Headlines

The owner of the beauty brand Avon in the U.K., Europe and Latin America has filed for bankruptcy as it tries to off-load more than $1bn of debt, including millions of dollars in liabilities linked to lawsuits alleging that talc in its products caused cancer, The Guardian reported. Avon Products Inc., a subsidiary of Brazil’s Natura, which bought Avon’s non-North American trading businesses in 2020, has filed for chapter 11, the American version of administration. API said that the process would allow it to address its debt obligations in an “orderly manner”.

Natura &Co posted strong Q2 2024 earnings, but Avon's chapter 11 filing added challenges and a significant net loss, Finimize reported. Natura &Co surprised the market with better-than-expected core earnings for Q2 2024. The beauty giant reported net revenue of 7.35 billion reais ($1.34 billion), a 5.4% rise from last year, beating forecasted revenue of 6.78 billion reais. Adjusted EBITDA also climbed 14.2% to 803.5 million reais, surpassing the expected 763.8 million reais. Success in Brazil and Mexico drove this performance, as highlighted by the CEO.

South Korea's mom-and-pop investors are defying last week's global financial markets rout by pouring even more funds into U.S. stocks, a years-long trend that analysts and investors bet will continue due to the depressed value proposition at home, Reuters reported. South Korean retailers have been scooping up Nvidia, Tesla Inc. and Apple shares this year fueled in part by the worldwide AI-frenzy, a move that comes despite government efforts to boost the domestic stock market.

A group of senior Biden administration officials is traveling to Shanghai this week for a round of high-level meetings intended to keep the economic relationship between the U.S. and China on stable footing amid mounting trade tensions between the two countries, the New York Times reported. The talks will take place on Thursday and Friday and are being convened through the U.S.-China Financial Working Group, which was created last year.

SG Investments, America, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of German-based manufacturer Dürkopp Adler (DA), has acquired ICON Aircraft assets — the result of a chapter 11 § 363 sale in ICON’s chapter 11 case filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, according to a Procopio press release. Procopio Restructuring and Bankruptcy Partner William Smelko represented DA in the transaction with the assistance of Procopio’s Asia Pacific team. Local Delaware Counsel Evan Miller of Saul, Ewing also assisted SG in acquiring the assets.

Japanese technology investor SoftBank Group Corp. reported a smaller loss for the last quarter compared to a year earlier, the Associated Press reported. Tokyo-based SoftBank’s losses totaled 174 billion yen ($1.2 billion) in the April-June quarter, the company said Wednesday. It racked up nearly 478 billion yen in red ink in the same period of last year. Quarterly sales rose 9% at SoftBank, which has investments in various technology companies including American office-space-sharing WeWork; Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, and telecommunications company T-Mobile.

Sweden’s economy has, in many ways, suffered from the same tribulations as the rest of Europe: recent bouts of crushing inflation and recession, and now the prospect of meager growth in a world split by geopolitical and economic conflict. Nevertheless, the Nordic country has a roster of high-tech entrepreneurs that is the envy of its neighbors, according to a New York Times analysis. Spotify and Skype are globally recognized brand names.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country's biggest lender, is expected to unveil a small decline in annual earnings on Wednesday, with investors focused on whether rising deposit payouts and bad loans will outweigh gains in mortgage revenue, Reuters reported. The earnings will be closely watched to see if the lender's share price surge of one-third since late 2023 is justified, especially considering the broader banking sector in July posted its strongest rally in nearly two years.

Stocks in Asia followed a rally on Wall Street after the latest U.S. inflation data reinforced bets that the Federal Reserve will be able to start its monetary easing in September, Bloomberg reported. Equity benchmarks in Japan and South Korea advanced more than 1% at the open, extending their recovery from a historic Aug. 5 selloff. The gains came after the U.S. producer price index rose less than forecast, helping to fuel a 1.7% rally in the S&P 500 that was led by gains in big tech. The easing of price pressures has bolstered confidence U.S.

As Sir Keir Starmer seeks to deliver economic growth, the worklessness crisis he inherited from Rishi Sunak is getting markedly worse, The Telegraph reported. Around 9.5m people of working age are neither in work nor looking for work – they are economically inactive, in the parlance of the Office for National Statistics. That is terrible news for the Prime Minister, who will struggle to drive up GDP if so many of the nation’s adults are not even interested in working. The figures also show the causes of another crisis: migration levels.