TheChek News Flow

Golden Goose is said to be eyeing the Italian Stock Exchange, while speculation circles around Missoni and the future of companies ranging from La Perla to Trussardi and New Guards Group is undetermined.

MILAN — The year 2024 is shaping up to see intense M&A activity in Italy, while potential investors are atwitter over the prospect of an initial public offering of Golden Goose.

In 2020, private equity fund Permira bought the Italian brand from the Carlyle Europe Buyout fund for a price pegged at 1.28 billion euros. Golden Goose, which achieved much of its success with the Superstar sneaker that offers 400 variations a year, is led by chief executive officer Silvio Campara.

Neither Permira nor Golden Goose have officially commented on the possibility of a listing in Milan in 2024, or on a potential sale. The company has been on an upward trajectory, posting revenues of 421 million euros in the nine months ended Sept. 30, up 19 percent compared with the same period in 2022. Compared with 2021, sales were up 60 percent. Profitability continued to grow, with the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization margin rising to 34.8 percent in the first nine months of 2023.

Following the lackluster debut of Birkenstock on the New York Stock Exchange, when shares declined on opening day, observers are carefully watching Golden Goose. But market sources say the latter’s shareholders aim to emphasize the luxury image of the Italian brand, which also includes apparel and accessories collections, compared to that of the German sandal maker.

Speculation has also been circulating about a possible sale of another sneaker brand, Autry, by the Made in Italy fund, which is managed by Quadrivio and Pambianco and invests in wine, food, beauty, fashion and furniture with brands ranging from 120% Lino and Rosantica to Dondup and GCDS.

Talk is swirling that other brands are under the microscope and could potentially change hands as well.

Italian investment fund FSI took a 41.2 percent stake in Missoni in 2018, while the founding and namesake family continued to have control with 58.8 percent of the shares. Sources say Missoni last year tapped Rothschild to explore a potential sale of the brand, which is designed by Filippo Grazioli and helmed by CEO Livio Proli. A rumor that OTB was eyeing Missoni fizzled quickly. Market sources speculated that an industrial partner could be interested in Missoni’s production and artisanal capabilities. (OTB, which controls Diesel, Jil Sander, Marni, and Maison Margiela, among others, is also eyeing an IPO but more likely in 2025.)

In 2021, private equity giant L Catterton acquired a majority stake in Etro in a deal valued at 500 million euros. Etro closed 2022 with sales of 277 million euros, up 17 percent on 2021, but had a loss of 23.6 million euros, mainly caused by amortizations and extraordinary expenses. That led L Catteron to a recapitalization at the end of last year, injecting 15 million euros into the company with the goal to finance further investments. However, sources say that L Catterton’s spearheading the combination of watches and jewelry distributor Nuova Publitex with the Etro company, which weighed on the bottom line, caused friction with the Etro family, which maintains a minority stake in the brand. Etro is helmed by CEO Fabrizio Cardinali and designed by creative director Marco De Vincenzo.

The future of Trussardi continues to be uncertain, after the company sought creditor protection last year. While there was speculation about potential white knights, including Miroglio, expressing their interest in helping the storied brand, no deal was finalized. The Bergamo, Italy-based 3X Capital, which specializes in company restructurings, had been called to consult with Trussardi’s parent, Italian independent asset management company QuattroR, which took a controlling stake in the Italian fashion brand in 2019.

CEO Sebastian Suhl and creative directors Serhat Işık and Benjamin A. Huseby left the brand last year.

Another storied brand, La Perla, also has been through challenging times, and in November members of the unions Filctem Cgil and Uiltec expressed their “intense concern for the destiny” of the innerwear brand “following the total lack of concrete response” by German businessman Lars Windhorst, the company’s owner via his London-based private equity firm Tennor.

The unions lamented “total financial inconsistency” and “generic and worrying” declarations of job cuts at La Perla’s Bologna, Italy-based plant. The troubled brand has failed to steadily relaunch in recent years, after Tennor, then known as Sapinda, took over the company in 2018. La Perla remains heavily indebted as it logged pre-tax losses of 48.8 million euros on sales of 69.1 million euros in 2022, according to the company’s annual report.

The fate of New Guards Group is also in doubt following the rescue of parent company Farfetch by Coupang, which has agreed to pump $500 million in emergency funding into the company as part of a “pre-pack” administration process. New Guards Group is home to 10 international brands, which include Marcelo Burlon County of Milan, Palm Angels, Unravel Project, Heron Preston, Alanui, Peggy Gou, Ambush and There Was One. It is also the licensee of Off-White and is the European partner of Reebok.

As reported, Capri contemplated a Versace and Jimmy Choo IPO before the deal to be acquired by Tapestry was struck, but so far there has been no additional sign of a spinoff. Time will tell how Versace will fit into the major American group which, when the acquisition is completed, will also own Michael Kors, Coach, Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade.

Shoppers have returned to physical retail, and the war is on to attract them with craftspeople on site; VIP floors; carefully chosen art on displays, and special exotics rooms.

LONDON — Step into any luxury district around the world and there’s a quiet war brewing for customer experiences — the signs of luxury slowing down are already apparent, which has prompted every brand to amp up their in-store presence with activations, special rooms and events.

In London, international shoppers proved again that they’re a force to be reckoned with as they continued to spend on Boxing Day, Dec. 26, and had previously shown signs of spending on the Black Friday weekend.

According to the New West End Company, the West End generated a 5 percent increase in footfall on Boxing Day.

Compared to last year’s results, footfall for the West End grew by 20 percent in November and by 6 percent for the month of December. It was the strongest growth since 2019.

“The West End is the home of luxury in the U.K. — in 2023, we had a flurry of exciting openings across the year, from the unveiling of Gucci’s salon-concept store, to the transformation of Burberry’s global flagship. 2024 promises to be much of the same, and already in the pipeline are new stores from Rolex, Moncler, Georg Jensen and Saint Laurent, which secured a record lease for its six-story space on the corner of Bond Street and Grafton Street,” said Dee Corsi, chief executive officer of the New West End Company.

“That there is still such a strong pipeline of world-class brands set to open their doors in 2024 and beyond underlines the enduring appeal of the West End and the value of giving consumers an elevated shopping experience,” she added.

Consumers are making their cash count for every thread they buy and in return they are expecting brands to demonstrate the high quality of the products they’re buying into.

English heritage company Swaine sits on a 7,000-square-foot space with three floors selling bridle leather goods with onsite bespoke services and a workshop with seven artisans inside the store.

On the lower ground floor, the artisans bring customers’ creations to life, with prices ranging from 3,500 pounds for a minimal briefcase going anywhere up to 20,000 pounds for a trunk.

The products are made by one artisan from start to finish, on average taking about 30 hours and involving 200 steps. Some items can take up to a year to finish, however, depending on the commission.

But Swaine is a rarity on the street, where a sea of French and Italian luxury megabrands dominate.

“Sad to say but I think the bigger brands now are unstoppable and as long as we remain in a recruitment market, they should continue to dominate,” said Erwan Rambourg, global head of consumer and retail research at HSBC, explaining that these players — Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès, Dior and Cartier among them — have scale advantages for media spending, real estate locations, better management and other business fundamentals.

When Gucci relocated from its former location on the corner of Old Bond Street to New Bond Street, it did so quietly with a lit-up Gucci sign outside. But still, it was apparent, taking up 15,000 square feet with five floors inside a Grade-II listed building that was founded in 1913 as an art gallery.

Its aim remains to be crystal clear — to create an experience.

Downstairs is dedicated to its menswear offering, while handbags, fine jewelry, women’s ready-to-wear and footwear can be found on its other floors.

There’s even a special room dedicated to exotic handbags and on display in the room are archive bags from the Gucci vault, carefully labeled, emulating the brand’s “Gucci Cosmos” exhibition at 180 Studios at 180 The Strand.

The store features Gucci’s first European salon on the top floor reserved for VIPs and top-tier clients by appointment only. The room will change with each appointment as it will be tweaked to fit the tastes of the client coming in, from the art on display, edit of clothes and leather goods to the food served.

Dior’s 30 Avenue Montaigne flagship in Paris offers valet parking service with the first floor showcasing the house’s exotic leathers, eveningwear and fine jewelry collections. Top clients can even stay in the store overnight if they so wish, all for a price, of course.

In December, Saint Laurent opened its own palace-like store on 123 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the brand’s largest store yet in Paris with over four levels, the penultimate being a large VIP suite with a giant circular mirror and metal furniture by American artist Donald Judd, and warmer, wooden seating by Rudolph Schindler.

At Van Cleef & Arpels, a dedicated waiting area takes clients through the brand’s heritage and craftsmanship before they are greeted with a sales associate.

Jewelry brands such as Mejuri, Missoma and Kimai have incorporated private spaces in their stores for one-to-one appointments that can include everything from customers getting their ears pierced for the first time to sitting down to commission a bespoke piece of jewelry.

“We used to host our customers in our offices [before opening a retail space] then we started off with a showroom and our assumption was that the existing Mejuri community would come. But we saw that 60 percent of the transactions that happened were from new customers. It made us think about how we could build a stronger connection with our community via activations and events. We opened our first store in Toronto, and then New York,” said Noura Sakkijha, cofounder of Mejuri, who has now opened 29 stores globally.

Even though the competition is high, smaller in-store activations don’t go unnoticed.

In the lead-up to Christmas, Moschino hosted a day of chocolate making for its clients and friends of the brand at its Conduit Street location in London; Louis Vuitton took over Claridge’s halls with a tree inspired by travel, and Givenchy celebrated its runway book with a cocktail reception at its New Bond Street store.

The novelty of a new handbag can wear off, which is why experiences are more important than ever.

At Rolls-Royce’s showroom on Berkeley Street, if a customer is serious about purchasing a car, they are directed to a customization suite for them to preview the different samples available, from fine leather swatches, wood inlays to the spectrum of Rolls-Royce paints.

The custom cars come to life at Roll-Royce’s headquarters in Goodwood, situated near Chichester, in the south of England, where the completion of a bespoke car is presented in a dramatic fashion inside a large studio with curtains, with the team producing a short film about the project that’s unveiled behind the curtain with flashing spotlights and high electro-operatic music.

The boom of 2023’s big trend — quiet luxury — has made brands realize what’s on the inside really counts more than ever, especially in a time of economic and political turmoil.

“The brands at the top of the pyramid are outperforming [others] because high-net-worth individuals are naturally gravitating towards something more understated,” said Edouard Aubin, head of luxury and sporting goods at Morgan Stanley.

“During the ongoing economic crisis, the concept of quiet luxury is increasing in significance as we look to focus more on value, longevity, and discreet designs and logos over conspicuous consumption,” agreed Fflur Roberts, head of luxury goods at Euromonitor International.

Ukraine’s gas storage helps Europe avert further energy crises

War-torn country’s tanks enable continent to keep its own facilities close to capacity

European companies have accelerated withdrawals of natural gas from Ukraine as demand for heating increases during the winter months, reducing the chances of the continent suffering another energy crisis.

They had turned to Ukraine, home to Europe’s largest tanks, to store their reserves earlier this year despite the war in the country following Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.

That decision helped energy groups and traders to make only relatively small drawdowns from repositories in the European Union, analysts said, keeping gas prices low and making refilling them easier next year.

“Ukraine is playing a key role for central and eastern Europe’s security of gas supply this winter,” said Natasha Fielding, head of European gas pricing at Argus Media, a price reporting agency.

Calling on gas stored in Ukraine “helps Europe to keep its domestic stockpiles high, reducing the risk of sites nearly emptying over any sustained cold in late winter”, she said.

Ukraine has more gas storage capacity than any country in the EU, a legacy of its role as a key transit country for Russian pipeline gas, which accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the EU’s gas supplies before the invasion.

The bloc was plunged into an energy crisis in 2022, with natural gas prices rising to record highs over the summer as Moscow slashed supplies.

Ukraine emerged as an alternative for holding gas destined for neighbouring states as storage sites in the EU reached near maximum capacity as early as mid-October.

The country also offered incentives such as cheap storage tariffs and custom duty exemptions for three years, allowing gas to be easily reimported to the EU as Kyiv seeks to further integrate itself into the bloc’s energy market.

Most tanks in the country sit deep underground in western Ukraine, far from the front lines, and Kyiv has offered up to 10bn cubic metres, a third of national capacity, to foreign customers. That adds to the 115 bcm of existing storage capacity in the EU.

European entities stored about 2.5 bcm of natural gas ahead of the winter months, according to Naftogaz, the state energy company, a record high since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Names of companies storing gas there are typically undisclosed because of security issues, but commodity trader Trafigura revealed in its latest financial statement that it is among them.

Companies began taking gas out of Ukrainian storage in early November, with net withdrawals averaging around 10.7mn cubic metres per day, according to Argus Media. That pace accelerated amid a cold snap in December, with net drawdowns nearly doubling to an average of 26 mcm daily until mid-December.

Argus said Poland received more than half the gas pulled out of Ukrainian storage, with the rest used by Moldova, Slovakia and Hungary.

The EU’s storage levels, despite the cold periods of weather, have stayed at nearly 90 per cent even in late December, well above the previous five-year average, according to industry body Gas Infrastructure Europe.

Ample reserves have helped keep European gas prices low; the benchmark Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) in December has been trading at around a third of its level of the same time last year.

Withdrawals from Ukrainian storage were “definitely helping keep European storage around the 90 per cent region”, said Nikoline Bromander, senior analyst at Rystad Energy.

Keeping these levels high during the winter months is important because it affects the level of difficulty the EU would face in refilling storage during summer, ahead of the following winter.

The European Commission has a target of 45 per cent full storage on average across the bloc by February 1 2024, but said member states should “strive to reach” 55 per cent.

Rystad forecast that barring major supply disruptions, and if demand continues at current subdued levels, the EU will be left with 80 bcm of gas in storage at the end of March, or about 70 per cent capacity.

“Europe is in a quite healthy position,” Bromander said.

China’s advanced machine tool exports to Russia soar after Ukraine invasion

Chinese suppliers now dominate trade in ‘computer numerical control’ devices vital to Moscow’s military industries

Chinese shipments to Russia of an important class of advanced machine tools have increased tenfold since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the country’s producers now dominating trade in high-precision “computer numerical control” devices vital to Moscow’s military industries.

The soaring shipments of CNC units, which permit extremely precise metal milling, have become a major concern to Ukraine’s allies as they seek to crack down on Russia’s access to the equipment.

Russian customs returns show Chinese producers shipped $68mn worth of CNC tools in July, the latest verifiable figure available, up from just $6.5mn in February 2022 when Moscow launched the full-scale invasion.

Michael Raska, assistant professor at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said CNC exports were an example of how China and Russia were being drawn into a deepening military-industrial partnership.

“China and Russia share the same political interest, which is to challenge and confront the US,” Raska said. “The fact is Russia has been cut off from importing European machinery, it has no choice but to rely on China.”

Russian imports of CNC tools from the EU, historically its main source, have dramatically fallen as restrictions have tightened since February 2022. Analysts said Moscow was seeking to obtain CNC tools from sources that would not be closed off by international controls.

The customs returns show Chinese-origin CNC devices made up 57 per cent of Russian imports by value in July, up from just 12 per cent before the war. They suggest Moscow also continued to import substantial amounts of CNC tools made in Taiwan and South Korea.

In November, the US imposed sweeping sanctions on all significant Russian importers of CNC tools — including some that had moved less than $200,000 of equipment since the invasion in February last year. Chinese companies that continue to trade with the Russian importers now risk action from the US that would imperil their ability to trade in other markets.

Beijing insists it does not ship lethal weapons to Moscow and denies supporting its neighbour’s war effort, but also rejects the use of sanctions. Chinese shipments of products including oil, machinery, consumer goods and cars are helping to sustain Russia’s sanctions-hit economy. Xi Jinping, president of China, told Russia’s Vladimir Putin in October that annual trade between the two countries had hit a “historic high” of nearly $200bn.

Allen Maggard, an analyst at the Washington-based conflict analysis organisation C4ADS, said CNC tools could “rapidly produce complex components from metal and other rigid materials with a consistent degree of precision and accuracy. These qualities make CNC machine tools particularly valuable for defence manufacturing.”.

They are also often large pieces of equipment, making them harder to smuggle into Russia from the west than smaller components such as microchips.

A Financial Times analysis of export records shows some major winners from the Russian surge have strong links with China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control, for example, has increased exports to Russia. In 2017, it was the main contractor in a “Brain Switch Project” — a scheme to replace foreign CNC systems with domestic ones in the defence industry — and has worked with Chinese jet fighter maker Shenyang Aircraft Corporation.

HuazhongCNC was itself the subject of US sanctions between 2008 and 2010 under an act banning the transfer of weapons technology or equipment to Syria, Iran and North Korea. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Emily Kilcrease, a former deputy assistant US trade representative, said Washington had been reluctant to use financial sanctions to target Chinese companies helping Russia because of concern that doing so would reduce the effectiveness of such measures in case of a crisis with Beijing.

“That dynamic about overuse is very much on the administration’s mind,” Kilcrease said. “They know that these sanctions and export controls are never going to be perfect. And so what they’re really focused on is making sure that what Russia can get is inferior goods. It’s cost imposition — making it much more difficult and expensive for Russia to get these sorts of machine tools.”

Analysis by the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies suggests the median price to Russia of a basket of Chinese goods that could support its war effort rose 78 per cent from 2021 to 2023. The price of Chinese exports of the same goods to other countries rose just 12 per cent.

Existing US sanctions and export controls against Beijing’s military contractors over other issues have led many Chinese companies to disregard potential US sanctions risks, according to Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

Many Chinese companies “expect that sooner or later, all companies linked to the People’s Liberation Army will be sanctioned”, Gabuev said. “So they think either you can try to stay on the market by avoiding deepening your military ties and get sanctioned anyway, or you can just go ahead with it.”

How Russia has deployed the Chinese CNC devices it has imported is unclear. Maggard said he believed Russian defence plants were only “beginning to use Chinese CNC machine tools”.

Analysts are yet to positively identify any being used on social media or during hours of propaganda footage filmed inside Russia’s high-tech military factories. CNC devices pictured are still all from European, Taiwanese, Korean or Japanese suppliers.

This picture is supported by other sources. For example, customs records show CFT, a large now-sanctioned Russian importer of CNC devices, imported very few Chinese-origin products up to July. A leaked internal document from CFT shows it is a supplier to Russian defence manufacturers including Aeroscan, which produces the Lancet kamikaze drone that has inflicted serious losses on Ukrainian forces. CFT did not respond to a request for comment.

Olena Yurchenko, an analyst at investigative and advocacy organisation the Economic Security Council of Ukraine, said it would be “almost impossible” to use a Chinese CNC machine in a plant that had based its production processes around a tool from another producer with different specifications.

A preference among defence manufacturers for equipment from other countries may also reflect scepticism about the quality of Chinese machines. Maggard noted recent public comments from a Russian sector expert who said that Chinese tools were less precise, less accurate, and had shorter operational lifetimes than equipment made by German and Japanese companies.

Private equity groups hunt for new exit strategies as cash piles up

Investors must get creative to get out of ‘a towering backlog’ of older investments and put new funds to work

The private equity industry has entered 2024 with record amounts of unspent investor cash and an unprecedented stockpile of ageing deals that firms must sell in coming years.

Private equity firms were sitting on a record $2.59tn in cash reserves available for buyouts and other investments as of December 15, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Nearly a quarter of that cash was held by 25 of the industry’s largest groups, including Apollo Global, Blackstone, KKR, CVC Capital and Advent International.

Industry executives and their advisers believe the new year presents a big test for private equity investors as they seek ways to sell down large investments while searching for new opportunities.

With the market for IPOs still lukewarm and global dealmaking slow, the number of private equity exit transactions last quarter was near a decade low, according to consultancy Bain & Co.

That has left buyout groups with a record $2.8tn in unsold investments and what Bain described as “a towering backlog” of companies to exit.

“What we are seeing from private equity owners is a lot of anxiety because it’s unclear how [asset sales] will evolve,” said a senior mergers and acquisitions banker.

The conditions have frustrated many large institutional investors that normally expect a regular flow of cash to be returned to them as private equity groups sell down profitable investments. Instead, these investors have received just a trickle of money over the past five years, even as they committed enormous sums to fund new buyout deals.

Bankers expect groups to put their cash to work in the coming months while also striking deals to sell off old investments — especially as optimism grows that US interest rates have peaked after the sharpest rise in decades.

“I felt like [2023] was a year where people were digesting their portfolios. Hopefully, 2024 will be a reset for an acceleration in deals again,” said Elizabeth Cooper, partner and co-head of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s private equity mergers and acquisitions practice.

“There’s a lot of deals in the pipeline for the first half and we expect that a good number of those will go through as planned,” said Carsten Woehrn, co-head of Emea M&A at JPMorgan.

In order to get deals done, many private equity groups have deployed financial engineering tactics to bridge a disconnect between what buyers will pay for a company and what owners will accept.

Charles Hayes, global co-head of private capital at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, said firms were increasingly turning to “structured transactions” — deals that utilised equity with debtlike features.

Industry sources told the Financial Times that private equity groups selling businesses to each other had increasingly used complex structures. Those included performance-based earn-outs — which pay sellers additional cash if a business performs better than expected — or other tools such as deferred payments from buyers and large rollover investments from sellers in order to get deals done.

Bankers and private equity executives are also growing excited about corporate carve-outs, in which a private equity firm buys a business line from a large corporation.

The largest private equity deal of 2023 was GTCR’s carve-out of payments company Worldpay from FIS at an $18bn valuation. FIS had abandoned a plan to spin off Worldpay into a publicly listed company, and instead sold 55 per cent of the business to GTCR in a deal that brought the seller $11.7bn in cash.

Many large buyout firms are looking to replicate those large carve-out deals in 2024, according to Max Justicz, Americas co-head of financial sponsors at UBS.

“The mega buyout firms are looking to demonstrate that they can buy carve-outs with some management expertise and plenty of dry powder,” he said.

Indian billionaire’s listed businesses have recovered nearly $46bn in market capitalisation

Indian tycoon Gautam Adani’s listed businesses have regained $46bn in market capitalisation over the past month, representing nearly half the losses incurred after Hindenburg Research released a damaging short-seller report almost a year ago.

The sprawling infrastructure conglomerate has been rebuilding its stock market value after the report in January last year accused Adani of accounting fraud and stock market manipulation.

The allegations plunged the group into a public relations crisis, forced it to call off a $2.4bn share sale and wiped as much as $150bn from its market capitalisation despite Adani’s strong denials.

India’s political opposition also seized on the report to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi, widely perceived to be close to Adani. The billionaire denies benefiting from any personal connection with Modi but says the group aligns itself with the Indian government’s development priorities.

Following a brief recovery rally in March, the market capitalisation of Adani’s 10 listed companies has languished at about Rs10tn ($120bn) for most of the year, roughly half their value prior to Hindenburg’s report.

But since November 24, the stocks have posted average gains of 36 per cent, delivering a recovery of Rs3.8tn in market value and paring overall losses for 2023 to about 25 per cent.

Most of the gains came after a decision on November 24 by the Securities and Exchange Board of India not to request more time for its probe into Adani businesses from India’s Supreme Court, with one official telling justices the regulator had finished investigating all but two of two dozen cases related to the group.

An Asia-based equities analyst at one large European asset manager said the regulator’s decision was “not quite a clean bill of health, but Sebi at least declined to say anything was off after looking into the accusations that were levelled against Adani”.

He added that the market value of the group’s listed companies was unlikely to fully recover from the short-seller report “because the unwelcome publicity from Hindenburg has probably highlighted to even retail investors how richly valued some of these companies were”.

The gains for Adani stocks follow a broader rally for India’s stock market, with the country’s benchmark Nifty 50 index up 20 per cent over the past year. Sentiment towards the group’s listings was also buoyed in early November, when the US government announced it was lending $553mn to an Adani-led container terminal development project in Sri Lanka.

As its share prices tumbled in the weeks following the short-seller report, Adani moved to reassure its bankers by paying off more than $2bn in share-backed loans that had been taken by the Adani family. It launched a bond buyback at its ports unit and found a new investor — US-based firm GQG — which initially bought $1.9bn worth of stock in March.

“They needed a few billion dollars on a personal level to pay off those loans,” said Samir Arora, founder and fund manager of Helios Capital, who has also invested in Adani stocks. “To get $2bn-$3bn was not an issue and then of course GQG came and solved it for them.”

Adani has insisted the Hindenburg report has not changed operations at his companies, which include ports, airports, cement processors, data centres and even apple farms.

“After the first few days of confusion and market volatility, life inside the organisation continued as normal,” said an Adani executive who asked not to be named. “There was never any cost-cutting that happened. We have only hired more people.

“The first thing he [Adani] did was that he called all the business CEOs and said that they could focus on the businesses and he will take care of the market noise,” the executive added.

The group has pointed to its financial performance as proof that Hindenburg’s attack has not harmed its operating business. The company said its earnings grew by 47 per cent — its best performance — in the first six months of India’s financial year, which begins in April.

The group has also brought its net debt down to 2.5 times its annual earnings, compared with 3.3 times before the short-seller report.

Adani has sold some assets, including shares in his businesses, with one deal involving the sale of shadow bank Adani Capital to US private equity group Bain Capital.

However, the group has also made some acquisitions, buying cement company Sanghi Industries and the news agency IANS.

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Evergrande Auto’s Investment Agreement With Dubai Automaker Lapses

NWTN had planned to invest $500 million for a 28% stake in Evergrande Auto

China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle said an agreement for a Dubai-based automaker to subscribe to its shares has expired, raising fresh doubts about a potential cash injection for the Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer.

The parties to the share subscription and the loan conversion agreement by Nasdaq-listed carmaker NWTN haven’t NWTN 1.17%increase; green up pointing triangle agreed to extend the long stop dates, which expired Dec. 31, 2023, Evergrande New Energy Vehicle, also known as Evergrande Auto, said in a filing late Monday.

Evergrande Auto shares fell nearly 18% early Tuesday, a three-month intraday low in terms of percentage decline, following the news.

NWTN in October suspended the performance of relevant obligations under its share subscription, citing significant uncertainties regarding the EV maker’s parent, China Evergrande Group EGRNQ -20.00%decrease; red down pointing triangle.

However, Evergrande Auto had said then that talks would continue between the related parties.

NWTN had planned to invest $500 million for a 28% stake in Evergrande Auto, which was intended to be used by the latter to fund the expansion of its factory that has been delayed by its parent’s financial problems.

In Monday’s filing, Evergrande Auto reiterated that the parties to the NWTN share subscription and the loan conversion subscription agreement will continue to negotiate amendments to certain key terms of the deal.

The company said the Dutch government recently partially revoked an export license of some lithography systems

Netherlands has blocked chip-equipment manufacturer ASML’s exports to China of some lithography systems, which are essential to making advanced microprocessors, in a partial license revocation following U.S. export restrictions.

The Netherlands-based company said Monday that the Dutch government recently partially revoked an export license for shipping the NXT:2050i and NXT:2100i lithography systems to China in 2023.

Dutch semiconductor companies have had to seek government permission since September before they can sell some advanced types of chip-making equipment abroad, the Dutch government said in June. The rule came after national-security officials from the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S. reached an agreement to start restricting such exports, aiming at limiting China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies.

The chip-equipment maker had previously said it could ship restricted chip-making equipment to China until the end of 2023 despite the rule, according to media reports.

ASML specializes in photolithography, the process of using light to print on photosensitive surfaces, a process key to chip makers.

“We do not expect the current revocation of our export license or the latest U.S. export control restrictions to have a material impact on our financial outlook for 2023,” the company said in a statement.