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Tech group conducted risky test drives in push for better data and investment, according to former staff

In January 2019, a green car made by Chinese company AutoX meandered a few miles through the roads of Las Vegas before arriving at a convention centre hosting the Consumer Electronics Show, an event attended by 175,000 people including blue-chip investors and the world’s media.

The ride was completed in “autonomous mode” with a human in the driver’s seat, though AutoX’s technology controlled the vehicle. The demonstration represented a landmark for the company’s founder Xiao Jianxiong, who brands himself as “Prof X” after the fictional leader of the X-Men in the Marvel Comic series. 

Those watching may have been unaware that Xiao had ordered that the AutoX car’s brakes, steering wheel, accelerator and red safety button to be disabled, according to people with knowledge of the incident. That decision meant the human driver would have been unable to instantly take control of the car in an emergency.

“The car was rigged so it would not disengage,” said one individual with direct knowledge of the event, whose account was confirmed by another former employee. “It was extremely dangerous, there were thousands of people on the streets that day for the conference. Thankfully nothing happened but someone could have been hurt.”

Xiao wanted to display how well his company stacked up against western rivals in a global race to build autonomous technology. The industry has attracted nearly $330bn investment since 2010, according to McKinsey, with the best-funded groups including Alphabet-owned Waymo, Aurora and General Motors’ Cruise.

Given the need for money to compete, AutoX received a welcome boost three months after the CES demo: a $100mn investment from a consortium that included the Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba and the state-owned carmaker Dongfeng. The following year, Xiao also won a previously undisclosed investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. SoftBank declined to comment. 

People with knowledge of the incident suggested AutoX considered the moment to be an important publicity stunt and wanted to ensure the demo ride for investors and the media was completed without human intervention. “It was all about the optics with Prof X,” said one former employee.

The episode was indicative of the company’s broader strategies, according to multiple former employees in the US and China, who spoke to the Financial Times on condition of anonymity. They said AutoX executives allowed the cars to operate in ways that put them closer to a potential collision in order to get vital data that would improve its technology. “They really pushed the envelope,” said one member of the operations team.

“Safety was not a top priority at AutoX,” said one person, pointing to how company bosses, including Xiao and Jewel Li, the chief operating officer, also pressured the operations team to test the cars on public roads even if a crucial safety feature had not been wired up or was not working.

They pointed to how AutoX drivers had often gone out on to roads in San Jose, where it is testing its driverless cars, even if the red safety button was not working. Four other team members with direct knowledge of the testing system spoke of the same problem.

AutoX did not respond to detailed questions for comment or make its executives available to discuss this article. But in February, Xiao told the FT in an unrelated interview that safety was his “highest priority”.

Scott Kennedy, an expert on China’s technology innovation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the loosely regulated autonomous vehicles are a “wild west” of players “racing” to be first to market.

Other automotive groups have also been accused of presenting themselves in a flattering image to show off futuristic driverless systems. In December, the New York Times alleged that in 2016 Tesla released a falsified video that showed its partially autonomous technology was more advanced than its tests had proven. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

AutoX is much smaller than rivals such as Waymo and Cruise. The company boasts a fleet of 1,000 cars, most of these are in China. Only six of these were driving on the roads of California last year, according to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicle report.

Those six cars drove a total of just over 50,000 miles in 2021. By contrast, Cruise had 135 cars on the road which drove 876,104 miles and Waymo’s 569 cars drove 232,584 miles.

Other Chinese autonomous driving companies, including AutoX, Didi and Pony.ai have operations in California, a location that is considered the industry gold standard for testing and developing autonomous vehicle technology.

The Californian DMV “disengagement” report has emerged as an unofficial metric for investors to compare the various companies’ technology. “Companies show improvements in technology by demonstrating their cars have driven further in autonomous mode with fewer interventions,” said Kennedy.

In 2021, AutoX topped the charts for the number of miles driven without disengaging. But the company only self-reported one disengagement for the entire 12-month period, compared with 291 by Waymo and 21 by Cruise.

Xiao’s company was spawned in 2016 when he was a computer vision and robotics professor at Princeton University, turning AutoX from an operation founded in the garage in a San Jose residential house into an operation spanning multiple cities in China and the US.

In 2021, AutoX became the first company in China to be given approval to run its cars in fully autonomous mode without a safety driver — a coup for the start-up against rivals including Baidu’s Apollo and Didi which have the backing of the country’s deep-pocketed internet companies.

Xiao has said it is easier to launch self-driving cars in China than in the US because motorists in the country are “not very good drivers” as most “start when they are 35”. He argued that this meant there would be greater acceptance for the mass deployment of autonomous vehicles in the country. “For our self-driving cars, it’s easier to be orders of magnitude better than humans,” he said.

In the push to create workable technology and attract investment, former employees said AutoX put the public at risk. One person said that drivers, before sitting behind the wheel, would jokingly ask colleagues to “pray” for their safe return.

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Russian billionaire targeted by EU and UK has moved quickly to shift billions of dollars in assets

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Alexei Mordashov moved swiftly to transfer billions of dollars of stock holdings out of his name, while a $500mn superyacht linked to the oligarch sailed back to his home country.

Mordashov, who made his fortune in steel but has interests in sectors from coal and gold to travel and media, is one of Russia’s richest men. But after the EU and UK targeted him with sanctions, he faces a tussle to keep hold of some of his most prized assets.

Like many oligarchs, he is exposed by an international web of interests but shielded by use of opaque ownership structures and the patchwork of imperfect legislation that differs from one jurisdiction to the next.

“It’s becoming very clear there are gaps in the framework,” said Maira Martini, an expert on money flows at campaign group Transparency International. “It’s just a joke, the number of loopholes people can use to circumvent the rules.”

On February 28, four days after the invasion and the same day the EU imposed sanctions on him, Mordashov transferred his 29.9 per cent stake in German travel group Tui from his Cyprus-registered Unifirm to a British Virgin Islands entity controlled by Marina Mordashova, believed to be his third wife.

He also passed to her a controlling stake in Nordgold, his London-based mining company, two weeks before the UK targeted him with sanctions.

Then in mid-March, the $500mn yacht reportedly delivered to Mordashov last year, weighed anchor in the Seychelles. The last tracked position of Nord, a 142m vessel that sails under a Cayman Islands flag, is at the Russian port of Vladivostok.

Despite such moves, he is under pressure. His wealth — up to $28bn before the war, according to Bloomberg data — has dropped.

The German government has ruled the transfer of Tui stock “invalid” until an official investigation has concluded.

The Russian tycoon’s Severstal group risks a debt default after Citigroup froze interest payments pending regulatory probes, while foreign advisers and directors have resigned.

Italian authorities have seized his €105mn compound in Sardinia, as well as another yacht, the €65mn Lady M.

Mordashov made his fortune during the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s by taking a controlling stake in Severstal, the steel factory established by Stalin in the gritty town of Cherepovets where his parents worked. He went on to build a group that acquired steel plants in the US and beyond — although Severstal sold its North American assets in 2014 — and diversified into coal, gold, turbines, retail, travel, media and telecoms.

From 2007 he started buying shares in Tui, joining the supervisory board and building a stake as high as 34 per cent last year during emergency fundraising.

People who have worked with Mordashov described him as shrewd, astute and a good spotter of business opportunities but not a person for small talk or flamboyance. He never spoke about politics, they said.

He created a joint venture with Tui in 2009 in Russia and Ukraine offering beach holidays in Egypt and Turkey. But he wanted to move faster than the others in the company considered comfortable. Tui completed its divestment in 2021.

Mordashov has an MBA and honorary doctorate from Northumbria University’s business school in Newcastle, where he has funded more than 200 Severstal managers’ degrees over a decade.

“The UK for him was more about services like education,” said Andrew Kakabadse, an emeritus professor at Cranfield School of Management, who received £1.7mn from Mordashov to research boardroom governance. “His business was much more in the US than Europe. At one time he was [Vladimir] Putin’s favourite not because of politics but because of his technical skills. He’s a very good manager. He kept his distance. He was invited to become a minister and refused.”

While avoiding any direct criticism of Putin, Mordashov in early March called for an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine and claimed to be distant from politics.

“I have absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of the current geopolitical tension and I do not understand why the EU has imposed sanctions on me,” he told the Tass news agency.

Nevertheless, he has long cultivated people close to Putin. He was an assistant at Leningrad Economic and Engineering University to Anatoly Chubais, the businessman and politician behind the “loans for shares” privatisations in the 1990s who recently quit as Russia’s climate envoy.

In 2003, Mordashov bought a stake in Rossiya Bank, which also counts as shareholders Putin proxy Yury Kovalchuk, Nikolay Shamalov, whose son Kirill was reportedly once married to one of the Russian president’s daughters, and oil company Surgutneftegaz.

Together with the bank and Surgutneftegaz, Mordashov set up Russia’s largest private media holding, National Media Group, with stakes in several newspapers and television channels, including the main state Channel One, which has fiercely defended Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine.

When Rossiya Bank came under US sanctions in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it opened branches in the region and an account for Putin for his Kremlin salary. As last month’s EU sanctions order described, Mordashov’s Power Machines also sold four wind turbines to the peninsula.

In an interview with the Financial Times last year, Mordashov said it was “important to acknowledge that Mr Putin is our president and the leader of our nation, and he reflects pretty much what every average Russian has in mind”.

But as governments target Mordashov and other oligarchs with close ties to Putin, the issue of transferred assets promises to complicate their efforts.

“One of the biggest challenges is when people shift assets to trusted associates, family and people standing in their shoes,” said Tom Stocks, senior investigator with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “It’s quite hard to unpick.”

Remuneration at the three big jab makers reflects surge in value of share options

The chief executives of Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have shared more than $100mn in pay during the pandemic reflecting the huge commercial success of the mRNA Covid vaccines developed by their pharmaceutical companies.

Albert Bourla of Pfizer, Ugur Sahin of BioNTech and Stéphane Bancel of Moderna have also seen their paper wealth grow over the past two years because of share price increases driven by investor enthusiasm for companies developing Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.

The mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have saved millions of lives during the pandemic while also transforming the companies developing them and prompting a surge in share prices. Pfizer’s stock price is up 60 per cent over the past 24 months, while the value of BioNTech and Moderna’s shares has tripled and increased by five times, respectively.

Moderna’s Bancel and Sahin of BioNTech have become paper billionaires as a result of their 7.8 per cent and 17.1 per cent shareholdings in the companies, which are worth about $5.4bn and $7.8bn, respectively.

The BioNTech/Pfizer jab generated $37.5bn in revenues last year and Moderna’s shot made $17bn, according to Airfinity, a data group.

An analysis of the remuneration packages of the mRNA vaccine makers in 2020 and 2021 shows that Pfizer chief Bourla was awarded the biggest pandemic pay rise. He received $45.3mn in 2020-2021, compared with $27.7mn in 2018-201, a period during which he was promoted from chief operating officer to CEO in January 2019.

Sahin received $30.8mn in remuneration in 2020-21, compared to $8.5mn in 2018/2019.

Bancel’s total remuneration fell during the pandemic, declining from $67.5mn in 2018-2019 to $31.1mn in 2020-2021. But that was primarily because of a one-off gain following Moderna’s IPO in 2018 which netted him $58.6mn of stock option gains.

Total remuneration at the three mRNA developers increased to $107.2mn in 2020-2021, compared to $103.7mn in the previous two years.

Pay experts said the remuneration outcomes reflected the huge profits linked to the Covid vaccines but also how pay in the biopharma sector was closing in on other high-paying sectors, such as banking.

Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, a London-based think-tank. said chief executives at top Wall Street banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America still earned more than pharma chiefs, typically $30mn or more each year, but the difference had narrowed.

He said that both industries were composed of high-profile companies operating across global markets, with comparable challenges like attracting, retaining and managing highly skilled staff.

Some campaigners have criticised the pay packets for vaccine maker CEOs, accusing the companies of unfairly profiting from the pandemic and not doing enough to ensure low-cost access to jabs in poor nations.

“Bancel, Bourla and the other vaccine kings built a royal fortune predicated on a monopoly business model that has driven vaccine apartheid,” said Steve Knievel, access to medicines advocate at Public Citizen, a progressive think-tank.

But there has been little pushback by investors that have been richly rewarded for backing the companies. “The vaccines provided an incredible return on investment from a societal perspective,” said Akash Tewari, analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank.

He added: “Most investors do not have an issue with executives getting fairly compensated, particularly when they have overseen such an increase in company value.”

The biopharma industry said the rewards were justified given the extraordinary efforts made by leaders during the pandemic in developing Covid jabs.

“Thanks to their hard work, we achieved a vaccine in record time and currently have multiple vaccines available — enough to reach every corner of the globe,” said John Murphy, chief policy officer at Bio, an industry trade group.

Bancel has cashed in on the phenomenal rise in market capitalisation of Moderna by selling $404mn of shares since January 2020, according to data from Verity. Bourla sold $5.6mn of shares on the same day that Pfizer and BioNTech said their vaccine was 90 per cent effective against Covid.

The “windfall profits” drew fire from Elizabeth Warren, liberal Democratic senator, who called on the SEC to consider regulatory “reforms that would prevent abusive practices”.

Sahin has not made any significant share sales.

Pfizer said Bourla’s bonus was appropriate based on his exceptional leadership, his focus on long-term strategy and his contributions to the company’s performance in 2021.

Moderna said the increase in executive pay reflected significantly expanded responsibilities during the pandemic. It added that 94 per cent of Bancel’s 2021 award was performance-based and consisted mainly of equity awards tied to the company’s performance over a four-year period.

Chinese start-up has launched in Norway in European expansion drive

Chinese electric vehicle start-up Nio is in talks with several other carmakers about licensing the battery-swapping technology that is at the heart of the group’s strategy to win over petrol-driving motorists in Europe, one of the company’s most senior executives said.

European president Hui Zhang said the company is holding talks with Chinese and international car groups to open its network of charging stations, which the company forecasts will rise from 800 to 5,000 globally by the middle of the decade.

It is targeting expansion in Europe, one of the most competitive markets in the world for electric cars, which is likely to become a testing ground for adopting the battery technology.

The group, which listed in 2018 and has sold 180,000 electric models in China, aims to have 1,000 swapping stations outside the country by 2025. These will be split between Europe and the US, which the business is expected to target after Europe.

“We want to be a well-established player in the premium segment [in Europe] by 2025,” Zhang said.

While about 50 companies working on battery swapping in China, Nio is the only one to have commercialised the system for cars to date.

The company wants to sell its battery-swapping system to other groups in order to widen the use of the technology, which it believes offers a way to overcome worries over chargers because of the limited number and the time it takes to power up a car that deters many consumers from switching to electric vehicles.

Nio’s system, which involves unscrewing the bottom of the car and replacing the battery through a hatch in the floor of the station, takes about five minutes.

Its first European site in Norway, the region’s leading electric car market because of its subsidies, is placed alongside superchargers used by Tesla, partly in order to demonstrate how much faster the system is than even the quickest chargers, which give some charge quickly but take up to an hour to fully replenish an empty battery.

The company began deliveries in September in Norway. It will launch in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark this year, and is expected to launch in the UK, where it has a development base, later in the decade.

The battery-swap technology, which companies including Tesla have tested and abandoned, has worked in Nio’s home market because of high urban density and the scarcity of driveways.

Carmakers that buy the system must use the same batteries as Nio, in order to exchange them at swap stations, where they are switched at a dedicated robot-operated bay.

The company has to tackle the problem of expanding its battery-swap operation as each site requires a dedicated grid connection of 650MW, the size of a small power station. This is used to charge up to 13 batteries at the site.

Because the batteries at the station have to be able to fit into any car that arrives, another carmaker that uses Nio’s technology will have to build its vehicles using the company’s platform, as well as the specific proportion and design of its batteries, Zhang said.

Several carmakers have sought partnerships to help recoup investments in the new technologies they believe will get them a competitive edge in electric cars. Volkswagen is licensing its MEB electric car production system to Ford, while Renault’s Alpine sports car brand is sharing a new electric technology with Geely’s Lotus.

Nio believes battery swapping will lower the cost of accessing electric vehicles by eliminating the battery, which accounts for more than a third of the cost of a vehicle, from the initial price.

Currently, electric cars lose significant value because finance companies are uncertain about the health of a car battery after three years. By removing the battery from the car’s cost, Nio hopes customers will be able to access vehicles far more cheaply.

The company also refuses to disclose how much individual swap stations cost, or whether it ultimately loses money from the service.

Zhang added: “The origin of the idea is it really makes your [battery] usage very free, it’s not about Nio needing to make some extra profit out of that.”

* Basler Raised to Buy at Berenberg; PT 135 euros

* NN Raised to Overweight at Morgan Stanley; PT 54.30 euros

* Swedbank Raised to Buy at Deutsche Bank

* Teva ADRs Raised to Overweight at Barclays; PT $13

* TGS Raised to Buy at SpareBank; PT 173 kroner

>>> Down

* Berkshire Hathaway Cut to Hold at Edward Jones

* CareTech Cut to Hold at Berenberg; PT 750 pence

* Credit Agricole Cut to Sell at AlphaValue/Baader

* Kojamo Cut to Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 24.25 euros

* Kongsberg Cut to Hold at SEB Equities; PT 370 kroner

* Lloyds Cut to Equal-Weight at Barclays; PT 58 pence

* Moneysupermarket Cut to Equal-Weight at Barclays; PT 220 pence

* Munich Re Cut to Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; PT 275 euros

* Olvi Cut to Hold at SEB Equities; PT 37 euros

* Paccar Cut to Hold at Jefferies; PT $85

* Traton Cut to Hold at Stifel; PT 18 euros

* Vale ADRs Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank; PT $22

* Valmet Cut to Hold at Handelsbanken

* Virgin Money UK Cut to Equal-Weight at Barclays; PT 225 pence

* Vodafone Cut to Hold at Berenberg; PT 145 pence

>>> Initiation

* Adyen Rated New Overweight at Wells Fargo; PT 2,201 euros

* Darktrace Rated New Underweight at JPMorgan; PT 400 pence

* Fiserv Reinstated Overweight at Wells Fargo; PT $122

* GSK Rated New Buy at Spin-Off Research; PT 1,800 pence

* Michelmersh Brick Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 160 pence

* PayPal Reinstated Overweight at Wells Fargo; PT $152

* Water Intelligence Rated New Buy at Arden Partners

>> Call

* Basler Now at Attractive Entry Point, Berenberg Upgrades to Buy

* Kion Guidance Removal No Surprise, But May Weigh on Stock: Citi

* Pirelli, Michelin Long-Term EV Winners, Shares Appear Oversold

* Truckmaker Estimates Cut at Jefferies, Traton Downgraded to Hold

* Vodafone Downgraded at Berenberg on M&A Risk, Consensus Concerns

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David Baszucki received one of the highest compensation packages in the U.S. last year

The boss of Roblox Corp. received a pay package that the videogame company valued at $233 million last year, instantly putting him in the ranks of the country’s top-paid chief executives, a Monday Securities filing showed.

David Baszucki, co-founder and chief executive officer of Roblox, had received just $6.8 million in 2020. Most of his 2021 package is made up of restricted stock dependent on the company meeting certain milestones, a common retention tool that underscores how some executives can end up with big payouts.

Mr. Baszucki’s compensation approaches that of the biggest pay package so far disclosed for 2021 for S&P 500 companies, that of Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav, at $247 million. At least two other public companies have reported bigger pay packages for their CEOs: more than $500 million each for KKR & Co.’s co-CEOs, and $308 million for Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.’s Ari Emanuel. Like Roblox, KKR and Endeavor aren’t in the S&P 500.

Roblox shares were first traded in March 2021 at around $65 when they were first offered on the market through a direct listing. They almost doubled in price by November amid the hope the company would benefit from rising interest in the metaverse. Its shares have slid since then.

Mr. Baszucki’s equity award is designed to vest—or become fully his—over seven years if Roblox shares average at or above a series of target prices for at least 90 days, starting at $165 after early March 2023 and continuing through $375 a share, the company’s annual proxy statement says. If the initial price target isn’t reached by March 2028, he would ultimately receive no shares under the grant. Roblox shares have traded as high as $141.60 and closed at $50.02 on Monday.

Last month Intel Corp. disclosed in a regulatory filing that its chief executive officer, Pat Gelsinger, received compensation last year valued at nearly $180 million, pegged to performance targets intended to dramatically improve its stock price.

Overall pay increases for U.S. CEOs have been gaining momentum. Median pay rose to $14.2 million last year for the leaders of S&P 500 companies from a record $13.4 million for the same companies a year earlier, based on disclosures through Friday evening, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.

Roblox operates a free online platform with millions of games made by its own users. Mr. Baszucki started building it in the early 2000s with fellow programmer Erik Cassel and it launched in 2006. Mr. Cassel died from cancer in 2013.

The company, which went public last year, was a big beneficiary of the pandemic’s sheltering restrictions. It has said that the health crisis had an outsize positive impact on its business and that it is working to drive growth by appealing to older and untapped demographics.

Equity awards like Mr. Baszucki’s can fluctuate considerably in value, especially over multiyear performance periods. The award valued at $232.2 million when he received it in February last year had risen to $1.2 billion by year’s end, with the company’s share price at $103, Roblox said in its securities filing.