TheChek News Flow

NetEase to raise up to $3bn in Hong Kong as US tensions rise

Gaming group’s share sale could start wave of Chinese businesses raising cash in city

Gaming group NetEase will sell up to $3bn of shares in a Hong Kong secondary offering, in what could mark the start of a wave of Chinese companies raising capital in the city as tensions between Beijing and Washington simmer.

People familiar with the matter said that NetEase, one of China’s biggest makers of online video games, would begin placing shares with institutional investors from Monday ahead of publicly listing its stock on Hong Kong’s bourse. The sale is expected to raise between $2bn and $3bn.

NetEase shares currently trade on New York’s Nasdaq but Chinese companies increasingly fear that they could fall victim to growing US-China hostilities. President Donald Trump on Friday announced a probe into Chinese groups listed in the US and last month ordered the main federal government pension fund not to invest in such companies.

NetEase, which has traded in New York for two decades, raised the prospect of it being delisted from the Nasdaq in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange last week, citing tougher US regulations regarding Chinese companies.

The move by NetEase is in line with similar decisions by other Chinese companies currently listed in the US, such as ecommerce business JD.com, which is also looking to raise up to $3bn through a secondary listing in Hong Kong.

Baidu, the company behind China’s leading search engine, is also considering selling shares in the city. Alibaba raised $13bn in a secondary offering in Hong Kong last year that also came during a time of intense US-China frictions.

“More and more Chinese companies are considering Hong Kong to diversify risk . . . you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket considering the current situation,” said Shawn Yang, managing director at Blue Lotus Capital Advisors.

Such a share sale by NetEase, which would be the city’s largest of the year so far, could also provide a much-needed shot in the arm for Hong Kong’s credentials as a regional financial hub. The city, which has been shaken by anti-government protests for much of the last 12 months, is set to be stripped of the special trade privileges it enjoys with the US after Beijing moved to impose a national security law on the former British colony.

NetEase, which gets four-fifths of its revenue from video games, has been boosted in recent months by lockdowns imposed due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in China. That trapped millions of its users at home with few alternatives for entertainment, helping to lift first quarter revenue by 18 per cent year on year.

The company would be “bringing our established brand back to China”, William Ding, NetEase chief executive, told shareholders last week. “Returning to a market that is closer to our roots will further fuel our passion in our business and our users.”

JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and CICC are joint sponsors of the NetEase Hong Kong listing. All four companies declined to comment on the matter.

Nestlé’s burgers are Sensational and Awesome, but not Incredible

Swiss group switches branding of plant-based products after challenge from Impossible Foods

Nestlé is to change the name of its plant-based “Incredible Burger” to “Sensational Burger” in European markets after a Dutch court granted an injunction filed by US start-up Impossible Foods.

In its preliminary judgment last week, the District Court in The Hague said Nestlé had infringed Impossible Foods’ trademarks, and was likely to confuse consumers. It prohibited use of the “Incredible” name throughout Europe, giving the Swiss food conglomerate four weeks to withdraw its products from retail shelves or face €25,000 a day in fines.

Nestlé said: “We are disappointed by this provisional ruling as it is our belief that anyone should be able to use descriptive terms such as ‘incredible’ that explain the qualities of a product. We will of course abide by this decision, but in parallel, we will file an appeal.” 

The legal fight is part of an intensifying battle between food producers, where the right adjective is a key weapon to convince consumers that a vegetarian burger can rival the taste of meat.

Nestlé has already opted to use “Awesome Burger” instead of “Incredible Burger” for the US market.

Sales of plant-based meat substitutes have jumped in western markets amid the coronavirus pandemic. In the US, the trend has been fuelled by slaughterhouses becoming Covid-19 hotspots, restricting meat supplies.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, entrepreneurs and start-ups have been launching new products. In Europe, competition has been hotting up, with brands including Beyond Meat, Moving Mountains, Meatless Farm and This vying for market share. Large food companies have also entered the growing market with Nestlé promoting its Garden Gourmet brand and Unilever buying Vegetarian Butcher.

Impossible Foods’ products have yet to enter the European markets, but last October it applied to sell its plant-based burgers with the region’s food safety authority. The company filed an application with the European Food Safety Authority to market soy leghemoglobin, which is made with genetically engineered yeast. The ingredient, known as heme, is a protein that gives the start-up’s plant-based burgers the meat flavour as well as replicating the “bloody” juices of meat.

The Dutch ruling noted that Nestlé had approached Impossible for a possible licensing or partnership deal in the summer of 2018 and entered into negotiations, but later that year announced that it would be launching its own product. The court stated that Nestlé appeared to have tried to frustrate Impossible Foods’ entry into the European market by offering its own plant-based foods under a similar name.

Impossible Foods filed for an injunction in The Hague after it withdrew similar requests last year from German regional courts in Frankfurt and Hamburg. The German courts told the US company that an injunction would not be imposed.

Dana Wagner, Impossible Foods’ chief legal officer, said while the company applauded other groups’ efforts to develop plant-based meat substitutes, “We don’t want them confusing people into thinking their products are our products.” He added: “We’re grateful that the court recognised the importance of our trademarks and supported our efforts to protect our brand against incursion from a powerful multinational giant.”

Future prosperity depends on securing reliable zero carbon power at the lowest cost

It is almost a year since Britain became the first country in the world to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming by 2050. 

But as yet there is no coherent plan for how it is actually going to get there. Despite the impressive vehemence of ministerial advocates, great areas of policy remain sketchy. What technologies will replace the fossil fuels we presently rely on for so much of our energy? How much can be wrung from efficiency steps? 

There is also the question of the new electricity system. Clearly there is a big role for renewable generation. But should we not be building more nuclear? And given the time involved in such projects should we not be starting in earnest pretty soon?

On nuclear, the UK is still pottering along on the piecemeal basis that it might keep the sector somehow ticking over, replacing on a like-for-like basis the 15 gigawatts of capacity that is presently on the system sometime before it is all decommissioned over the next two decades.

That is despite the need for a substantial hike in capacity to deal with the decarbonisation of transport and heating.

The Committee on Climate Change has identified a need for 150GW of new green capacity, of which it thinks some 30-60GW should be “firm power”. That requires far more than a one-for-one replacement by nuclear, assuming that the gap cannot be filled by some other non-weather dependent technology such as carbon capture and storage or long-term battery storage. The snag here is simple: no such proven technology that is commercially viable presently exists.

If more nuclear is required, as seems certain, if only as an insurance policy, a big question concerns the funding model. The UK’s first new nuclear project — at Hinkley Point in Somerset — is a by-word for extravagance. To get the private-sector owners to take on the risk of a £22bn “first of a kind” project, a strike price worth some £110 per megawatt hour at current prices was guaranteed and indexed for 35 years. (Pre the coronavirus slump, power prices were between £40-£50/MWh). 

Getting that down is vital if the economy is not to be saddled with uneconomic energy. True, that means lower construction costs, but the more pressing need is actually to reduce nuclear’s cost of capital. While construction accounts for about 20 per cent of the total cost of a plant, capital amounts to close to half.

EDF, the French utility, has come up with an answer. It proposes a mechanism that would impose a form of tax on electricity consumers, requiring them to pay up front for electricity they had yet to receive. Known politely as the “regulated asset base (RAB) model”, this allows the project to avoid rolling up interest during the long construction phase, cutting the amount of compounded debt to be serviced and paid off during the life of the asset. 

Applied to EDF’s proposed project at Sizewell, an identical follow-on project to Hinkley for which the planning application was announced last week, that could reduce the 9.3 per cent capital cost of Hinkley to something closer to 5 or 6 per cent.

Critics have raised concerns about this structure, such as whether it saddles consumers with risks they cannot themselves control. But a more pertinent question is whether it is really a pointless halfway house. Taxpayers and electricity consumers are essentially one and the same people. So why not substitute the complexities of the RAB with direct government finance? After all, the UK government’s cost of 30-year money is less than 1 per cent. 

Granted, the reduction would not be quite as wide as those numbers imply. Capital expenditure still involves equity risk that must be funded. But state funding would bring down the electricity prices needed to service a project’s financing pretty sharply. 

It would allow the UK to tender for a series of reactors from a wider range of suppliers. At present there is a danger that the only “private sector” player which can finance new nuclear projects might be CGN, a Chinese nuclear company. Meanwhile, building a series of stations in sequence would allow the creation of a deep supply chain, speeding new build and reducing construction and equipment costs.

There would, of course, be complexities, such as the need to apply cumbersome state procurement rules. But these are not insuperable. Direct state financing of construction would not mean recreating the Central Electricity Generating Board. Projects could be sold on to investors at completion if that made economic sense.

In a report published in January, engineering company Atkins, which works across the energy sector, noted that it was “entirely possible that the least cost route to net-zero will require considerably more nuclear than is currently being considered”.

As the coronavirus crisis has shown, politicians need to plan for contingencies. Britain’s economic competitiveness ultimately depends on the decisions around energy transition. With so much at stake, nuclear cannot be dropped.

And the award for how not to handle readers’ refund requests goes to . . .

My column on air passengers’ difficulties in obtaining the refunds to which they are legally entitled prompted many responses, both in the comments section and in emails. Readers had their own stories and some, as we shall see, thought I had been unfair.

To make up for the cancellation of ceremonies such as the Olivier Awards and the Turner Prize, I have decided to group the reactions into a series of awards.

This is named after Our Lady of Loreto, designated by the Vatican in 1920 as the patron saint of aviation. The prize goes to below-the-line commenter Jacques5646, who said that while he “felt sorry for those low-cost users who have painstakingly saved the money for their annual vacation”, the rest of us should consider the airline workers whose jobs were at stake and the airlines that risked going bust. Music-festival ticket holders were holding off on demanding refunds in order to save the events for future years, he said. “What about [doing the same for] your favourite airline (even if it treats you more and more like cattle)?”

This prize takes its name from the villainous Harry Potter character who had, it transpired, actually been carrying out valorous deeds all along. Last time, I shamed British Airways for offering vouchers online but requiring passengers who wanted refunds to call a number, which was often impossible to reach. BA has long been a villain for this column’s readers, but on this occasion many leapt to its defence.

“I phoned BA, got through in under two minutes, had a full cash refund offered within a few minutes and, notwithstanding the following day was a bank holiday, received the money in my bank account two days later,” one reader emailed me.

This prize is based on an interview Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, gave to the FT in 2003, in which he told passengers who asked for their money back because their granny was ill: “What part of no refund don’t you understand?”

One FT reader told me that after weeks of waiting for his Ryanair refund, he contacted the airline via Twitter. “I duly received an email which I foolishly thought might contain the details of my refund.” Instead, it had a voucher attached. “If I did not want this voucher then I should click on the link for a full refund. Guess where that took me? Yes, to the Ryanair page where you could claim YOUR VOUCHER.”

The rules do not require airlines to refund money if the passenger’s granny is ill, but they do require a prompt refund when flights are cancelled. Ryanair told me that anyone who didn’t want a voucher would get their money “once this unprecedented crisis is over”.

So the Granny Award goes, fittingly, to Ryanair, for its failure to know the answer to the question: “Which part of the law don’t you understand?”

This goes to Air France-KLM for palming off an FT reader by saying that a number of EU member states had asked the European Commission to amend the rule that passengers have a right to their money back. Some governments have indeed made this request, but the Commission has said no.

But what clinched the prize was the airline telling the customer that “in the Netherlands, the Minister of Infrastructure & Water Management, who has responsibility for transport, instructed the Transport Inspectorate to accept that airlines do not have to refund the ticket price to passengers” — despite the clarity of the EU law to the contrary.

I had hoped to present Air France-KLM with a proper trophy of a brass neck but, with factory closures, this has not been possible, so I hope they will accept a voucher instead.

After coronavirus and Ghosn: Renault and Nissan plot their future

‘This is the last roll of the dice. If this doesn’t work, the companies won’t survive on their own’

When Nissan and Renault set out to make their first mass-market electric car a decade ago, early ambitions of collaboration drained away amid infighting between the groups. The resulting Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe shared only a single common part.

“No street artist in Paris will ever say the ‘Mona Lisa’ is better than his own painting,” Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s chief operating officer, told the Financial Times over video link this week. “It is the same with engineers: no engineer will say that the other engineer is better than me.”

Now as the carmakers announce their latest attempt to reboot their fractured alliance and weather the economic storm, past efforts at close co-operation are being unwound.

A new “leader-follower” system puts one group in charge of the production of particular models and regions in an attempt to play to each company’s strengths.

Jean-Dominique Senard, Renault’s chairman, agrees that the previous attempts to divide work between the businesses led to “a tremendous amount of mess in terms of going back and forth in meetings and all the rest where they decide nothing”.

He added: “It has paralysed the company.”

In the broader restructuring, Nissan and Renault are to scale back models, close factories and lay off workers. They are attempting to cut $5bn in fixed costs and plan to shed at least 27,500 jobs in the coming years. Both companies are looking at cutting back production capacity by about 20 per cent to a combined 8.7m vehicles a year by 2024.

The alliance has also attempted to slay the ghost of Carlos Ghosn, who led the group that also includes Mitsubishi, for two decades with a vision of building an untouchable global behemoth.

If it works, the alliance, which was once the car industry’s largest, will come through the current crisis intact. If not, a split seems all but inevitable, forcing them to find new partners — or acquirers.

“This is the last roll of the dice,” said one person close to alliance management. “They have tried every option. If this doesn’t work, the three member companies just won’t survive on their own.”

While the businesses were struggling before the global pandemic took hold, Covid-19 has stripped away any pretence that the companies can survive alone in an industry where the largest players are still bulking up.

The full merger long envisioned by Mr Ghosn is off the table. His audacious sales targets and an obsession with “being first on the podium, irrespective of whether customers were willing to pay” to make the sales profitable have been ditched, Clotilde Delbos, Renault’s interim chief executive, told investors.

“Now we have faced reality, we do not want to be on top of the world. What we want is to have a sustainable, profitable company,” she said. “It’s a complete change of goals.”

Alliance leaders carved out the strategy in less than six months, flying between Paris and Yokohama once a month before switching to weekly Zoom video calls when global travel became impossible.

“Look, we’ve been here before and we could be here again, wondering if it’s the last chance for the alliance. But this is serious, we know we have to become profitable,” said a board member at one of the companies.

But people inside both businesses say significant hurdles remain, not least governments in both France and Japan — and question whether the new approach is a clean break from the past or merely the latest effort to paper over the cracks.

For the two companies struggling to stem the cash drain caused by the global halt to car sales, executives say the new framework is the “best available option” for the alliance to slash fixed costs of plants and other investments in underperforming markets.

While the leader-follower model essentially means Nissan’s retreat from Europe and Renault’s retreat from Asia, the strategy saves both companies the painful and costly process of negotiating a complete exit from the regions with dealers and government officials. 

“The main objective is to avoid duplication of investment. But there is no magic solution beyond that,” said one person close to Nissan’s management. “This does not ensure that the alliance will develop and grow from here.” 

Beyond the cost-cutting exercise, the strategy requires a fundamental change in mindset for employees used to how things were done during the Ghosn era. The new regime will also part with a pay-oriented culture where employees were rewarded for hitting financial targets. “That involves pain and it takes time,” said a senior official inside the alliance. 

Mr Gupta said: “You have to change their mindset from volume to value. This change of mindset around the world, including our dealers, is really important.”

Mr Senard also sought to draw a line under the target-based culture of the Ghosn-era: “I’m fed up with these false targets and synergies that dance around in the air in a show where at the end of the day nobody understands where they are. And they end up nowhere because the process is not the right one.”

Representatives for Mr Ghosn defended his performance and management of the alliance, saying he could not “be responsible for the state of the company that he hasn’t run for 18 months”.

The strategy overhaul also comes at a period of leadership change at both Nissan and Renault. The French carmaker’s incoming chief executive Luca de Meo has yet to start after leaving Volkswagen, while Nissan is still experimenting with a troika management team led by chief executive Makoto Uchida.

Amid the boardroom shake-up, people close to Nissan said both Mr Uchida and Mr Senard have yet to develop a solid relationship with the top management of its third partner, Mitsubishi Motors, the only member not to announce a new midterm plan last week. 

Within the alliance, there remain doubts whether the interests of the three partners are aligned. “It’s all done with an eye to what’s best for Nissan and none of it has to do with what’s best for the alliance,” said one person close to the Japanese group. 

Hard choices lie ahead, fraught with political considerations as well as business rationale. Talks are continuing over the transfer of dealer networks and other services as the alliance divides itself by region.

The French state, which is Renault’s largest shareholder and is close to signing a €5bn loan guarantee for the carmaker, is also trying to walk a line between allowing the group to cut costs and keeping unions and the public on side. At Renault’s Maubeuge factory in the north of the country, protesters accusing Mr Senard of treachery marched on Saturday against the planned job reductions, of which 4,600 are to be in France.

Elsewhere, discussions between the pair to build two Renault models in Nissan’s UK Sunderland site, reported in the FT last month, were temporarily halted as it became clear it was not feasible to push ahead in the political climate, according to two people.

The two sides, who fundamentally agree on the industrial logic of the move, intend to restart discussions “within weeks”, one of the people said. The other said it was too early to put any timeline on the talks beginning again.

But both companies now say the hard choices have to be made — this crisis is too deep to allow the luxury of internecine warfare.

“There is no way back,” said Mr Senard. “There is no return because we can’t afford it.”

Germany’s savings banks under fire from European watchdogs

ECB and BaFin call for sweeping changes to banking group’s deposit protection scheme

Europe’s main financial regulators are on a collision course with Germany’s dominant savings banks as a push to reform their deposit protection scheme threatens to shake up decades-old privileges at the country’s largest and most politically entrenched banking group.

The European Central Bank and the German financial regulator BaFin have for much of this year been urging the savings banks to overhaul the sector’s safety net that is meant to protect individual lenders from collapse, but have so far met stiff opposition.

With 50m clients, Germany’s 377 municipally-owned Sparkassen and their larger siblings, the crisis-prone Landesbanken, are the dominant force in the country’s banking system, controlling a quarter of its banking assets between them. Sparkassen deposits total €742bn.

While most of Germany’s Sparkassen are individually too small to be among the banks supervised by the ECB, the central bank has responsibility for checking that national deposit insurance schemes are sufficiently robust and there is a level playing field across the bloc.

Supervisors have long been concerned about the lack of clarity over who is responsible for stepping in to support a public sector bank in Germany when it runs into difficulties, said a person briefed on the matter.

“This has been a known issue for years,” a different person familiar with the discussion said, adding that German financial watchdogs ignored the problem because of political lobbying from the Sparkassen. “This issue is really a case in point why a pan-European regulator is necessary,” this person said. 

Should regulators ultimately lose confidence in the Sparkassen protection scheme, they might strip the group of one of its most important institutional privileges.

While each Sparkasse is a legally independent entity, the whole group is still treated like an integrated, nationwide bank by regulators in one important aspect — each Sparkasse does not have to put equity aside for loans to other members of the group. “This privilege has been an important competitive advantage for the Sparkassen sector,” a former regulatory official said.

The issue also has a wider political sensitivity because the Sparkassen have long lobbied the German government against proposals for a pan-eurozone deposit insurance scheme, which they fear would supersede their own support system.

Since the 1970s, the Sparkassen have operated an “institutional protection scheme” that is designed to prevent the collapse of an individual lender, rather than just to guarantee clients’ deposits in case of the demise of a Sparkasse.

Other countries that have similar institutional protection schemes between groups of co-operative and savings banks include Spain and Austria. 

The German system is highly fragmented as it consists of 13 different regional funds. Moreover, the protection scheme does not act automatically should a member run into trouble. Instead, it only comes to the rescue if a qualified majority of its other members agrees to do so.

“The fact that there is no binding obligation to act is a fundamental design flaw,” the former regulatory official said, adding that nobody can rely for sure on the scheme.

In a letter to Helmut Schleweis, the president of the German Savings Banks Association, the ECB and BaFin pointed out shortcomings in the deposit insurance system, people familiar with the letter told the Financial Times. The contents of the letter were first reported by Handelsblatt. 

The regulators are calling for sweeping changes like the creation of an additional rescue fund on top of the 0.8 per cent of deposits the Sparkassen is building by 2024. 

The regulators worry that the institutional protection scheme operated by the Sparkassen has not been properly stress-tested to ensure it has enough money to handle a crisis. 

The German Savings Banks Association has dismissed the regulatory demands. “Over the past 50 years, not a single client lost his deposits or needed to be reimbursed,” the association said in a statement, adding that it was confident that it could convince regulators of its point of view. The association declined to comment on details, pointing to the confidentiality of the talks. 

The ECB is expected to communicate its final decision to the German savings banks this summer after central bank officials made little progress during months of discussions with sector representatives, according to one person briefed on the talks.

The ECB and BaFin declined to comment. 

Jan Pieter Krahnen, professor of finance at Goethe University in Frankfurt, welcomed the regulatory scrutiny. “The Sparkassen’s institutional protection schemes has evolved over decades but has become outdated,” he said, adding that it needed to be revamped urgently.

Mr Krahnen pointed to the costly bailouts for publicly-owned Landesbanken HSH Nordbank and NordLB, which cost the German taxpayer billions of euros. “These examples show that the institutional protection scheme does not work properly.”

Swiss debate on corporate liability comes to head

Parliament considers new ethical regulations for some of the world’s biggest companies

Some of the world’s biggest companies, from Nestlé to Glencore, face the prospect of tougher ethical regulations in Switzerland, as a four-year debate over business practices comes to a head in parliament this week.

From Tuesday, MPs will have less than three weeks to thrash out a compromise to a proposed change to the law brought by the Responsible Business Initiative (KVI) .

The proposal will make businesses in Switzerland legally liable and “guilty until proven innocent” for abuses of human and environmental rights anywhere in their supply chains around the world — whether at subsidiaries or third-party companies. 

The Responsible Business Initiative emerged in 2016 as a result of Switzerland’s direct democratic process garnering the support of more than 100,000 citizens, the threshold for triggering a referendum. 

Under Switzerland's constitution, the country’s lawmakers have the right to formulate an alternative to the popular proposal. If the initiative’s sponsors agree to the parliamentary compromise, the proposal becomes law. If the initiative’s sponsors do not, then their original proposal is submitted for a popular referendum.

So far, however, factions within parliament have not even been able to agree themselves, meaning the stage is now set for a high-stakes nationwide vote on the most radical formulation of the law.

“It’s an extremely hot issue,” said Mark Pieth, a legal professor at the University of Basel’s Institute of Governance. “It’s at a tipping point and if industry were sensible they would push for a compromise [in parliament] next week.”

Critics say the proposed legal changes would impose crippling legal liabilities on businesses for abuses far beyond their control, and turn Switzerland into a centre for activists trying to “blackmail” some of the world’s biggest multinationals. 

Supporters meanwhile argue the move will put Switzerland at the forefront of a global change. It will force businesses to account for their conduct, and prevent the Alpine country from becoming an international pariah as investors and other developed nations alter their ideas about good business practice. 

Countries across the developed world have begun to put in place wide-ranging laws to enforce greater corporate, social and ethical responsibility. Switzerland has so far resisted greater legislation, in part because the introduction of such rules could have serious implications for businesses around the world.

Switzerland is a global hub for the trading of commodities and home to some of the world’s biggest multinationals in industries from finance to pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs to fashion. Swiss companies such as Nestlé, Roche, Glencore, Credit Suisse, Richemont and Syngenta, with subsidiaries across the globe, will all be caught by whatever option Bern chooses.

“Switzerland will be left behind if it does not legislate on this,” said Vincent Kaufmann, chief executive of the Ethos Foundation, a leading Swiss ethical investment adviser. “You have regulation like this going on everywhere — such as the modern slavery act in the UK. We are already late in Switzerland. If we adopt nothing we will be lagging. The proposals now will certainly put us ahead of other countries, but this is the direction of the trend. And since Switzerland was the host country for the universal declaration of human rights, I think we can afford to be ahead of the pack.”

Polling indicates that support in Switzerland for the original, hardline text of the KVI is high: an independent poll conducted last month found that 78 per cent of respondents were supportive of enforcing the new requirements on big business. 

“It is not a left-right struggle as you might think,” said Mr Pieth. “There are already 120 Swiss NGOs which have come out in support of it, including all of the country’s churches. People generally seem to be in favour. The attitude among a lot of ordinary Swiss is that ‘we are fed up of our territory being misused by these big anonymous international businesses like Glencore. We don’t need that money’.” 

* Cellnex PT Raised to 65 euros from 50 euros at Morgan Stanley

* Maersk Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 7,964.96 kroner

* Nokia ADRs Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT $5.50

* Nokia Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 5 euros

* Pearson Raised to Buy at Goldman; PT 678 pence

>>> Down

* British Land Cut to Sell at AlphaValue

* Cineworld Cut to Underweight at Morgan Stanley; PT 60 pence

* Europcar Cut to Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; PT 2 euros

* GCP Student Living Cut to Hold at Berenberg; PT 130 pence

* HSBC Holdings Cut to Hold at Jefferies; PT 400 pence

* Johnson Matthey Cut to Hold at Liberum

* Neste Cut to Equal-Weight at Barclays; PT 33 euros

* S Immo Cut to Reduce at Baader Helvea; PT 18 euros

* Temenos Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank; PT 150 Swiss francs

* Victrex Cut to Hold at Liberum

>>> Initiation

* Aena Reinstated Buy at Deutsche Bank; PT 157 euros

>>> Call

* British Land Downgraded on London Office Pessimism: AlphaValue

* Europcar Debt Concern Rises With Profits Elusive: Morgan Stanley

* GCP Student Cut at Berenberg on Reduced Enrolment, WeWork Risks

* Greece, CEE Stocks To Benefit From EU Fund: Morgan Stanley

* StanChart Raised, HSBC Cut as Jefferies Switches HK Preference

* Victrex, Johnson Matthey Cut as Liberum Sees Vehicle Demand Risk

Nikkei +0.84% Hang Seng +3.51% CSI +2.68% Shanghai +2.16% Shenzen +3.08%

Eur$ 1.1140 CNH 7.1303 CNY 7.1186 JPY 107.56 GBP 1.2386 CHF 0.9604 RUB 69.8075 WTI$ 35.32 -0.48%

S&P +0.10% S&P -0.03% Nasdaq -0.10% EuroStoxx +1.31% FTSE +1.23% Dax +1.32% SMI Closed

Macro :

- Goldman Rolls Back Its Pessimistic Outlook for American Stocks

- Swiss Recovery Needs Foreign Trade, Economy Minister Tells TA

- U.K. Advisers Warn Lockdown Easing Is Too Soon, Sky News Reports

- Goldman Says Options Show Top U.S. Bank Dividends May Fall 30%

- U.K. Must Be ‘More Realistic’ on Trade Talks, EU’s Barnier Says

Keep an eye on :

- ABN NA : ABN Amro Calls to Redeem EU1.5b Tier 2 Instrument

- ACPH BB : Acacia Pharma Announces Debt for Equity Swap with Cosmo

- AGS BB : Belgian Supreme Court Dismisses Bondholder Claims Against Ageas

- AIR FP : Airbus Set to Reassess Output After Virus Shatters Jet Demand

- AMZN US : U.K. Set to Force Websites to Collect Overseas Sales VAT: FT

- ATL IM : Italy to Solve Autostrade Impasse Soon, Gualtieri Says

- AVST LN : Avast Eyes Blue-Chip Fame as Remote Work Boosts Software Sales

- BATS LN : BAT Appeals to Court After South Africa Digs In on Tobacco Ban

- BMW GY : Germany to Propose 5B Euro Bonus Pool to Boost Car Buying: Rtrs

- CA FP : Carrefour Sets Issue Price Optional Stock Dividend at EU12.19

- CYAD BB : Celyad’s Cyad-101 Shows No Evidence of Graft-Versus-Host-Disease

- COPN SW : Acacia Pharma Announces Debt for Equity Swap with Cosmo

- DAI GY : Germany to Propose 5B Euro Bonus Pool to Boost Car Buying: Rtrs

- EUCR FP : Europcar Debt Concern Rises With Profits Elusive: Morgan Stanley

- BAER SW : Julius Baer to Target More Rich Asian Customers, CEO Tells FuW

- LHA GY : EU Commission Confirms Agreement With Germany on Lufthansa: DPA

- MTW LN : Mattioli Woods Sees Earnings Ahead of Expectations

- MJD LN : MJ Hudson Group Sees Earnings in Line With Market Expectations

- MB IM : Tycoon Del Vecchio Asks ECB to Raise Mediobanca Stake Up to 20%

- NHY NO : Northvolt, Norsk Hydro to Build Car Battery Recycling Plant: FT

- POG LN : Gold Miner Petropavlovsk Explores Merger With UGC: Telegraph

- RNO FP : Renault Is Prepared to Produce Nissan Cars in Europe: Nikkei

- SAN FP : Mylan Defeats Sanofi Patents on Lantus SoloStar Device

- SAN FP : Sanofi Halts Patient Recruits in Hydroxychloroquine Trials: Rtrs

- SHB LN : Capco to Buy 26.3% Stake in Shaftesbury for GBP436 Million

- SHL GY : Siemens Healthineers Gets FDA’s EUA for Virus Tests (Correct)

- SOFF NO : Solstad Offshore Gets Restructuring Approvals From Bondholders

- SCMN SW : After Latest Outage Swisscom CEO Creates Task Force: SB

- TED LN : Ted Baker Says It’s Preparing for Placing, Open Offer

- TKA GY : Thyssenkrupp, India’s Tata May Revisit Partnership: WiWo

- TKA| GY : Cinven Fears Holding Outsized Thyssenkrupp Elevator Stake: FT

- VIV FP : Tencent in Talks to Buy Warner Music Stake

- VOW3 GY : Germany to Propose 5B Euro Bonus Pool to Boost Car Buying: Rtrs