(Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it will write down between $15 billion and $22 billion in the second quarter, as the company gave investors a wider glimpse of just how severely the coronavirus crisis has hit Big Oil.The impairment is the firm’s largest since Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. and Shell Transport & Trading Co. merged in 2005, and shows how the pandemic has left no part of the energy giant’s sprawling business unscathed. Shell lost money from pumping oil, fuel sales fell and shipments of everything from liquefied natural gas to petrochemicals suffered.The lockdown-induced slump has permeated through the entire industry, which is reassessing both the value of its assets and longer-term business models. Shell’s large LNG business, which is central to its vision of the future of energy, is seen taking the biggest hit.“We see material downside for second-quarter earnings,” Banco Santander SA analyst Jason Kenney said. Despite...
U.S. lender Wells Fargo & Co (WFC) plans to cut its dividend in the third quarter to shore up its finances as it grapples with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.The U.S. bank said it expects its common stock dividend in the third quarter to be reduced from the current level of $0.51 per share. The extent of the dividend cut will be announced when Wells Fargo releases its second-quarter financial results on July 14. The move comes after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it would put a limit on dividends for banks based on earnings.“There remains great uncertainty in the path of the economic recovery and though it’s difficult to accurately predict the ultimate impact on our credit portfolio, our economic assumptions have changed significantly since last quarter,” said Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf. “Accordingly, we expect our second quarter results will include an increase in the allowance for...
(Bloomberg) -- China over the past decade built an alternate online reality where Google and Facebook barely exist. Now its own largest tech corporations from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd. are getting a taste of what a shutout feels like.India’s unprecedented decision to ban 59 of China’s largest apps is a warning to the country’s tech giants, who for years thrived behind a government-imposed Great Firewall that kept out many of America’s best-known internet names. If India finds a way to carry out that threat, it may present a model for other countries from Europe to Southeast Asia that seek to curtail the pervasiveness of apps like ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok while safeguarding their citizens’ enormously valuable data.The surprise moratorium hit Chinese internet companies just as they were beginning to make headway in the world’s fastest-growing mobile arena, en route to going global and challenging American tech industry supremacy....
