>>> Missoni will consider IPO in four-five years (translated)

Missoni will consider IPO in four-five years (translated)
16 JUN 2018
Missoni, the family-owned Italian fashion house that sold a 41.2% to state-backed private equity firm Fondo Strategico Italiano (FSI) yesterday 15 June, will consider an IPO on the Italian Stock Exchange in four-five years, Italian language daily Il Sole 24 Ore reported. The report cited Creative Director Angela Missoni.

The Missoni family continues to retain control of the company with a 58.8% stake.

The report added that Missoni has EUR 150m turnover, 75% of which is generated abroad.

>>> Borsalino receives new offer from Haeres Equita (translated)

Borsalino receives new offer from Haeres Equita (translated)
16 JUN 2018
Haeres Equita has made a new offer for Borsalino, the Italian millinery company in administration, Italian-language daily Il Messaggero report reported. The report cited a statement noting that the administrators said that the offer would serve as the basis for a new auction for the asset.

The report noted that Haeres, which is owned by Italian-Swiss entrepreneur Philippe Camperio already manages Borsalino's production facilities. Previous reports noted that Haeres already owns the brand, for which it paid EUR 18m.

The Verge : Here’s how Elon Musk might use rocket thrusters on the new Tesla Roa

Here’s how Elon Musk might use rocket thrusters on the new Tesla Roadster

It may not be exactly street legal

Last week, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced bold plans to combine the technologies of his two biggest companies by placing rocket thrusters on future specialized models of Tesla’s Roadster. The thrusters won’t actually combust, according to Musk; instead, they will expel highly pressurized cold air, giving the Tesla an extra boost in acceleration. It’s a move the might technically work, but it also baffles industry experts and engineers: the thrusters won’t be very efficient and probably won’t be street legal.

Specifically, Musk is talking about incorporating a key piece of hardware from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket — a tank known as a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, or a COPV. These bottles are made out of a thin metal liner that’s wrapped in carbon fibers, and they’re a great way to store a lot of pressurized air in a very small space. They’re also fairly lightweight, which is why many rocket manufacturers like using them to help pressurize their rockets.

“IS IT AN OPTION? YES. IS IT A WISE OPTION? ABSOLUTELY NOT.”
On the Falcon 9, the COPVs sit inside the propellant tanks and keep them pressurized during flight. As the rocket climbs to space, the propellants rapidly empty from the tanks, and it’s the job of the COPVs to replace those liquids with helium so that the tanks maintain their shape. The compressed air inside these bottles isn’t being used to propel the rocket directly. Some automobiles use COPVs, too: buses and trucks use them for storing compressed natural gas, and cars with hydrogen fuel cells also rely on COPVs. But the air inside these tanks is used as fuel for the motors inside these cars.

With the Roadster, Musk has a different idea: he wants to use them as thrusters, where they blow air out of the back end or front of the car to help propel and stop the vehicle. It could potentially blow out the sides, too to help with turning at high speeds or in tight corners. Commercial cars have never used COPVs this way before, and the idea raises a lot of questions about safety and efficiency.


For one, the Tesla Roadster already accelerates and brakes incredibly quickly, and the new Roadster is supposedly one of the fastest cars in the world, with a 0–60 time of 1.9 seconds. It’s so fast that there’s vigorous debate about whether any modern tires can ever go faster. So the COPVs would need to blow out a lot of cold air at super high speeds to push even faster acceleration or deceleration times. That will require a lot of power and some fairly large tanks to have any kind of discernible effect against some real limits of physics. And if truly affecting speed is the goal, these thrusters would be extremely loud, prone to extreme temperature changes, and possibly put other cars on the road at risk. “Is it an option? Yes,” Sam Abuelsamid, a senior research analyst at Navigant, an advisory firm for the auto industry, tells The Verge. “Is it a wise option? Absolutely not. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.”

What an average COPV tank looks like. Image: NASA
Many car manufacturers have looked at ways to use compressed air to power vehicles, though. For example, in 2013, French car manufacturers Peugeot and Citroën announced plans to build a hybrid vehicle that used pressurized air as a source of energy, though the development has been put on hold. These designs typically work by releasing air from a container in a controlled manner to drive an engine’s turbines or pistons. Compressed air cars are hailed as environmentally friendly, since they don’t burn gasoline. But the downside is they’re not super efficient.

For one, compressing air takes a lot of energy. Musk claims that the air will be replenished in the COPVs using an electric pump, which would draw from the Tesla’s power pack. But experts argue that could significantly drain the battery voltage needed to drive the car. “It would surely eat away at the energy stored in the battery,” Dave Sullivan, a manager and product analyst at AutoPacific, an automotive consulting firm, tells The Verge. “The range calculation or the test cycle for the range of an electric vehicle does not take into account this idea.”

IT ALL DEPENDS ON HOW EFFECTIVE MUSK WANTS THE COPVS TO BE
Of course, it all depends on how effective Musk wants the COPVs to be. Cold gas thrusters have a relatively low specific impulse, which means they need a lot more fuel — or air, in this case — to get a decent amount of thrust. This makes them good for satellites in space, which don’t require a whole lot of thrust to maneuver in a vacuum. But on the road, with air resistance and tire friction, cold gas isn’t as powerful. So the Tesla COPVs will have to be large and bulky to store enough air needed to have any kind of major effect. “It seems like to have a thruster that’s going to have a meaningful amount of energy, it’s going to take a pretty decent amount of size and capacity in the tank to be of any real performance benefit,” says Abuelsamid. (Musk did say the COPVs would take up a good chunk of the car, turning the four seater into a two seater.)

The company could potentially fill the COPVs to a higher pressure to save on space, but the tanks would need to be much stronger and heavier to be considered safe for passengers. The more pressure you want in a commercial car, the sturdier your tanks need to be. The COPVs that Musk wants to use are upgraded ones certified for the Falcon 9 rockets that will carry crews to the International Space Station. “This is by far the most advanced pressure vessel developed by humanity,” he said at a press conference before a SpaceX launch in May. “It’s nuts.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Image: SpaceX
Still, the idea does bring many safety issues to mind. While crucial for spaceflight, these COPVs have also been a source of anxiety for SpaceX. In September 2016, a COPV caused a Falcon 9 rocket to explode on a Florida launchpad while the vehicle was being fueled for a test. SpaceX claimed that friction between the propellants in the engine tank and the COPV was to blame. The super cold liquid oxygen that SpaceX uses for its Falcon 9 reacted badly with the carbon fiber that was wrapped around the COPV.

SpaceX has significantly upgraded its COPVs since then, and any bottles put into a Tesla won’t be surrounded by cryogenic oxygen. Still, when air is released quickly from a highly pressurized bottle, it does experience extreme temperature changes. The faster that air is released, the colder the COPV will become. So if the Tesla is going to blow down these bottles quickly, they could easily reach super frigid temperatures, which would make the COPVs brittle and less structurally stable. Tesla could combat this by blowing the bottles down more slowly, but then the thrusters won’t have as big of an impact on the car.

“I CAN ONLY IMAGINE THIS WOULD BE EXTREMELY LOUD AND NOT BE STREET LEGAL.”
And depending on how fast the air is blasting, the thrusters could pose risks to other cars on the road. If the COPVs are going to have any significant force on the Tesla, they’ll also have a significant force on the cars surrounding the Tesla. Cold gas thrusters can get to a specific impulse of about 70 seconds. That means the gas leaving the COPV could reach a little more than 1,500 miles per hour. So the air has the potential of sending fast-moving debris at a nearby car or even pushing on surrounding vehicles.

But even if Tesla figures out workarounds for all of this stuff, there’s the noise to consider. Releasing lots of highly compressed air is loud. There are regulations in place about the amount of pass-by noise a car can have, and it’s doubtful the thruster-outfitted Tesla will meet those. “Gasoline vehicles can’t make too much noise,” says Sullivan. “I can only imagine this would be extremely loud and not be street legal.” Musk did say the car is not recommend for urban environments.

So adding COPVs to a Tesla is doable, though they probably won’t be allowed on any major roads given the risks. Still, it’s a whole lot of complicated machinery to make an already very fast car go slightly faster.

Barrons : Reeling From Netflix, Big Media Turns to Mergers

Reeling From Netflix, Big Media Turns to Mergers

There’s a great irony to the merger craze that has swept the media world. The deals are all being driven by a desperate attempt to catch up with Netflix, even though a few years ago any rich and savvy media company could have acquired the upstart for what would now seem a relatively small sum.

In 2013, just as Netflix (ticker: NFLX) was launching House of Cards, its first original show, the streaming pioneer had a market value of just $10 billion. Even a confident Netflix board would have struggled to turn down an offer of $20 billion to $30 billion.

Barron’s speculated about a Comcast (CMCSA) and Netflix merger 18 months ago, when Netflix was still valued at a relatively cheap $52 billion. It never happened, of course.

Instead, media and telecom companies continued to spend big money on each other. Comcast bought the remainder of NBCUniversal for $17 billion in 2013, bringing its total outlay for the entertainment network to $47 billion. In 2014, Verizon Communications (VZ) laid out $130 billion to acquire the rest of Verizon Wireless that it didn’t already own from Vodafone Group (VOD.UK), and AT&T (T) agreed to pay $49 billion for DirecTV. Then, in 2016, Charter Communications (CHTR) paid $66 billion to buy pay-TV operators Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, only after Comcast failed in its own effort to acquire Time Warner Cable.

Fast forward a few years, and media companies are still in the same spot—chasing Netflix. Except now, Netflix is worth more than all of them, with a market capitalization of $170 billion.

The speed of Netflix’s ascent has been staggering. Since December, when Walt Disney (DIS) agreed to buy 21st Century Fox (FOXA) assets, Netflix has added $88 billion in market value. That gain alone easily outstrips the current value of CBS (CBS), Viacom (VIAB), Discovery (DISCA), and Dish Network (DISH) combined.

The panicked response is more mergers. On Thursday night, AT&T closed its $85 billion deal for Time Warner. Comcast and Walt Disney are locked in a bidding war for the Fox assets. A long dance between CBS and Viacom ended in litigation, leaving both parties searching for other partners.

There’s little reason to think these deals will change media’s destiny any more than the prior ones. To some degree, investors already share the skepticism. After a federal judge on Tuesday approved AT&T’s deal for Time Warner—essentially giving a green light to more consolidation—shares of Walt Disney, Comcast, and AT&T all initially slipped. Wall Street is worried the companies are going to overspend, without ample payoff.

There are alternatives to M&A. Tech firms, after all, invaded media’s world by taking organic risks and thinking outside the box, not through consolidation.

To some degree, media companies have gotten the message. Disney is finally playing hardball with Netflix, removing its content from the streaming company while building out its own direct-to-consumer platform. For the first time, ESPN content is now available without a cable subscription. Disney’s Netflix clone—an entertainment package with proprietary franchises like Star Wars and Pixar films—is due out next year.


But these experiments reveal the conflicts that legacy media faces in trying to build new businesses while protecting a still-profitable business model. ESPN+, the new sports streaming package, doesn’t include live coverage that’s on ESPN’s cable channels, a concession to the pay-TV providers that still pay large sums to Disney for the right to exclusive content.

Disney could face similar dilemmas in the future in deciding whether to launch a Pixar film on its streaming platform or at the box office. As they merge, media companies will have to navigate an even more complex maze of legacy interests.

The next time TBS’ Samantha Bee makes a controversial statement on her show, for instance, how will her new parent company, AT&T, react? The combined company now has more than just advertising revenue at stake. What happens when unhappy consumers also threaten to cancel their AT&T wireless service?

Pure-play Netflix doesn’t face those issues. The company essentially jettisoned its one legacy business—DVDs by mail—even when streaming still seemed like a niche business.


One company that’s been noticeably absent from the merger buzz is Verizon. The nation’s No. 1 wireless provider had an earlier dalliance with digital content—it acquired AOL and Yahoo’s core internet business in 2015 and 2017. But the company spent less than $10 billion combined on those deals.

Now, Verizon is doubling down on what it knows best. Earlier this month, the company said Hans Vestberg would succeed Lowell McAdam as CEO in August. Vestberg is Verizon’s president of global networks and its chief technology officer. The appointment is a clear message about Verizon’s future.

“We are experiencing unprecedented changes in the way users interact in the digital world, and we are racing ahead to remain at the forefront of technology, connectivity, and mobility,” Vestberg said in a news release about the leadership changes.

One word left out of the lengthy announcement? Content.

“I think what Verizon is doing, and it might not be a bad approach, is sticking to its knitting,” says Jennifer Fritzsche, a Wells Fargo analyst who rates Verizon at Outperform. “Their whole marketing messaging is about their map and quality of the network. And they’re putting their capital behind that message.” So, as AT&T and Time Warner are focused on integrating their very different cultures, Verizon will be building out its 5G network.

That’s an opportunity for investors. Verizon is now the least risky way to play trends in media. As media companies move to digital streams, Verizon’s pipes—wireless and wired—grow in importance. Cisco estimates over three-fourths of global mobile traffic will be video by 2021, up from 60% in 2016.

Verizon’s 5G plans, meanwhile, are about much more than faster speeds. The company hopes to rival existing wireline services by offering 5G service, as a broadband replacement, to 30 million homes in the coming years. The product is scheduled to roll out in three to five cities later this year.

Despite its 5G lead, investors don’t give Verizon anything close to a tech-like multiple. The stock trades at just 10.5 times earnings estimates for the next 12 months, versus 118 times for Netflix and 15 for Apple (AAPL). It’s the cheapest Verizon has been since the financial crisis, according to FactSet, and below a 10-year average of 13.3 times. The stock yields 4.9%, putting it in the top 20 among companies in the S&P 500 index.

The yield offers a comfortable seat from which to watch one of the year’s best shows: media’s desperate journey to catch up with tech.

Barrons : Hard-Hit European Bank Shares Merit a Buy

Hard-Hit European Bank Shares Merit a Buy

Italian politics is knotty. But lately, it has become as twisted as a bowl of spaghetti bolognese, providing a chance to buy beaten-down European banking shares that will likely jump when the clouds over the sector evaporate.

Following elections in March, the country was left without a government until June 1 because no single party took a majority in the parliament. The uncertainty about when a new government would be formed was exacerbated by mounting Italian government debt and concerns that surging populism might lead to the country ditching the euro as its currency. Italy is the third-largest economy in the euro zone. A recent report from Peter Tchir at Academy Securities titled, “Italy—Debt Only a Mother and the ECB Could Love!” sums up the bearish view of many on Wall Street.

So negative is the consensus that bank stocks have taken a beating. The iShares MSCI Italy exchange-traded fund (ticker: EWI), which holds a basket of Italian shares including 30% or so financials, has lost more than 9% this month through June 14. Meanwhile, the iShares MSCI Europe Financials ETF (EUFN), which owns financial stocks from across Europe, lost almost 8% in that period. The stocks fell “because the banks hold a lot of sovereign debt,” says Marc Halperin, senior portfolio manager at Federated Investors in New York. Specifically, they own Italian debt, which looks increasingly risky.

Is it time to buy? Halperin thinks the negativity is overdone. The European Central Bank has “quite a lot more Italian debt than any individual European bank,” he says. The ECB has regularly purchased billions of euros of Italian government bonds as part of its quantitative easing program. He also notes that Italian commercial banks are fast shedding their nonperforming loans to clean up the balance sheets. Simultaneously, they’re increasing their consumer and small/medium business lending businesses.

“A number of them have moved up their targets to be on a par with other European peers by one year to the end of 2020,” says Halperin. Put simply, Italian banks will soon be as strong as the rest of Europe’s banks.

“Everyone now is suddenly an Italian bond expert,” says J.C. Parets, CEO of All Star Charts and a specialist in analyzing stock price patterns. “When you talk about the fundamentals of these banks, then people get really scared, but there comes a certain point where that horribleness gets priced in.” Put simply, the bad news is out, and the stocks have adjusted to reflect that reality.


Parets is bullish on the entire European bank sector. He suggests buying the iShares MSCI Europe Financials, as long as the ETF is above $21; it’s currently at $21.56. He sees potential that the price will break through the 2014 higharound $26. And above that level, Parets sees little resistance to further gains.

Some banks—both inside and outside Italy—have fared worse than others, and so will likely see a disproportionate bounce as the sector recovers. Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) and Banco Santander (SAN), plus Italy’s UniCredit (UCG.Italy) and France’s BNP Paribas (BNP.France), are down by 12% to 20%, versus nearly 8% for the iShares MSCI Europe Financials ETF, which holds all three stocks, as well as others.

“The weight of the evidence is that the track of least resistance for stocks is higher, and that includes the European banks,” Parets contends.

NY Post : Facebook is no longer the world’s front page

Since the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook has come under fire for the rise of so-called “fake-news,” an issue the company is correcting, albeit with mixed success. Despite its efforts, the social network has seen a significant drop in people using it for news, as messaging apps, including Facebook-owned WhatsApp, become more prevalent for news consumption.

The Digital News Report notes that social media and in particular Facebook, has seen a sharp drop in news consumption globally, as well as in the US “News consumption via Facebook is down 9 percentage points in the United States and 20 points with younger groups,” Nic Newman, Research Associate, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism wrote in the report’s overview.

Newman continued: “In our urban Brazilian sample the use of Facebook for news has fallen to 52 percent — a 17 point change from 2016.”

The report was quick to add that the decline is not universal, with Facebook news usage rising in countries like Malaysia and the Czech Republic, “but in most countries the picture is one of decline.”

Facebook recently announced it was funding news shows on its Facebook Watch platform, including one from Fox News, known as “Fox News Update.”

Part of the decline is due to concerns about privacy and the often contentious nature of debate on the platform, but also a change to Facebook’s algorithms, which have de-prioritized news in users News Feeds.

Following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the changes, which included showing fewer viral videos, resulted in “reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.”

A source familiar with Facebook’s thinking that these efforts, which Facebook outlined in a blog post earlier this year, said that Facebook will work to ensure that users see “news from publications the community rates as trustworthy,” news they find both informative and relevant.

The research was done by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at the University of Oxford and was based on a YouGov survey of “over 74,000 online news consumers in 37 countries including the US and UK.”

WhatsApp’s rise in news
While concerning for Facebook, the findings from the report are not all bad, especially as WhatsApp becomes more important in how people share and consume news.

The study found that average usage for news on WhatsApp has doubled in four years, to 16 percent. The discussion about news on WhatsApp is also more significant, with 24 percent of respondents more likely to “take part in a private discussion about news” and 16 percent likely to “take part in a group set up specifically to discuss a news topic.”

“Somehow WhatsApp seems a lot more private,” said a female between the age of 20 and 29, who was part of a focus group. “Like it’s kind of a hybrid between texting and social media. Whereas in Facebook, for some reason it just feels like it’s public. Even if you’re in Messenger.”

Other apps, such as Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, also see some usage for news, but significantly less than WhatsApp, as these services are not primarily focused on messaging.

Privacy concerns
WhatsApp prides itself on end-to-encryption and never showing users ads, something that has put it at odds with parent company Facebook, which generates the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Its privacy features may help explain why it has seen a large bump in news consumption.

“Privacy is an important issue for users and this partly explains the growth in use of messaging apps, as opposed to more open social networks,” Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Research Fellow, Reuters Institute wrote. “As noted in the Executive Summary, users in some ‘less free’ countries are more likely to think carefully before expressing their political views online.”

The study also noted that the rise of consumers paying for news has been maintained since the election, particularly as the crisis in fake news persists. “Last year’s significant increase in digital subscriptions in the United States (the so-called Trump Bump) has been maintained, while donations and donation-based memberships are growing in popularity,” the report reads.

The research noted that concerns about fake news persist, with 54 percent of those polled saying they were worried about this issue, in countries like the US, Brazil and Spain.

Trust in news stood at 44 percent, but only 34 percent of those surveyed say they trusted news found via search and just 23 percent trusted news found on social networks such as Facebook.

In October 2017, Zuckerberg asked for forgiveness for the ways the social network “was used to divide people rather than bring us together.”

“For those I hurt this year, I ask forgiveness and I will try to be better,” Zuckerberg wrote during the last night of Yom Kippur. “For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better. May we all be better in the year ahead and may you all be inscribed in the book of life.”

>>> US Gapping down

Gapping down
In reaction to disappointing earnings/guidance:

  • ROX -7.1%, FNSR -3.8%, ADBE -2.9%

Other news:

  • GNK -8.1% (commences public offering of common stock)
  • AI -8.1% (declares quarterly $0.375 per common share dividend, down from prior $0.55 per share)
  • CISN -6.9% (prices secondary offering by selling shareholders of $12 mln shares of common stock at $15.00 per share)
  • AFMD -6.1% (presents new interim data from Phase 1b dose escalation study evaluating AFM13 -- best response data from 18 patients confirms favorable safety profile and overall response rate of 89%)
  • GFF -3.2% (secondary offering by selling shareholders of 4,855,109 shares of its common stock at $18.00)
  • PSTG -3% (indicated lower on block trade pricing)
  • JCP -1.5% (estimates corporate aircraft assets impairment charge to be approx $50 mln)

Analyst comments:

  • CLDR -2.6% (initiated with Reduce rating at Nomura Instinet)
  • ATI -2.4% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
  • ROIC -1.1% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
  • LUV -0.9% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Argus)


>>> US Gapping up



Gapping up
In reaction to strong earnings/guidance:

  • GOOS +18.1%, SCHN +3.2%, JBL +1.7%

M&A news:

  • NXPI +2.4% (following reports of MOFCOM approval of NXPI / QCOM deal), QCOM +1.2%
  • TWX +1.7% (DOJ cleared AT&T deal)

Other news:

  • VSTM +11.8% (announced a registered sale to funds managed by Consonance Capital of 7,166,666 shares of the Company's common stock at a price of $6.00/share), RDY +6% (receives FDA approval for launch of Buprenorphine and Naloxone Sublingual Film in US)
  • HUYA +4.1% (recent IPO seeing continued momentum after today's 13% move to new all time highs)
  • MFIN +3.1% (Key Colony discloses 5.26% active stake)
  • IQ +2.8% (extending today's 17% move higher)
  • SRNE +2.1% (indicated higher after releasing Chairman/CEO letter with corp update - says evaluating strategic partnerships for some of assets in development)
  • BLUE +2.1% (reports new Data from Northstar studies of LentiGlobin)
  • DDR +1.2% (files mixed securities shelf offering)
  • MYL +1% (FDA approved first generic versions of Suboxone (buprenorphine and naloxone) sublingual film (applied under the tongue) for the treatment of opioid dependence)

Analyst comments:

  • TXMD +4.5% (initiated with a Overweight at JP Morgan)
  • AMD +1.3% (target raised to $21 at Cowen)
  • HDP +1.1% (initiated with Buy rating at Nomura Instinet)