(Bloomberg) -- South Africa’s gold industry output has dwindled to a fifth of its 1970s’ peak as ever-deepening shafts and higher costs take their toll. The coronavirus may pose an even bigger threat.The pandemic jeopardizes the future of a 134-year-old industry that once employed more than half a million workers on the world’s biggest gold field. While Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has been praised for its rapid response to the health crisis, the country’s five-week lockdown and the strict conditions attached to reopening gold mines risks undermining their viability.To ensure the social distancing needed to safeguard tens of thousands of workers in the world’s deepest mines, the nation’s gold producers will only be allowed to operate with half their normal employees. That may make them unprofitable, even as they struggle with the added burden of screening workers for virus symptoms and testing of those who display them.“They are pretty much on a...
(Bloomberg) -- Volkswagen AG joined other automakers around the globe in warning of the unprecedented fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.Supply and demand disruptions from government measures to slow the spread of the disease will cause operating profit to drop “severely” this year, the world’s largest automaker said on Wednesday. Efforts to rein in spending will allow the German company to remain profitable for the full year, despite an anticipated second-quarter loss.Volkswagen’s warning pales in comparison to the announcement from Ford Motor Co. last night. The U.S. carmaker forecast a second-quarter operating loss of more than $5 billion, devastating its efforts to recover from three consecutive annual earnings declines.The auto industry has been hit hard by the crisis, which forced factory stoppages and crippled sales in key markets from China to the U.S. Even as factories gradually begin to ramp up again, consumer behavior remains uncertain amid shaky confidence and concerns that...
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr will meet in Vienna on Wednesday to discuss urgently needed state aid for the German carrier's Austrian business, a spokesman for Kurz said. Lufthansa, which like many international carriers was forced to ground nearly all its flights as the coronavirus outbreak spread, is in negotiations over a 9 billion euro ($9.76 billion) rescue package. The talks include governments in Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, where Lufthansa owns local airlines....
(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire activist investor Christopher Hohn has called on Wirecard AG to remove Chief Executive Officer Markus Braun after an independent audit of past revenues criticized the German payments processor for internal “shortcomings.”The probe by KPMG was unable to obtain the data needed to verify revenues of 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in transactions with third parties. Wirecard hired the accounting firm in October to look into its third-party partner business as well as operations in India and Singapore following a series of reports by the Financial Times that accused the company of accounting fraud in several countries.Shares in Wirecard fell 12.6% in early trading in Frankfurt, taking the drop since start of trading Tuesday to 37%.Given management didn’t provide KPMG with the necessary documentation to verify the revenue, “we are of the view that the supervisory board is legally obliged to intervene,” Hohn’s TCI Fund Management Ltd. said in...
(Bloomberg) -- Airbus SE consumed an unprecedented 8 billion euros ($8.7 billion) of cash in the first quarter as Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury warned of the “gravest crisis the aerospace industry has ever known.”Some 3.6 billion euros of the cash hit came from a payment to settle a bribery case, eating up reserves while the planemaker grapples with the coronavirus outbreak, it said in a statement Wednesday.Airbus is battling to adapt to collapsing demand as the pandemic wipes out new aircraft sales and threatens existing orders as airlines run short of money. Faury said the company is aiming to survive without state support but that its customers and supplier base need as much help as they can get.“The crisis is really unprecedented,” he said on a call. “It’s hitting all regions of the globe and all industries at the same time so the role of governments is obviously key. One...
(Bloomberg) -- Saudi Arabia’s central bank depleted its net foreign assets in March at the fastest clip since at least 2000, showing the severity of the damage inflicted by the slump in oil prices even as the government is only starting to lean on the holdings to cover budget needs.The drop of more than 100 billion riyals ($27 billion), or over 5% from the previous month, brought the stockpile to $464 billion, the lowest since 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the first quarter, the government ran a budget deficit of 34.1 billion riyals, which was mostly covered by external and domestic borrowing, Finance Ministry data showed on Wednesday.Economists say the world’s biggest oil exporter will have have to dig deeper into reserves despite scaling back spending and looking to rely more on debt to withstand the historic collapse in commodity markets. Crude sales account for the majority of...
(Bloomberg) -- Airbus SE consumed an unprecedented 8 billion euros ($8.7 billion) of cash in the first quarter as Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury warned of the “gravest crisis the aerospace industry has ever known.”Some 3.6 billion euros of the cash hit came from a payment to settle a bribery case, eating up reserves while the planemaker grapples with the coronavirus outbreak, it said in a statement Wednesday.Airbus is battling to adapt to collapsing demand as the pandemic wipes out new aircraft sales and threatens existing orders as airlines run short of money. Faury said the company is aiming to survive without state support but that its customers and supplier base need as much help as they can get.“The crisis is really unprecedented,” he said on a call. “It’s hitting all regions of the globe and all industries at the same time so the role of governments is obviously key. One...
