TheChek News Flow

Adani Ports to Sell India Port Stake to Swiss Shipping Group MSC for $1.40B

The investment values the Vizhinjam port at $2.85 billion

Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone 532921 1.00%increase; green up pointing triangle has agreed to sell 49% of one of its Indian ports to Swiss-based Mediterranean Shipping Company for $1.40 billion, as it seeks to boost the cargo volumes through the Kerala-based transshipment hub.

The Indian port operator, part of energy and infrastructure conglomerate Adani Group, said Tuesday the deal with MSC is the single largest foreign private investment in Indian port infrastructure.

MSC, the world’s largest transport and logistics conglomerate, is making the investment in port concessionaire Adani Vizhinjam Port through its unit Terminal Investment.

The investment values the Vizhinjam port at $2.85 billion. It currently has a capacity of 1.6 million twenty-foot equivalent units—the standard unit of measurement for cargo capacity—and that is being expanded to 5.7 million TEUs by end-2028.

Adani Ports’ deal with MSC, which is subject to customary approvals, is likely to boost the port’s volume visibility and ramp-up, as well as strengthen its presence on East African trade routes, said the company. Adani Ports and MSC have two other major port partnerships.

The companies’ collaboration is poised enhance supply chain efficiencies and improve India’s access to global markets, Adani Ports Chief Executive Ashwani Gupta said.

Adani Ports’ shares are 0.7% higher at 1,789.00 rupees, equivalent to $18.90.

EU must choose which sectors to protect or face exodus, warns Covestro chief

Comments come as Abu Dhabi-owned German group announces investments of up to €4bn in China and the UAE

The EU must decide which industries to prioritise or face an exodus of energy-intensive sectors, warned the head of Covestro, as the German chemicals group announced investments of up to €4bn in China and the United Arab Emirates.

“There’s a political decision at one point in time to subsidise, strategically, value chains that you want to keep,” said Markus Steilemann, chief executive of the group owned by Abu Dhabi’s national oil company, in an interview.

Any moves by the EU to subsidise the local chemicals industry should, however, be seen as a “last resort”, he said. European chemicals companies were better advised to “leave behind” energy-intensive production to focus on innovation, Steilemann added.

His comments come as chemicals companies across Europe have been struggling with record-high energy prices and a tangle of complicated green legislation from the EU.

At the same time, Chinese competition has been putting pressure on demand for local products, stoking fears about plant closures and job cuts.

Even before the Iran conflict, European producers, battling vast oversupply of cheap chemicals from China, lodged a record number of anti-dumping complaints with the European Commission.

European chemical production fell by 3.2 per cent in the first quarter from a year before, while exports declined by 12.4 per cent, according to Cefic, which represents the bloc’s chemical industry.

In its first big investment since it was taken over by Adnoc, Covestro on Tuesday announced the construction of a new facility in China for MDI, a chemical used in foam-based products such as housing insulation. The company would also carry out a feasibility study for a similar plant in the UAE, it said, with the investment in each facility totalling up to €2bn.

The decision to open a plant in Shanghai was not a move “against Germany or for China”, Steilemann added, but one guided primarily by the region’s stronger growth prospects.

“The market in Europe, as well as the growth rates in Europe for these type of products and its value chains, the construction industry, the coal chain industry, housing and insulation simply do not have the size,” he said.

At the same time, high energy prices in Europe meant that energy-intensive chemicals produced locally were not competitive on global markets, Steilemann said.

“We do not have the overall right frameworks in Germany as well as in Europe,” said Steilemann, who has led Covestro since 2018.

The future of industry in Germany lay in capitalising on the country’s research expertise in chemicals to develop cutting-edge products, he argued.

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Household energy debts hit £4.8bn in the UK, adding more than £50 a year to the average bill

One of Britain’s largest household energy suppliers is calling for a portion of bad household energy debts to be pooled and sold to banks as part of a radical plan to deal with the £4.8bn debt pile weighing on the sector. 

Andrew Ward, chief executive of Scottish Power’s retail energy division, said securitising debts that poorer customers are deemed unable to pay would reduce pressure on suppliers, as well as the associated costs that are passed on to households each year. 

In a report published on Tuesday, the consultancy Baringa warns that the amount households owe to their energy suppliers is on course to reach £7bn by the end of 2027, which it argues would “deepen financial strain” across the country. 

“We need to stop going round in circles,” Ward said in an interview with the FT. “We are going to have to grasp this now. It has reached a point where it’s totally out of control.”

Scottish Power supplies gas and electricity to around five million homes and businesses, making it one of the largest suppliers in the country.

Household energy debt — defined as debt and arrears more than 91 days old — has climbed to £4.8bn across Britain as of the first quarter of this year, up from £1.1bn at the start of 2018, according to Ofgem figures.

The large increase follows steep hikes in bills after wholesale gas prices surged in 2021 after the pandemic, in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and again this year at the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran.

On Wednesday the price cap covering typical British household energy bills is set to rise by 13 per cent, with the rate per unit of electricity almost 60 per cent higher than in 2019.

Under Ofgem rules suppliers are allowed to charge all customers more to recoup the costs of bad debt from other households, which currently adds around £55 per year to the typical annual bill. Baringa says that could rise to £100 per household if debts reach £7bn as predicted.

Ward said suppliers were working to recover debts and stop the pile from increasing. But he said that a portion of households, accounting for an estimated one-third of the £4.8bn, were simply unable to pay. 

He argued that this portion of roughly £1.6bn should be securitised and sold to banks, who would then be paid back over around ten years at a cost of under £10 per household each year, according to the company’s analysis. Households would still face costs connected to the wider debt pile, but overall they should pay less than without securitisation.

“We can look for support from the financial sector and we can ringfence off this debt; we can take that financial support and spread it over a much longer period,” he said. “We need to step in, it’s got too big.”

Ward said he had raised the idea with Ofgem, the energy regulator, and the government’s energy department.

It is unclear how much support Scottish Power’s proposal has across the industry. Rival EDF has described energy debt levels as “out of control”, but one industry executive questioned this week whether it was worth tackling the backlog of debt while it was still growing.

Ward stressed that suppliers would need to show they had followed up on unpaid bills and knew which households genuinely could not afford to pay. 

Scottish Power’s parent group, Iberdrola, has previously used securitisation to help finance its Spanish electricity network after the government fixed revenues from households lower than network costs, and in the US to help repair networks after a storm. 

A government spokesman said tackling the “affordability crisis” was its “number one priority” and it had extended support for vulnerable households, while taking measures to stop bills rising further.

“Ofgem is considering a range of options to reduce energy debt in the system and we are working with them to understand the impacts of different approaches on consumers,” the spokesman added.

The one-off electric vehicle comes in tandem with a capsule clothing collections. The color red — and crocodiles — predominate.

FAST TIMES: How many crocodiles can one fit in a compact electric racing car? Exactly 290 of Lacoste‘s animal emblem have been incorporated into the one-off Alpine Lacoste A290 Rallye, which is to be unveiled Monday night in Paris.

One can find crocodiles on the steering wheel, padded door panels and as an unconventional rear spoiler.

The collaboration between Lacoste and the French carmaker also extends to a capsule collection spanning polos, T-shirts, lightweight outerwear, caps and key rings.

According to Eric Vallat, chief executive officer of Lacoste, the two companies share “the same culture of innovation, shaped since their origins by pioneers convinced that performance is born as much from ingenuity as from mastery of detail.”

Formula 1 driver Pierre Gasly joined Lacoste ambassador and actor Pierre Niney for the humorous promotional film, produced by Niney’s production company.

In the clip, Niney is pictured talking calmly on his cell phone as Gasly races around him in the Alpine car, squealing the tires. They ultimately switch roles, and let’s just say one emerges as the superior pilot.

Christened “Beware of the Crocodile,” the car boasts widened tracks, pronounced wheels, prominent wings, a spectacular diffuser and roof air intake.

Icy blue outside, the interior is red, “as though the driver were literally stepping inside the crocodile’s mouth,” according to Lacoste, which lent its emblematic petit piqué fabric for the seats and door panels.

The capsule collection drops on July 30 on Lacoste’s Europe e-commerce, at Lacoste flagships in Paris and London, and Lacoste stores in racing capitals Le Mans and Monaco.

More recently, Amazon has played a complicating role in Anthropic’s simmering conflict with the U.S. government. CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns with White House officials about security risks in Anthropic’s latest models. That call contributed to the White House prohibiting foreign nationals from using those models, called Mythos and Fable, which subsequently led Anthropic to suspend use of the models more broadly.

An Anthropic spokesperson said that their relationship with Amazon continues to grow. “Amazon is one of our most important partners, with more than 100,000 customers building with Claude on AWS,” a spokesperson said.

Tokens vs. Hours

Tokens are the standard measure of charging for models. Many Anthropic customers have been hit with steeper costs this year as Anthropic switched its pricing model from seat-based pricing that capped at $200 a month for some plans to usage-based pricing. Some customers have been eating those costs, while others have responded by adopting open-source models. (Amazon’s arrangement had been structured as a usage-based model, linked to compute hours, already).

But Amazon is one of Anthropic’s most important business partners. Their business arrangement dates back to 2023, when Amazon agreed to invest $4 billion in Anthropic, in exchange for Anthropic making AWS its primary cloud provider and using Amazon’s custom AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia.

AWS provided Anthropic with the computing power to build its models, along with a huge swath of new business customers. AWS debuted a new service in 2023: Bedrock, where its customers could access an array of AI models.

Anthropic had to pay handsomely for that relationship. When AWS sells Anthropic models, Anthropic not only pays AWS to use its cloud service but forks over half of what is left (its gross profits) to Amazon, The Information previously reported. Anthropic expected to pay cloud providers including Amazon $1.9 billion in 2026, according to the company’s projections from late last year.

Amazon employees have been worried for some time about the risk of Anthropic raising prices, according to a former employee.

The company has taken various measures to keep costs down for customers. Jiggar Thakkar, vice president of agentic AI for business at AWS, said its workplace assistant Quick for instance, allows customers to choose what kind of AI model they want for their task and then Amazon selects the model from the many models available on Bedrock.

“We picked the right model for the right task. And yes, cost is a consideration, speed is a consideration,” Thakkar said in an interview.

Intellectual Property

Anthropic’s reliance on Amazon to both host and sell its models has led to tensions. Anthropic was frustrated when Bedrock engineers didn’t add new Anthropic features fast enough to the Bedrock service. Amazon engineers, for their part, have been limited in how much they can customize Anthropic models.

Amazon struggled to create its own large language models that performed as well as Anthropic’s. AWS executives worry that too many Amazon products are powered by Anthropic rather than by Amazon’s own Nova models, which could lead to the perception that its products are just a wrapper on top of Anthropic’s technology.

Fears that Anthropic’s models might eventually become more expensive have prompted some engineers to distill them proactively, according to someone involved with the effort. Employees have also distilled models for other reasons, the person said.

Amazon has some rights to use Anthropic models to build small models for internal use cases, a source familiar with the arrangement said.

There have been times when Anthropic and Amazon have taken a collaborative approach to sharing intellectual property. Those include contributions Anthropic made to Trainium’s software, which helped make the chip easier for developers to use.

Apple Supplier Luxshare Set for Hong Kong’s Biggest Listing So Far This Year

Luxshare Precision Industry is gauging investor interest for a $3.1 billion Hong Kong listing

Apple supplier Luxshare Precision Industry is gauging investor interest for a US$3.1 billion Hong Kong listing that would be the city’s largest so far this year, amid a fundraising frenzy for technology-related stocks.

The Chinese company, which assembles iPhones and other Apple products, is among nine firms seeking to test investor demand for Hong Kong listings, underscoring a growing wave of mainland tech companies tapping capital pools in one of Asia’s biggest financial centers.

The contract manufacturer, which is already listed in Shenzhen, is set to offer 383.5 million shares at a maximum of 63.28 Hong Kong dollars a share. The shares are expected to start trading July 9.

If successful, the HK$24.27 billion offering would top Nvidia supplier Victory Giant Technology’s HK$20.12 billion listing in April.

Luxshare plans to spend most of the proceeds on expanding its production capacity and investing in research and development.

Among other companies that launched Hong Kong offerings on Tuesday, Shenzhen-listed Chaozhou Three-Circle, a Chinese manufacturer of advanced electronic components and ceramic materials, aims to raise HK$7.16 billion via an offering of 71.4 million shares.

Nexchip Semiconductor, China’s third-largest chip foundry behind SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor, is looking to raise HK$6.98 billion, while Guangdong Dtech Technology, which makes micro-cutting tools used to build printed circuit boards, is eyeing a HK$4.80 billion listing.

The nine companies, many of which are already listed in mainland China, could raise up to around US$6 billion in total.

Hong Kong is posed for another stellar year of listings after reclaiming the top spot in terms of most funds raised globally in 2025, mostly supported by secondary listings by Chinese companies.