4bn in 2023, later doubling this in 2024. Anthropic uses AWS for cloud provision.

On Wednesday 4 February, Gartner stock dropped over 20%, as did IP-management software firm Clarivate. NIQ Global Intelligence, formerly Nielsen IQ, that provides consumer insights, also dropped almost 20%.

Gartner's cousin, Forrester, dropped 12%, potentially as its business decline was already priced in. FactSet dropped 10%.

S&P Global dropped 11.2%. That is despite historical investments in AI, including Kensho in 2018. Kensho specialized in NLP and machine learning for financial data.  Some of S&P's current work involves interfacing with LLMs - a product win for S&P but a not a financial one - that cash goes to AI companies.

LSEG dropped 9.72%. Around 60% of their revenue can be said to be data-driven revenue, coming from the Data and Analytics segment. The rest comes largely from trading services.

$6.4bn Take-Private of OneStream by Hg to Accelerate AI Growth

Orbex in Talks to Sell its business to The Exploration Company

The Exploration Company (backed by investors such as EQT and Red River West) is reputedly in talks to acquire Orbex, a Scotland-based rocket launch startup (which builds rockets powered by BioLPG instead of kerosene).

Netflix updates bid to all-cash offer for Warner Bros

Netflix has offered an all cash for Warner Bros.

The aim is to push off  repeat bids from Paramount Skydance (PSKY, backed by Larry Ellison, whose son David founded Skydance, and produced Top Gun -Maverick) which have been repeatedly rebuffed.

The deal would include Warner Bros film and TV studios, HBO and HBO Max, content library and streaming operations. 

However, Warner Brothers (currently Warner Bros Discovery) would lose the Discovery brand (which includes CNN, Discovery Channel and Food Network, making it one of the largest linear TV operators in the world). Discovery would be taken public mid 2026.

Warner Bros has stuck with Netflix's bid and questioned Skydance's financing.

Netflix stock is up, Paramount down.

Suedzucker performance improves despite weak sugar prices

Suedzucker, Europe's largest sugar producer (it produces beet sugar which is table sugar or sucrose, extracted from the sugar beet plant), reported 3Q earnings improvement, driven by its non-sugar businesses such as biofuels, starch and fresh fruit (protecting itself against a weak EU sugar market).

Suedzucker warned that the EU sugar market is likely to remain depressed and hence forecasts a fall in operating profit from the previous year.

80% of world sugar production comes from sugarcane (grown in tropical and subtropical regions) and 20% comes from sugar beet (grown in temperate climates like EU, Russia, UK, US). 

Sugar beet is very important for Europe's sugar supply.

Worldwide sugar production is roughly 181 million tons (2024/25).

Loss-making Costa Coffee Calls off Sale from Coca Cola

Coca-Cola has called off plans to sell Costa Coffee to private equity after low valuations manifested from wannabe bidders.  

Coca-Cola was said to be selling Costa for £2bn, a discount from the £3.9bn it paid for the business from Whitbread, its previous owner.  Bidders included TDR Capital (which owns ASDA) and Bain Capital (which owns Gail's - which it bought for £200m - and Pizza Express).

Costa has faced competition from cheaper rivals like Greggs, and brands like Blank Street and Black Sheep Coffee.

James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola, admitted the Costa transaction had not delivered. Henrique Braun (California-born COO) will come in as new CEO from March 2026.

BitGo Eyes up IPO

BitGo, based in Palo Alto and founded in 2013, is targeting a valuation of $1.96 billion for its upcoming IPO on the NYSE. 

GS and Citi are lead underwriters. 

BitGo bills itself as "The Digital Asset Infrastructure Company" with a reputed $104bn of assets on the platform. They provide a number of services, including digital wallets and prime services (the latter services promise best execution with low capital commitment).

There is investor appetite for IPOs however a crypto selloff last October has risen the bar for crypto firms.

Accenture to Acquire Faculty, Gets AI Talent Boost

Accenture is acquiring Faculty, a UK-based AI services company, for over $1bn.  

Faculty emphasises safe and ethical AI systems build with customer collaboration, and profiles a number of clients on its website including the UK's National Health Service.

CEO of Faculty, Marc Warner, will become CTO of Accenture. 

Accenture will acquire 400 AI native professionals, including data scientists and AI engineers.

Bulgaria Becomes 21st Country in Eurozone

Bulgaria became the 21st country to embrace the Euro on 1 Jan 2026. The lev and euro will remain in use throughout January but change will be given in Euros only.