Company news in brief

Adidas reports 93% profit plungeAdidas reported a 93% plunge in first-quarter profit and sales off 19%, missing forecasts, and warned of a deeper hit to second-quarter revenue as lockdowns forced the German sportswear maker and other retailers to close stores.First-quarter operating profit fell to 65 million euro, well short of the 263 million expected by analysts.Adidas said it had taken a hit of around 250 million euro on unsold stock in greater China, purchase order cancellations and higher bad debt provisions.Sales fell 19% to 4.75 billion euro versus 4.85 billion forecast by analysts, Refinitiv Eikon data showed, and the company warned of a possible 40% fall in the seond quarter.It said it could not provide an outlook for the year given the uncertainty over when closed stores might reopen. Adidas said more than 70% of its stores were currently closed worldwide, with a 35% rise in e-commerce in the first quarter only partially offsetting that. – Nampa/ReutersVW re-starts Europe's largest car factoryVolkswagen the world's largest carmaker by sales, yesterday said it had resumed work at its biggest factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, to give its workers time to adapt to new hygiene measures to combat the coronavirus.Encouraged by a fall in infection rates, Germany eased lockdown rules and carmakers are relying on the country's ability to trace and contain the coronavirus to put Europe's largest economy back to work.In Wolfsburg, around 8 000 workers started building cars again yesterday, including the VW Golf. This week 1 400 cars will be built, followed by 6 000 cars in a fortnight, VW said.Production capacity in the Wolfsburg plant will be at around 10%-15% to begin with, and reach around 40% of pre-crisis levels in the week after, Andreas Tostmann, VW brand's board member responsible for production told Reuters.This week Volkswagen Group will re-start production in Portugal, Spain, Russia, South Africa and South America and from May 3 onwards in Chattanooga in the United States. – Nampa/ReutersEgypt's CIB buys 51% of Kenya's MayfairEgypt's Commercial International Bank (CIB) has acquired a 51% stake in Kenya's Mayfair Bank, the Kenyan central bank said on Friday, the latest in a string of deals in the East African nation's banking sector.Mayfair, which started up in 2017, controls just 0.2% of the market and is expected to benefit from funds, skills and banking infrastructure from CIB to help it grow, the central bank said.CIB, one of Egypt's leading private sector banks, has assets of US$24.18 billion, according to the central bank added. It is the first Egyptian bank to venture into the Kenyan market.Kenya's banking industry has had a flurry of deals in the last three years after the government capped interest rates, hurting earnings for many banks and forcing them to look for ways to preserve earnings or survive.CIB has injected additional capital of US$35 million into Mayfair under the deal, CIB chairman Hisham Ezz Al-Arab, told Reuters. – Nampa/ReutersZoom users top 300 mlnZoom video conferencing app's user base grew by another 50% to 300 million in the last three weeks, as the company fought to quell a backlash around security and safety that has seen a number of governments and firms ban its applications.Shares of Zoom, which have surged nearly five-fold since the company went public in March last year, rose 12% to a record high of US$168.24 on Thursday.Zoom's growth has continued even as it faced a barrage of criticism from cyber security experts and users alike over bugs in its codes and the lack of end-to-end encryption of its chat sessions.It has appointed former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos and a number of other experts to attack these concerns and security researchers say it has responded robustly to the issues. – Nampa/ReutersAirbus warns staff on jobsEuropean planemaker Airbus issued a bleak assessment of the impact of the coronavirus crisis, telling the company's 135 000 employees to brace for potentially deeper job cuts and warning its survival is at stake without immediate action.In a letter to staff, chief executive Guillaume Faury said Airbus was “bleeding cash at an unprecedented speed” and that a recent drop of a third or more in production rates did not reflect the worst-case scenario and would be kept under review.Airbus has begun implementing government-assisted furlough schemes starting with 3 000 workers in France, “but we may now need to plan for more far-reaching measures,” Faury said.“The survival of Airbus is in question if we don't act now,” he added.Industry sources have said a new restructuring plan similar to its 2007 Power8 which saw 10 000 job cuts could be launched in the summer, but Faury indicated the company was already exploring “all options” while waiting for clarity on demand. – Nampa/Reuters

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Republikein 2025-08-05

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Company news in brief

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