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Alors que le groupe mène un intense bras de fer avec ses créanciers, Altice a confié sa filiale XPFibre à la banque Natixis dans le cadre d’une fiducie.

Patrick Drahi, connu pour affectionner les montages complexes et opaques, s’est cette fois surpassé. En toute discrétion, le patron d’Altice vient d’appliquer son génie financier à XPFibre, la société qui détient le réseau en fibres optiques de SFR. Jusqu’à récemment, son capital était détenu à 49,99 % par trois fonds (Omers, Allianz et Axa) et à 50,01 % par Altice France, la filiale qui regroupe ses actifs de Patrick Drahi dans l’Hexagone (SFR, etc.). Mais selon nos informations, c’est Natixis qui en est depuis quelques mois l’actionnaire. Plus précisément, le groupe de télécoms et les trois fonds ont confié leurs actions à la banque dans le cadre d’une fiducie (trust en anglais) : la filiale de BPCE gère désormais cette participation pour leur compte.

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Contacté, Axa explique que cette fiducie a été mise en place à cause du refinancement de la dette de XPFibre intervenu fin mars. La société avait alors levé 5,775 milliards d’euros, dont 3,45 milliards d’euros auprès des banques Natixis, Société Générale, Crédit agricole et BNP, le solde via des placements privés auprès d’investisseurs européens et américains. Tout cet argent a permis de verser un dividende exceptionnel à ses actionnaires (Altice empochant ainsi un milliard d’euros), mais au prix d’un doublement de l’endettement supporté par XPFibre. Si Patrick Drahi a considéré qu’il pouvait alourdir le fardeau pesant sur sa filiale, c’est que cette dernière a quasiment achevé le déploiement de son réseau, et devient donc bien plus rentable. Il y a un an, Altice avait promis « à moyen terme » un excédent brut d’exploitation (Ebitda) de 600 millions d’euros sur un chiffre d’affaires de 900 millions, soit une marge plantureuse de 66 %…

Selon notre enquête, Natixis détient désormais (en tant que fiduciaire) une holding intermédiaire, XPFibre Groupe, qui est le nouvel actionnaire de XPFibre. Une opération qui a valorisé le capital de XPFibre à 4,5 milliards d’euros. Pour mémoire, la société avait été constituée par le rachat du réseau en fibre de SFR pour 3,5 milliards d’euros en 2018, puis celui de Covage l’année suivante pour un milliard supplémentaire. Il y a un an, Patrick Drahi a tenté de vendre XPFibre sur une valorisation du capital de 7,5 milliards d’euros (hors dette), mais sans aboutir.

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Pourquoi avoir orchestré une telle opération ? Il faut noter que XPFibre a levé sa dette à un moment de vive tension entre Patrick Drahi et les créanciers d’Altice France. Début mars, il leur a demandé de faire une croix sur un tiers des 24 milliards d’euros qu’il leur devait… ce qu’ils ont, logiquement, très mal pris. Certes, ces créances sont gagées par des actifs. Mais, au printemps, le milliardaire a retiré trois bijoux de famille de ces garanties : ses data centers, ses médias (BFM & RMC) et sa participation dans XPFibre. Dans le jargon financier, on dit qu’ils ont été transférés vers des filiales « non restreintes » (unrestricted) d’Altice France, sans doute immatriculées au Luxembourg. Résultat : les créanciers n’ont plus accès aux deux milliards d’euros provenant de la vente des data centers et des médias, ni au milliard de dividende exceptionnel de XPFibre. Selon Bloomberg, Patrick Drahi aurait même fait remonter vers ses holdings personnelles luxembourgeoises les 1,5 milliard d’euros récoltés en vendant BFM. Quant aux 50,01 % détenus dans XPFibre, on ne sait plus trop où ils sont logés désormais. Jeudi, Patrick Drahi a indiqué dans un communiqué cryptique que cette participation était désormais détenue par « une filiale latérale d’Altice France, qui n’est pas une filiale restreinte d’Altice France, ni Altice France Holding, ni une filiale d’Altice France Holding ». Conclusion, selon un spécialiste de la restructuration de dettes : « il paraît évident que, vu ce contexte tendu, la fiducie sur XPFibre a été mise en place à la demande des prêteurs, pour garantir que cet actif ne s’évapore pas vers d’autres cieux. »

Contactés, Omers et Axa ont précisé que « les droits économiques et de gouvernance restent inchangés ». Omers a ajouté que « XPFibre Groupe est détenu, via Natixis en tant que fiduciaire, par XPFibre Holding. L’actionnariat de XPFibre Holding reste inchangé entre Altice France, Omers, Allianz et AXA ». Pour leur part, Altice et XPFibre n’ont pas répondu, tandis que Natixis et Allianz se sont refusés à tout commentaire.

Knife assault in Wuxi comes as country reels from car ramming in Zhuhai that killed 35

Eight people were killed and 17 injured in a stabbing attack at a vocational college in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi late on Saturday, the country’s second mass-casualty event in a week.

Police said in a statement that they had detained a suspect, a 21-year-old male student surnamed Xu, at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology in Yixing, a smaller city within Wuxi, in eastern Jiangsu province.

China was shaken earlier this week by its worst mass killing in a decade when a driver in the southern city of Zhuhai rammed his vehicle into a crowded exercise area, killing 35 people and injuring dozens more.

Authorities on Saturday charged the driver, a 62-year-old man surnamed Fan, state media said.

According to the Yixing police statement, Xu confessed to carrying out the attack after he was detained at the scene. It attributed his motivation to frustration with failing his exams and dissatisfaction with his salary at his internship.

Analysts have said that a spate of violent attacks in recent months could point to aggravated social tensions as the China grapples with slowing economic growth that has led to job losses and dented household incomes.

“The thing that seems to stand out is that people are resorting to such mass violence because they seem to feel that they don’t have much to lose,” said Steve Tsang, head of the Soas China Institute at the University of London.

In May, two people were killed and 10 injured in an attack at an elementary school in south-eastern Jiangxi province. The same month, an assailant killed two people and injured 21 at a hospital in Yunnan.

In June, a deadly attack targeted a school bus full of Japanese children in Suzhou, while a separate rampage killed three people in a metro station in Shanghai.

In July, a 64-year-old man killed three people with a knife and injured one in Shenyang, in north-eastern Liaoning province, while in September, a man stabbed a boy walking to a Japanese school in Shenzhen, in southern China. The boy died the next day in hospital.

In Wuxi on Saturday, police said they were investigating and authorities were working to treat the victims.

But information about many of the attacks has been sparse, with internet discussions of the events censored and footage removed from internet platforms.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping released a rare personal statement addressing the Zhuhai attack, which analysts said reflected authorities’ sensitivity about social stability and desire to strengthen public controls. Xi called on officials across the country on Tuesday to improve risk prevention “at-source”.

Chinese policymakers have also unveiled a series of stimulus packages in an effort to support the country’s flagging property sector and spur economic growth, including a $1.4tn fiscal package this month aimed at restructuring local governments’ off balance sheet debt. But economists have called for more direct measures to alleviate household burdens and restore consumer and investor confidence.

“The problem here is that this is still being seen primarily in the light of a social and political stability challenge, so a security-focused response is likely,” said Tsang.

“What will be needed is to change the environment [to] make people feel that there is a better future for them.”

China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of weekday working hours.

UK’s largest investment site accused of continuing to recommend Woodford’s flagship fund even as it ran into trouble

More than 5,000 people who invested in Neil Woodford’s collapsed equity fund are suing Hargreaves Lansdown, claiming the UK’s largest investment site continued to recommend the product even as it ran into trouble.

Claims firm RGL Management said the number of people taking part in a group High Court claim against Hargreaves Lansdown had nearly doubled over the past two years. It added that the average individual claim, including interest, was about £20,000.

The final number of claimants is expected to be larger, with RGL planning to file on behalf of more Hargreaves Lansdown customers next year.

Hargreaves Lansdown declined to comment. It previously rejected all the claims made by RGL when it filed for the first set of claimants in 2022 “for lack of a substantive basis of claim”.

Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK’s largest seller of retail investment products and promoted Woodford’s flagship UK Equity Income Fund from when he set up his own business in 2014.

However, the fund collapsed in 2019 after investors rushed to try to withdraw their money because of the poor performance of its shareholdings and private company investments.

The fund was frozen as a result. Nearly 300,000 people had invested in it through Hargreaves Lansdown, accounting for £1.6bn of the fund’s total £3.7bn.

RGL said the claim was for “investor losses sustained as a result of Hargreaves Lansdown’s conduct in continuing to recommend [the fund] right up to the day of its highly publicised collapse, despite Hargreaves Lansdown being aware of the fund’s long-standing portfolio diversification and liquidity issues”.

The firm said claimants were seeking the return of the money they lost, as well as damages for the missed opportunity of generating returns by investing elsewhere. It is working with law firm Wallace LLP.

RGL said on its website that if the claim is successful, the “amount to be deducted from gross proceeds . . . by the RGL Group will be 25 per cent including VAT”, noting that this includes legal fees among other costs.

Michael Green, director at RGL Management, said that “adding thousands more claimants . . . represents another step closer to holding Hargreaves Lansdown to account for its conduct” in relation to the Woodford Equity Income fund. RGL filed to the High Court on behalf of the new claimants on Friday.

Woodford’s fund administrator, Link Fund Solutions, reached a settlement agreement with the Financial Conduct Authority last year over its role in the fund’s collapse.

As part of the agreement, LFS has provided redress to affected investors through a compensation scheme worth up to £230mn. As a result, LFS avoided a £50mn fine from the watchdog.

The film club’s screenings have drawn in the likes of Alexander McQueen’s creative director Seán McGirr, English filmmaker Edgar Wright and actors Marisa Abela and Hugh Skinner.

LONDON — Club Ciné, the by-invitation-only film club founded by casting director Tom Macklin, is expanding its reach and is launching an editorial arm by turning its Instagram page @clubcine.ig into a magazine format filled with articles and interviews with actors, directors and costume designers.

The platform will also introduce a Substack newsletter in early December.

The film club’s screenings at The Cinema at Selfridges has drawn in a diverse crowd from fashion and entertainment, including Alexander McQueen’s creative director Seán McGirr; English filmmaker Edgar Wright; Dunhill’s creative director Simon Holloway; actors Marisa Abela and Hugh Skinner, and photographer Venetia Scott, who has never missed a screening.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 14: Carrie Mae Weems speaks onstage during Under the Oculus: A Celebration of Visionaries at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 14, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Getty Images for The Solomon R.

This year the film club has screened “High & Low — John Galliano,” “Anora,” “The Room Next Door,” “MaXXXine,” and more, usually followed by Q&As with directors such as Kevin MacDonald and Ti West.

The Instagram page will be a deeper dive into the lives of the creatives, with weekly posts.

The first is with film producer Malcolm Washington, who was behind Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” followed by Canadian artist and writer Bruce LaBruce and then actor Hari Nef, asking them about their film influences, obsessions and what they’re indulging in right now.

“I was always finding myself going to film festivals or first lit screenings at distributors, but I was always sitting there on my own watching these movies. The movies make you feel something, but you come out and there’s nobody to talk to about it because they’re under embargo and it took out the pleasure of going to the cinema,” said Macklin, who spent 15 years at Hearst booking talent for the covers of Harper’s Bazaar U.K., Esquire U.K. and Elle U.K.

Club Ciné is injecting the fun back into watching films for Macklin and his fellow industry colleagues.

The Cinema at Selfridges was designed by the famous Milanese interior design company Dimore Studio and has a David Lynch meets Wes Anderson interiors feel to it.

On arrivals there are Champagne and cocktails greeting guests and inside the screening rooms, each velvet seat is accompanied with popcorn and a goodie bag from Aesop or Haeckels, as well as a special pamphlet that contains trivia and tidbits from the film.

Before each screening Macklin speaks to the audience about interesting facts about the film being shown to put it in context and plays a quickfire quiz game about the director or actors in the film.

The film club has accidentally catapulted into something bigger than Macklin expected. “I never launched it as a business or to make profit,” he said.

Cutler & Gross was Club Ciné’s brand partner last season and Jimmy Choo is its current partner.

The idea for the film club started in 2018 for Macklin, where he would invite a small group of friends from Hearst to use the screening room at the W Hotel in Piccadilly Circus, which is a few minutes’ walk away from the publisher’s London offices. The film club took a break during COVID-19 and he decided to relaunch it after leaving his editorial job at Hearst.

In the relaunch, art directors Peter Ainsworth and Johanna Bonnevier helped him come up with a logo, which is a coat of arms that features a rooster, a lion and the helmet of a knight. Meanwhile, art director Tristan Bartolini has curated the visuals for the Instagram and Substack pages, with illustrator Richard Kilroy drawing the subjects.

On Nov. 22, Club Ciné will host a screening of “Paris Is Burning” with Aesop to launch the brand’s Gift Kits, which have been inspired by cinema.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Aesop’s senior art director Francesca Davoren-Britton and its global head of visual merchandising and brand environment Shawana Grosvenor.

The appetite for the film club is growing and in December, Club Ciné will host a screening for 80 people for Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.”

The Withering Dream of a Cheap American Electric Car

‘That market sucks,’ Lucid Chief Executive Peter Rawlinson says, as Elon Musk pivots Tesla to driverless cars

Elon Musk has abandoned it. President-elect Donald Trump is unlikely to help. And the current economics of the U.S. auto industry don’t support it.

The key problem: America doesn’t really sell cheap new cars anymore.

Why would any automaker offer an EV—with all of that costly technology—at a price point that’s half of what the average new vehicle goes for these days?

“I think having a regular $25,000 model is pointless,” Musk said a few weeks ago. “It would be silly.”

Yes, the chief executive says Tesla TSLA 3.07%increase; green up pointing triangle is still working on a $25,000 robotaxi to arrive in 2026. But for those who don’t think his driverless cars are actually going to happen by then or for Luddites who just want to buy a new $25,000 EV with a steering wheel and pedals—no luck.

Musk isn’t alone in taking a sour view of making a cheap EV for the U.S.

“That market sucks,” Peter Rawlinson, chief executive of Lucid Motors, told me and my colleague Christopher Mims for our new podcast, called “Bold Names.”

Lucid LCID -3.37%decrease; red down pointing triangle which has begun taking orders for its coming $90,000 version of the new electric SUV called the Gravity, aims to bring out a more affordable midsize vehicle to compete against the Tesla Model Y in late 2026. That vehicle is said to cost less than $50,000, but a cheap EV is something Rawlinson said he would only support by licensing his technology to another company.

“That market is notorious because you get into mass manufacture—terrible, low margins,” he said of the low-price EVs. “To install the manufacturing base for millions of these units makes little sense to me.”

Abandoning the idea of a $25,000 car comes as a blow to those who were betting that the electrification of the automobile was on track to happen seemingly overnight—with EVs for every pocketbook replacing the tens of millions of vehicles on the roadways.

Instead, we’ve swung back to a belief that the transition, at least in the U.S., is going to be slower.

Musk upended the car industry almost two years ago with his incredible claims about Tesla’s ability to slash costs as it sought to develop a lower-priced EV while at the same time starting a price war by cutting the prices of the Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport-utility vehicle.

Rivals, lest they be left behind Tesla and its now-discarded claims, have aimed for cheap EVs of their own. But their broader efforts to electrify have been running into trouble. Ford Motor, for example, last month said it was pausing production of its electric F-150 Lightning, which starts at around $63,000, in the midst of slumping demand.

A slowdown in the rate of EV sales growth has complicated the picture. So has the growing anticipation that the new Trump administration will eliminate federal tax credits that have made EVs more affordable for buyers. The cheapest car Tesla currently sells in the U.S. starts at around $43,000—or $35,500 with a federal tax credit of $7,500.

Building and selling a cheap car for the U.S.—EV or not—was already difficult.

To start, profits can be thin. And that’s before adding expensive batteries to the equation, before inflation jacked prices up for everything, and before Chinese rivals got really, really good at making really, really inexpensive EVs of their own.

A lot of attention has focused on the fact that new cars, like everything these days, just cost way more than they used to.

The average transaction price for a new vehicle sold in the U.S. last month was $48,623, according to Kelley Blue Book, roughly $10,000 higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.

A decade ago, about 40% of the new-vehicle transactions in the U.S. were less than $25,000, including incentives and discounts, according to the researcher J.D. Power. This year, that figure is 9%.

In 2020, when Musk fanned the flames of excitement for a $25,000 car that he said was in the offing, the new-vehicle market in the U.S. was a much different thing. Even then, roughly a quarter of the new-vehicle transactions were for less than $25,000.

A year later, according to J.D. Power, it was 15%. It then fell to 6% before slightly rebounding this year as car companies offered deals to help move vehicles as higher interest rates made buying a car harder for some.

What happened? The pandemic. Prices shot up—first in the midst of supply shortages, and then they stayed high as automakers adjusted their lineup to cut out low-profit vehicles.

“As automakers were profit maximizing during the supply chain crisis era, you are going to prioritize the bigger vehicles, the more expensive vehicles with their higher margins,” Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, told me. “Now we just don’t have” these cheaper models.

Today, just four models account for more than two-thirds of all vehicles with suggested retail prices of less than $25,000 in the U.S.—Toyota’s Corolla, Kia’s Forte, Nissan’s Sentra and Chevrolet’s Trax.

It isn’t as though people don’t want cheap cars. Now, many are just left buying used cars.

What has Western automotive executives’ stomachs churning is that they might have inadvertently left a huge opening for Chinese rivals who have shown an ability to build inexpensive EVs that consumers outside the U.S. are gobbling up.

While Trump has promised even heftier tariffs to effectively keep Chinese imports out, the president-elect has suggested he might be open to Chinese automakers’ setting up factories in the U.S.—though such a move would mean their labor costs would surely increase compared with what they’re accustomed to back home.

Even for Musk, though, the world seems to be shifting quickly. He has said Tesla sales could rise as much as 30% next year by offering cheaper versions of existing models.

“The amount of work required to make a lower-cost car is insanely high,” Musk told analysts in October. “It is harder to get like 20% of the cost out of a car than it is to design the car and build the entire factory in the first place—it’s like excruciating.”

He added: “There’s not a lot of movies made about the heroes who got 20% of the cost out of a car, but let me tell you, there should be.”

Albemarle’s Kent Masters says economics do not support pivot away from Asia on commodities in EV supply chains

Albemarle, the world’s largest lithium producer, says it is not economically viable to build a supply chain in North America and Europe that could wrest control of critical minerals from China.

Kent Masters, chief executive of the US-based group, told the Financial Times that the “returns are not there” to pivot supply of the commodity, which is crucial for the electric vehicle industry, to the west because of low lithium prices and high operating costs.

“We were trying to pivot to the west . . . the prices we see in the market don’t really allow us to do that,” Masters told the Financial Times, adding that the US was “absolutely” at risk of losing the race to compete with China on lithium.

Prices for lithium have fallen more than 80 per cent since the start of last year, as a global slowdown in electric vehicle sales and a tough macroeconomic backdrop muted demand for the metal while supply continued to grow.

“At the current price level, new entrants are not being incentivised to enter the market,” said Adam Megginson, a senior analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The downturn in the lithium market undermines western efforts to build a domestic supply chain for metals crucial for the energy transition and reduce reliance on China, home to the majority of the world’s refining capacity and some of the largest mining companies.

Albemarle reported a quarterly loss of $1.1bn earlier this month on low lithium prices and reduced its workforce by 6-7 per cent as part of its cost savings plan. Earlier this year, the company paused its plans to build a $1.3bn refinery in South Carolina and partially halted its expansion in Kemerton, Australia.

The company owns the only operating lithium mine in the US in Nevada and is securing permits for a mine in North Carolina. Masters told the FT that the development of that mine depends on “what the economics look like at the time”.

“Once we get through permitting, we’ll have to make a decision whether we do it,” Masters said. The company plans to spend $800mn-$900mn in capital expenditures globally next year, about half of this year’s spending.

The slowdown from Albemarle comes as producers report lower profits and pull back on expansion plans. In August, Piedmont Lithium scrapped its plans to build an $800mn refinery in Tennessee. In September, International Battery Metals suspended operations at its lithium plant in Utah two months after it started production.

“The gap from China seems to be widening rather than getting closer,” said Oliver Montique, a trade and supply chains analyst at Eurasia Group.

China made up 65 per cent of the world’s refining capacity of lithium last year and is expected to generate more than half of the world’s supplies through 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.

Some companies are moving forward. Last month, Rio Tinto acquired Arcadium Lithium for $6.7bn, the largest lithium acquisition on record. Global mining supply is expected to grow about 24 per cent this year and 21 per cent next year, according to Macquarie, which does not expect prices to recover until 2027.

While the US Inflation Reduction Act included tax credits to encourage the sourcing of non-Chinese sourced materials and domestic production, Albemarle says the law has not accelerated the buildout of a supply chain down to the minerals sector.

Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association, called for a “more aggressive and holistic approach” to boost domestic production, including “stockpiles, offtake backstops, [and] advance market commitments.”

In addition to low prices, lithium producers face long permitting timelines, workforce shortages, and policy uncertainty. Promises from incoming president Donald Trump to “end the insane electric vehicle mandate” in the US and undo the IRA could slow EV adoption even further and drive down lithium prices, say analysts.

“Anything that changes or decreases the demand is not going to be good,” said Alice Fox, senior base metals strategist at Macquarie Group.