WWD : Parisian Cashmere Brand Kujten to Open First U.S. Store on Sept. 9



From: Laurent Chekroun (MAKOR CAPITAL MARKET) At: 08/28/25 22:21:47 UTC+2:00
Subject: WWD : Parisian Cashmere Brand Kujten to Open First U.S. Store on Sept. 9
Parisian Cashmere Brand Kujten to Open First U.S. Store on Sept. 9
The Paris-based men's and women's luxury cashmere brand operates more than 50 stores globally.

Kujten, a Paris-based luxury cashmere brand, will open its first U.S. flagship on Madison Avenue this fall.

The company, founded by Carole Benaroya and Stéphanie Eriksson, has inked a deal for a three-level, 4,400-square-foot store at 831 Madison Ave. The space, on 69th Street, had formerly housed Akris. It is expected to open on Sept. 9, right before the kickoff of New York Fashion Week.

Kujten was created in 2012 by Benaroya and Eriksson, who had met in school as teenagers. Benaroya opted for a career in finance and began her career at Goldman Sachs in London while Eriksson studied fashion and joined the British fashion brand Joseph.

The friends reconnected in their 30s and decided to create a high-end brand focused on basic and statement cashmere pieces offered in an array of colors. They named it Kujten after the highest peak in Mongolia, a spot the founders visit several times a year to hand-select the finest raw materials.


It aims to offer timeless, modern, elegant pieces that can be worn every day. As Eriksson said: “I’ve always been a little frustrated that I only had three or four colors to choose from when I was buying cashmere. With Kujten, we have a beautiful color palette so our items can be worn every day.”

Among its key pieces are sweaters, sweatshirts, vests, cardigans, capes, jackets, dresses, pants, shorts and hoodies for women and men as well as accessories and a children’s collection.

Sustainability is also a hallmark of the brand and in 2021, Kujten obtained the Sustainable Fibre Alliance ranking that certifies a company’s respect for the environment and social responsibility. In 2019, the brand launched Kujten Organic, an eco-responsible men’s and women’s line that uses no dyes or chemical components and promotes the manufacture of organic cashmere in Mongolia.

The brand operates more than 50 stores in Europe but this marks the first move into the U.S. market, which makes up a sizable portion of its international sales. The brand created a capsule with the L.A. tattoo artist Dr. Woo last year.

“The search for the ideal location was complex as the vacancy rate on Madison Avenue has been decreasing drastically over the past few years,” said Eric Le Goff, head of luxury for Retail by MONA, the retail leasing and advisory firm that represented Kutjen. “It was a challenge to identify the perfect space for Kutjen that combined the right square footage, premier storefront, and most importantly, the right neighbors for the brand such as Toteme and Khaite.”

Le Goff said if the store is successful, the plan is to continue to open stores around the country.

FT : How long can Airbus keep its edge over Boeing?

How long can Airbus keep its edge over Boeing?
As its US rival has stumbled, the company has established a lead in the market for commercial single-aisle aircraft. But both are eyeing Chinese competition

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister during the 1980s, took a dim view of Airbus’s prospects. Asked to provide government money to support the launch of a new small passenger aircraft, the A320, she warned: “It will never work, Boeing will dominate the market.”

It was a reasonable assessment at the time. Airbus was then an upstart European competitor to the US aerospace and defence giant, whose best-selling 737 jet had already been flying for over a decade.

Despite her initial misgivings, the UK lent close to £250mn towards the launch of the new aircraft. The decision paid off. The A320 family of single-aisle jets, typically used on short and medium-haul flights, is now poised to overtake the 737 as the most popular commercial aircraft in history with 12,153 delivered since launch, according to aviation consultants Cirium.

The success of the A320 family has been the driving force behind Airbus’s ascendancy in its five-decade rivalry with its US competitor. For years, the two companies had a roughly 50:50 split of the market for commercial single-aisle aircraft. But by the end of last year, Airbus held a market share of 61 per cent measured by order backlog and 72 per cent by deliveries, according to Cirium.

Boeing still leads in larger, wide-body aircraft types, but in recent years has been mired in the fallout from two crashes of its 737 Max 8 aircraft in 2018 and 2019 which led to the grounding of the plane for 20 months. The mid-air blowout of a door panel on a Max 9 aircraft, in January 2024, led to US regulators imposing a production cap. 


With Airbus delivering at higher rates and preparing to increase A320 production further, it is “hard to see how its lead can be broken”, says Rob Morris, global head of consultancy at Ascend at Cirium.

Airbus’s rise has not been trouble-free — political interference from European governments hindered decision-making early on, while another aircraft programme, the A380 superjumbo, proved a commercial mistake. 

More recently, the company has grappled with industry-wide supply chain issues that have forced it to delay deliveries. The decision to push back plans to fly a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2035 has been heavily criticised, and there are challenges in its defence and space business. 

As aerospace industry veteran Kelly Ortberg steadies the ship at Boeing, an emerging rival in China is looking to challenge the duopoly. And with pressure growing over aviation’s carbon footprint, Airbus faces perhaps its biggest test yet: how to stay on top.

“It’s one thing to run a very strong company when the other guy is busy shooting himself in the foot,” says Richard Aboulafia, managing director of consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory.

“When the other guy is getting on track, you’ve got to be prepared for a wide variety of choices and outcomes.” He adds that “the next battle” is for the coming decade, when both manufacturers are expected to launch a new generation of single-aisle aircraft.

Guillaume Faury, Airbus’s chief executive since 2019, told the FT that Airbus wants to keep leading from the front. The company is targeting 2030 as the launch date for the successor to the A320, with a new plane entering service in the second half of that decade.

Airbus, he makes clear, has to be a pioneer in aerospace. “We want to continue to lead, to take risks in terms of business . . . to experiment.”

A risk for the group, he adds, is to lose agility. “We know the world will not be what we think it will be. You need to be able to move, to adapt, to adjust.” 

Faury’s biggest problem right now is how to speed up production of existing models.

In 2020, the company was forced to cut production by about a third as the Covid-19 pandemic grounded planes around the world, bringing a decade of ever-increasing output to a juddering halt.

The industry has struggled to regain its previous productivity levels. A loss of experienced labour and persistent supply chain bottlenecks held back output just as demand for travel bounced back, and deliveries from the two manufacturers have remained below pre-pandemic peaks.

Airbus may have struggled, but Boeing has fared worse due to the worldwide groundings of the 737 Max after the two fatal crashes. The European group has held the crown as the world’s largest aircraft maker by deliveries for the past six years.

Boeing delivered 348 jets in 2024, fewer than half the 766 that Airbus managed, as 737 Max output remained subject to a 38 per month cap pending improvements to quality control.

A shortage of engines has been one of the most persistent challenges for both companies. CFM International, a joint venture between France’s Safran and GE of the US, and Pratt & Whitney have struggled to keep up with demand. Both companies’ engines for the A320neo have also had durability issues. 

The engine bottleneck is straining Airbus’s plans to increase production, especially its aim to raise A320 manufacturing to 75 a month by 2027. It said in July that it had been forced to build 60 “gliders”, or aircraft waiting for engines, but stuck to its ramp-up trajectory. 

Faury told analysts at the time that Airbus would keep working with engine makers in 2026. “They have to deliver on the ramp-up, both for us and for the after-market as the number of [A320neos] flying is increasing quite fast.”

Customers, frustrated by repeated delivery delays, say they want Airbus — as well as Boeing — to focus on delivering existing orders before launching ambitious new aircraft development programmes. 

“We need to have greater confidence that Airbus and Boeing will be able to get to those production rates at a high standard of quality before they launch any new product,” says John Plueger, chief executive of Los Angeles-based aircraft lessor Air Lease. 

“The confidence you have in any new product is largely gained from what your experience is with either manufacturer on the current product.”

Other operational hurdles loom for Airbus. It is adding A320 final assembly lines at existing sites, notably in Tianjin in China and at Mobile in Alabama in the US, to support the higher production volumes. 


The company must also integrate parts of Spirit AeroSystems into its operations. The US supplier is being taken over by its former parent Boeing, forcing Airbus to carry out the work Spirit used to do for its programmes, including operations in Belfast, Northern Ireland. 

The task of making sure Airbus’s factories deliver will fall to the incoming head of its planemaking division, Lars Wagner. Currently chief executive of German engine maker MTU Aero Engines, Wagner will succeed Airbus veteran Christian Scherer in January. 

Although Wagner previously worked for Airbus and is known in the industry for his strong operational focus, Plueger warns that he “will walk into a different Airbus than the one he left”.

It is “a much larger, much more successful [Airbus] but also a much more complicated machine in terms of how many planes have to be produced”. 

While Airbus’s commercial business is straining to meet demand, its defence and space division faces more deep-seated challenges.

Its second-largest business segment accounts for about one-fifth of the group’s revenues and builds everything from fighter jets and transport aircraft to drones and satellites. 

Parts of the division are doing well — Eurofighter, the pan-European project in which Airbus is a partner, has won recent orders, while MBDA, Europe’s missile champion in which the company holds a 37.5 per cent stake, has also benefited from new work due to the war in Ukraine. The troubled A400M transport aircraft this summer secured new agreements from France and Spain that will keep its production line running. 

But it has suffered from higher costs and growing US competition, in particular from players like Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the market for satellites, and has not seen the same surge in orders as other European players that have benefited from demand for products like armoured vehicles.

Faury argues there is commercial logic in retaining the unit. “There are a lot of synergies and cross-fertilisation between civil and military on aircraft, that’s what we do on helicopters, on satellites, on rockets,” he says.

He is also an outspoken advocate for consolidation in Europe’s fragmented defence industries so they can better compete with the US. Airbus has scale in commercial aerospace and military helicopters but needs to build up in satellites, where it is negotiating a joint venture modelled on the successful MBDA missile partnership with Italy’s Leonardo and Thales of France. The companies, says Faury, have “more homework to do” but talks are “progressing very well”. 

Less positive are relations with France’s Dassault Aviation, Airbus’s main partner on the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) to build a new fighter. There have been repeated arguments over technology sharing, who would lead critical parts of the programme, and the specifications of the fighter jet. The two companies have reached a stalemate on the second phase of the programme, which should culminate with a prototype version of the jet.

Dassault, which builds the successful Rafale fighter for France and other countries, has said the governance structure needs to change and that despite being the designated lead on this phase it can still be outvoted by partners in Germany and Spain.

It is a sensitive topic, with politicians from both Berlin and Paris now charged with unblocking the stalemate. The partners are also under pressure to accelerate development amid competition from the rival Global Combat Air Programme involving BAE Systems of the UK, Leonardo and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. 

GCAP has pledged to build an advanced fighter jet by 2035. Were FCAS to collapse, Airbus could try to team up with GCAP, but given that programme’s advanced timetable, industry experts believe Airbus’ time is running out.

Faury won’t discuss what a potential compromise with Dassault might look like but insists that, unlike his French partner, Airbus “is not challenging the rules of the co-operation which have been defined [at the outset]”.

The longer-term challenge for both Airbus and Boeing is when to launch a new aircraft — and what kind of aircraft it should be. Airlines are under pressure to cut their carbon emissions by 2050, meaning the choice of technologies will be crucial. 

“If they don’t get that right and someone else does, Airbus loses everything they’ve worked the last 55 years for,” says Sash Tusa, an analyst at Agency Partners. “They’ve really got to get climate right.” The next plane, he adds, has to be revolutionary or “it probably won’t have a very long shelf life”. 


Faury believes that 2030 “is the moment where the stars will be aligned” for the launch of a new aircraft programme. A plane launched then will enter service in the second half of the 2030s, meaning that “there will be a lot of those planes in service by 2050, which is the time when we want to see a significant, very significant improvement in carbon dioxide emissions.”

Boeing chief executive Ortberg has struck a more cautious tone, saying in July the company was assessing several factors that would need to converge before launching a next-generation plane. These included the readiness of the market and key technologies, as well as Boeing’s financial condition. “That is not today, and probably not tomorrow.”

Faury agrees that the technologies are not ready today. But he believes they will be by 2030, potentially including a radical engine design with exposed fan blades. 

Test flights of a demonstrator of the “open fan” engine, being developed with CFM and dubbed RISE, are due to take place on a modified A380 superjumbo towards the end of this decade. Airbus hopes the new engine configuration will contribute to an expected 20 to 30 per cent fuel efficiency improvement compared with existing models. 

Faury says CFM is offering ideas that are “really more than evolutionary” and that Airbus is committed to “giving [RISE] the best possible chances” but does not rule out an engine based on improved conventional technology.

A new plane is likely to have much longer wings than today’s models. Faury says the company believes a more radical “blended wing” design that merges into the fuselage could make sense for bigger wide-body aircraft of the future or for drones. For the single-aisle size, he says the benefits of blended wing are “minimal”: “We believe a RISE-based architecture with long wings is something that still wins.” New production methods will also be required to turn out planes at much higher rates than today’s A320s.

Airbus’s healthy balance sheet gives it financial flexibility to invest in what would be a multibillion-dollar programme, though Faury likes the “idea there is skin in the game with governments [that] they are supporting this”. 

But government backing for a new programme could prove contentious at a time of trade tensions between the US and the EU and — while Airbus is not yet ready to approach national governments — Faury notes that the US administration is “heavily supporting [its] own national champion”.

US President Donald Trump has rowed back from including aerospace in his tariff blitz against the EU but has made buying Boeing planes part of recent trade deals. Faury contends that awarding it the contract to build the F-47, the next-generation US fighter jet, is another form of support.

Boeing also is not the only threat to Airbus’s current dominance. Brazil’s Embraer, the world’s leading producer of smaller regional jets, has been studying whether to expand into larger models.

Industry experts worry that in the long term, China’s Comac might prove the real disrupter. Many of the components on its single-aisle C919 jet, including the engines, still come from US suppliers, but that could change over the next two decades. 

Faury’s current remit at Airbus runs until 2028 and he says it’s up to the board to decide what happens after that. But the decisions he takes over the coming years will determine Airbus’s path into the 2030s and beyond.

With potential new rivals and a resurgent Boeing backed by a mercantilist president ready to make a comeback, the vast company has to stay nimble. 

“It’s very hard to conceive of Airbus losing its number one position,” says analyst Tusa. “But it’s one of the rules of war — always remember the enemy has a turn.”

FT : Investors bet on Cambricon to be China’s next AI champion

Investors bet on Cambricon to be China’s next AI champion
The young chipmaker has software advantages over much larger rival Huawei as it aids Beijing’s race for tech self-sufficiency

In 2019, when Huawei stopped using Cambricon’s technology for its smartphones, the Chinese AI chip designer lost the bulk of its business, in what could have been a devastating blow.

But six years later, a pivot has made Cambricon Huawei’s primary challenger in China, with investors placing big bets that it will be one of the winners from Beijing’s campaign to achieve more technological self-sufficiency and cut its AI industry’s reliance on chips made by US tech giant Nvidia.

Cambricon’s share price has shot higher on speculation that it could become the leading supplier of chips to power models developed by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI champion whose technological breakthrough stunned Silicon Valley and markets this year.

After its shares doubled since the start of the month to Rmb1,495 ($209), lifting its market capitalisation to Rmb580bn, the chipmaker warned investors on Friday that its “stock price may be separating from the [business] fundamentals”.

Huawei still dominates China’s AI chip industry. But policymakers have thrown their weight behind Cambricon in an effort to create a competitive environment as they work to increase domestic chip output. The start-up, less than a decade old, makes AI chips for data centres and edge computing modules, which place computing resources closer to devices instead of faraway data centres.

Cambricon, which on Tuesday reported a Rmb1bn ($140mn) profit in the first six months, has aligned itself with Beijing’s AI development plans.

The company “must shoulder the mission and responsibility of our era” to advance AI technology, founder Chen Tianshi said during an investor call this year.


The start-up emerged from a team, including Chen and his brother, which spent years developing processors at China’s main research institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With CAS backing, the fledgling group spun off in 2016 and soon released its first chip for AI tasks. The institute remains Cambricon’s second-largest shareholder after Chen, with a 15.7 per cent stake.

Huawei, the company’s first major customer, accounted for 98 per cent of revenues in 2018, licensing AI technology for its smartphones. When the conglomerate replaced Cambricon with its own technology, the chip designer shifted its focus to cloud computing accelerators, which process complex AI tasks. The move put the company directly in competition with its former client.

Cambricon suffered another significant setback in 2022, when Washington added it to the “entity list” for allegedly supporting Chinese military development. It had to sever ties with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, its leading fabrication partner, forcing it to turn to Chinese manufacturers.

Between 2020 and 2024, Cambricon invested Rmb5.6bn in research and development, which it ploughed into software improvements to make it easier to deploy models originally trained on Nvidia’s GPUs to run on its rival Siyuan chips.

Several people, including a ByteDance AI engineer, said Cambricon’s software compatibility made its products easier to use than Huawei’s Ascend.

“Cambricon struggled to gain traction until the end of 2024, when it collaborated with ByteDance to make its chip more compatible with algorithms trained on Nvidia’s ecosystem,” said Lin Qingyuan, semiconductor analyst at Bernstein.

Cambricon’s revenues are forecast to climb from Rmb6.5bn this year to Rmb13.8bn in 2026, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, with the company’s market share of China’s AI chip market expected to increase from 3 to 11 per cent by 2028.

Many of China’s leading purchasers of AI chips, including China Telecom, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, also compete with Huawei in other businesses, such as network equipment, cloud computing, and self-driving cars, creating a strong incentive for them to support alternatives to the sprawling tech conglomerate.


Huawei declined to comment. ByteDance and Cambricon did not respond to requests for comment.

Cambricon’s growth is dependent on how quickly its manufacturing partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), can expand production of 7nm chips, the advanced nodes used for AI processors.

Last year, Beijing instructed SMIC to set aside a larger portion of its capacity for Cambricon, rather than selling all the advanced nodes to Huawei, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Financial Times reported that SMIC plans to double its 7nm capacity next year, which will give Cambricon and other Chinese semiconductor designers even more of its output.

Cambricon has struggled to meet demand after selling most of its chips in the first quarter to internet giant ByteDance, according to two people familiar with the matter, including one executive at the internet giant.

Bernstein’s Lin said it was a “matter of time” before Chinese fabs led by SMIC could increase manufacturing capacity for AI chips.

“There has never been a capacity issue that China has not been able to solve. Building things is what we do if there is money to be made,” said an investor in Chinese semiconductors.

Even so, analysts caution that Cambricon will remain a smaller player relative to Huawei.

Huawei has been working to fix software issues that have made its chips difficult to use. It is adjusting its chip architecture to provide developers with greater flexibility and is also designing a new processor to make training and deploying large language models easier, according to several people familiar with the effort.

Huawei is the only chipmaker that offers a viable alternative to Nvidia’s NV-Link, a technology that connects its chips, which could give it an edge over Cambricon in AI training chips, said analysts.

Cambricon’s immediate concern is securing more capacity from SMIC to manufacture its chips.

“Our customers have a very high rating for its products after testing,” said one salesperson at Inspur, one of China’s biggest data centre assemblers. “There just isn’t enough supply.”

>>> Europe : Brokers Upgrades & Downgrades - 29th of August 2025

>>> Up
* PUMA upgraded from Sell to Buy at UBS, PT €20.9
* Schaeffler Raised to Buy at Citi; PT 6.75 euros
* Softcat Raised to Overweight at Cantor; PT 1,900 pence
* Springvest Raised to Accumulate at Inderes; PT 8 euros

>>> Down
* Air New Zealand Downgraded to Sell from Neutral by UBS
* Ayvens Cut to Neutral at Citi; PT 9.50 euros
* ITM Power Cut to Hold at Peel Hunt; PT 70 pence
* Maersk Cut to Sell at Pekao Investment Banking; PT 10,889 kroner
* Schneider Electric Cut to Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 220 euros
* Telecom Italia Cut to Neutral at Oddo BHF; PT 41 euro cents

>>> Initiation
* Pennon ADRs Rated New Outperform at BNPP Exane; PT $15.50
* SCA Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 150 kronor
* Severn Trent ADRs Rated New Neutral at BNPP Exane; PT $34.40
* Stora Enso Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 10.40 euros
* Swatch ADRs Rated New Underperform at BNPP Exane; PT $6.83
* United Utilities ADRs Rated New Outperform at BNPP Exane
* UPM-Kymmene Rated New Sell at Berenberg; PT 21 euros
* Veolia ADRs Rated New Outperform at BNPP Exane; PT $22.50

>>> Call
* Ayvens Cut at Citi With Risks More Balanced Following Rally
* Morgan Stanley Flags Early Signs of China Stocks Overheating
* Schaeffler Upgraded at Citi Ahead of CMD on Outlook for Margins
* SCA Buy, UPM Sell at Berenberg in Forestry and Paper Initiations
* Yuan to Get a Boost From PBOC Fix, Exporter Conversion: Deutsche

>>> What to look at today - 29th of August 2025

Chinese stocks extended gains as investors awaited earnings from the nation’s biggest banks and companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and BYD Co., a test of whether the rally can endure. Goldman Sachs strategists raised their 12-month target for the CSI 300 Index to 4,900 from 4,500 on Thursday. The index gained as much as 1.2% - headed for its highest close since March 2022 - as China faced its busiest earnings day this week, with 441 locally listed companies reporting, according to Bloomberg data. Indexes elsewhere in Asia were mixed ahead of the Federal Reserve’s favored price gauge due Friday. Oil fell 0.7% after gaining in the previous session on waning prospect of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. A gauge of the dollar edged up while Treasuries inched lower, with yields on the benchmark 10-year rising one basis point to 4.21%. China’s stock market is heading for a record turnover this month, underscoring the intensity of a bull run that’s bringing in more investors by the day. Market excitement in China is running high even as banks and regulators hint they might try to cool things down, with US tariffs and a deep-rooted property crisis straining the economy. Liquidity of mainland shares “is expected to remain relatively high in the future,” said Dickie Wong, executive director of research at Kingston Securities Ltd. “Although there may be profit-taking in the short term, A-shares have already entered a bull market and are looking ahead.” While investors await Alibaba’s results, earnings from its peers make clear that hyper-competition in the sector is taking a toll. JD.com Inc.’s recent food delivery losses were bigger than expected, while Meituan’s shares tumbled this week after it warned of big losses due to “irrational competition.” As economic optimism grew, China’s central bank nudged the yuan higher, stoking speculation of a subtle shift in strategy toward favoring a stronger exchange rate after strong exports brightened the nation’s growth outlook. While Goldman Sachs boosted China stock targets, Morgan Stanley analysts flagged emerging signs of the market overheating. Also, Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker Cambricon Technologies Corp.’s stock fell as much as 8.7% after it issued a warning to investors about elevated trading risks. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 rose 0.3% to a record Thursday after data showed the US economy expanded faster than initially estimated, highlighting the resilience of consumer spending. While that soothed recession jitters, it raised doubts about Friday’s inflation report, which is expected to show core personal consumption expenditures prices rising 2.9% in July, the fastest pace in five months. In commodities, oil gave up some of its gains in the prior session amid waning hopes for peace in Ukraine, which reduced the likelihood of more of Moscow’s supplies reaching broader markets in the near term.
Oil is headed for a monthly loss, as investors weighed concerns about a looming glut along with geopolitical tensions, including US-led efforts to end the war in Ukraine. A meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin is unlikely to materialize, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, even though it was touted earlier by US President Donald Trump. The president will make a statement on Russia and Ukraine later, the White House said. US After Hours ESTC +18.2%, AMBA +17.9%, AFRM +13.5%, ADSK +10.3%, S +8.7% higher on earnings; MRVL -9.8%, DELL -6.3%, GAP -5.9% lower on earnings.

Nikkei -0.30% Hang Seng +0.88% CSI +0.67% Shanghai +0.27% Shenzen +0.33%

Eur$ 1.1664 CNH 7.1241 CNY 7.1294 JPY 146.93 GBP 1.3500 CHF 0.8026 RUB 80.6221 TRY 41.1460 WTI$ 64.19 -0.63% Gold 3,409 -0.23% BTC 111,467 -0.41% ETH 4,478 +0.43%

S&P -0.11% Nasdaq -0.20% EuroStoxx -0.07% FTSE +0.08% Dax -0.14% SMI +0.09%

Macro :
- Greece’s GDP Warrants Dispute Set to Go to Trial in April

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WSJ : Cambricon Technologies Warns of Trading Risks After Stock Surges

Cambricon Technologies Warns of Trading Risks After Stock Surges
The chip maker’s share gains come amid a broader market rally in China

  • Cambricon Technologies cautioned about trading risks after its stock price surged, surpassing industry peers and major indexes.
  • The company clarified it has no plans for new products.
  • Analysts are cautious about the frenzy over Cambricon and China’s ambition to produce AI chips at home due to manufacturing hurdles.

Chinese artificial-intelligence chip maker Cambricon Technologies 688256 -9.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle issued a warning about trading risks after a surge in its stock price over the past month.

The company’s stock gains have exceeded that of most of its industry peers and major indexes, the Beijing-based company said in an exchange filing late Thursday.

There is a risk that the stock price may have deviated from current fundamentals, as its current price-to-earnings ratio is over 5000 times, far exceeding the industry level, the company said.

Cambricon’s Shanghai-listed stock fell 5.6% as of midday on Friday after the warning. Despite the decline, its shares have more than doubled over the past month and have overtaken liquor maker Kweichow Moutai as China’s most valuable stock.

Cambricon’s rise comes amid a broader market rally in China, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index gaining over 6% over the past month and notching a 10-year high earlier this month.

China’s AI push and drive to make chips locally have given the AI chip designer another push as domestic investors shift their focus to AI infrastructure names.

Another catalyst behind the stock’s gains was Goldman Sachs raising its target price on Cambricon by 50% over the weekend to 1,835.00 yuan.

Cambricon also clarified Thursday that it doesn’t have plans to launch new products.

Chinese demand for AI inferencing has been rising after the launch of local foundation models such as DeepSeek, while domestic clients are diversifying their channels for obtaining chips amid tariff uncertainty and data-security concerns.

DeepSeek said last week that its new model uses a new format designed for next-generation homegrown chips, indicating a potential breakthrough in Chinese AI hardware. Markets have speculated that the latest AI chip could come from Cambricon.

Cambricon expects its 2025 revenue to be between 5 billion yuan, equivalent to $701.2 million, and 7 billion yuan, after its first-half revenue grew roughly 44-fold to 2.88 billion yuan.

Some analysts are cautious about the frenzy over Cambricon and China’s ambition to produce AI chips at home.

Cambricon, as a fabless chip maker, can’t turn into TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker overnight, said Morningstar analyst Phelix Lee. Meanwhile, SMIC, China’s largest chip maker, still has very low yields in manufacturing advanced chips, Lee added.

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Barron's : Citadel's Ken Griffin on Markets, the Fed, and Building His Firm for

Citadel's Ken Griffin on Markets, the Fed, and Building His Firm for the Next Century

(Barron's) -- The most successful companies on Wall Street have been built by those with relentless ambition -- and a strong wind at their back.
Decades of deregulation helped growth-minded CEOs turn firms such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America into behemoths. More recently, financial entrepreneurs have leveraged booming private markets to create the likes of Blackstone in private equity, Bridgewater Associates in hedge funds, and Andreessen Horowitz in venture capital.

Now a somewhat stealthier trend, fueled by the explosive growth of technology in finance, is behind a new wave of digital-first powerhouses such as Interactive Brokers Group, Susquehanna International, Jane Street, and especially Citadel -- a burgeoning Wall Street empire controlled by billionaire Ken Griffin.

Citadel is a two-headed business beast consisting of Citadel LLC, a $68 billion hedge fund operation best known for its top-performing multistrategy flagship Wellington, and Citadel Securities, a sprawling market maker that facilitates and engages in the trading of stocks, derivatives, and increasingly bonds. Citadel -- Griffin chose the name because it "denotes a place of strength and protection," he says -- is defining the prototype of a next-gen, bulge-bracket firm, except that Citadel isn't that bulgy, with just a fraction of the employees and overhead of the traditional Wall Street firm.

As of now, the boss is happy. "It's incredibly satisfying to run one of the world's most successful hedge funds and to witness the transformative impact of Citadel Securities on the capital markets around the world," Griffin says. "Yes, I'm proud of that."

Taken separately, first, Citadel the hedge fund is a huge deal even as a stand-alone. Wellington (not related to Vanguard Wellington Fund or Wellington Management) has been a superstar, producing annual average returns of 19.2%, net of fees, since inception in 1990 -- nearly two times the market. A million dollars invested in the fund back then is worth $452 million today.

Even though Griffin says he spends the majority of his time working on the hedge fund's investment portfolio, arguably the hotter ticket is Citadel Securities. CitSec, as it is known, is a complex, sometimes controversial, ever-evolving endeavor -- which, Pac-Man-like, is on a seemingly inexorable march across capital markets, gobbling up market share in options, equities, Treasuries, and corporate bonds, and now expanding to Europe and Asia. Example: CitSec recently bought Morgan Stanley's U.S. equity-option market-maker business, leaving no major banks in the market-making business.

Citadel Securities says it now trades 25% of all U.S. equities, including 35% of retail flows plus 45 billion options quotes a day, and is a top-three trader in U.S. Treasuries and swaps. In total, it executes $652 billion in notional trades a day. The goal is clear. "Building the capital-markets firm of this generation is a vision that is increasingly becoming a reality," says Citadel Securities CEO Peng (pronounced "pung") Zhao, a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. (Griffin serves as nonexecutive chairman of CitSec.)

"This is a very different company than most people understand," says Alfred Lin, a partner at venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital who sits on Citadel Securities' board (and whose brother happens to be the head of global fixed income and macro at Citadel the hedge fund). "Citadel is taking math and their distribution and technology power to price risk using techniques not traditionally used on Wall Street."

While technology has been absolutely critical to Citadel's success, so too has Griffin's strategy. "You don't want to go up against the Wall Street incumbents," he says. "Instead, you want to understand where the market is heading and position yourself there before the incumbents arrive." The incremental rise of electronic trading allowed Citadel to move step-by-step ahead of names like Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley in a number of trading businesses.

Griffin also makes all kinds of headlines. A Republican who has given hundreds of millions mostly to GOP candidates and causes, Griffin has praised and criticized Trump. Just this past week, Griffin told Barron's: "I hope President Donald Trump appreciates that while he can score political points by attacking Jay Powell, ultimately the independence of the Fed is of the utmost importance to the American and global economy."

Meanwhile, Griffin, 56, has been adding to his personal portfolio at a stunning pace, including buying over a billion dollars worth of real estate (in New York City, the Hamptons, London, St. Tropez, Hawaii, and multiple properties in South Florida, including $400 million in Palm Beach, according to The Wall Street Journal). His art collection, estimated to be worth close to $1 billion, includes works by Picasso, Van Gogh, and Warhol, and he has bought priceless historical American documents, including rare copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment (signed by Abraham Lincoln). Then there's the $45 million stegosaurus.

Griffin's philanthropy, now directed through an entity called Griffin Catalyst, exceeds $2 billion and includes funding vaccine development during the pandemic and helping create Operation Warp Speed. On the hipper side, he recently donated $2.255 million to Mr. Beast's water philanthropy after the YouTube superstar called him out on the Today show. "It seems very important to Ken that the world knows how wealthy he is," says a business associate. "A lot of other people go to great lengths the other way."

The totality of Griffin's world is dizzying. The billions upon billions of hedge fund investments, market-making activities, and personal assets are markers of a man with great aptitude and perhaps even greater ambition.

Along the way, Griffin and his companies have encountered friction, false starts, falling outs, fines, and failure. The hedge fund dropped 55% -- losing $9 billion of clients' money -- during the global financial crisis, and was at death's door. CitSec tried and failed to get into investment banking. The market maker has had a number of run-ins with regulators. Yet now, after more than 30 years in the business, the tumblers have been falling into place.

A decade ago, Griffin was worth $6.1 billion, according to Bloomberg; today his net worth has ballooned to $48.3 billion, making him the world's 31st-richest person, by dint of hedge fund payouts and an 85% stake in that business, plus his 80% piece of the market maker -- the latter being valued at $22 billion three years ago after Griffin sold a 5% stake to Sequoia. Never mind the real estate and art.

Wealth accumulation by longstanding lieutenants such as Griffin's right-hand man and chief operating officer of the hedge fund, Gerald Beeson, who joined in 1993 as an intern out of DePaul University, and Zhao, who joined in 2006, is likely significant as well. Not that making a career at Citadel is easy. Both the hedge fund and CitSec look to hire what Griffin calls "great athletes," and are known to be workplaces where elbows are sharp and fools aren't suffered gladly -- or really at all.

"I thought we ran hard at Goldman," Pablo Salame, the co-chief investment officer of the hedge fund, who came from Goldman Sachs in 2019, said to a colleague. "And then I showed up here, and I realized there's a whole different gear." (Griffin is co-chief investment officer and CEO of the hedge fund.) "I would tell my team, you're playing for Real Madrid," says a former Citadel executive. "You don't get to keep your spot on the field if you're not producing."

"Ken would call you on a Sunday night at 11 p.m. and he might be screaming and yelling at you, but he was working," says another former employee. "He demanded 150%, and nothing else in your life should matter."

"Ken's not yelling at you, he's yelling with you," a person close to Citadel joked.

"Citadel Securities and hedge fund Citadel are highly performant places to work," says Matt Culek, CitSec's COO, who has worked at the firm for 13 years. "This is a place to come if you have a lot of confidence in your ability and want to challenge yourself." It's true that Citadel hardly has an issue attracting aspiring masters of the universe. "We had over 100,000 applicants for our summer intern program, and our acceptance rate was 0.4%," says Culek. "People are falling over themselves to demonstrate they deserve to be here just for the summer, and then some subset of them get to come back full time."

Griffin was STEM-smart and an achiever from his earliest days, growing up in Boca Raton, Fla., where he was president of his high school's math club. He graduated from Harvard University with an economics degree in three years. Chapters of Griffin's origin story have become the stuff of Wall Street legend, like convincing Harvard to let him install a satellite dish on the roof of his dorm so he could trade convertible bonds.

After Harvard, Griffin moved to Chicago, where Frank Meyer, a pioneering hedge fund investor, mentored him and helped seed Griffin's hedge fund. "The best advice I've ever gotten was from Frank Meyer, who in the early days of my career really pushed me to think big," says Griffin. (Meyer also pressed Griffin to build a multistrategy platform instead of a single-strategy fund.) Griffin stayed in Chicago until three years ago, when he says he became disgruntled with the crime and business environment and relocated his companies to Miami -- a triumphant return of South Florida's most successful financier native son.

As he built his businesses, Griffin leaned heavily into his math and computer science background, applying evolving technology along the way. "The term HFT [high-frequency trading] was coined here," says Zhao, who adds that a physicist working at the firm came up with the name for a strategy he created. Though Citadel Securities used to be known mostly as a high-frequency shop, Zhao says that today HFT is "part of the core competency you need to have as a modern-day market maker, but it's becoming less and less a business model."

After the hedge fund's meltdown during the financial crisis, Griffin rallied the troops, and by 2012 he had led the fund back to its high-water mark.
Performance has been strong. Over the past five years, Wellington has had annualized net returns of 23.6%, according to the Global Investment Report, versus a 14.5% annualized total return for the S&P 500. The hedge fund has returned more than $25 billion to investors over the past eight years -- a mixed blessing for the funds' limited partners, who then have the problem of where to reinvest that money.

As a multistrat hedge fund, Citadel employs a podlike structure, where individuals or groups of money managers pursue their own thesis strategies but with strong central controls. The firm isn't wedded to a single asset class or investment strategy and style, which allows Salame and Griffin and the management committee to shift the emphasis of the fund. Instead of a typical 2%-of-assets management fee, Citadel "passes through" its direct costs, such as employee salaries, which can amount to up to 7%. And it charges 20% of upside as well. Citadel is unique in that it is publicly rated investment grade by S&P Global Ratings, which, as of May 1, rated it BBB-, one notch above junk, and "stable."

"We want to generate returns that are diversifiable and where there is liquidity," says Salame, an Ecuadorean who's an aficionado of Japanese whiskies. "You have to constantly review whether your capital allocation and portfolio shape is optimal today, even though it was optimal a day ago." As a former Goldman colleague says, Salame was "demanding and one of the smartest people I've ever worked with."

The fact that Griffin owns the two Citadels makes for a singular and potentially conflicted structure. Executives on both sides of the house, as they describe it, stress that there is zero communication between the two, and that no trading information from the market-maker business passes over to the hedge fund. The two firms do share office space in some cities, such as New York, where both are slated to move into a proposed 1,600-foot-tall Park Avenue tower, sharing some back office functions and even a logo. Furthermore, Citadel Securities does, in fact, use trading information from its market making business, not in the hedge fund, but in Citadel Securities itself.

Like other market makers (also known as nonbank liquidity providers), such as Jane Street and Virtu Financial, CitSec receives orders from retail and institutional clients. It processes customers' trades by executing them mostly on an exchange or sometimes on an alternative trading system such as a dark pool. Citadel can make money off the spread between the bid and offer, but more important, it can use those securities in myriad strategies including hedging, mitigating risk, or trading for its own account. It's a hideously complex, esoteric business, but a very profitable one. In the first quarter of this year, CitSec had $3.4 billion in net trading revenue, up some 45% from the same period last year, while net income climbed 70% to $1.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.

"Ken tells an amazing story about when he developed conviction on a trade, which he was right on," says Billy Hult, CEO of Tradeweb Markets, a bond trading platform of which Citadel is a customer. "When Ken went to take the trade off, he realized how much money the market maker was making by unwinding his trade, and he said, 'Wow, there are two great businesses to be in -- the business of investing, and the business of market making -- and they're both really lucrative.' "

CitSec's market-making business also entails the somewhat controversial business of payment for order flow, much scrutinized during the GameStop imbroglio in 2021, where Citadel pays retail brokerage firms like Robinhood Markets and Charles Schwab to process their trading orders. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Citadel paid brokers $388 million -- much of that for options contracts, according to Global Trading -- more than any other market maker. Citadel says it gets the most orders because it has the best execution, and that the money it pays to the brokers is essentially rebating back part of the spread. Those payments allow brokers to offer rock-bottom-priced or even free trading to investors -- which begets more trading, which benefits Citadel.

Trading data, which is nonproprietary, can be fed into Citadel's massive computing stack, where 260 Ph.D.s have access to some 100 petabytes of data -- more than the entire collection of the Library of Congress. Citadel data scientists and traders can use that information to identify inefficiencies between securities and arbitrage opportunities to obviate risk and make trades. Some are longer-term trades, says Zhao, while an HFT strategy, in which time is measured in 500 millionths of a second, makes thousands of small trades. Profiting from the spread on customers' trades, mitigating risk, and trading for its own account are closely intertwined. Revenue from those activities "can't be separated in a rational way," according to Zhao.

Market conditions recently have been ideal for Citadel Securities. Citibank says that year-to-date average daily volumes through July are 17.2 billion shares, a record high and up over 2.5 times from 2017. So far in 2025, stocks below $5 have represented 31.7% of total volumes, reflecting the latest meme-stock craze. And zero-day-to-expiration options are booming as well. All that trading means more volume for Citadel.

"The equity market is robust in pricing, but also reflects that the U.S. government is running a very large fiscal deficit, which is incredibly stimulative for the economy and healthy for corporate profits," Griffin says. "That, combined with a weaker dollar, has created tailwinds. There is one salient issue in the equity market now: How much of the hype of AI will translate into the reality of a more productive, more prosperous future?"

Going forward, Citadel has limitless possibilities, says Sequoia's Lin. "They can invest. They can trade and make a market. They can use math to help trade, absorb, and price risk better or help clients do that. They can provide advanced analytics and technology. They can provide intelligence to banks and to customers."

"We're still in early innings, even for some of our core products," says Jim Esposito, the president of Citadel Securities, who came over from Goldman last year. "In equities, we're skewed to the U.S.; in fixed income, we're just getting started. I'm spending time with Ken and Peng thinking about geographic and product expansion. We're everybody's favorite strategic partner to chat with, from technology platforms like Google to private-equity firms like Apollo [Global Management]."

Espo, as he is known, is amping up client-facing efforts at this tech-first company as it pushes more into bond trading and European operations, which can require high-touch relationships with senior clients and government officials.

"We're seeing higher levels of uncertainty in the world," says CitSec COO Culek. "That's going to increase the need for price discovery, which will lead to more market activity." Culek also points to strength in retail trading, event-based derivatives (trading on elections, economic data, or policy decisions), and crypto. "We're bullish on the growth of that set of opportunities," he says. "We see revenue others are already making that we can capture over time, and we can envision entirely new revenue in the future, some of which we are going to proactively create ourselves."

Griffin continues to be thoroughly engaged. "Some people who have Ken's success at his age start doing things like getting married in Europe," says a top executive at a major financial institution. "But Ken is uniquely still driven. That's a really important factor in why they succeeded and why they'll continue to succeed."

While one generation of Wall Street entrepreneurial titans, including the likes of Bridgewater's Ray Dalio and Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, is winding down, another, with Griffin at the fore, is still gearing up. "Where we are today represents a phenomenal starting point for where these businesses will go over the next century," says Griffin.

With ambition like that, and a digital wind in his sails, what sounds audacious might just be plausible.

FT : Could Singapore’s GIC actually be the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund

Could Singapore’s GIC actually be the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund?

One of the best things about being filthy rich is the massive passive income it affords you. Ask Singapore. We don’t know exactly how rich they are — that’s a state secret. But we do know how large their passive income is. Can we work out how rich they might be just by looking at this income? We can try.

Around a fifth of government revenues come from the NIRC, or “Net Investment Returns Contribution”. This is the dividend that Singapore’s massive sovereign wealth funds pay into central coffers each year — more than income tax or VAT.


And, as we explored earlier in summer, Singapore appears to have built itself substantial reserves through some combo of budgetary conservatism and successful balance sheet YOLOing. (We omitted the state’s close control of land sales and leases, and multiple readers pointed to this as the third leg of their stool.)

Since 2000, sovereign wealth dividends have meant the difference, on average, between running an annual budget deficit of 2.4 per cent of GDP (before NIRC) and running a surplus.


The formula to arrive at the NIRC is enshrined in Singapore’s constitution. You can read the actual legalese here. And translating into human seems pretty straightforward:

  • Tot up the relevant assets; call this ‘y’.
  • Take the expected long-term real rates of return; call this ‘x’;
  • Multiply x and y.
  • Divide the answer by two. Because why not.

Okay, there’s also a couple of wrinkles around also adding on up to half the net investment income derived from past reserves from remaining assets. We think means other so-called “Fifth Schedule” entities like Jurong Town Corporation, the Housing & Development Board and the Central Provident Fund. Analysts we’ve been in touch with think these are relatively minor.

But going back to our equation, what do these words actually mean?

So what are the ‘relevant assets’?
They include the net assets of Temasek (S$434bn), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (S$58bn), government deposits at the MAS (S$93bn) and of course GIC — the government’s massive asset management arm.

Taking just the nominal sum of these asset pools would lead to a huge number, and incentivise even more central government debt issuance to pump up the numbers. So the constitution says you need to subtract government liabilities, which we understand total S$1,286bn.

But hold on, what are net assets of GIC again? Time to roll out our favourite quote from any Ministry of Finance:

Just as our defence forces do not reveal the full extent of our weaponry and military capabilities, it would be unwise to reveal the full and exact resources at our disposal.

The number seems important. It defines the equation that is used to make Singapore’s fiscal maths add up.

So we got in touch with Rain Yin, lead Singapore sovereign analyst at S&P Global Ratings. She told us that S&P doesn’t actually model GIC assets at all, assuming instead that they will be “at least equivalent to the government’s gross debt stock, as most of the government’s debt is issued to meet the investment needs of CPF monies”.

We can see that in a world where governments can get a AAA rating with sizeable net debt, fussing over the quantum of Singapore’s net assets is probably immaterial to their rating, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In contrast, GlobalSWF makes a stab at estimating GIC’s net assets, and come to a figure of $936bn, or just a smidgen over S$1.2tn. Diego Lopez, the company’s founder and managing director, says he models it by tracking inflows from the government, outflows through the NIRC, and triangulating the annual performance through longer-term return disclosures published over the past 25 years. It sounds like a pretty sensible framework, though we can’t be sure how close it will ever be to reality.

And so our running total for ‘relevant assets’ look like an unknown number minus S$700bn. Hmm.


ELTRROR?
Is there more clarity over the “expected long-term real rate of return” that we set at X in our formula? Nope.

Apparently there is a “rigorous process in place for determining the ELTRROR of the investment entities”, starting with recommendations from the boards of GIC, MAS and Temasek, then flowing through the Singapore MOF, before hitting the president’s desk. S/he consults a Council of Presidential Advisers, and either agrees or disagrees. If s/he agrees, yay! If s/he disagrees, the whole thing defaults to a 20-year historical average real rate of return.

We’ve seen worse frameworks. And the current president — Tharman Shanmugaratnam — is well-placed to navigate this, having previously served as minster of finance, chairman of the MAS, and deputy chairman of GIC.

Can we see the workings? No. How about whether Singapore has defaulted to historical average rates of return? No. But can we at least see the current expected return? Not a chance.

Can we back-out an estimated size for GIC?
Lian Chuan Yeoh, a partner at law firm Withers KhattarWong, got in touch with us to point out that we could try estimating GIC’s size by backing it out of the NIRC equation — even if both variables are unknown.

Because, given that NIRC = (relevant assets X ELTRROR) ÷ 2, and given that we know that NIRC was S$24bn in 2024, and given that the big unknown quantity in relevant assets is GIC assets (again, leaving aside other Fifth Schedule entities) we can have a look at what mix of GIC assets and ELTRROR values gets us to S$24bn.


We appreciate that the chart looks intimidatingly like the sort of thing you left behind in high school maths. But it’s interesting. It seems to imply that GIC is radically larger than every other estimate we’ve seen.

GIC report its 20 year historic real return as 3.8 per cent per annum. If the ELTRROR was 3.8 per cent GIC assets would need to be around $1.5tn to make the maths work — larger than China’s CIC, and almost as large as China’s SAFE.

If Singapore have been using the long-term real rate of return of around 3 per cent that NBIM — Norway’s massive oil pension fund — thinks reasonable, it would imply that GIC was worth $1.8tn (again, leaving aside income from Fifth Schedule entities).

This year the NIRC is rising to $S27bn, implying either even larger net asset values for GIC (or a higher ELTRROR). And this is in the context of investment returns from Temasek that have reportedly been sufficiently low to prompt an organisational shake-up.

Long term return assumptions that might realistically be being made by the Singaporean president could imply GIC assets that would make it the largest SWF in the world.

It feels like we’re missing something. We wondered whether maybe we’d misread Article 142 of the Constitution, included the wrong set of MAS assets or maybe even included bits of government debt that should be excluded from relevant assets. Maybe the net investment income from remaining assets was bigger than we’d understood? We contacted the Ministry of Finance, shared our workings and asked for help.

Did their response help us unpick the secrets of Singaporean state wealth? Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is no.