Moncler to buy Stone Island Sportswear brand for $1.4 billion
CorporateDec 07. 2020Pedestrians pass a Moncler luxury fashion store in London on Oct. 15, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jason Alden
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Tommaso Ebhardt, Flavia Rotondi · BUSINESS, RETAIL
Moncler SpA agreed to buy Stone Island, a rival maker of high-end sportswear, for $1.4 billion (1.15 billion euros) in cash and shares, investing in a new platform for growth as the pandemic erodes demand for skiwear.
Moncler said Monday it will purchase 70% of Stone Island’s parent company SPW from Chief Executive Officer Carlo Rivetti and other members of his family. The skiwear maker will then buy the remaining 30% from Singapore’s state investor Temasek. Moncler shares rose as much as 3.8%.
With Stone Island, Moncler is diversifying after a streak of double-digit sales growth ended. The purchase also gives the Italian company, known for expensive winter jackets, a bigger presence in its home territory and a sportswear brand that appeals to younger customers after a takeover approach by French fashion company Kering SA last year.
The brand, founded in 1982, is known for colorful edgy sport jackets, which can cost more than $1,000. It also specializes in high-tech fabrics and has made garments that change colors depending on temperature.
Most European countries besides Switzerland have ordered ski resorts to shut down, undercutting one of the markets Moncler depends on. Chairman Remo Ruffini, 59, said that while the deal comes at a challenging moment, he sees potential in expanding Stone Island’s reach.
“I can see Stone Island growing in essential markets, such as Asia and the Americas, still unexplored by them, which we know well,” he said on a conference call. “It is precisely in these moments that we need new energy and new inspiration to build our tomorrow.”
Covid-19 has accelerated the luxury industry’s dependence on e-commerce and underlines the importance of younger shoppers from Generation Z, who were first to return to stores after lockdowns, Bain & Co. said in a report last month.
The deal values Stone Island at 16.6 times 2020 expected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 68 million euros. The Rivetti family plans to reinvest part of the proceeds to become a shareholder in Moncler.
The deal is the latest in the luxury industry this year after LVMH salvaged plans to buy Tiffany & Co. in a record $16 billion acquisition. Luxury-goods makers are betting that demand for high-end products will rebound as consumers cut back on travel spending during the pandemic.
Moncler may be able to help Stone Island improve its distribution. The acquirer gets 77% of its revenue through its own network of 218 stores, while Stone Island only has 24 shops and gets three-quarters of sales from wholesale partners.
Moncler and Stone Island have benefited from growing demand for so-called athleisure wear, which may be accentuated by the switch to working from home. McKinsey and Business of Fashion forecast a strong market for the segment in 2021 in a report published last week.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Rita Nazareth, Claire Ballentine
Stocks fell as coronavirus infections swept across U.S. states, triggering fears of more restrictions. The pound pared losses as the U.K. agreed on further talks with the European Commission to address the impasse over a trade deal.
The S&P 500 dropped from an all-time high, led by energy, real estate and financial companies. Intel Corp. tumbled on news that Apple Inc. is planning a series of new Mac processors for introduction as early as 2021. Interactive Brokers Group Inc. sank after saying it was experiencing “a significant failure” across multiple parts of its data-storage system. The Nasdaq 100 rose for a ninth straight day — its longest winning streak in almost a year. Boeing Co. jumped as UBS Group AG recommended buying shares of the plane maker. Airbnb Inc. boosted the price range of its initial public offering.
The U.S. is now averaging about as many deaths per day from covid-19 as it was in April, and several large states — including California, New York and Pennsylvania — are facing alarming upward momentum in hospitalizations. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, warned that the Christmas season could be worse than Thanksgiving for fueling the spread of disease. Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said indoor dining in New York City — the early epicenter of the pandemic — will close if the regional hospitalization rate hasn’t stabilized after five days.
As coronavirus cases surge, markets are increasingly expecting a stimulus deal to be done — especially after last week’s disappointing jobless data. With Republican and Democratic negotiators struggling to reach an agreement on both a mammoth government spending bill and covid-19 relief, lawmakers are set to postpone what had been a Friday night deadline for passing a bill. Talks over a $908 billion pandemic relief plan have slowed, with negotiators unable as yet to resolve key details on state and local aid as well as liability protections for businesses.
“The market is basically assuming that it gets done,” said Bryce Doty, portfolio manager at Sit Fixed Income Advisors. “Now any setback makes the market vulnerable, because it’s built in that they will pass it.”
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will travel to Brussels for crisis talks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as they try to break the deadlocked negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal. The two spoke on Monday evening amid warnings from British officials the talks could collapse unless negotiators make a rapid breakthrough.
A record close for the S&P 500 last week did little to move the needle on valuations from a recent tight range. Still, multiples are tracking higher and well above the long-term average.
“On a classic valuation metric, the market looks very expensive. But on a price-to-cash return basis, it actually doesn’t look that expensive,” Dennis DeBusschere, head of portfolio strategy at Evercore ISI, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
These are some of the main moves in markets:
Stocks
– The S&P 500 fell 0.2% at 4 p.m. EST.
– The Stoxx Europe 600 Index fell 0.3%.
– The MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell 0.2%.
Currencies
– The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index increased 0.1%.
– The euro fell 0.1% to $1.2109.
– The Japanese yen strengthened 0.1% to 104.05 per dollar.
Bonds
– The yield on 10-year Treasuries decreased three basis points to 0.93%.
– Germany’s 10-year yield decreased three basis points to -0.58%.
– Britain’s 10-year yield decreased seven basis points to 0.283%.
Commodities
– The Bloomberg Commodity Index fell 0.5%.
– West Texas Intermediate crude decreased 1.1% to $45.74 a barrel.
In a bid to help businesses affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) and Kasikorn Bank (KBank) have separately come up with food delivery platforms
.SCB’s “Robinhood” app, which aims to help community level eateries by waiving application fees and gross profit fees, expects some 50,000 members when it is officially launched next year.
Meanwhile, KBank subsidiary KBTG’s “Eatable” a platform serves as a “helper” for restaurants by allowing customers to book tables or order in advance.
In the “new normal”, the food delivery business has grown exponentially, especially since the need for social-distancing to curb Covid-19 infections has taken the joy out of going to restaurants.
Kasikorn Research Centre found that since the arrival of Covid-19, the food-delivery industry has become very competitive, with as many as 20,000 small to medium-sized eateries signing up to delivery apps every week. In the first half of this year, the food-delivery sector grown by about 150 per cent compared to the same period last year.
It is believed that up to 68 million food deliveries will have been made in Thailand by year end.
Meanwhile, Srihanath Lamsam, managing director of Purple Ventures which created SCB’s Robinhood app, said the aim of the platform is to help society and small merchants by waiving gross profit fees. Most food delivery apps charge up to 35 per cent.
He said by using the Robinhood app, restaurants can save money and focus on boosting the quality of their products.
Under Robinhood, the delivery person also gets paid delivery charges in full without any deductions.
The Robinhood platform, which was introduced in October, will be officially launched early next year.
Even before its official launch, this platform is proving to be very popular, with 300,000 transactions taking place over the last few months with nearly 30,000 restaurants participating. There are more than 10,000 drivers looking after the delivery side of things.
Meanwhile, KBank’s “Eatable” platform is not a food-delivery app but serves more like a “helper” for restaurants and provides customers a new experience by offering them the options of dine-in, dine-out and delivery.
Eatable can be accessed via any web browser, and allows customers to order food for delivery, book a table, or order in advance for pick-up etc.
These services are provided for free and can help boost sales for small businesses.
Ruangroj Poonpol, president of Kasikorn Business-Technology Group (KBTG), said more than 1,000 eateries have joined the platform since it was launched for trial two to three months ago.
The platform will be officially launched in early 2021.
KBTG is also in the process of creating a new platform called Kai Tai Dian Cai that Chinese tourists can use via WeChat. This system is also expected to be launched next year.
Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam has ordered the Department of Airports to accelerate the 2021 investment of Bt5 billion, most of which will be spent on increasing runway length.
Trang airport’s runway will be extended from 2,200 metres to 2,990 metres at a cost of Bt1.8 billion while Buriram airport runway will be extended from 2,100 to 2,900 metres for Bt950 million.
The budget will also be spent to expand an apron at Buriram airport, and reinforce a runway and expand an apron at Surat Thani airport (Bt800 million).
Meanwhile, a runway will be improved and an apron extended at Khon Khaen airport to increase capacity from five to 12 aircraft. The department is drawing up a reference price and bidding detail.
The department has requested a budget of Bt12 billion for 2022.
Thawon also ordered the department to open Betong airport in Yala in the next couple of months.
The Trade Competition Commission said it will set up a unit to handle complaints of unfair practice in the food delivery service business.
Complaints were already being sent to the commission and would be considered according to recently issued guidelines, said chairman Sakon Varunyuwatana.
The new unit will have seven days to consider whether the complaints have merit. If so, they will be submitted to the commission’s fact-finding committee.
If a case is simple, it will proceed immediately as per the legal process. If a case is complicated, the commission will set up a subpanel to investigate the evidence for 90 days, extendable by another 15 days.
By The Washington Post · William Booth, Michael Birnbaum · WORLD, EUROPE
LONDON – According to sources, Brexit talks are “on a knife’s edge.” It’s “the make or break moment.” It’s “down to the wire.” It’s “crunchtime.”
Sound familiar? It is. Even Brexit obsessives have lost track of how many “crunch times” have come and gone over these many months and years of negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union.
All that to say that Brexit talks have still not concluded. Negotiators met in the London over the weekend and worked until late at night trying to strike a deal. Now the two sides are back in Brussels, at it again.
British and European teams are struggling to craft a free-trade agreement that will allow the two sides to continue the orderly movement of goods and services across the English Channel.
If they fail to strike a deal, then Britain and Europe will enforce new customs duties, tariffs, border checks, and quotas on goods, increasing prices and fully ending the era of the free, frictionless trade.
They have 24 days to make a deal.
Specifically, the two sides are arguing over European access to fish in British waters, an emotional issue that taps into issues of sovereignty, even though the fisheries sector accounts for a tiny fraction of Britain’s gross domestic product.
There have been suggestions that European access to fish in British seas could be slowly reduced. Should the transition period be three years (a British proposal) or 10 years (a French proposal)? Stay tuned.
The Europeans, too, are pressing to maintain a “level playing field,” to stop Britain from undercutting worker protections or granting large state subsidies to British businesses, potentially giving the U.K. firms unfair advantages.
The political press is reporting a “final push” this week, but in reality the sides have been pushing for a very long time.
Britain officially left the European Union in January, though it didn’t quite leave. What it did was begin an 11-month transition period, which ends midnight on Dec. 31. The transition period that was granted to give the sides time to craft a trade deal, to avoid last-minute chaos and uncertainty. Numerous deadlines have come and gone.
How are things going? Not good.
“The news is very downbeat,” Ireland’s foreign secretary Simon Coveney told Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE, who described the mood as “very gloomy.”
The Irish minister said, “I’d like to be giving more positive news but at the moment these negotiations seem stalled, and the barriers to progress are still very much in place.”
The British Foreign Office was a little less gloomy. Minister James Cleverly told the BBC the U.K. would keep negotiating “for as long as we have available time or until we get an agreement.” He said negotiations “often go to the last minute of the last day.”
“We are a global player, we are one of the biggest economies in the world, we are a real prize for many countries,” Cleverly said. “I think if E.U. recognise this they will see that actually making a few small but significant concessions can get this deal done and that will be in their interest and in our interest.”
Diplomats in Brussels, confronted with a spiraling series of crises, say that Brexit was long ago supplanted as the most burning issue they are facing.
Nor is it even the trickiest negotiation they are facing in Brussels this week, amid acrimonious talks with two of the European Union’s own members, Hungary and Poland. The two countries, whose commitment to democracy is increasingly shaky, have vetoed the entire $2 trillion E.U. budget because the other E.U. members want to make receiving funds conditional on adhering to the rule of law.
Now E.U. ambassadors are receiving briefings almost every day from the bloc’s top negotiator, Michel Barnier, a lanky former French politician who has sounded increasingly glum about the prospects for the talks.
They are fast running out of time, since any deal would need to be approved by E.U. leaders and a handful of parliaments before Dec. 31.
“It was always going to go beyond any reasonable deadline,” said one finger-drumming senior E.U. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail frustrations with the British approach.
E.U. officials familiar with the negotiations said that there was an agreement among themselves to halt talks Wednesday, regardless of their outcome, although such deadlines could easily be bargaining tactics.
Another senior diplomat said Monday that differences remain on fisheries, rules about state aid to industries, and which body will enforce the deal – a summary that could easily have described most of the entire last year of negotiations.
“If that sounds familiar to you, it is because there has been no decisive progress made so far,” the diplomat said of the last few days of discussions, briefing reporters on the talks under ground rules of anonymity.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plan to speak Monday evening. A Saturday night conversation lasted an hour but proved fruitless in the end: they told their negotiators to keep negotiating.
A downcast von der Leyen came out after the conversation to tell reporters that many differences remained.
“Whoever has a crystal ball and is able to predict how first-of-their kind negotiations will unfold and conclude deserves a job as scriptwriter in the movie industry or to write novels,” von der Leyen’s spokesman, Eric Mamer, told reporters on Monday.
Will Jennings, a professor of political science at the University of Southampton, said it was “very difficult” to know what was going on in negotiations as “both sides are giving briefings that tell different stories.”
He said it was a “strange political moment” because “it’s incredibly salient for key decision-makers” but “the public seemed almost to have moved on.”
He said that there was a tendency, with E.U. and British politicians, “to take things to the brink and the last minute . . . like students handing in term papers” but it was also difficult to know whether the government really wants a deal. “The notions around Brexit are so wrapped up around sovereignty and taking back control” that there are “huge tensions around the integrity of Brexit and the grubby compromises of international negotiations.”
Jennings said Johnson wasn’t merely talking tough to appease some of the hardcore Brexiteers in his own party, although they are applying pressure. “The government is led by key advocates of the Leave vote, not the softer side of the Brexit coin,” he said.
Brexiteers outside the party have been applying pressure, too. Nigel Farage, a media personality and former head of U.K. Independence Party, tweeted that there was “no reasonable negotiation on offer,” as he disparaged French President Emmanuel Macron.
“Either we cave to Barnier and Macron or walk away,” Farage said.
Northeast Rubber has set its 2021 revenue target at Bt22 billion in line with the substantially growing demand for rubber, the company’s chief executive officer Chuwit Jungtanasomboon said recently.
The firm produces and distributes ribbed smoked sheets as well as standard and mixed rubber to manufacturers in various industries plus middlemen in both local and foreign markets.
He added that demand from rubber-glove producers has continued to rise.
The company expects half of its total sales next year to come from the local market.
Govt confident economy will cross 4% growth mark, central bank not so sure
EconDec 07. 2020Deputy Prime Minister Supattanapong Punmeechaow
By The Nation
The government is confident the economy will expand no less than 4 per cent next year, said Deputy Prime Minister Supattanapong Punmeechaow.
Supattanapong, who also doubles as energy minister, said the government will continue to seek more measures to lift the economy, which is struggling in the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Earlier, the Bank of Thailand’s governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput said he expected economic growth next year to be below 4 per cent as the tourism and export sectors may not recover fully.
Speaking at a separate event, Sethaphut said the bank was ready to control the rising baht to mitigate the impact on the export sector as well as execute a monetary policy to support economic growth.
Economic growth this year is expected to be better than the earlier estimate of minus 8 per cent, he said, adding that the bank will revise its growth forecast for 2020.
He said growth next year will be less than 4 per cent as the number of foreign tourists is unlikely to reach the previously estimated 9 million.
However, he expects the figures for consumption to enter the positive territory next year.
Earlier, the Joint Standing Committee on Commerce, Industry and Banking predicted that the Thai economy will grow 2 to 4 per cent next year, while exports will grow 3 to 5 per cent.
Tax collection by the Excise Department will be boosted by blockchain technology from next year, said director general Lavaron Sangsnit.
Blockchain will be introduced early next year for taxation of imports, then for exported oil products in the first quarter.
The department is seeking ways to boost revenue without raising taxes by adopting new technology to enhance collection systems, Lavaron said.
The use of blockchain will enable the departments of Excise, Customs, and Revenue to share information on a real-time basis on taxable products, making it harder to evade tax, he added.
Exported oil products account for two-thirds (Bt200 billion) of annual excise tax revenue, said the director general.
Excise tax collected in the first two months of fiscal year 2021 were slightly up on the annual target of Bt600 billion, he added.
Former Rangsit University dean of the economic faculty, Anusorn Tamajai, has warned the Thai government to prepare for a new US trade policy under President Joe Biden who will take office next month.
His comments came after a group of nine US senators introduced a resolution to support the pro-democracy movement in Thailand and called on the Thai government to listen to the people’s demands and end crackdown on protesters who assemble peacefully.
Thai-American senator Tammy Duckworth was among the nine members of Congress who introduced the resolution. Another was Senator Bob Menendez, who has played a key role in proposing US trade sanctions against Latin American countries accused of violating human rights and freedom of the press.
Thai police have so far filed lese-majeste charges against 17 protest leaders, but the draconian law has been viewed by rights groups as a major source of human rights abuse in Thailand as it imposes a jail term of up to 15 years for those convicted of insulting the Thai monarch.
The government had not used the lese majeste law in the past two years, but PM Prayut Chan-o-cha recently gave police the green light to resume enforcement of this tough law.
Anusorn said the Biden administration was expected to focus more on human rights and labour rights in dealing with trading partners, such as Thailand.
Biden is expected to introduce a rule-based system to replace Trump’s deal-based system, he said.
The new US administration is also expected to reintroduce non-discrimination and national treatment for international trade policy.
The US Trade Representative Office also is expected to use non-tariff barriers against China and other Asian countries, he said.
President Trump has imposed high tariff rates against China and other countries and he has been dubbed “Tariff Man”.
Although the trade war may ease under a Biden administration, it would not completely go away as US wants to curb China’s global influence, Anusorn predicted.
He also forecast the introduction next year of Diem, formerly known as Libra, which is a permissioned blockchain-based payment system proposed by the American social media company, Facebook. The payment system will include cryptocurrency whose value will be tied to the US dollar. This so-called stable coin will have a significant impact on the global financial markets where central banks play a key role, although it will have limited use. The coin is said to be used as a substitute for the US dollar and euro currency with limited scope for financial transactions. The digital currencies will have an adverse impact on the role of central banks globally, Anusorn added.
Pedestrians pass a Moncler luxury fashion store in London on Oct. 15, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jason Alden 
Chief executive officer Chuwit Jungtanasomboon 
Deputy Prime Minister Supattanapong Punmeechaow 
Lavaron Sangsnit 
US President-elect Joe Biden 
