TheChek News Flow

• Infineon (IFX TH) +1.2%
  • Watch European Chip Stocks After Microchip Lifts Sales Forecast
• Daimler Truck (DTG TH) +0.7%
• E.On (EOAN TH) +0.6%
• BASF (BAS TH) +0.6%
• Adidas (ADS TH) -2%
  • Adidas Cut to Underperform at BofA

• RENK Group (R3NK TH) +1.8%
• TKMS (TKMS TH) +1.6%
  • TKMS Raised to Market Perform at Bernstein
• Hensoldt (HAG TH) +1.1%
• Nordex (NDX1 TH) +1.1%
  • Nordex Group Gets Orders Totalling 224 MW in Germany
• RTL (RRTL TH) +0.9%

• Kontron (KTN TH) +1.2%
• HelloFresh (HFG TH) +1.2%
• Siltronic (WAF TH) +1%

To contact the reporter on th

Founder Pavel Durov’s efforts to distance the messaging app from Moscow collide with sanctions reality

Telegram bonds in Russia worth half a billion dollars have been frozen under western sanctions, revealing the messaging app’s financial exposure to the country even after founder Pavel Durov has sought to sever ties with Moscow.

The company launched a series of bond offerings in recent years, including $1.7bn issued in May, to buy back existing debt. According to people familiar with Telegram’s discussions with investors, it bought back most of the bonds maturing in 2026.

However, the company has said $500mn of outstanding bonds have been immobilised in Russia’s central securities depository due to western sanctions, the people said.

The revelations highlight the extent to which Telegram remains exposed to Russian capital, with the sanctions complicating its debt repayments and buyback opportunities.

EU, US and UK entities all imposed asset freezes and other restrictions on Russia’s National Settlement Depository (NSD) in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine — a move that potentially affects any western organisation with Russian bondholders.

However, the asset freeze is particularly jarring for Durov, who has sought to distance himself from his native Russia in recent years, criticising speculation that he is beholden to the Kremlin as “conspiracy theories”. Telegram declined to comment.

The revelations come as Durov explores a potential initial public offering for the company, although those plans have been delayed while he faces legal proceedings in France.

Telegram’s Russia-born owner was hailed the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia” for co-founding the country’s most popular social media network, VKontakte, in 2007.

The billionaire has said he left in 2014 after refusing to share the data of certain Ukrainian users of VK with Russia’s security agency, selling his VK stake to Kremlin-linked entities under duress. 

Around the same time, he founded Telegram, later relocating the group to Dubai, arguing it would be committed to free speech and resist government interference.

The company has told bondholders that it will repay the frozen debt at maturity, with the bonds’ paying agent and depositary then deciding if payment can flow to the Russian holders.

Unlike larger US rivals such as Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X, Telegram has fewer than 100 full-time staff. It only recently began to make substantial revenues from its 1bn users through advertising and subscriptions.

According to previously unreported half-year disclosures, Telegram had $910mn in cash and cash equivalents at June 30, up from $142mn a year prior. 

Durov, who has French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was placed under formal investigation in Paris in 2024 over the app’s alleged failure to address criminality including child abuse content. Durov has denied any wrongdoing.

Telegram’s bondholders are closely watching the French case for signs it could derail IPO plans drawn up prior to the French legal action.

The company’s recent bond offerings give investors the option to buy shares in any future flotation at a discount of as much as 20 per cent. 

Telegram told some bondholders on a recent call that the case needed more resolution before it can proceed with a public market listing, but that it continued to both co-operate with authorities and vigorously contest Durov’s case.   

Unaudited financial statements, seen by the Financial Times, show that the messaging app continues to post sales growth despite the ongoing threat to its leadership from the French legal proceedings.

According to the filings, Telegram’s revenues in the first half of 2025 jumped more than 65 per cent to $870mn, compared with $525mn in the same period the previous year. 

Nearly a third of Telegram’s revenue — or $300mn — came from so-called exclusivity agreements. The nature of the agreements could not be established but according to FT reporting of previous Telegram earnings, these have been related to toncoin, a cryptocurrency that is closely linked to the messaging app.

Advertising revenue was up 5 per cent to $125mn in the first half of the year. Meanwhile, premium subscriptions jumped 88 per cent to $223mn, compared with $119mn in the same period in 2024 as the number of paying users rose.

The company has told bondholders that it is now on track to hit its financial targets for the full year, according to two people familiar with the matter, implying further growth in the second half of 2025. Telegram aims to book $2bn in revenues in 2025, one of the people said.

Despite achieving an operating profit of nearly $400mn, net losses in the half year were $222mn, compared with a $334mn net profit in the first half of 2024. A person familiar with the matter said this was because the company had to write down the value of its holdings of toncoin, which has steadily fallen in price in 2025 amid a broad crypto market slump.

Toncoin was initially developed in-house at Telegram but is currently developed by an open-source community after the project ran into regulatory troubles with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020.

Since then, Durov has publicly championed the coin, integrating Ton features into Telegram and insisting advertising on Telegram must be paid for using the cryptocurrency. The total value of its digital assets stood at $787mn at the end of June, compared with $1.3bn at the end of June 2024. 

Nevertheless, the company told investors on a call in recent weeks that Durov was prioritising improving the Ton ecosystem and further incorporating the crypto into the Telegram platform in 2026.

The company told investors it had sold more than $450mn in toncoin in the year to date. The coin has recently been listed on major exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini.

Rome and Italian group look for a solution ahead of US ban on Chinese-backed car software and hardware

The Italian government, Pirelli and its shareholders are searching for ways to end Sinochem’s involvement in the Milan-based tyremaker, which could be banned from the US due to the Chinese chemical group’s shareholding.

Rome is mulling a fresh intervention as Washington’s ban on Chinese-backed hardware and software that interact with US cars comes into effect in March, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Sinochem is Pirelli’s largest shareholder with a 37 per cent stake, and the Italian tyremaker could lose access to the US, which accounts for a fifth of its revenues.

In the US, Pirelli primarily sells its flagship premium tyres with embedded proprietary technology. Over recent months, US officials have pressured Rome to limit Sinochem’s influence over the company, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Although Pirelli executives have sought to end the long-running saga, presenting Sinochem with several options including a sale of its stake, executives at the Chinese state-owned group did not immediately engage, according to the people. However, Sinochem last month appointed BNP Paribas as advisers to explore sale options, the people added.

Pirelli and Sinochem declined to comment.

If both sides to fail to come to a compromise in January, the “last resort” would be for the Meloni government to suspend Sinochem’s voting rights, under its “golden powers” legislation that allows it to impose limitations or veto investments by foreign companies in strategic assets.

However, industry minister Adolfo Urso said on December 30 that the Italian government had worked to bring the parties back to the negotiating table: “It is positive that the parties have resumed their dialogue now.”

In November Urso vowed to help Pirelli, saying Italy would “do its part to make sure the company isn’t cut out from international markets”.

State-backed ChemChina, which received final approval to merge with Sinochem in 2021, bought Pirelli in 2015 and relisted the tyremaker in Milan in 2017.

Tensions flared between the Italian group and Sinochem after the Chinese shareholder sought to tighten its grip over the tyremaker after the merger.

Pirelli’s former chief executive Marco Tronchetti Provera, whose holding company Camfin is the second-largest shareholder in the tyremaker, sounded the alarm over Beijing’s interference in its management and governance.

This prompted Rome’s direct intervention in 2023 under its golden powers rules.

Aimed at protecting “strategically relevant information and the company’s knowhow”, they included limiting information access and sharing between Pirelli and Sinochem, and the requirement of a four-fifths majority for some “strategic” board decisions.

In April 2025, Pirelli’s board stripped Sinochem of its control over the tyremaker, raising tensions between Chinese and Italian shareholders. Italy has been careful not to antagonise the Chinese government further, and had been hoping to find an amicable solution to the dispute.

It offered the Chinese an olive branch in September by dropping an investigation into the Sinochem-owned China National Rubber Company, for allegedly violating Rome’s 2023 measures, according to the people close to the talks.

The European groups continued to supply the Latin American country after the US dialled up economic pressure on Caracas

Two of Europe’s largest energy companies are struggling to recover payments worth about $6bn from Venezuela and are facing indifference from US officials about the debt, according to two people familiar with the situation. 

For several years, Italy’s Eni and Spain’s Repsol have supplied Venezuela with large quantities of gas and naphtha, which is used to dilute the country’s heavy oil so it can be more easily transported. 

The two companies jointly own the Perla gasfield off the Venezuelan coast, which underpins Repsol’s claim to provide roughly a third of the gas used for the country’s electricity generation. 

Until last March, they had been receiving Venezuelan crude from the authorities as payment for the gas. But as it dialled up the pressure on Caracas, Washington said it would cut off those payments by revoking a special permit to operate for all foreign companies before exempting US oil major Chevron from the rule.

The move exposed energy groups to sanctions if they continued to take payments. 

Repsol and Eni have since continued to supply Venezuelan gas to the domestic market while receiving no payments in cash or crude but accumulating IOUs. Despite heavy lobbying, no solution has emerged. 

One person familiar with the situation said the administration’s “America First” policy was having an impact on European companies, which have sensed a lack of urgency from the White House in resolving their payment problems. 

Kevin Book, analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, noted that President Donald Trump’s first administration introduced carve-outs in 2019 for certain US companies operating in Venezuela. “This isn’t a new strategy . . . The president uses the phrase ‘American First’, one shouldn’t ignore it,” he said.

Josu Jon Imaz, Repsol’s chief executive, had said his group was in talks over resolving the block on payments in kind before President Nicolás Maduro was ousted by the US on Saturday.

“We maintain . . . a constructive and fully transparent dialogue with the US administration at the moment,” he said on an earnings call in October. 

Analysts have suggested that both Eni and Repsol, among other European players, might be interested in investing in Venezuela’s energy sector in the future, but the companies declined to comment on the prospect or on the debt they are owed. 

The $6bn also includes some historic debts for naphtha supplied by Eni and Repsol to Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA in 2023. 

Repsol owns several assets in Venezuela, which was its second-largest market in production volume after the US in 2024, tied with Trinidad and Tobago. It produced 24mn barrels of oil equivalent, 85 per cent of which was gas.

With 256mn barrels of proven oil equivalent on Repsol’s books in Venezuela, the country accounts for 15 per cent of the company’s total proven reserves.

The US Treasury, which issues special licences enabling companies to operate in Venezuela, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The companies expect to offer the robotaxi service in the Bay Area later this year

Uber UBER, Lucid and Nuro said they began on-road testing for their planned robotaxi service.

The companies said Monday the testing began last month and evaluates a number of capabilities including Nuro’s artificial intelligence foundation model. The program also includes closed-course testing and simulation.

Nuro is leading the testing using robotaxi engineering prototypes supervised by autonomous vehicle operators, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area, the companies said.

Pending final validation, the robotaxi is expected to start production at Lucid’s Arizona factory later this year. The companies expect to offer the service in the Bay Area later this year.

The companies announced their plans for the service, which will be offered on Uber’s ride-hailing app, in July.

CEO Jensen Huang says more powerful chips will enable training of models in simulated environments

As the artificial-intelligence race intensifies, the speed with which the world’s biggest chip companies roll out each successive generation of computing products is quickening.

On Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia NVDA -0.39%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s newest AI server systems, known as Vera Rubin, which go on sale in the second half of this year.

Usually, Nvidia details the specs and capabilities of its latest chips at its spring developer conference in Silicon Valley. This year, Huang said, the complexity of computing required by AI and the immense demand for advanced processors to train and operate models has prompted the semiconductor industry to move faster.

“The amount of computing necessary for AI is skyrocketing,” Huang told the Las Vegas audience Monday afternoon, pacing the stage wearing a shiny black jacket in a crocodile-scale pattern. “The race is on for AI. Everyone is trying to get to the next frontier.”

Multiple paradigm shifts in computing are behind the surge in demand, Huang said. Inference, or the process by which AI models respond to user prompts, “is now a thinking process,” the CEO said, and new models need to be trained on increasingly immense amounts of data to teach AI tools how to think.

Nvidia has long argued that the next phase of AI is what the company refers to as the “omniverse”—a type of model-training that allows AI to use simulations of reality to learn how to navigate real-world situations. For example, autonomous vehicles guided by AI models can be refined more quickly using simulations of on-the-road driving situations, rather than spending thousands of hours doing real-world training.

The company’s new Vera Rubin servers—named for a midcentury American astronomer who made groundbreaking discoveries in observing how heavenly bodies move—are designed to be able to handle the enormous computing loads needed to create those simulations and use them in model-training.

Nvidia tested the new system assuming that developers will soon be using up to 10 trillion data parameters to train AI models. Using Rubin graphics processing units—the chips that accelerate the millions of computations required in training—developers can train such a model in a month using one-quarter the number of chips they would need if they were using Nvidia’s previous generation of GPUs, known as Blackwell.

For inference, Rubin delivers a 10-fold reduction in cost, compared with Blackwell, the company said. Nvidia has also integrated a host of connectivity and memory-storage products into the new system to speed up computing capabilities, which Huang said had made Nvidia into the world’s largest networking hardware company, in addition to the biggest maker of computing semiconductors.

“Our job is to create the entire stack so you can create the applications” that change the world, Huang told the audience.

Nvidia is also promoting a host of new programming libraries and other software products that make it easier to use its chips for advanced computing tasks, especially in robotics, autonomous vehicles and other examples of what Huang called “physical AI.”

Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, an AI research firm, described Vera Rubin as an “incredible generational leap,” based on the specifications Huang described Monday, and said that unveiling of the chip this early in the year will send a signal to the market that the ramp-up of production of the Vera Rubin system is on-time and that the servers will come to market quickly.

Nvidia’s shares were roughly flat Monday, including in after-hours trading.

“The pace of innovation continues to impress,” Newman said.

Lisa Su, chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, a much smaller rival designer of AI chips, also emphasized physical AI in her keynote Monday in Las Vegas.

AMD announced a partnership with Italian robotics firm Generative Bionics that involves using AMD’s chips to train a humanoid industrial robot named GENE.01 that was trained using advanced AI simulations.

The company also unveiled its latest AI chips, known as the Instinct MI440X, which launch later this year and are expected to be AMD’s most legitimate competition to Nvidia yet.

US reduces number of recommended vaccines for children

Shots against diseases such as polio and chickenpox will only be suggested for those who are considered high-risk

The US has narrowed the recommended number of childhood vaccines to 11 from 17 while emphasising that jabs will remain covered by health insurance.

Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr on Monday said the health department’s recommendation that only certain children receive vaccines for the flu, meningitis, Covid-19 and other diseases more closely aligns with schedules in Australia, Japan and Europe.

While no vaccines have been rejected by the government, jabs including those for polio and chickenpox will only be suggested for high-risk children or with advice from a doctor.

The recommendation for the human papillomavirus vaccine will drop to one shot only instead of two, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This Schedule is rooted in the Gold Standard of Science, and widely agreed upon by Scientists and Experts all over the World,” US President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social later on Monday. “Effective today, America will no longer require 72 ‘jabs’ for our beautiful, healthy children.”

The changes immediately triggered a rift with Republican Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate panel that oversees the HHS. Cassidy on Monday said changing the paediatric vaccine schedule would “cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors” and “make Americans sicker”.

Cassidy, a doctor, cautiously endorsed Kennedy last year amid concerns about his vaccine policies.

Previously, the US recommended more childhood vaccine shots than any other developed country. Denmark, for example, only recommends childhood vaccines for 10 illnesses.

US officials emphasised vaccines will remain available and will be covered by insurance.

“All vaccines currently recommended by CDC will remain covered by insurance without cost sharing,” said Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“No family will lose access,” he said. “This framework empowers parents and physicians to make individualised decisions based on risk, while maintaining strong protection against serious disease.”

Since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, vaccine policy has dominated his health agenda. Last year, Kennedy fired CDC director Susan Monarez over vaccine policy.

Kennedy also fired all of the members of the US top vaccine advisory committee. An outspoken vaccine sceptic, Kennedy has said he wants to restore public trust in vaccines after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump has repeatedly urged people to space out childhood vaccines, along with warning pregnant women to avoid taking the painkiller paracetamol, citing unproven links to autism.

“BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS [sic] B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday.

Internationally, the Trump administration last year halted funding for the global vaccine group Gavi that provides free jabs for meningitis, malaria and other diseases.

Chinese brands boost new car sales back above 2mn in UK

Return to pre-pandemic levels of demand has been mainly driven by an influx of cheaper electric vehicles

Sales of new cars in the UK topped 2mn for the first time since before the pandemic as BYD and other Chinese brands increased their share in Europe’s second-largest electric vehicle market.

Some 2.02mn cars were registered in Britain last year, up 3.5 per cent from 2024 and compared with 2.31mn sales in 2019, according to annual figures released by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders on Tuesday. 

“It’s obviously not a full recovery,” said SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes. “If you strip out the Chinese brands, there wouldn’t have been growth in the market.” 

The return to pre-Covid annual sales of 2mn cars was mainly driven by the rise in demand for electric vehicles, which accounted for 23 per cent of the UK market.

The rapid rise of Chinese brands has contributed to the sharp increase in EVs and plug-in hybrid sales — they increased their share of the UK’s EV market to 12.8 per cent last year, compared with 8.5 per cent in 2024. 

Chinese carmakers such as BYD and Chery, which sells the Omoda and Jaecoo brands, have aggressively targeted the UK market in the absence of higher import tariffs imposed on Chinese-built EVs in other parts of Europe. 

New car sales of Chinese brands doubled to more than 196,000 vehicles in 2025 compared to the previous year as they rolled out affordable EVs and hybrids. 

Despite the popularity of Chinese-built EVs and hybrids, Hawes warned that progress in EV sales remained “fragile”.

The SMMT estimated that manufacturers spent roughly £5.5mn last year — equivalent to £11,000 per newly registered electric car — to offer discounts to boost consumer demand and achieve the UK government’s EV sales target. 

The current scheme requires a certain percentage of each carmakers’ annual new car sales to be zero emission vehicles, with the percentage rising from 28 per cent last year to 33 per cent in 2026, reaching 80 per cent in 2030. Companies face fines of £15,000 for each missed vehicle.

The EV market share jumped to 32 per cent in December but this has been the only month where EV sales topped the UK government’s target of 28 per cent for 2025.

In April, the government watered down some of those targets by lowering the fines and analysts say manufacturers are unlikely to pay penalties for last year due to other flexibilities built into the scheme.

However, the SMMT has called on the government to bring forward a planned review of the country’s “zero emission vehicle mandate” so it can be completed this year, instead of early in 2027.