Microsoft is adding a feature to its Slack rival, the Teams corporate chat program, that lets store workers push a button to turn their mobile phones into walkie-talkies for in-store communications. In a speech on Jan. 12 at a retail industry event, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella plans to discuss how Ikea shifted more than 70,000 workers to Teams, using the service for meetings and chat. The home furnishing giant’s largest store, in Stockholm, also started using a scheduling feature to manage the shifts of 150 restaurant staffers.

Ikea is also working with Microsoft to determine if Teams can play a role in its “store of the future” concepts. The Swedish company may put video screens in stores that use Teams to connect customers with kitchen design advisers, said Kenneth Lindegaard, an Ikea vice president. The company plans to have the rest of its 165,000-person workforce on Office 365 cloud software and Teams by the end of spring, although Ikea still has some smaller groups using Slack and Google’s G Suite, he said. Ikea also uses Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, he said.

The retail industry has been one of Microsoft’s most successful as the software maker tries to gain ground in cloud computing against market leader Amazon Web Services and lure more customers to its internet-based Office products. Some retailers are loath to work with e-commerce rival Amazon. Nadella and Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian are set to speak next week at the annual show of the National Retail Federation, the biggest retail trade group, underscoring how significant the industry is to Amazon’s biggest cloud competitors.

“A key part of our offering is that we partner and we don’t compete,” said Shelley Bransten, the vice president who oversees Microsoft’s work with retailers and consumer goods companies. But there are other benefits to working closely with retailers, she said in an interview. Some of the software products built for retailers will be useful for companies in other industries.

For example, the walkie-talkie feature in Teams can help manufacturers, said Emma Williams, a Microsoft vice president who is charged with adding features to Office and Teams for use by customers in health care, retail, manufacturing and finance.

Microsoft explained the new features in a blog post Thursday ahead of Nadella’s speech in New York, the CEO’s first appearance at the retail conference.

Retail customers are also key to Microsoft’s competition with Salesforce, the leader in cloud-based customer relations software. Microsoft announced the official release of its Dynamics Commerce software for helping retailers manage inventory, scheduling, call centers, e-commerce sites and in-store operations. The company said outerwear maker Canada Goose Holdings Inc. has been using it.

Microsoft also provided new details on how some previously announced Azure customers are working with its products. One year ago, Microsoft said Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. would begin using Azure and deploy Microsoft 365-a collection of software that includes Windows 10, Office cloud services and security and mobile-management software-to the pharmacy giant’s more than 380,000 workers. Now Walgreens will try Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 goggles for worker training and the drugstore chain also is using Microsoft products to anonymously track shoppers’ steps, in order to better plan store layouts.

Microsoft is also targeting another lucrative Amazon business – digital advertising for products on retailers’ websites. In August, Microsoft acquired New York-based PromoteIQ, which helps companies like Kroger and Kohl’s sell ads on their websites to companies who want prime placement for their goods. Nadella will announce Home Depot has also signed up for the service.

The addition of the world’s largest fund manager is a significant milestone for Climate Action 100+, bringing total assets under management by its members to more than $41 trillion. The group already has some notable victories in its campaign of engagement with corporate giants that account for more than two-thirds of global industrial emissions.

Last year, BP agreed to report in detail on how its investments are compatible with the Paris climate agreement after shareholders supported a resolution proposed by the activist group. It has also extracted pledges from Royal Dutch Shell and commodities giant Glencore.

“This announcement from BlackRock will lead to some uncomfortable shuffling in the board rooms of Big Oil, power utilities and other carbon intensive industries,” Mark Campanale, founder and chairman of Carbon Tracker, said in an emailed statement.

BlackRock joins more than 370 global investors already participating in the initiative, which has the ambition of becoming the biggest, richest, and possibly most benevolent bully the corporate world has ever seen. It is cajoling companies to detail exactly how climate change will affect their business, so shareholders can pull money from those that aren’t preparing for the future.

“BlackRock’s decision to sign on to Climate Action 100+ reinforces that the world’s largest asset manager believes that climate change is a growing financial risk to both companies and the global economy,” said Mindy Lubber, a member of the Climate Action 100+ steering committee and also chief executive officer of Ceres, which campaigns for sustainable investment. Its involvement “sends a powerful signal to companies to reduce emissions, improve corporate governance and strengthen their disclosure.”

Climate change is becoming an increasingly important topic in the asset management industry. Protesters and non-profit groups are ramping up criticism of the largest fund managers for what they say is insufficient action around the global environmental crisis. Investor money is starting to follow, with environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investment strategies for exchange-traded funds drawing in a record $8 billion in 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

BlackRock has come under pressure for doing too little to tackle climate change. Boston Trust Walden and Mercy Investment Services submitted shareholder proposals to BlackRock, Vanguard Group and JPMorgan Chase & Co., blasting the firms for failing to align their public stance on the issue with their proxy voting records.

The New York-based asset manager has been promoting products with ESG-minded strategies. In 2018, it introduced a series of sustainable ETFs meant to serve as the core building blocks of an investor’s portfolio. It also offers products with more targeted goals, like the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, a fund first introduced in 2008 that holds about $444 million in assets.

Joining Climate Action 100+ “is a natural progression of the work our investment stewardship team has done,” BlackRock said in an emailed statement. “We believe evidence of the impact of climate risk on investment portfolios is building rapidly and we are accelerating our engagement with companies on this critical issue.”

At least three firms raised their price target on the stock, while KeyBanc Capital Markets named it one of its “key ideas” in the Internet sector this year. In particular, analysts were broadly positive that Alphabet would see strong growth in its ad business, helped in part by political ad spending.

Thursday’s gain extends a push into record territory, with the stock having risen nearly 40% from a low in June. The rally has brought Alphabet within striking distance of a $1 trillion valuation; the current market capitalization is about $980 billion.

There are several advertising and shopping initiatives “that could increase product monetization and impact overall revenue growth,” wrote BofA analyst Justin Post, who called Alphabet “a top Internet utility.” He reiterated his buy rating on the stock and lifted his target to $1,620 from $1,450.

Jefferies raised its target by $100 to $1,650, making it one of the most optimistic forecasts on Wall Street, behind Credit Suisse’s Street-high view of $1,700. Analyst Brent Thill reiterated his buy rating, seeing “continued search strength, aided by increasing contribution from mobile, YouTube and international expansion.”

KeyBanc sees Alphabet benefiting from key 2020 trends, including a heightened investor focus on profitability, an “intensifying battle for entertainment space/time” and political ad spending in an election year. The “historic scale” of digital political ads this year “should benefit large ad platforms, both through the direct spend and in the competition for ad space, which should raise prices for other advertisers.” Analyst Andy Hargreaves has an overweight rating and $1,546 price target on Alphabet shares.

Cowen also cited an improved view of 2020 ad spending, mentioning a survey it conducted of ad buyers.

Google Search is the highest return on investment platform, and YouTube is expected to be one of the “bigger expected ad budget share gainers” through 2021, wrote analyst John Blackledge. He reiterated his outperform rating and raised his price target to $1,575 from $1,525.

Currently, 40 analysts recommend buying Alphabet, while five have a hold rating on the stock. None of the firms tracked by Bloomberg have a sell rating on the shares. The average price target is about $1,467, roughly 4% above the most recent close.

Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and L Brands all reported drops in same-store sales, which is a critical measure of retail success. Macy’s also reported a drop in comparable sales on Wednesday, while Bed Bath & Beyond withdrew its financial projections amid weak results.

The holidays are the most important time of year for most retailers, so hopes for a sustained turnaround in large part hinged on a better performance in the final months of 2019. But deeply ingrained trends – such as digital-savvy shoppers migrating to wherever the discounts are, forcing prices down across the market – are preventing many retailers from regaining their former stature.

The declines at Kohl’s and L Brands in particular were surprising, said Poonam Goyal, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.

“Sales should have been up, but they weren’t and that’s a bit concerning,” Goyal said. “They could have posted better results, and the fact that they didn’t shows the need for them to drive traffic and maybe even shrink their stores into smaller formats. It’s time to do more.”

The biggest retailers – especially Amazon.com, Walmart and Target – have been the biggest beneficiaries of the mall-based troubles.

Here’s a look at some of the details the companies released on Thursday.

– Kohl’s

Kohl’s reported a same-store sales decline of 0.2% in November and December. The company also said profit for fiscal 2019, which ends in February, will be at the low end of its previously announced range of $4.75 to $4.95 a share.

Chief Executive Officer Michelle Gass said strength in e-commerce, beauty, footwear and other areas was offset by weakness in women’s apparel, and said the company is working “with speed” to fix the problem.

“Although the sales dip at Kohl’s is only modest, it is disappointing that the company was not able to continue the growth posted during the third quarter,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in emailed comments. “This is especially so as the consumer economy was strong over the period, so the flat performance is more reflective of Kohl’s and its strategy rather than of external dynamics.”

Kohl’s shares fell as much as 9.6% to $44.63, the most in more than a month.

– L Brands

The owner of Victoria’s Secret also posted negative results, a sign its efforts to shift its marketing approach haven’t been enough. L Brands has struggled to adjust to a broader change in the lingerie business, with competitors gaining traction by embracing different body types while Victoria’s Secret continued to push its push-up bra aesthetic.

Same-store sales dropped 12% for Victoria’s Secret, and L Brands cut its earnings forecast for the fourth quarter to about $1.85 a share, down from a previous projection of about $2.

Investors shrugged off the results, however, with L Brands stock up 1.93% to $18.5.

– J.C. Penney

The Dallas-based department store chain, which has been fighting to reverse falling foot traffic and improve its inventory management, reported that same-store sales fell 5.3% in the holiday period when excluding the impact of its exit from the appliance and furniture categories.

J.C. Penney reaffirmed its forecast for a full-year adjusted comparable-store sales decline of 5% to 6%. The company is scheduled to report earnings on Feb. 27.

The shares fell as much as 8.3% to $1.1.

The People’s Bank of China made the announcement on its official Wechat account Wednesday, without giving more details. The decision to accept the application signals that it’s moving closer to final approval.

AmEx in November 2018 became the first foreign company to win permission to start preparation for the business after forming a joint venture with LianLian, a Chinese fintech-services firm.

The latest move shows progress in U.S. payment networks’ battle for access to mainland China, which has been a point of contention raised in the trade dispute with the U.S. China on Thursday announced Vice Premier Liu He will travel to Washington to sign the first phase of the trade deal with the U.S. on Jan. 15, confirming a ceremony announced by President Donald Trump.

China in June 2015 allowed foreign bank-card clearing providers to obtain licenses by setting up units or acquiring a local company, ending a monopoly by state-run China UnionPay Co. But progress in entering China has been slow for Visa and Mastercard, the world’s two biggest payment networks, with neither firm as of yet obtaining approval.

The Communist Party ruled country is opening up its financial markets this year to allow foreign firms to set up fully owned operations to run insurance businesses, asset management and investment banking. BlackRock Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among a bevy of firms that are preparing to pile in full bore to capture profits from China’s fast growing wealth.

China had 8.2 billion bank cards in circulation at the end of September, with 90% of them debit cards.

AmEx will pit itself against large domestic players and a well-developed market for mobile payments. Mobile transactions topped 190 trillion yuan ($27 trillion) in China in 2018, making it the world’s largest such market, according to iResearch. Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay are the dominant firms.

The projects will be at Thammasat’s Rangsit campus and the Nava Nakorn Industrial Promotion Zone in Pathum Thani.

Memoranda of understanding for the “digital industrial zones and intelligent communities” were signed on Wednesday (January 8).

Ratch chief executive Kijja Sripatthangkura said the sites were carefully chosen based on the suitability of the surrounding communities and their educational, residential, commercial and industrial zoning as well as infrastructure.

Thammasat’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning and the Harvard design school will create conceptual designs for architecture and landscaping and a master plan for urban planning and infrastructure.

Ratch, NNCL and ALT will contribute the needed information about energy technology, industrial and commercial infrastructure, telecommunications innovations and an intelligent communication network.

The project model is expected to be completed by mid-2020.

They join two other telecom operators to consider a bid.

TrueMove H Universal Communication, the mobile-phone unit of True Corp, was the first company to have picked up the documents for next month’s 5G spectrum auction. It picked up the documents on January 3, a day after the NBTC made the documents available

Dtac TriNet Co Ltd, subsidiary of Total Access Communication (DTAC), picked up the bid documents on Wednesday (January 8).

The documents will be available until February 3 and bids must be submitted on February 4.

The NBTC will auction the 700 megahertz, 1800MHz, 2600MHz and 26 gigahertz spectrum licences.

Labor rates in Vietnam are rising and workers are getting increasingly scarce, said Clarence Smith, CEO of Haverty Furniture Cos., which uses Asian factories to make its company-branded products.

And even though Asian suppliers continue to source much of the timber they use from the Appalachian region of the U.S., the manufacturing of wood furniture “is not coming back to the United States,” Smith said in an interview.

Bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. was one of the Trump administration’s stated goals in imposing tariffs on Chinese-made goods.

The Atlanta-based furniture retailer wrestled with supply chain disruptions last year as the manufacturers it buys from fled China and set up operations in Vietnam. Some suppliers stopped making Haverty’s top-selling merchandise, forcing it to find new sources in Vietnam on the fly and causing shortages of some items at its roughly 120 U.S. showrooms.

For now, most of the disruptions are behind them even if the first phase of the U.S.-China trade deal will keep the 25% tariffs on Chinese-made furniture in place, Smith said. Haverty still imports leather and upholstered pieces from China, although it no longer gets any wood furniture from the country.

The factory relocations aren’t going to end, he said: “They’re already building plants in Cambodia. It’s moving just like it’s always moved.”

Smith compared the shift from China to Vietnam and into other developing Asian countries to U.S. furniture industry’s shift to North Carolina from Michigan a century ago. The upholstered furniture industry has seen a recent resurgence in North Carolina, but Smith said it’s far cheaper for Asian factories to make wood furniture from logs harvested in the Carolinas than for companies to manufacture the same products in the U.S.

He was referring to the central bank’s latest directives for banks to change the method of interest and fee calculation that may result in lower revenues. The central bank also asked banks to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) restructure their debts.

Predee forecast that combined bank loans to SMEs this year is expected to reach Bt100 billion, providing ample liquidity to their operations. He said the new way of interest rate and fee calculation will not depress banks’ revenues.

A projection made before the BOT measure on fee calculation pointed to a drop of 5 to 17 per cent in fee incomes this year given banks have different fee structures. However, he said the new measure introduced a few days ago would not significantly change the estimation.

The interest rate reduction on default debts is expected to be steep, but it is not a big part of banks’ revenues and the impact is not significant, he said.

Chansak Fungfu, executive director and senior executive vice president of Bangkok Bank (BBL), said central bank’s measures to help debtors cut cost would also reduce banks’ revenues. Banks have to adjust by adopting new technology or introduce new business models to tap other sources of income in compensating for the losses.

As of September 30 last year, Siam Commercial bank’s fee revenue accounted for 21.20 per cent of its total revenue, Kasikornbank 27.33 per cent, BBL 20.3 per cent, Krungthai Bank 17.2 per cent and Krungsri Bank 16.07 per cent.

Ghosn stunned Japan last week by jumping bail and fleeing to Lebanon, evading trial on four charges of financial misconduct while running the Nissan auto company.

“These allegations are untrue, and I should never have been arrested in the first place,” he said. “I’m here to clear my name.”

Ghosn complained of a “systematic campaign by a handful of malevolent actors to destroy my reputation and impugn my character” because of his plans for a closer partnership between alliance partners Nissan and Renault, and of his detention under a “corrupt and hostile system that presumed my guilt from day one.”

After his arrest in November 2018, Ghosn says he was kept in a tiny cell in solitary confinement, with lights kept on during the day and night, and faced hours of interrogation without his lawyer being present, a system he called “anachronistic and inhumane” that “violates the most basic principles of humanity.”

Japan’s legal system rests on the right of prosecutors to detain people without charge and subject them to relentless interrogation without the presence of defense counsel until they confess or incriminate themselves, a system criticized as amounting to “hostage justice.”

Suspects must be indicted or charged after 23 days, but Ghosn was simply rearrested on slightly different charges to prolong his detention for more 100 days. He was then released on bail, only to be rearrested when he threatened to hold a news conference inside Japan.

The whole case, he said, was cooked up between Nissan, the Japanese government and prosecutors to prevent closer relations between the Japanese automotive giant and its French partner Renault.

“Some of our Japanese friends thought the only way to get rid of the influence of Renault over Nissan was to get rid of me, and unfortunately they were right,” he said. “The collusion between Nissan and prosecutors are everywhere, the only people who don’t see it, maybe, are the people in Japan.”

Ghosn named executives in Nissan he alleged were involved in the plot to bring him down, but said he would not name Japanese government officials involved out of respect to the Lebanese government and people. But he said he did not believe Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was involved.

Ghosn was charged with underreporting his income and diverting company funds for his own benefit. But Ghosn said the income had never been paid to him, and the final amount had not even been decided or fixed.

Despite his protestations of innocence, Nissan and the Japanese government are not his only accusers. Renault, initially supportive, said its investigation found evidence of unethical practices, removing him from office and canceling his pension.

In September, Ghosn paid the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission $1 million to settle fraud charges for failing to disclose $140 million to be paid to him in retirement. Under that deal, Nissan was also forced to pay $15 million to settle charges that the car company and Ghosn neither admitted nor denied.

Nevertheless, many legal experts share Ghosn’s serious concerns with Japan’s justice system, while many foreign business executives say it is unthinkable that powerful, well-connected Japanese businesspeople would have faced similar treatment by the country’s legal system.

Ghosn said his trial was being “constantly postponed,” adding that learned on Dec. 25 that a second trial of some of the charges would not start before 2021 at the earliest at the prosecutor’s request.

All the time, he said, he was not allowed to see his wife Carole, supposedly because they might conspire to tamper with evidence but actually as a pressure tactic, he said.

“They knew I love Carole, and she’s a pillar for me,” he said. “Because they know all of this they said, ‘OK, we’re going to put him on his knees – we’re gonna cut him from his wife.’ ”

Over time, it became very clear that he had no chance of a fair trial in Japan, he said, while he had “no horizon” to see his wife, forcing him to flee to Lebanon.

“I said: ‘What is left? What is left? I had to leave,” he said. “It’s not very difficult come to the conclusion that you’re going to die in Japan or you have to get out.”

Defense lawyers in Japan complain that prosecutors routinely delay or deny them access to evidence, or even destroy evidence, while leaking damning details to the press, but the country’s Justice Ministry says it sees no need to change the system.

Ghosn said he had been portrayed in Japan as a greedy, corrupt dictator, with sections of the media uncritically reporting information illegally leaked from the prosecutor’s office.

“Why Japan is paying me with evil for the good I think I have done to the country? I don’t understand this,” he said. “I know the people of Japan aren’t like this.”

The war of words has intensified this week in the run-up to Ghosn’s public appearance.

On Wednesday, Ghosn’s defense team accused Nissan of a “gross perversion of the truth” for claiming that it conducted a robust internal investigation into its former boss.

The Japanese carmaker issued a statement Tuesday saying it would continue to pursue legal action “to hold Ghosn accountable for the harm that his misconduct has caused” to the company, citing “incontrovertible evidence” of various acts including the misstatement of his compensation and “misappropriation of the company’s assets for his personal benefit.”

But Ghosn’s international defense team issued a scathing rebuttal on Wednesday.

“The facts demonstrate that investigation was never about finding the truth; it was initiated and carried out for the specific, predetermined purpose of taking down Carlos Ghosn to prevent him from further integrating Nissan and Renault, which threatened the independence of Nissan, one of Japan’s iconic, flagship companies,” the statement said.

Nissan’s investigation, it said, was run by executive Hari Nada, “whose own conduct was the subject of the investigation,” with the help of the company’s long-standing outside counsel, which had already given the company legal advice on the same issue. Nissan never sought to interview Ghosn nor shared with him or the public the evidence it purported to find, it said.

“These are not the hallmarks of a company committed to conducting fair and impartial investigation, rather evidence that Nissan’s investigation was fundamentally flawed, biased, and lacking in independence from its inception,” the legal team said.

The scandal has damaged Nissan’s image and left the car company grappling with plunging sales and profits. But it has also tarnished Ghosn’s reputation.,He has been fired by both Nissan and Renault has become a fugitive with an Interpol red notice against his name.