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JPM Comment :

JPM on CSG – note dated 5 May 2026 (David Perry)

1. Rating reiterated Overweight, PT €40 unchanged (vs share price €15.9 after Monday’s -13%) — JPM explicitly defends the thesis despite the Hunterbrook short report.

2. Hunterbrook arguments dismantled point by point: the recommissioning/new ammo mix (~80% in 2024 per HB) is “not relevant” and was already disclosed in the IPO prospectus.

3. M/L Ammo orders: €650m YTD 2026 (three unnamed customers), broadly in line with RHM — “far too early to draw conclusions,” European defence orders being lumpy and back-end loaded.

4. Capex: CSG at 10.2% of sales 2026E (joint 2nd in the peer group); comparison with RHM deemed unfair (RHM consolidates 100% of JV capex, not yet restated for partner reimbursement).

5. Governance / minorities: JPM rejects the “undisclosed minority shareholders” claim (already visible in pre-IPO accounts) and flips the Kratochvil argument — “if Mr Kratochvil believes his minority stake is worth a lot of money, then it is because he believes that CSG as a whole is worth a lot of money.”

Bottom line JPM: buy the weakness, no estimate changes; the onus is now on CSG to deliver on its 2026 guidance (FCF €800-900m, capex ~€700m).

LC

Virus spread by rodents killed three people, sickened three others, WHO says

Authorities are rushing to contain a suspected hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship currently off West Africa that they say killed three people and sickened three others.

The World Health Organization said it was investigating how the virus, which is transmitted by rodents, spread on the Dutch-flagged vessel currently off the coast of Cape Verde. The passenger-cruise ship called MV Hondius was traveling in the Atlantic Ocean, said Oceanwide Expeditions, the vessel’s operator.

The WHO said Sunday one case of hantavirus infection was confirmed, while the five others were suspected cases. One of the infected people is in intensive care in South Africa, the WHO said.

Oceanwide Expeditions laid out a timeline of the outbreak, saying a Dutch man died on the ship on April 11. His body was removed from the ship over a week later on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena. His wife got sick on a return journey and died later that month, the company said. Both the man and woman were infected with hantavirus, Oceanwide Expeditions said.

A British passenger with a confirmed hantavirus case became seriously ill on April 27 and was evacuated to South Africa, Oceanwide Expeditions said. The passenger is in critical but stable condition. A German passenger died on May 2, the company said.

Two crew members require urgent medical care for respiratory issues, Oceanwide Expeditions said. Dutch authorities are preparing to evacuate both of them by aircraft.

The Netherlands-based company said it’s attempting to repatriate the two symptomatic crew members from Cape Verde to the Netherlands.

“The priority of Oceanwide Expeditions is to ensure that the two symptomatic individuals on board receive adequate and expedited medical care,” the company said.

Humans can be infected with hantavirus by inhaling viruses that become airborne from rodent droppings. The virus doesn’t normally spread between humans, according to the WHO. One strain that is primarily found in Chile and Argentina, where the cruise departed from, has shown limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hantavirus infection can lead to a rare but serious illness called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, or HPS. Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, abdominal problems, shortness of breath and fluid-filled lungs, according to the CDC. There is no cure but the disease can be treated.

Betsy Arakawa, a pianist and the wife of actor Gene Hackman, died of HPS in her home in New Mexico last year.

The MV Hondius departed from Argentina on April 1, Oceanwide Expeditions said. It went to Antarctica and the British overseas territory of St. Helena, according to MarineTraffic. On Sunday, it anchored in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. Oceanwide Expeditions operates cruises to Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean.

The company said there are 149 people, including 17 Americans, on the ship. Oceanwide Expeditions said local health authorities needed to give permission for passengers to disembark, possibly in the Canary Islands.

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The WHO said the remaining passengers and crew on the cruise ship were receiving medical care and support.

Company is considering an Alphabet-like structure for its portfolio of products, though no discussions are currently active

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman discussed spinning out the company’s robotics and consumer-hardware divisions late last year, a move intended to give them more room to grow without weighing down the core business.

As part of the plan, the two companies would have been able to raise external funding and operate more independently. But it was rejected, in part because OpenAI concluded the new entities might have to remain consolidated on its balance sheet, according to people familiar with the matter.

The proposal offers a window into the difficult trade-offs OpenAI has to make as it races toward an IPO. For years, Altman greenlighted ambitious projects that went well beyond its popular chatbot, hoping to set a high bar for research and product development. But it is facing more pressure to clamp down on so-called “side quests” that aren’t helping it meaningfully boost revenue.

OpenAI is pivoting its business around building a new “superapp” to win over more coders and enterprise users after falling behind rival Anthropic. It recently missed some internal user and revenue targets, though the company has said its growth recently accelerated after the launch of a new AI model. The company also cut its video-generation tool Sora to help it free up more computing resources for its core products.

OpenAI could revive the idea of spinning out different business lines in the future, people familiar with the matter said. Under such a scenario, the company could create a holding company similar to Alphabet, which Google started in 2015 to separate its core search business from more speculative bets like Waymo, its self-driving car division, and Verily, its life-sciences division.

In its financial statements, Alphabet separates out revenue from cash cows—including Google’s search business, YouTube and its cloud division—from the operating losses of more speculative bets. The structure allows investors to weigh the performance of Google’s core business against the scope of the company’s longer-term investments separately.

Other tech giants have offered investors similar transparency without such structural changes. Meta Platforms separately has disclosed the tens of billions of dollars in losses from its metaverse division, while Microsoft breaks out the performance of businesses like its videogame unit and LinkedIn, all within their financial statements.

The robotics and consumer-hardware divisions operate separately from the rest of OpenAI, and report directly to Altman. Their work is carefully guarded, and some employees have described them as separate startups within the company.

OpenAI started its consumer-hardware division last May, when it paid $6.5 billion in stock to acquire io, an AI company led by former Apple designer Jony Ive, and hired its staff of roughly 55. Altman has teased the details of the new device under development, telling staff last year that it would be fully aware of a user’s surroundings, able to rest in one’s pocket, and be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

OpenAI disclosed in a legal filing this year that the device won’t ship to customers before the end of February 2027.

The company has also been working on robotics for years, at one point training a humanlike robotic hand to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Last year, it announced a research partnership with the robot delivery service Coco Robotics, where Altman is also a personal investor.

“We’re trying to figure out how to be very successful at robotics,” Altman said on the Core Memory podcast last month. “If you could pick one thing to make the U.S. competitive at manufacturing and the world of atoms in general, you would say we need a lot of robots that can build a lot, lot more robots.”

Americans 55 and up control most wealth, and many of them have decades of living left

Older Americans are sitting on $110 trillion of wealth. Their heirs might not get it anytime soon.

Financial advisory firms like to talk about a looming event called “the great wealth transfer,” where the huge and very wealthy baby-boomer generation dies off and their children inherit their money.

But the process may be more of a slow drip than a sudden windfall. The two generations that hold the most wealth are baby boomers, who are between age 61 and 80, and Gen X, who are between 45 and 61.

People are living longer, and wealthy Americans in particular are spending large sums on longevity. They are also spending more on themselves with luxury travel and upscale retirement communities. Some wealthy people are already parceling out their riches in smaller doses to children and grandchildren, helping them with home purchases, college tuition and vacations.

When they do die, many will pass wealth first to their spouses. Boomers are still getting windfalls from their own elderly parents. And many Americans of modest means won’t inherit anything at all.

“There’s no world in which a great wealth transfer does not happen. It’s just math,” said John Sabelhaus, a Brookings Institution economist and former Federal Reserve official who studies wealth. But, he adds, “There is a world in which it’s misunderstood.”

Older Americans’ wealth has grown an outsize amount in the past few decades. Many of these people bought stocks or started businesses long ago, and those have soared in value over the years. In the fourth quarter alone, boomers gained over $1 trillion in wealth, more than any other group.

Sabelhaus and his colleagues used Fed data to calculate the total wealth that Americans can pass down when they die (this is a family’s net worth minus pensions and annuities that they typically can’t give to heirs). The researchers found that this so-called bequeathable wealth rose from 256% of gross domestic product in 1997 to 424% in 2021, the last year of available data.

A staggering 97% of that increase was due to wealth gains in households where the head of household was 55 or older. About 75% of the total increase was from gains by the wealthiest 10% of households age 55 and older, the analysis found.

Sabelhaus calculated that the age group with the most aggregate wealth in 2021 was 55 to 64 years old—a demographic that could have decades of life left. That is especially true if a person is well off. The top 1% of earners on average live into their late 80s, longer than people earning less, according to an analysis from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others.

The richest Americans are particularly interested in longevity, pouring billions into investments in the area. A UBS survey of 87 of the bank’s billionaire clients found that most of them expect to live longer than they did a decade ago.

Older Americans may keep accumulating wealth, especially if the stock market keeps rising. But some will spend it on living costs and expensive long-term care, leaving less for heirs.

When they die, many will leave their money to their spouses, who are often in their same generation. This year, around $1.3 trillion is expected to be passed onto spouses, compared with about $2 trillion to heirs in Gen X and younger generations, according to projections from research firm Cerulli Associates.

The age that people are inheriting money from older generations has risen. In Fed surveys conducted between 1998 and 2010, Americans in their late 50s were most likely to report receiving an inheritance. People in their mid-60s were most likely to report inheritances in surveys conducted between 2013 and 2022.

“Everyone speaks about money going to millennials and how millennials are the next great opportunity. I think that’s pretty far off,” said Chayce Horton, associate director at Cerulli.

No one has figured out how to live forever, though, so the money will make its way to younger generations—eventually. Last year, boomers and millennials inherited roughly the same amount of money from older generations, according to Cerulli. For the next 12 years, Cerulli projects, Gen X will inherit the most money of any group.