WSJ : Judge Allows Challengers to Trump-Era Oil Drilling Safety Rule to Review A

Judge Allows Challengers to Trump-Era Oil Drilling Safety Rule to Review Agency Records
Judge says oil-safety regulator must turn over communications as part of a lawsuit over a Trump administration change

A federal judge in Louisiana said an oil-safety regulator must turn over internal memos, texts, chats and other communications as part of a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s rollback of a major rule passed in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The court sided with plaintiffs challenging the rollback, who argued that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement hadn’t submitted a complete record of its deliberations over the changes to the so-called Well Control Rule, including whether communications with industry or other outside entities had influenced its decisions.

The plaintiffs requested additional documents after The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some key details had been deleted from memos that make up the official administrative record of the rule change. The deletions were made at the behest of Scott Angelle, an ally of the Gulf Coast oil industry who ran BSEE in the Trump administration, the Journal reported, citing memo drafts and email correspondence.

Environmental groups sued BSEE in 2019 over the rollback of the well-control rule, under a statute called the Administrative Procedures Act, which provides for courts to review whether a federal rule change was arbitrary or capricious.

That review is supposed to be based on the “whole record” of the agency’s rule-making process, which the groups, including Earthjustice and the Sierra Club, said hadn’t been made public because of the deletions and Mr. Angelle’s refusal to request other rule changes in writing.

BSEE, in turn, argued that it was entitled to withhold certain records because they were “deliberative,” and largely refused to disclose whether other communications requested by the environmental groups even existed, court filings show.

Magistrate Judge Michael B. North of the Eastern District of Louisiana rejected the Trump administration’s argument in his order dated Wednesday.

“The Court finds that the administrative record lodged in this case is incomplete, because the materials referenced in the Wall Street Journal article and vaguely described by the Federal Defendants as ‘deliberative’ should have been included in the record in order for it to be considered ‘whole,’” Judge North wrote.

‘This ruling is a win for anyone who cares about government transparency.’— Chris Eaton, attorney for Earthjustice
In addition to the decision memos mentioned in the Journal article, Judge North granted limited discovery to allow plaintiffs to examine whether Mr. Angelle and other BSEE officials used text messages and chat programs to discuss relevant matters, to review their communications with higher-ups in the Interior Department and to examine meeting records.

“Defendants’ caginess leaves the Court with little choice but to order limited discovery into these matters,” he wrote.

Chris Eaton, an attorney for Earthjustice, said: “This ruling is a win for anyone who cares about government transparency. It rightly rejects the government’s attempt to hide the ball…and its muzzling of its own experts who opposed these changes.”

One of the decision memos that was altered for the official record, the Journal reported, concerned “drilling margin”—the amount of pressure drillers are required to maintain while drilling a well to prevent blowouts. A surge of high pressure led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout and explosion in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing more than 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The memo at first said agency staff wanted to “keep proposed language as is,” but the industry pressured Mr. Angelle to eliminate the standard to give drillers greater flexibility, according to a cache of documents reviewed by the Journal.

The same memo said “BSEE does not agree with industry” on the effectiveness of a proposed alternative standard drafted by the American Petroleum Institute, an oil-industry lobbying group.

After Mr. Angelle weighed in, those lines were deleted from the official record, emails and revised documents show.

The plaintiffs are hoping that discovery will yield documents that show the agency ignored safety concerns in crafting their changes to the well-control rule and turn up evidence that the industry influenced the changes.

>>> Europe : Brokers Upgrades & Downgrades - 5th of March 2021

>>> Up
* AB Dynamics Raised to Buy at N+1 Singer; PT 2,300 pence
* Alten PT Raised to 123 euros from 90 euros at Berenberg
* Bobst Raised to Buy at Stifel; PT 86 Swiss francs
* CFE Raised to Buy at ING; PT 110 euros
* Frontier Developments Raised to Buy at Panmure Gordon
* Netcompany Raised to Buy at SEB Equities; PT 640 kroner
* Nilfisk Raised to Buy at SEB Equities; PT 200 kroner
* Reach Raised to Hold at Peel Hunt; PT 200 pence
* Royal Unibrew Raised to Neutral at JPMorgan; PT 610 kroner
* Scout24 Raised to Outperform at RBC; PT 73 euros
* Subsea 7 Raised to Buy at Jefferies; PT 120 kroner

>>> Down
* Evotec SE Cut to Neutral at Citi
* Hyve Group Cut to Hold at Peel Hunt; PT 140 pence
* Maersk Drilling Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 251 kroner
* Sixt Cut to Hold at Jefferies; PT 110 euros

>>> Initiation
* Adyen Rated New Buy at Stifel; PT 2,700 euros
* Carlsberg Reinstated Buy at HSBC; PT 1,260 kroner
* Gevelot Rated New Buy at IDMidcaps; PT 260 euros
* Nexi Rated New Hold at Stifel; PT 17.50 euros
* Rieter Reinstated at Add at Baader Helvea on March 4
* RWE Rated New Buy at Deutsche Bank; PT 35 euros
* UCB Reinstated Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; PT 105 euros
* VNV Global Rated New Buy at Jefferies
* WH Smith Reinstated Neutral at Exane; PT 2,050 pence

>>> Call
* Evotec Thesis Played Out, Downgraded at Citi After Re-Rating
* Sixt Still a Top Performer, Albeit Lacking Catalysts: Jefferies
* Subsea 7 Beating Competition on Renewables, Jefferies Ups to Buy
* UCB a Portfolio Transition Story, Equal-Weight: Morgan Stanley

WSJ : China Sets 2021 GDP Growth Target at Over 6%

China Sets 2021 GDP Growth Target at Over 6%
Premier Li Keqiang says nation aims to create more than 11 million new jobs this year

BEIJING—Chinese leaders said they would target gross domestic product growth of 6% or more this year, a relatively modest goal that nonetheless signals continued optimism after a year in which the coronavirus eviscerated the global economy.

The target, announced Friday in Beijing by Premier Li Keqiang, is comfortably lower than most economists’ expectations that the world’s second-largest economy will grow by 8% or more this year.

Even so, many economists had predicted that Beijing would forgo the numerical target altogether, as it did last year for the first time since 1994, yielding to the uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic.

China’s economy recovered relatively quickly from the initial outbreak centered in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and ended up with 2.3% growth for the year. It was the only major world economy to grow in 2020.

With growth momentum now at pre-virus levels, Beijing policy makers have signaled that they plan to gradually withdraw stimulus measures and focus instead on reining in debt and heading off an emerging bubble in the real-estate market.

Mr. Li said in the annual report on Friday that the government would seek to cut the fiscal-deficit target to 3.2% of China’s projected GDP this year, compared with a target of more than 3.6% in 2020.

Beijing also plans to reduce the amount of debt that local governments are permitted to raise, allowing localities to issue 3.65 trillion yuan, the equivalent of $580 billion, in local government special-purpose bonds in 2021, from the 3.75 trillion yuan earmarked last year. The bond proceeds primarily fund infrastructure projects.

Mr. Li said China aims to keep consumer price inflation at around 3% in 2021, compared with last year’s 3.5% target and its actual increase of 2.5%.

The government also said it plans to create 11 million new jobs this year, up from the 2020 target of 9 million. It also aimed to cap the urban surveyed jobless rate at 5.5% in 2021, compared with a ceiling of 6% in 2020.

Beijing said the defense budget would increase by 6.8% in 2021, compared with a 6.6% increase last year.

The government’s targets were released at the opening of the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Friday’s gathering also unveiled a draft blueprint of China’s 14th five-year plan, covering 2021-25, as well as broad guidelines that would shape China’s growth model over the next decade and a half.

In their five-year plan, Chinese leaders broke with convention in not giving an average numerical growth target, saying only that they would plan to keep the economy running “within a reasonable range.” In the 2016-20 plan, the target was “more than 6.5%.”

Lawmakers will review the blueprint during the weeklong legislative session, according to the official agenda.

In lieu of a five-year GDP target, Beijing’s leaders said that they would aim to cap the surveyed urban unemployment rate at 5.5%, with labor productivity growth outpacing overall GDP growth. It also planned to increase the country’s urbanization rate to 65%, from 60.6% in 2019.

Reflecting Beijing’s emphasis on encouraging consumer spending—given concerns that rising geopolitical tensions could hurt export demand—officials said they want Chinese residents’ disposable income to keep pace with the country’s overall economic growth over the five years.

And underscoring the increasing importance China’s leaders ascribe to science and technology, total research and development expenditures will grow by more than 7% annually for the five years, they said.

China’s leaders also talked up the importance of supply chains and cutting-edge technologies, including pushing forward in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, blockchain and next-generation 6G wireless networks.

The plan also pledged to keep the proportion of manufacturing “basically stable” during the 2021-25 period.

Mr. Li said China aims by 2025 to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 18% from 2020 levels, the same pace as in the previous five-year plan, which China exceeded by achieving a reduction by 18.6%. It aims to cut energy consumption per unit of GDP by 13.5%.

Facing social and fiscal pressures stemming from a rapidly aging population, the government also plans to raise the statutory retirement age in “a phased manner,” reviving a long-mooted but unpopular proposal.

The proposal was mentioned in the five-year plan, without detail. Men currently can retire at 60, and female factory workers as early as 50. Female public-sector and white-collar workers can retire at 55.

The draft plan sets a goal of raising China’s average life expectancy by one year over the next five years. It was 77.3 years in 2019, according to the National Health Commission.

With the economy back on track, China’s policy makers also signaled a shift of focus to reining in financial risks and debt levels. Mr. Li said the government would keep China’s overall leverage ratio stable in 2021 while stepping up regulation of financial conglomerates and financial technology companies.

Beijing also aims to keep growth of money supply and total social financing on par with the economic growth. The premier called for the nation’s biggest commercial banks to maintain at least 30% loan growth to small firms and to extend loan relief to small business borrowers hit hard by the pandemic.

The government also said it would keep export and import volumes stable this year, and increase bank lending to the manufacturing sector and expand investment in the sector’s equipment upgrades.

China’s 2021 fiscal budget projected growth in annual revenue and expenditures of 8.1% and 1.8%, respectively.

FT : Coinbase founder rides crypto boom to Nasdaq listing

Coinbase founder rides crypto boom to Nasdaq listing
Brian Armstrong’s plan to make bitcoin accessible to the masses has helped his company’s valuation soar

Of all the ways to grow rich from the cryptocurrency boom, Brian Armstrong chose perhaps the most conservative. 

Nine years after founding the most popular destination in the US for cryptocurrency buyers, Coinbase, his decision is about to pay off as bitcoin reaches new peaks. 

Trades between private investors have valued Coinbase at about $100bn. At those prices, the company’s direct listing on the Nasdaq exchange could convert Armstrong’s shares into a $14.8bn stake as soon as this month, without any lock-ups that would normally prevent immediate selling.

For Armstrong, a 38-year-old engineer, the windfall would vindicate his determination to make the complex and defiantly anti-establishment world of cryptocurrencies accessible to the mainstream.

Growing up in San Jose, the largest city in Silicon Valley, Armstrong began coding websites in HTML for money during the dotcom boom in the ‘90s. “Even back in high school I was that nerdy kid who was reading a book on Java,” he recalled in an interview.

At Rice University in Houston, Texas, Armstrong and a roommate created University Tutors, a site that paired college students with parents seeking extra academic help for their children. The company’s phone number connected directly to the founders’ room in their residential college, Lovett.

“If we had a party or people over or something, we would have to unplug our phones,” said John Nelson, Armstrong’s former roommate and co-founder of University Tutors. 

Nelson said they also started a side hustle that booked off-campus bars for college club events, charging cover and a cut of the bar tab. “They were quite popular events.” University Tutors eventually sold to an undisclosed buyer for 21 times its revenues, said Nelson, who is now chief executive of the ecommerce start-up Vroom Delivery.

A few years after graduating with degrees in computer science and economics, Armstrong moved to Argentina, where his encounters with hyperinflation planted the seeds for an interest in supposedly inflation-proof cryptocurrencies.

In Armstrong’s telling, he first came across the white paper that explained bitcoin while home with his parents for the holidays in 2010.

His first bitcoin venture, a wallet to hold the currency on mobile phones, drew some attention in tech circles. But its mobile-only design left it unreliable and without the computing power that cloud computing companies had made cheaply available for websites.

“I had this realisation: Somebody is going to have to make a really rock-solid cloud service for this, and that is the future,” Armstrong recalled.

In 2012, he left his job at the travel rental site Airbnb, where he had worked for a brief stint on the global payments team. He partnered with a British programmer, Ben Reeves, and entered the Y Combinator start-up accelerator with the idea for Coinbase.

The new venture immediately ran into problems. Armstrong broke from Reeves, partly over a disagreement about whether bitcoin owners should be able to recover misplaced cryptocurrency “keys”. 

Armstrong believed Coinbase should retain back-up copies, a move that bucked consensus in the nascent bitcoin community, which resisted the idea of centralised data storage. But the decision made Coinbase friendly to novices, who could not be expected to reliably keep track of the lengthy passwords.

“The early decisions that Coinbase and Brian made were sort of the opposite of what I would call the bitcoin wisdom of the time,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, the company’s third employee and head of the cryptocurrency fund Polychain Capital. “He wasn’t building for that narrow audience of 10,000 people.”

Since then, Armstrong has grown Coinbase into the dominant US-based cryptocurrency exchange, by providing a user-friendly service and avoiding the security problems and regulatory headaches that have plagued his rivals.

But Coinbase’s public listing paperwork revealed several probes into the company, among a litany of risk factors. Coinbase also said it is currently involved in litigation resulting from Armstrong’s activities outside of the company, without disclosing additional details.

Former Coinbase employees and people who know Armstrong describe him as a stoic leader whose moods rarely fluctuate with the ups and downs of cryptocurrency markets.

The company’s fee-based business model produced sizeable profits during the recent boom, raking in more than $320m last year. But a milder cryptocurrency market a year earlier resulted in more than $30m in losses.

“He was always kind of the same consistent, even keel, calm guy,” said Dalton Caldwell, a managing director at Y Combinator.

Coinbase employees tested Armstrong’s resolve last year after he appeared slow to react to the Black Lives Matter movement, igniting complaints about the treatment of black workers at the company. 

Armstrong responded to the early uproar with a blog post that declared Coinbase was a “mission focused company” with an “apolitical culture”. The company invited disgruntled employees to leave with a severance package. Roughly 5 per cent took the offer.

Elsewhere in the Coinbase network, the listing has inspired animal spirits, promising fresh funds for employees and other early shareholders to plough into new ventures. “We’re gonna have the crypto Elon Musk,” said Linda Xie, founder of cryptocurrency fund Scalar Capital and a former Coinbase employee.

With his own money, Armstrong has founded a scientific research site, ResearchHub, modelled on the code repository GitHub. He has also signed the Giving Pledge and formed a charitable organisation, GiveCrypto, for making direct donations in digital assets. In more than two years, the non-profit has announced $4m in donations toward its target of creating a $1bn fund.

People who know Armstrong dismiss the notion he will become distracted by wealth or veer from his aims for Coinbase.

“Brian will be there whether the company is worth a trillion dollars or somehow ends up at zero dollars,” said Dan Romero, an early Coinbase employee and angel investor. “He will be there the whole time.”

FT : Google’s rivals fret as the advertising cookie crumbles

Google’s rivals fret as the advertising cookie crumbles
Search giant phases out third-party identifiers that track users moving around the web

In the world of online advertising, relevance is relative. An advertisement targeting system might not live up to the ideal of delivering exactly the right message to the right person at the right time — but if it’s the best of the available alternatives, then the advertising dollars will follow. 

So it is easy to understand the sense of dread felt by many online publishers and ad tech companies as one of the linchpins of the advertising-supported internet — the third-party cookie — heads off into the sunset. Apple was the first to sound the death knell for these identifiers that track users as they move around the web, blocking them in its Safari browser. Google has said its Chrome browser, which accounts for more than half of web traffic, will stop supporting them by early 2022.

That might not matter if it leaves everyone on an equal footing in a more privacy-respecting future. But the warring plans for what will replace cookies — and Google’s ability to shape the future for much of the industry — make that highly unlikely.

Not surprisingly, the risk that Google will rebuild the world of online advertising around its own interests has some regulators feeling nervous

The search giant delivered its latest broadside on the subject this week, in the process earning itself flattering headlines for promising to end the era of personal profiling based on privacy-invasive web tracking. But to rivals, it has come to feel as though Google is out to deliberately demonise them to tilt the playing field in its own favour.

This week, for instance, it sought to cast a cloud over the use of email addresses to help with ad targeting. If publishers combine their users’ email addresses with data held by other companies to build up personal profiles, it warned, then both internet users and regulators are likely to reject the idea. No matter that Google itself has a trove of personal information about people signed in on its own services and faces no obstacles in building up a very precise picture of their interests.

As the owner of the most widely used web browser, key parts of the ad-tech supply chain and some of the most widely used ad-supported internet services, Google has a clear ability to shape the future for everyone. For instance, its own advertising services will follow the new post-cookie techniques, dubbed the Privacy Sandbox, that are being trialled by Chrome, guaranteeing them wide currency. Is it any wonder rivals worry that it is trying to reshape the open web in its own image?

Google’s vision of the post-cookie world preserves a surprising amount of the old. Importantly, the tracking of internet users as they browse the web in Chrome will not end. What will change is that the data will no longer be fed into the ad-tech supply chain, where it is in danger of leaking. Instead, it will stay in a user’s own browser. The “signal” from the data will be extracted and aggregated with other similar users to create “cohorts” that can be sold to advertisers as a group.

It may be more secure, but for users it means the experience of online advertising will not change. Messages will still be tied closely to your web-browsing habits, and they will still follow you around from site to site.

This sets up a world of conflicting privacy visions and business interests. Apple’s Safari and the Firefox browser have turned their faces against tracking, and are instead likely to accept personal identifiers for ad targeting, such as the one being developed by ad-tech company The Trade Desk. Google, on the other hand, has signalled that it will reject identifiers and keep its own version of tracking.

Not surprisingly, the risk that Google will rebuild the world of online advertising around its own interests has some regulators feeling nervous. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is looking into the plan, warning that it makes the browser a “bottleneck”. The devil will be in the detail. Will Google gain any informational advantage from being able to create the user cohorts? And will its ownership of the browser enable it to channel more business to its other services?

Even if these worries are unfounded, Google will have designed a system that reflects its own powerful interests. When you use its search engine to look for shoes, for instance, Google will still be able to serve you with Nike ads — delivered through the new cohorts — as you visit other sites around the web.

And behind it all, Google will still have an unrivalled trove of information on users of its own services that will be free of the limitations placed around the handling of third-party data. It all adds up to a fortress of data that could come to seem even more impregnable after the demise of the third-party cookie.

FT : EU set to accuse Apple of distorting competition in music streaming

EU set to accuse Apple of distorting competition in music streaming
Brussels will formally charge tech company used its dominance to squeeze out App Store rivals

The EU is set to bring antitrust charges against Apple for the first time, putting more pressure on the iPhone maker to change the way it runs its App Store.

According to several people familiar with the case, the EU will act on a complaint brought two years ago by the music streaming site Spotify, which said Apple was taking a 30 per cent cut of its subscription fees for featuring it in the App Store and denying it the right to tell its users that other ways of upgrading were available.

Spotify also complained that Apple Music, the Cupertino company's own music service, was able to undercut it on price because it did not have to pay the same 30 per cent fee.

More recently, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had its hugely popular game thrown off Apple's App Store after it started directing players to its own payment system. Epic has also filed a competition complaint against Apple in the EU.

Antitrust challenges around the world are threatening one of Apple’s fastest-growing and most profitable lines of business. Its suite of digital services — which include music and video, cloud storage, games and a growing range of other add-ons — is now Apple’s second-largest source of revenue after the iPhone, bringing in $15.8bn in sales in the three months to December.

The latest charges are the culmination of a series of EU antitrust probes into its business practices, launched after Spotify’s complaint.

They also come as global regulators increasingly circle the company. Earlier on Thursday, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced an antitrust probe into whether the company abuses its dominance on the App Store by imposing unfair terms on developers.

“Complaints that Apple is using its market position to set terms which are unfair or may restrict competition and choice — potentially causing customers to lose out when buying and using apps — warrant careful scrutiny,” said CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli.

Apple has argued that its system ensures security and privacy for its customers, while allowing independent developers access to the same set of tools as larger firms such as Spotify and Epic.

But critics say it applies the rules unevenly and commands too high a commission from its position as gatekeeper to every iPhone owner.

Under Apple’s current rules, apps that provide paid digital content on the App Store must use the company’s own in-app payment system and are unable to advertise lower prices if customers sign up outside Apple’s marketplace.

App developers must share 30 per cent of monthly subscription fees with Apple for all customers who sign up through the App Store. That commission falls to 15 per cent after the first year but can still make it difficult for thin-margin services such as music streaming to run profitably.

As a result, some of Apple’s rivals have either disabled their in-app payment option on the App Store, or passed the additional costs on to their customers. Regulators believe that Apple’s practices may lead to consumer harm by preventing them from accessing greater choice and lower prices.

Apple has tried to head off regulatory pressure and appease its developers by slashing some of its fees, announcing in November that it would halve the charges it places on in-app purchases for smaller developers.

People familiar with the matter cautioned that it could still be months before formal charges are brought against Apple, and that the case could still be shelved.

The European Commission declined to comment. Apple was not immediately available for comment. However, at the time of the Spotify complaint, Apple accused the music streaming app of wrapping “its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric”.

>>> US After Hours Summary: FLGT +33.8%, GPS +5.5%, SWBI +2.9% higher on earning

After Hours Summary: FLGT +33.8%, GPS +5.5%, SWBI +2.9% higher on earnings; MDLA -6.4%, GWRE -3.6%, OPEN -3.6%, SDC -3.3%, COST -2.1%, AVGO -1.1% lower on earnings

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: FLGT +33.8%, PLYA +6.8%, IDT +6.4%, GPS +5.5%, ATEC +4%, VERI +3.3%, CERT +3.2%, SENS +3.2%, NTCO +3.1%, SWBI +2.9%, IMAX +2.5%, MANU +2.4%, HEAR +1%, AQN +0.3%, DMTK +0.1%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: WTRH +36.1% (announces expansion in to cannabis market), CLOV +5.5% (among recipients of NIH grant for study focused on innovative approach to advance care planning), WPRT +3.1% (files for $400 mln mixed securities shelf offering), OCUL +2.9% (announces FDA acceptance of sNDA for DEXTENZA), PGRE +1.4% (files mixed securities shelf offering), APSG +0.8% (Vista Equity Partners in talks to add DealerSocket and Omnitracs to its deal for Solera, according to Bloomberg), CLA +0.8% (Ouster and QCraft announce launch of robobus fleet outfitted with Ouster lidar sensors in China), BALY +0.5% (to become authorized sports betting operator of the NBA), ASR +0.5% (reports February passenger traffic), NXPI +0.4% (increases dividend; also approves new $2 bln share repurchase program), AMT +0.4% (increases dividend), TMST +0.1% (to increase prices on seamless mechanical tubing products)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: MDLA -6.4% (also to acquire Decibel for $160 mln in cash), GWRE -3.6%, OPEN -3.6%, SDC -3.3%, COST -2.1%, AVGO -1.1%, WORK -0.9%, NX -0.6%, COO -0.3%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: EVFM -19.3% (files for $150 mln mixed securities shelf offering, also reports earnings), AMRC -6.2% (stock offering), CLGX -4% (CSGP withdraws bid to acquire CLGX, terminates any further acquisition discussions), MARA -0.6% (expects bitcoin mining fleet to produce approx. 1.4 EH/s by the end of March), PNW -0.4% (files mixed securities shelf offering), ON -0.2% (to cut 740 jobs globally), PAG -0.1% (to acquire Kansas City Freightliner

>>> Europe : Brokers Upgrades & Downgrades - 4th of March 2021 V2(+)

>>> Up
* Also Raised to Buy at Baader Helvea; PT 314 Swiss francs
* Dufry Raised to Reduce at Baader Helvea; PT 55 Swiss francs
* EDP Renovaveis Raised to Buy at SocGen; PT 22.50 euros
* Georg Fischer PT Raised to 1,360 Swiss francs at Bank Vontobel (+)
* Handelsbanken Raised to Buy at Citi
* Kuehne + Nagel Raised to Add at AlphaValue
* Mayr-Melnhof Raised to Accumulate at Erste Group
* Neoen Raised to Buy at Stifel; PT 59 euros
* Nel Raised to Buy at Norne Securities; PT 35 kroner
* Reckitt Raised to Buy at SocGen; PT 7,000 pence
* RWE Raised to Buy at SocGen; PT 39.10 euros (+)
* Safran Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 136 euros
* Tryg Raised to Buy at SEB Equities; PT 172 kroner
* Whitbread Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 4,000 pence

>>> Down
* InterContinental Hotels Cut to Underweight at JPMorgan
* Kering Cut to Add at AlphaValue
* Novartis Cut to Hold at Intron Health; PT 83 Swiss francs
* Roche Cut to Hold at Intron Health; PT 300 Swiss francs
* Sampo Cut to Underweight at JPMorgan; PT 38.21 euros
* Swiss Life Cut to Hold at HSBC; PT 498 Swiss francs
* Weir Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank; PT 2,000 pence

>>> Initiation
* Iberdrola Rated New Buy at Jefferies; PT 12.70 euros
* PZ Cussons Rated New Overweight at Barclays; PT 300 pence (+)

>>> Call
* BBVA Cut at Barclays on Limited Upside, Constructive on Peers (+)
* Evonik 4Q Below Consensus, Guidance Slightly Ahead, Warburg Says (+)
* Prospects Attractive for Nordic Banks; Citi Raises Handelsbanken
* Iberdrola Seen Among Best Plays on Energy Transition: Jefferies
* Kuehne + Nagel Raised at AlphaValue on its Customer Skills (+)
* Lufthansa Has Enough Liquidity, 2021 Still Difficult: Bernstein (+)
* Royal Unibrew Results In Line, Guidance Cautious: Jefferies
* Telia Execution Risks Seen High After Strategy Update: Citi
* Vivendi Results Solid, Although Uncertainties Remain: Citi

WSJ : Google’s User-Tracking Crackdown Has Advertisers Bracing for Change

Google’s User-Tracking Crackdown Has Advertisers Bracing for Change
Companies that gather data on their customers will be in the best position to weather Google’s decision to rein in tracking, executives say

A move by Google to rein in tracking of web users drew mixed reviews in the ad world, with some executives expressing cautious optimism the change will be good for consumers and others worrying it will increase the tech giant’s industry stranglehold.

The Alphabet Inc. GOOG -2.37% company announced Wednesday that its ad tools would no longer support individual tracking of users across websites starting in 2022. Taken with a similar announcement last year that Google plans to stop supporting a key tool for such tracking, called third-party cookies, the moves represent a major shift from the largest player in digital advertising, an industry where many companies rely on tracking and targeting users.

Advertisers use data harvested from people’s browsing across the web to figure out whom to serve an ad to, and whether that person then went on to buy the advertised product. After Google’s change, they won’t be able to get as detailed a picture of either.

“In a way, you are losing the ability to track and measure behavior as we have been accustomed to at this point,” said George Popstefanov, chief executive of digital ad agency PMG. However, he supports the change, which he believes is better for consumers. “I think our ability to track and measure is going to change, but I don’t think it’s going to be worse,” he said.

Scott Hagedorn, North America chief executive of Omnicom Media Group, a collection of media agencies, said the Google privacy change is part of an inexorable trend the company had long been preparing for. “We’ve been planning for it for 10 years,” he said, describing the change as seismic.

In recent years, this preparation meant testing out ways to work directly with large tech platforms such as Google without being able to peek at any personally identifiable data. Google’s latest move will accelerate this kind of dynamic, Mr. Hagedorn said.

Others in the industry saw Google’s move as an anticompetitive power grab. “This is Google unilaterally trying to define the privacy standards for the internet,” said John Nardone, CEO of Flashtalking, an ad server company. “It’s not appropriate.”

Google is proposing its own technologies that it says will accomplish many of the same things advertisers were trying to achieve by tracking web users down to the individual level, but in a way that better respects consumers’ privacy.

These include tools that promise to group consumers into interest groups, or cohorts, on their devices, and never send their browsing information to a central server. Google has claimed that these tools have performed nearly as well as the existing tools—which track consumers individually—and is beginning to open them to testing by the industry.

Mr. Popstefanov of PMG said it is too soon to determine how well they really work. “Is it going to be as good as what we have? No. It’s too early to tell whether it’s going to give us the insight we need.”

Advertisers will have to decide whether they are comfortable with the new Google approach to targeting ads, which will be less precise. “When you’re able to target precisely to individuals your effectiveness is very high,” said Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communication officer at Mastercard. “When you’re doing it to cohorts it’s bound to be lesser than the individual, but we don’t know how much less at this point in time.” He said it would take time to decipher the impact of Google’s plan.

Ad executives said companies that have a lot of first-party data—information they have gathered on their own customers, such as through apps or loyalty card programs—will be in a stronger position to carry out precise digital ad campaigns.

Companies that don’t have a lot of first-party data or whose business models are focused on new customer acquisition versus marketing to existing customers will face challenges, according to John Lee, chief strategy officer at digital marketing agency Merkle.

“You don’t have this crutch anymore,” said Mr. Lee. “You’ve got to use first party data.”

Because of the potential weakness of Google’s replacement, some advertising executives believed the move created an opening for other industry players who have been working on alternative technology to track users in a privacy-safe manner.

“I see this as a major declaration of opportunity for the rest of the ad ecosystem,” said Paul Silver, global chief strategy officer at MiQ Digital, a company that helps agencies with their media buying.

Advertisers who want to target users individually across websites will be able to do so—just not with Google’s ad tools, Mr. Silver said.

The Trade Desk, a company that makes tools for advertisers, put forward a technology that would create identifiers for users based on their emails; the plan is currently being reviewed by the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an advertising industry group.

PRAM has been seeking to work with Google to create privacy-safe identifiers that would work in Google’s Chrome browser after cookies are removed.

Although Google’s announcement on Wednesday seemed to take aim at these types of solutions, Google hasn’t yet weighed in on whether the solutions pursued by PRAM will work in Chrome when cookies go away next year. Google’s Chrome has a dominant share of the web browser market.

“We are disappointed that Google didn’t work more closely with the industry prior to announcing its plan,” said Bill Tucker, executive director of the PRAM effort. “But we believe that this presents a critical opportunity for future collaboration.”

Other agency executives agreed with Google’s assessment in a blog post announcing the change Wednesday that individualized user tracking isn’t likely to survive future regulatory action on privacy.

“Whether we like it or not, even if you can find ways to supply Band-Aids and keep going, legislation will kill those Band-Aids,” said Simon Poulton, vice president of digital intelligence at Wpromote.