Less than four months after Gov, Andrew Cuomo, D, vowed to produce 100% of New York’s electricity from clean sources by 2040, the state power authority launched an innovation challenge involving 60 companies in a quest to reach that goal. The winner: A Canada-based startup whose pitch can be wrapped up in two words: Think zinc.

Battery systems built around zinc, they said, don’t catch fire as lithium-ion systems do. The longer they run, the less costly they are in comparison. And zinc is cheaper and more widely available. It’s a pitch drawing interest not just in New York, which in January initiated a $2.55 million project with the winning startup. Canada and Indonesia are funding their own zinc-battery projects.

“Storage for utilities is an untapped market,” said Ron MacDonald, the head of Zinc8 Energy Solutions, the company that won the state challenge. “It’s a holy grail.”

Lithium-ion batteries were first commercialized in 1991 and are used in applications ranging from electronics to vehicles. As utilities turned toward renewables to generate electricity, they were a natural choice to fill in when solar or wind was interrupted.

Zinc-based batteries, with their lower charge rates, were limited to tiny hearing aids until about two years ago. That’s when engineers first discovered how to make them rechargeable on a commercial scale. Since then, companies including Zinc8, NantEnergy Inc. and e-Zn Inc. have been targeting their use for utilities, where they can accrue energy over an entire day and utilize it at night.

“There’s no question lithium and lead-acid batteries currently dominate the energy storage market,” said Andrew Green, Executive Director at the International Zinc Association. “But we’re the upcoming group.”

In January, Zinc8 penned a three-year contract with the New York State Power Authority to develop a demonstration project that can produce back up power for a municipal building or a building on a college campus for 8 hours, at a cost of around $250 per kilowatt hour.

The Vancouver-based company is in the process of finding a right-sized site for the project, most likely in western New York, MacDonald said in an interview. Once that’s done, the system could be up and working by 2022, he said.

The power authority has set a goal to achieve 3 gigawatts of energy-storage statewide by 2030 to support Cuomo’s Green New Deal. The company goal, according to MacDonald: “Go through testing in different scenarios where we can efficiently add our batteries” to different types of grids.

The New York project “opens the door for Zinc8 to deploy its technology into the broader utility market,” he said.

The idea behind zinc batteries isn’t new. They’ve long been used in hearing aids because they’re both light in weight and safe. But there are markets they still can’t breach: For instance, zinc-based batteries still can’t replenish quickly enough to be used for the electric vehicle market.

Like other batteries, zinc-air systems generate electricity from a chemical reaction. But instead of having all reactants located within the cell, they pull oxygen in from the outside through tiny holes. The oxygen then reacts with molecules inside the porous zinc to free electrons that travel through a circuit to the outside contact points.

Using outside oxygen makes the batteries less flammable than lithium-ion systems. With a lithium battery, the oxygen is locked inside the cell so the fire keeps going even if you put a wet blanket on it, said Fabio Albano, the vice president of technology at NantEnergy.

Safe, Cheap

At the same time, there’s no toxic elements involved. Raw lithium can be corrosive to the eyes, the skin and the respiratory tract when not properly handled. ​And zinc is relatively cheap: Lithium was trading at around $8,500 a metric ton last month, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The benchmark three-month zinc price on the London Metal Exchange fell 1.3% to settle at $1,984 a ton on Friday.

At play is a stationary storage market that’s forecast to grow globally to 155 gigawatt hours over the next 10 years from 23 now, according to James Frith, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. Frith also also sees the value of the market, including batteries, installation and equipment costs, reaching $30 billion within a decade.

Arizona-based NantEnergy already has a working solar storage microgrid on Madagascar, with more than half the financing coming from a $800,000-grant from the U.S. Trade Development Agency. It’s also formed joint ventures with Indonesia to provide energy storage for microgrids in remote villages there.

Because the microgrids are located in isolated areas, powering up communication and basic services, the lack of flammability is especially appealing, Albano said by phone.

OPEC Lesson

Meanwhile, Toronto-based e-Zn recently won $4.3 million in grants from the Canadian government to develop projects there. The first is to provide power for a manufacturing facility outside Toronto, with a duration capacity of 48 hours.

James Larsen, the e-Zn CEO, sees another advantage for zinc over lithium-based batteries.

“What’s attractive for me is that it is a truly global resource you can find almost anywhere,” Larsen said by telephone. “We learned the lessons from OPEC, where a few nations control a very important resource. We’re going down that path with lithium-ion.”

Global zinc production reached 13 million metric tons in 2019, and there are around 250 million tons in reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In comparison, about 77,000 metric tons of lithium were produced. Lithium reserves are estimated at around 17 million tons.

While there are barriers to be overcome by zinc-base batteries, utilities “need to be more familiar with them through things like pilot projects, which can then give them confidence to build further projects,” BloombergNEF’s Frith said.

AT&T is bracing for handset shortages across the U.S. A carrier in the U.K. and one in France are already dealing with supply disruption and could run out of some popular models, people familiar with the matter said.

British network operators may even resort to using stockpiles of phones they’d built up in case of a Brexit-related supply crunch, said one of the people, a company executive who asked not to be identified as the information is private.

The supply chain chaos may last only a few weeks, but it’s already wiping out the smartphone industry’s hopes for sales growth this year.

Worldwide device sales are set to fall 4.3% in 2020, with European sales tumbling 7.4%, according to industry consultancy Canalys. It was forecasting global growth of 3.6% before the virus brought much of Chinese industry to a juddering halt.

“There’s a huge supply-side shortage for smartphones that we are already starting to see trickle through to some markets around the world,” said Ben Stanton, head of devices research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Canalys.

He said global handset production was 35% of normal levels in February, will return to 85% this month, and could get back to normal by April. The output slump means it’ll take time to fix delivery backlogs for brands like Apple, Samsung Electronics and Huawei Technologies.

The Canalys estimates are based on confidential feedback from manufacturers, distributors, carriers and retailers.

About 5 million mobile phones are sold every day. Many of those units take just a few weeks to go from the assembly plant to the consumer in tightly-choreographed arrangements planned months in advance.

“The supply chain is a complex system, only as strong as its weakest link, and at present a lot of elements are out of sync,” said Marina Koytcheva, vice president of forecasting at CCS Insight.

CCS cut its forecast for sales of mobile phones outside China in the first six months of the year by 10%. Koytcheva said the industry may face an even bigger problem than supply glitches if virus outbreaks hit phone demand and economic growth across the world.

“Judging by the weak demand for smart devices in China in January and February, this is a major concern,” she said.

Carriers are hoping Apple’s first 5G iPhone will boost their revenue by kicking off a new sales cycle and getting customers to upgrade their plans. Doubts about the launch timing are now creeping in, and Stanton said 5G marketing campaigns may need to be delayed.

Some Apple products, such as the iPad Pro tablet, have been seeing limited availability at stores in major cities in the U.S., Australia and Europe, according to a review of the company’s website.

The virus has led to a “modest tightening” of iPhone supply over the past two weeks, Loup Ventures, which tracks lead times for Apple products, said on its website on Wednesday. Apple has said the supply shortages will affect its worldwide revenues.

At a Morgan Stanley investor conference on Tuesday, AT&T Chief Operating Officer John Stankey said the U.S. carrier faces potential phone shortages.

Its rival, Verizon Communications Inc., has seen no material impact from the virus response, but it’s still early, Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said at the same event. If disruption continues, “I think we’ll see a more material impact on our equipment revenue line,” he added.

Carriers can’t even raise prices to make up for lower unit sales as they’re locked into agreements with manufacturers to sell the devices at set values, said Stanton at Canalys.

“March is going to be the big month of challenge, and it may well extend into April as well,” he said. “There’s not a lot they can do at this stage.”

Far from President Donald Trump’s campaign to stop the world from using the Chinese company’s technology, cows in this northern Swiss village — with its white-washed cottages and manicured fields — wear Huawei’s 5G-connected neck-straps instead of traditional flat bells. And in the village’s Cistercian abbey, converted into a test farm, Switzerland’s second-biggest telecommunications operator, Sunrise Communications Group AG, and Huawei test the next-generation 5G wireless network.

“You could call it a Fitbit for cows,” said Alexander Lehrmann, Sunrise’s chief of new business development and internet of things, referring to Fitbit Inc.’s fitness device. “It allows farmers to get complete control and insight into their health conditions at any time and from any place.”

While countries in Europe are grappling with U.S. claims that Huawei’s gear could open them up to Chinese spying, Switzerland is quietly building a network with the company. Flying under the radar, the Swiss have become world leaders in the rollout of 5G technology with the early sprouting of private and public networks. Entities from the Zurich airport, the national mail service and railways to food giant Nestle SA and Zurich Insurance Group AG either have or envisage private networks with Sunrise, whose exclusive supplier is Huawei.

“The Swiss government has done a very neutral and objective evaluation of Huawei and they have come to the conclusion that there is no significant other risks included in the technology and in Huawei as a company,” Sunrise Chief Executive Officer Andre Krause said in an interview. “(But) if the reputation of Huawei is continuously under pressure, that could also have an impact on us at some stage.”

The stakes are high as networks move toward the new-generation technology that promises faster connections, enabling uses such as autonomous vehicles, remote surgery and the transfer of data over a network without human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

For now, much of what’s happening with Huawei in Switzerland is the industrial use of 5G, or private networks, that draws less attention. But Switzerland is also the first country in Europe to start using a commercial 5G network for individuals in a limited way, amid opposition from environmental and health activists fighting antenna emissions.

The U.S. has been frustrated by Europe’s refusal to accede to Trump’s demands to keep Chinese tech companies out of advanced 5G networks. The U.K., France, and Germany are all looking to keep the door open to the Chinese telecom giant in some way, snubbing the U.S. view that Huawei could be a security risk. Italy, Croatia and Hungary, like Switzerland, have signed partnerships with Huawei.

The Chinese company in February touted as many as 47 commercial contracts for 5G in Europe, more than in Asia. It claims to have 91 contracts, but did not respond to queries seeking details.

Still, the European Union may force member states to eventually change some of the deals after the bloc published a series of security recommendations in its “5G toolbox” that could keep non-European gear makers out of the network core, towers and towers bases.

Switzerland, which is not a member of the European Union, doesn’t face those constraints. Swiss insurers and pharmaceutical companies are testing Huawei’s 5G networks. Huawei has also built a partnership with the Swiss engineering company ABB Ltd., which is seeking to offer industrial partners competitive 5G platforms.

Sunrise’s Lehrmann said banks haven’t yet signed up. He said Sunrise is present in Swiss hospitals, where “the use case is what can you do in order to improve the patient experience by connecting data.”

Swisscom, the former monopoly is also testing the industrial technology but won’t disclose its gear maker. Salt, the Iliad SA-owned Swiss operator, is working with Nokia.

“Radio Network Antennas (the technical name for private networks) are inside offices, factory, hospitals, whatever it is,” Duncan Stewart, Deloitte’s director of research in telecommunications, told reporters in Paris Feb. 4. “The machinery in your factory, the robots, the sensors, the cameras, the turbines, all these IoT devices, will only work on the private 5G networks.”

Stewart forecast that by 2030 almost all companies with more than 10,000 employees may have private 5G networks.

Some other European countries are also testing private networks.

The Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest, has tested the technology starting 2018 with the national telecom operator KPN in partnership with Huawei, according to KPN’s website. Germany has prioritized the expansion of its industrial 5G application too, allowing companies to apply for private networks with gear makers, without necessarily going through a telecom operator. Companies including Bosh in partnership with Nokia, Siemens with Qualcomm Inc. and Volkswagen are building such networks.

To Sunrise’s Lehrmann, the situation is simple.

Customers “are looking at 5G as a technology that allows them to drive new uses and new business cases,” he said.

On the test farm in Taenikon, meanwhile, cows eat, sleep and stroll under surveillance cameras. Their milk production, health and other data are transmitted at speeds about 100 times faster than current networks and processed in real-time. The test is meant to see how remote farms can function, information Sunrise and Huawei can use for other applications to boost factory output, enable big data usage in the finance sector or take health care in hospitals to a newer level.

“The Swiss population and economy depend on high-performance mobile communications,” Sunrise’s Chief Administrative officer Marcel Huber said on his LinkedIn account in February.

Takorn Tanthasit, NBTC secretary-general, said that the commission had surveyed mobile internet usage from 2,554 samples and found that the usage of social media and online shopping applications had increased significantly in the past two months. “Popular apps have increased usage by over 80 per cent compared to previous year’s statistics,” he said. “The usage of Facebook has increased by 93.8 per cent, Twitter has jumped 266 per cent, Line has increased 154 per cent, YouTube is up 82.2 per cent, Lazada by 121.5 per cent, Shopee by 478.6 per cent and Grab by 74.3 per cent.”

“One of the factors behind the increase in mobile internet usage is the outbreak of the new coronavirus [Covid-19], which has made people avoid outdoor visits to shop and switch to online shopping instead,” he said. “Furthermore, the virus situation has urged people to look for information and updates online more frequently.”

Takorn also added that in February, people used significantly more mobile data per day compared to the previous month. “In January the average data usage per person stood at 136.6 megabytes per day, but in February the number jumped 88.2 per cent to 257.06 megabytes per day,” he said. “This huge increase in such a short period signals the need for a faster network, therefore operators must push the 5G system into the market as soon as possible to cope with customers’ demand.”

“Due to concerns around the coronavirus [Covid-19], and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre,” the company stated on its official websitefor google I/O.

All attendees who have purchased the tickets will receive a full refund by March 13.

Guests who have registered for I/O 2020 will not need to enter next year’s draw and will be automatically granted the option of purchasing an I/O 2021 ticket.

But Lemasters felt spooked. The 29-year-old had used another ADHD drug, Adderall, but never publicized it. The ads “just felt invasive,” says Lemasters, who says he quit Adderall in 2017 because it made him feel like a zombie. “What bothers me is how powerful those drugs are and how it’s pushed, rather than a doctor actually assessing a patient and suggesting a proper solution.”

After years of avoiding social media, drug companies are growing bolder about advertising on Facebook and other social networks, according to interviews with advertising executives, marketers, health-care privacy researchers and patient advocates. That is exposing loopholes around the way data can be used to show consumers relevant ads about their personal health, even as both social networks and pharmaceutical manufacturers disavow targeting ads to people based on their medical conditions.

Ads promoting prescription drugs are popping up on Facebook for depression, HIV and cancer. Spending on Facebook mobile ads alone by pharmaceutical and health-care brands reached nearly a billion dollars in 2019, nearly tripling over two years, according to Pathmatics, an advertising analytics company. Facebook offers tools to help drug companies stay compliant with rules about disclosing safety information or reporting side effects.

But seeing an ad for a drug designed to treat a person’s particular health condition in the relatively intimate setting of a social media feed — amid pictures of friends and links to news articles — can feel more intrusive than elsewhere online. The same opaque Facebook systems that help place an ad for a political campaign or a new shoe in a user’s feed also can be used by pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to target consumers who match certain characteristics or had visited a particular website in the past.

The ability of drug companies to reach people likely to have specific health conditions — a far cry from a magazine or TV ad — underscores how the nation’s health privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), has not kept up with the times. HIPAA, which safeguards personal health records, typically does not cover drug companies or social media networks.

It also typically doesn’t cover the sea of companies known as data brokers that can collect medical information like prescriptions, insurance claims and even electronic health records, as long as they detach the data from the full name and address of the patient, as well as other personal details. Those data brokers first sort the information into groups that are useful for advertisers. Then brokers match that data with identifiers like email addresses, ZIP codes, phone numbers.

Facebook says membership or activity in a group is not used to target ads, and the company’s policies prohibit using medical history for targeting, too.

“Medical history is not used to inform the interest categories that we make available to advertisers, and we prohibit businesses from sending us sensitive health information,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said in a statement. “Our teams work with health related companies looking to reach their audiences on Facebook and we require them to act in accordance with the law.”

Targeting is ubiquitous when it comes to advertising a bathing suit or dish soap on social media. But some patient advocates worry applying standard ad-targeting techniques to health data could cause embarrassment in front of friends and family or discrimination by employers, potentially even affecting insurance rates or service offerings.

“Knowledge about us shouldn’t be used to target us, to limit our choices, or manipulate our human vulnerabilities,” says Andrea Downing, who moderates a Facebook group for women who have a gene that raises the odds of breast cancer. She filed a 2018 complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook’s privacy practices.

The growing concern about targeted pharmaceutical ads is unfolding against an expansion at Facebook focusing more generally on health — including encouraging more groups, where community members gather to discuss certain topics, like the one Downing moderates. It’s also been actively soliciting more health-care-focused ads. Underscoring the important role Facebook plays in health information, the company has recently policed disinformation around the coronavirus.

To reach potential consumers, drug companies don’t need to know an individual’s medical history. In many cases, the companies don’t want the data, since it comes with increased liability of violating new privacy laws like those in Europe and California or angering regulators.

Health-care researchers say that geographic data could be used to target communities with a high percentage of people with substance abuse disorders. Or data like the size of pants bought online, the type of food purchased with a supermarket loyalty card and a cable TV subscription could be combined to target a potentially obese group of consumers, says Adam Tanner, author of “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records.”

Data brokers match data acquired from hospitals, pharmacies and elsewhere with emails, phone numbers, IP addresses and advertising identification numbers to provide a customized list of people who have the characteristics advertisers want to target. Advertising identifiers are a string of numbers assigned to iPhone or Android devices or to Facebook users to help advertisers pinpoint consumers without knowing who they are.

Advertisers can then upload those custom lists and match identifiers with social media users. Using Facebook’s tools, advertisers can also create a “look-alike audience” that shares those same attributes.

In addition to using custom lists, Facebook’s ad tools allow advertisers to target based on user behavior (such as “likely to engage with conservative U.S. political content”), demographics (such as household income) and interests (like “motherhood” or “parenting”). Facebook says “interests” categories are informed by only three actions: whether a user has liked or interacted with a Facebook page or clicked on an ad. A user’s search history within the platform or on the wider web are not used to inform interest categories, the company says.

Still, even if the drug companies aren’t using personal data to target an ad, “the effect is the same from the user’s perspective,” says Kirsten Ostherr, a digital health technology researcher at Rice University.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which paid for the Vyvanse ads seen by Lemasters and which also owns Adderall, says it does not have access to information about an individual’s past or present prescriptions “to be used in that way,” says Kara Hoeger, director of corporate communications for neuroscience.

“Takeda is strongly committed to protecting individuals’ privacy and rights with regard to their personal data,” Hoeger said in a statement. “Notably, it is not possible and we do not engage an individual on any social media platform based on what treatments they are prescribed.”

Takeda did not respond to questions about how the ads were targeted. But when someone visits a Vyvanse web page featured in a Facebook ad, they are tracked by a variety of tools, including cookies and fingerprinting technology, which profiles your online behavior, according to a feature on Firefox browsers that helps users see how their online activity is being tracked.

Pharma advertising has been around for a while on Google and its video-streaming service YouTube, which allow prescription ads to target based on content. They prohibit drug companies from using personalized targeting, such as demographic information, customized audiences or interest-based targeting. Even so, ad agencies say Facebook is still the leading choice for health advertisers, in part because many users are already discussing their health there.

According to Pathmatics, Pfizer, Allergan, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline were among the top 10 spenders on Facebook mobile ads in 2019, along with fast-growing health start-ups like SmileDirectClub and Roman.

Pharmaceutical companies say they only target based on nonsensitive data. Ryan McKeel, a spokesperson for Gilead Sciences, which is running Facebook ads for the HIV drugs Descovy and Biktarvy, told The Washington Post: “The intended audiences for these campaigns are based on epidemiologic data. Outreach is a result of commonly available, aggregate demographic data (age, gender, geography), self-reported information and user interests.”

There are potential benefits to this kind of advertising, says Eric Perakslis, former chief information officer and chief scientist of informatics at the Food and Drug Administration. Pharma companies can reach people most in need of their product, and the social aspect of advertising could even help with adherence to taking medication.

Social media has also been an effective tool for recruiting patients for clinical trials and for getting ads in front of health-care professionals most likely to prescribe a drug, according to Kate Endres, vice president of health and beauty at Havas Media Group, who works with pharmaceutical clients.

Currently on Facebook and Instagram, pharma ad campaigns promote prescription drugs that treat major depressive episodes, weight loss for overweight and obese people, HIV prevention and treatment, and cancer immunotherapy, as well as a multiple sclerosis medication marketed to millennials. Those “branded” ads promote the name of the drug and warn about potential risks, just like on TV.

Even more common are sponsored posts from celebrity influencers and patient influencers, or “unbranded” disease awareness campaigns that don’t name the drug. For example, Audrina Patridge, a reality TV star from MTV’s show “The Hills,” recently promoted lip injections by Juvéderm to her 1.7 million Instagram followers.

Unbranded advertising offers another workaround to regulatory concerns. AMAG Pharmaceuticals reached 25 million women on Facebook and Instagram for a disease awareness campaign called Unblush for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, says Meghan Rivera, AMAG’s head of women’s health sales and marketing. It was launched months before AMAG’s “female Viagra,” a prescription injection taken 45 minutes before intercourse, was approved by the FDA. The campaign targeted users only by age, gender and people who visited their unbranded websites, she says.

Rivera says social media was an obvious fit because using real women to speak authentically about their experience helped destigmatize the conversation around sexual health. “This is where women are going and engaging not only in conversations, but also as an exploratory space. If you’re posting something relevant to them, we see significant interaction,” she says.

Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is regulated by the FDA, which published “draft guidance” in 2014 around social media drug ads that did not include any restrictions on ad targeting.

When Facebook started actively soliciting pharmaceutical ads in late 2016, the initial pitch fizzled out in part because pharma companies found the standard behavioral advertising tactics — like using cookies to target consumers based on which websites they visited — too risky, says Ritesh Patel, chief digital officer of health at Ogilvy Consulting, a division of the global ad agency, which works with large pharma clients.

Even now, Patel says, “all of my clients are absolutely very particular about making sure that any program that we do, whether it’s digital or social, there’s no ability to get access to personally identifiable information.”

Facebook has made a renewed push to attract pharma ads over the past couple of years, says Endres, from Havas Media Group. She estimates that there are at least 30 people inside Facebook working with health and pharma clients and says Facebook’s legal team has jumped on a call when one of her pharma clients had questions.

Health advocates say the ability to target patients in an otherwise highly regulated space underscores the broader lack of accountability in how consumer health data is shared and used to influence behavior.

“There’s widespread acknowledgment that HIPAA needs to be updated for the 21st century,” Ostherr says. “We should be demanding that policymakers really think about not just the Facebooks of the world, even though they’re important, but the larger economy of data mining and digital profiling that is totally invisible to the average user, but also the average doctor.”

In late January, the FDA proposed a set of studies that will use a real Instagram influencer to promote a fictitious prescription medication for endometriosis to examine influencer marketing, including how “focusing on target populations” impacts consumer awareness of risks and intent to purchase the drug.

In a statement, FDA spokesperson Brittney Manchester said, “The FDA actively continues to consider these and other social media topics, and more broadly works to develop approaches to a variety of topics related to the labeling and advertising of medical products.” The FDA requires promotion of medical products on the internet and social media to be “truthful, non-misleading and balanced.”

The Federal Trade Commission, which oversees deceptive advertising, also has regulatory oversight. The FTC says that companies that “use or disclose sensitive personal information, such as health information, for or through targeted advertising, it could be subject to an FTC enforcement action” for deception or unfairness.

Industry trade groups who want to keep these practices self-regulated have stepped in to offer guidance. In January, the Network Advertising Initiative, an association for third-party digital advertising companies, published a code of conduct on “health-related tailored advertising.” It covered consent from consumers, the use of offline data, and “inferences that a user has, or is likely to have sensitive health conditions.”

The NAI’s head of compliance, Anthony Matyjaszewski, says, “We didn’t want companies to take advantage, under the guise of demographic marketing, to get really very specific about who they’re trying to target.”

Originally planned to begin operations in October, Rakuten pushed back its network rollout to April 8, using the interim to run trials with a limited group of users. The company’s sales pitch to mobile subscribers will be price: a single plan offering unlimited monthly data will cost 2,980 yen (about $28), less than half the comparable tariffs from rivals SoftBank Corp., KDDI Corp. and NTT Docomo Inc.

As Japan’s premier online retailer, Rakuten has millions of habitual users of its services, many enticed by the company’s long-running loyalty points program. Rakuten ranks as the country’s most popular Mobile Virtual Network Operator, according to a study last year. It also offers Rakuten Pay for contactless mobile payments. The company already has much of the auxiliary infrastructure and operations that mobile carriers set up after getting their network off the ground.

To lure subscribers from rivals, Rakuten is offering its service for free in the first year for as many as 3 million users. The unlimited data usage will be confined to Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya areas where the company has installed its own wireless equipment. Outside these regions, KDDI will carry the traffic and data usage will be capped at 2 gigabytes.

Rakuten’s plan is to roll out 4G services starting next month and then upgrade to fifth-generation networking in the summer. The company currently has 3,490 base stations and plans to expand coverage to all of Japan by March next year. For complete geographical coverage, Rakuten is partnering with satellite communications services provider AST, taking a 20% stake in the Texas-based company.

“This is a start of the project to make Rakuten Mobile a service you can connect to wherever you go in the world using a satellite,” Rakuten founder and Chief Executive Officer Hiroshi Mikitani said at a briefing in Tokyo on Tuesday.

The Taiwanese company, which assembles the majority of the world’s iPhones from China, joins a growing number of corporations envisaging a return to normalcy in the world’s No. 2 economy. Beijing has curbed the spread of an epidemic that erupted in January and forced millions to work from home, tangled up logistics and dented economic growth. Hon Hai said Tuesday its factories are now operating at about 50% of seasonal capacity but that should ramp up over the course of the month as workers stream back into its plants.

Still, Chairman Young Liu warned it remained difficult to quantify the full impact of a weeks-long disruption, or gauge the effect on final demand for the swathe of consumer electronics it makes from laptops to game consoles. Business across all of Hon Hai’s four major divisions should decline in the March quarter compared with the previous year, meaning sales in the first half could end up being flat, Liu told investors and reporters on a conference call.

“There’s not a huge hit on demand yet so far, but I dare not and don’t want to predict the outlook of the outbreak,” Liu said. “We don’t see a huge issue with our suppliers and we are helping them to secure resources.”

As China’s largest private employer and a key partner to many of the world’s most recognizable consumer brands, Hon Hai — known also as Foxconn — has become a symbol of how the outbreak could disrupt the global supply of made-in-China electronics. Apple scrapped its revenue guidance for the March quarter because of the work slowdowns and worsening demand, showing the outbreak was taking a bigger-than-predicted toll on one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Foxconn has already slashed its 2020 revenue projections in the wake of the epidemic. The contagion has disrupted Apple’s carefully calibrated production chain: Hon Hai was forced to postpone the reopening of its “iPhone City” mega-complex in the central city of Zhengzhou while it imposed strict quarantine measures on thousands of laborers. But Foxconn has since sharply raised signing bonuses to attract the new workers it needs to assemble its products.

The first quarter is typically a lull for Apple and Foxconn, because most iPhone sales occur over the holiday season. But Foxconn’s supply chain turmoil coincided with the envisioned launch of Apple’s cheaper iPhone SE2, slated for launch as early as this month. On Tuesday, Liu deflected questions about the gadget, saying only that Foxconn’s product research and development efforts were proceeding.

Liu also said Foxconn was considering reducing its annual revenue outlook, confirming a Bloomberg News report. Hon Hai is projecting a sales increase of 1% to 3% this year, Liu told Bloomberg News in a text message last month. That’s down from a Jan. 22 forecast for 3% to 5% before the epidemic spread around the globe and lagged the average of analysts’ projections at the time. Analysts expect Hon Hai to post 4.9% topline growth in 2020.

Still, Chinese companies have begun to return to work, heeding a call to safeguard economic growth — though often not at full capacity. Hon Hai, which also makes products for companies from HP to Sony, has said it is restarting facilities throughout China in an orderly manner. Other key tech and Apple suppliers with major Chinese operations, such as Quanta Computer, Inventec and LG Display, are also gradually bringing their factories back online.

“As of today, the production resumption has reached 50% of seasonal required capacity. Based on the current schedule, we shall be able to reach full seasonal capacity by the end of March,” Hon Hai said in a stock exchange filing. “There are still plenty of uncertainties which we cannot quantify around the potential impact on the full year.”

Read more: Apple’s Cook Sees Minor Supply Chain Changes in Wake of Virus

Apple’s China-focused supply chain has faced two major tests — first from trade tensions and more recently from manufacturing suspensions spurred by the spread of the coronavirus. China is also Apple’s biggest international market, and smartphone sales there are expected to take a big hit from the outbreak after government-imposed containment measures snarled logistics and closed stores.

Research firms vary in their estimates of how big the shipments drop-off will be but agree it will hurt. Strategy Analytics forecasts a 32% decline in Chinese shipments in the first quarter, to 60 million from roughly 89 million shipments a year earlier. Canalys, starting from a similar estimate for 2019, scythes its expectations down to 42.5 million shipments.

Samsung had a 27 percent market share in Europe in the fourth quarter, up 2 percentage points from a year earlier, according to market researcher Counterpoint Research.

Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker, apparently enlarged its presence after Huawei was barred from installing Google services on its phones, Counterpoint said.

However, Samsung’s market share in other regions fell slightly due to aggressive marketing from mid-tier Chinese smartphone vendors such as Oppo and Realme, according to the research firm.

Samsung’s market share in the Middle East-Africa region slid from 22 percent to 20 percent in the fourth quarter, while its presence in the Central and South American market fell from 36 percent to 34 percent in the same period. Its market share in North America also slipped from 22 percent to 20 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the data.

According to Counterpoint Research, Samsung had the lion’s share in countries like Ukraine, Chile, Portugal, Italy and Peru.

In particular, the South Korean tech giant had a 49 percent share in Ukraine, up 23.2 percentage points from a year ago.

“Samsung’s smartphone business is likely to see stable growth this year,” said Park Jin-suk, an analyst at Counterpoint Research.

“Even though competition with Chinese brands appears to be fierce in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia regions, Samsung is able to supply differentiated products with its technology, so the company will stay competitive.” (Yonhap)

Xerox has pitched HP investors on a cash-and-stock offer worth $24 a share. For each HP share, a holder would receive $18.40 in cash and 0.149 Xerox shares. The photocopying pioneer has said combining the companies would yield $2 billion in cost savings and more than $1 billion in additional revenue growth. Both hardware companies have invented technologies still in use by consumers and office workers, and have struggled in a world increasingly driven by software.

HP’s board has rejected Xerox’s offer as undervaluing the Palo Alto, California-based company, and said last week it will return $16 billion to shareholders in an effort to show it can stand on its own. HP executives, however, said they will engage Xerox to discuss a potential combination on their terms.

On Monday, HP said in a statement that it will review Xerox’s offer over 10 business days before advising the best course of action for shareholders.