Ein Mann vor einer Anzeigetafel der Börse Tokio blickt auf sein Smartphone.
(Foto: AFP)
TokioAsiens Finanzmärkte spiegelten am Mittwoch den Verlauf der US-Kongresswahlen wieder. Die Handelsplätze öffneten, als in den USA die Wahllokale für die Midterms schlossen und die ersten Ergebnisse veröffentlicht wurden. Ein klarer Trend war noch nicht zu erkennen. Und dies drückte sich in abwartendem, jedoch teilweise volatilem Handel aus.
In China schwankte der Shanghai Composite Index weiter um den Vortagswert. Der Hongkonger Hangseng-Index und der auf asiatische Großunternehmen basierende Nikkei-Asia-300 lagen ganz leicht im Plus.
Doch in Japan und Südkorea begannen die Kurse nach einer kurzen volatilen Phase zu steigen. Auslöser waren die ersten Anzeichen in den USA, dass die Republikaner von US-Präsident Donald Trump wenigstens im Senat eine Welle der Demokraten verhindern könnten.
Am stärksten schwankten die Devisen- und Aktienkurse in Japan, der Spielwiese für globale Hedgefunds. Gleich zu Beginn des Handels sackte der Dollar von 113,40 Yen auf 112,99 Yen ab. Doch innerhalb der folgenden 40 Minuten schoss er wieder auf 113,66 Yen empor, bevor er um 113,50 Yen schwankte.
Auch der Nikkei-225-Index öffnete volatil. Innerhalb der ersten 35 Minuten stieg Japans Leitindex um 1,1 Prozent auf 23.280,87 Punkte an. Dann sackte er innerhalb von nur neun Minuten unter den Schlusskurs vom Vortag, um danach mit den ersten Trends aus den USA wieder anzusteigen. Bis zur Mittagspause um 11.30 Uhr stieg der Nikkei um 1,2 Prozent auf 22.420,62 Punkte.
Aber der koreanische Kospi-Index deutet an, dass noch offen ist, ob der Trend anhält. Zuerst zeigte der Kospi auf einem niedrigeren Niveau einen ähnlichen Verlauf wie der Nikkei, mit einem Unterschied. Als Japans Händler zum Mittagessen gingen, verlor der Kospi wieder die Hälfte der Gewinne aus den ersten Handelsstunden.
Genauso ging es am Nachmittag auch in Japan weiter, als sich abzeichnete, dass die Demokraten wenigstens das Unterhaus kontrollieren würden. Um 13:34 notierte der Nikkei nur noch 0,4 Prozent über dem Schlusskurs vom Vortag.
Die Besonderheit: Nicht zuletzt wegen des launischen Wetters erlebte Interlagos so manch denkwürdigen Grand Prix. Ayrton Senna feierte 1991 seinen ersten Heimsieg, auf dem Podium war er entkräftet und von Krämpfen geplagt. 2008 durfte sich Felipe Massa für Sekunden als Weltmeister fühlen, ehe Lewis Hamilton seinen Traum noch zerstörte. Oder 2016, als Hamilton nach fünf Safety-Car-Phasen und zwei Renn-Unterbrechungen Nico Rosberg die vorzeitige WM-Party verdarb.
Das Streckenprofil: Die Architekten ließen sich in den 1930ern von gleich drei Kursen inspirieren: Roosevelt Raceway (USA), Montlhéry (Frankreich) und Brooklands (Großbritannien). Das rund 800 Meter über dem Meeresspiegel gelegene Autódromo ist nur eine von fünf Strecken im aktuellen Rennkalender, die gegen den Uhrzeigersinn gefahren wird. Sie bietet mit Vollgaspassagen sowie den schnellen und langsamen Kurven viel Abwechslung. Das „Senna S” nach der Start-Ziel-Geraden ist eine der Schlüsselstellen. Auf der Links-rechts-links-Kombination geht es eng zu, häufig kracht es auch.
Das sagen die Fahrer: Nico Hülkenberg (Emmerich/Renault): „Es gab in Interlagos so viele WM-Entscheidungen und viele weitere herausragende Formel-1-Momente. Auf einer Runde über den Kurs spürt man all die Emotionen, deshalb finde ich ihn so besonders.” Romain Grosjean (Frankreich/Haas): „Die Strecke ist ziemlich hart, man kann kaum einmal durchatmen. Selbst auf den Geraden kann man nicht so viel durchschnaufen, wie man gerne möchte.”
Der deutsche Faktor: Rekordweltmeister Michael Schumacher ist auf dem Autódromo José Carlos Pace mit vier Erfolgen Rekordsieger. Sebastian Vettel stand aber auch schon dreimal (2010, 2013, 2017) ganz oben, Nico Rosberg war 2014 und 2015 erfolgreich. Nico Hülkenberg erlebte in Interlagos 2010 seine Sternstunde, als er zu seiner ersten und bislang auch einzigen Pole raste.
That was one of the immediate reactions when word leaked out on Monday that Amazon’s much-ballyhooed search for a second headquarters outside of Seattle would result in not one, but two new locations. On Twitter, people used farce, sham or stunt to describe what had happened.
Amazon’s critics were apoplectic at what they called a bait and switch.
“I was shocked,” said Robert B. Engel of the Free & Fair Markets Initiative, a nonprofit that is a determined foe of the retailer on all fronts. “They’ve duped more than the bidders. They’ve duped all of us. They can’t even live up to a promise that wasn’t fair to anyone but Amazon.”
From the company’s point of view, however, things seem to be working out rather nicely.
The quest kept a persistent spotlight on Amazon as the suitor everyone sought — would it choose Denver? maybe Atlanta? surely Chicago? — even as the company apparently decided instead to set up smaller operations in the Washington metro area and in New York City, the two most obvious places all along. (Amazon declined to comment.)
Amid the guessing game, the company got information from dozens of cities about how much they would pay for a strong Amazon presence, valuable data that it will no doubt use to expand.
A City of Markham sign with a with a “Possible home of Amazon HQ2” is shown in Markham, Ont.
Handout, Twitter, City of Markham/The Canadian Press
“What we see is Amazon evolving into a corporation whose headquarters is virtual and whose physical presence will span the globe,” said Charles R.T. O’Kelley, director of the Berle Center on Corporations, Law and Society at Seattle University. “Instead of being headquartered in one place and moving to a second headquarters, Amazon is going to be, and be thought of as, everywhere.”
What we see is Amazon evolving into a corporation whose headquarters is virtual and whose physical presence will span the globe
Charles R.T. O’Kelley,
This, after all, is how Amazon sees its destiny: to become not just the everything store, as it was branded a mere five years ago, but the everything company. People will buy groceries from Amazon, be entertained by Amazon shows, pick up snacks at Amazon Go stores, see all the ads they need on Amazon, find a plumber through Amazon, communicate through Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant — and that is just the beginning.
Set against such ambition, the words “second headquarters” or, in Amazon parlance, “HQ2,” which proved so beguiling to the media, politicians and local governments ultimately mean little.
“The word ‘headquarters’ is a nontechnical, nonlegal term, but it plays well in the press to talk like this,” O’Kelley said. “It was a great PR move in all kinds of ways.”
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED25
Qinghai Wang, a finance professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied corporate headquarters, agreed.
“Corporate headquarters, or at least the part that is central to decision-making, should be just in one place,” he said. “Boeing, another Seattle company that moved headquarters more than 10 years ago, only moved a few hundred people to Chicago. Amazon is a big company, and it has a very big headquarters already.”
At least one expert realized some time ago how the game would end.
“Don’t be surprised if later this year, Amazon announces that it’s going to have more than one HQ2,” the City Observatory, a think tank in Portland, Oregon, said in an essay posted in January. One reason: “If a single winner is announced, and its competitors are dismissed, then Amazon’s negotiating position becomes much weaker,” the essay said. Having multiple winners, on the other hand, would allow the company to play one off the other.
The Amazon Spheres under construction at the company’s headquarters in Seattle in 2017.
Elaine Thompson/AP Photo files
Even as the news sank in on Monday, some people rued the lost chance that Amazon would do something truly transformative — not just for the company, but for its new home.
“Big tech is at a pivotal moment, and Amazon is at the head of the class,” said Scott Phillips, an entrepreneur who submitted a headquarters proposal to build an enormous city for Amazon in rural Oklahoma. “It is time for them to aggressively think not just about their bottom line but about ways they can do right by the world.”
(Amazon has) learned all kinds of things from the bidding cities — like their future infrastructure plans — that even their citizens are not privy to
Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Washington and New York already have lots of tech talent, which of course explains why Amazon would move to those places. “Amazon could have pulled a new region of the country onto the ‘haves’ list and pioneered much of the world’s future in the process,” Phillips lamented.
In a way, the two-headquarters story was too good to be true even when Amazon proclaimed it bluntly and at length. “Amazon HQ2 will be Amazon’s second headquarters in North America,” the company said in its promotional material. “We expect to invest over US$5 billion in construction and grow this second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs — it will be a full equal to our current campus in Seattle.”
Instead, while nothing official has been announced and things could shift at the last minute, it appears HQ2 will rank with the company’s proclamation that drones would deliver packages. When the chief executive, Jeff Bezos, unveiled that initiative on “60 Minutes,” he said the drones would come in “four, five years.” That was almost exactly five years ago.
The drones have not taken flight, but many articles about them did. Amazon likewise gained enormous amounts of raw publicity from its search for a second headquarters.
It gained something else as well.
“It’s tempting to roll your eyes at this soap opera, but Amazon will walk away from this stunt with a cache of incredibly valuable data,” said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a frequent Amazon critic. “It’s learned all kinds of things from the bidding cities — like their future infrastructure plans — that even their citizens are not privy to.”
Here’s what next, she said: “Amazon will put this data to prodigious use in the coming years as it looks to expand its market power and sideline the competition.”
A worker walks in a alley of Amazon’s distribution centre in central France.
Guillaume Souvant/AFP/Getty Images
Amazon is always expanding its market power. Consider a routine news release it issued Friday: “Amazon Announces 14th Inland Empire Fulfillment Center in Beaumont,” it said. Fulfillment centre is a fancy term for warehouse. The Inland Empire is a vast area east of Los Angeles. To build 14 warehouses there in six years is a feat. Amazon said it was now the largest employer in the region.
Amazon likes to release news on its own schedule. But the headquarters story leaked out to outlets including The Washington Post — owned by Bezos — and The Wall Street Journal. It was a rare stumble for a company that excels at controlling the narrative.
The real narrative, now and always with Amazon, is its ambition — sometimes veiled, sometimes overt, but never absent. The satirical site The Onion took the present to its logical extreme last month:
“After a search for a new location lasting more than a year, a massive dome was seen descending from the sky and enclosing the whole nation Friday as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced to a horrified American populace that it was now living inside his company’s second headquarters.”
CALGARY – Nalcor Energy executives will discover Wednesday whether millions of dollars in seismic exploration work and trips to the world’s oil capitals were enough to attract lucrative bids from global oil and gas majors.
For the first time in two years, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board will announce winning bids for prospective offshore exploration blocks on Wednesday, which independent evaluators believe contain a total of 11.7 billion barrels of oil and 60.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
The last time the C-NLOPB held a bidding round for an offshore exploratory block, in 2016, BP Plc marked its entry into the province’s oil and gas sector with a winning bid of $461 million for a prospect that contained an estimated 25.5 billion barrels of oil and 20.6 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Expectations for Wednesday’s bid are high and should reveal whether or not the provincially owned energy company’s revamped approach to attracting oil and gas bids continues to be a success.
“We have a saying around here, which is ‘Those who use crystal balls end up with broken glass,’” Nalcor executive vice-president, offshore development, Jim Keating said. He declined to provide an estimate of what Wednesday’s bid might fetch in work commitments from oil and gas companies.
“I think we’ve experienced a real good level of interest from oil and gas companies for the last several months and for the better part of a year now since the licence area was announced, so that makes us optimistic,” Keating said.
The province, through its Crown corporation Nalcor and the C-NLOPB, made major changes to its bidding process beginning in 2011. It moved to a scheduled bid process from a system in which any entrant could bid at any time.
Nalcor also began spending significantly more money on 2D and 3D seismic work to better understand the province’s offshore geology and de-risk the exploration blocks for prospective oil companies.
In addition to conducting that exploratory work, the Crown corporation now sends its geoscientists to Calgary, Houston, London, Oslo and other oil centres to present their findings to the world’s largest oil and gas producers. Keating was in Calgary last week promoting his province’s oil and gas prospects.
“Since 2011, we’ve invested just over $100 million. That level of investment has revealed just about $2.5 billion in bidding thus far and there are more bidding rounds to come,” Keating said.
By comparison, in the previous 20 years the province managed to attract an average of just under $100 million per year in bids.
The new approach has helped sustain and even expand the province’s offshore energy sector in recent years even as global oil prices collapsed and the world’s largest oil and gas companies scaled back spending, Newfoundland and Labrador Oil and Gas Industries Association CEO Charlene Johnson said.
“We’ve now seen seven new entrants to our province and that, in effect, doubles the number of operators with acreage in the province, so it’s helped attract foreign direct investment,” she said.
The additional bids are leading to more work in the province’s energy sector, Johnson said, as five companies have submitted drilling programs to the provincial regulator and a sixth program is expected.
There are about 25 to 30 of these licence rounds going on each year all around the world so we need to have that leg up
Charlene Johnson, CEO, Newfoundland and Labrador Oil and Gas Industries Association
Exxon Mobil Corp. is expected to drill on its parcels in the province’s Flemish Pass in summer 2019 and BP has issued requests for drilling proposals in the past two weeks.
“There are about 25 to 30 of these licence rounds going on each year all around the world so we need to have that leg up and jurisdictions need to be competitive,” Johnson said, adding that Nalcor taking on much of the exploratory risk helped provide that leg up.
She also said the federally approved carbon tax plan introduced in St. John’s this week would not unduly hurt the local oil and gas sector.
“I think it strikes a balance,” Johnson said of the carbon tax. She said the tax exempts oil and gas exploratory work, which is important given the province’s attempts to encourage the growth of the industry.
She said the provincial government understands the energy sector still accounts for 24 per cent of Newfoundland and Labrador’s gross domestic product, down from 33 per cent of GDP prior to the oil price crash of 2014.
The National Energy Board forecasts Newfoundland and Labrador oil and gas production will average over 300,000 barrels of oil per day this month. That is a significant increase over the 227,000 bpd oil platforms in the province pumped at the beginning of the year, driven by rising production from ExxonMobil’s Hebron project. Exxon receives global oil prices as it’s not subjected to Canada’s pipeline constraints.
In its fall fiscal update released this week, Newfoundland and Labrador announced its deficit would come in $135.9 million lower than expected at $547 million, partially as a result of higher-than-expected oil prices.
“All in all, we view the update as positive for the province, and note that the prospects for a cheaper-than-expected (Canadian dollar) along with above planned oil prices could provide for stronger royalties relative to budget planning assumptions, which could improve progress on the provincial deficit,” National Bank Financial analyst Catherine Maltais said in a research note.
Saskatoon-based Nutrien Ltd., the largest potash company in the world, announced late Monday evening that it is closing a mine in Sussex, N.B. that cost billions of dollars to construct and that it had barely operated.
Marc Thorne, mayor of Sussex, said that the news arrived quickly. On Monday, the company asked for a meeting on short notice, and told him it planned to close its potash mine and return the site to nature.
“In four or five years, there may not be any indication that the mine was even there,” said Thorne.
The situation illustrates the dismal state of the potash market. Nutrien’s predecessor, the Potash Company of Saskatchewan, started building the mine in 2007 and finished eight years later at a cost of US$2.2 billion. During that time, the bottom dropped out of the potash market and prices fell 75 per cent from more than US$800 per ton to around US$225 per ton.
In early 2016, not long after construction finished, the mine was put on “care and maintenance” and 430 employees were laid off.
Now, Nutrien is taking a US$1.8 billion impairment charge, and closing the mine. That will save some $25 million per year, including the elimination of around 50 staff.
“We can expect to see that as savings in a year or two as we complete closure,” said Will Tigley, a spokesman for the company.
Overall, the company reported a US$1.1 billion net loss for the third quarter, or US$1.74 per share. Nonetheless, the company reported that retail earnings increased ten per cent year over year, and increased its dividend to 43 cents.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the potash market collapsed in 2009 as the broader global economy suffered. Potash prices had been high in the first half of the year, which led to a drop in consumption. But that drove up inventories, and the price fell and never fully recovered.
Mayor Thorne say losing potash mining has been a big blow to the people of Sussex, a town of around 4,300 people, located between Moncton and Saint John.
“It’s huge,” he said about the recently completed mine that is now being closed. “The headframe dominates the landscape from kilometres away.”
But he insisted the town has never been entirely reliant on mining, with agriculture and forestry running deeper in its history.
Thorne added that everyone in town had hoped Nutrien would “cut some salt” out of the new mine before decommissioning it, a prospect that might have created several dozen jobs. But no one expected the company to reopen the mine, he said.
I think everybody accepted the reality
Sussex Mayor Marc Thorne
“I think everybody accepted the reality,” said Thorne. “I’ve met on a frequent basis with the representatives and they’ve never indicated that they were going to reopen the mine.”
For nearly three years, the town has been working to absorb the shock of the closure. The original potash mine arrived in town in the 1980s and now Sussex is planning a future without potash mining.
Some of the people who were laid off started commuting to Saskatchewan to work for Nutrien there, while others found jobs in the dairy industry or in forestry, he said.
Thorne’s older brother, an engineer at the mine, was 57 in 2016, and stayed on for a year helping with maintenance, before leaving the company with two years’ severance pay. But he had always planned to retire at age 60, so the closure had no impact, Thorne said, adding that other families are still reeling from the impact.
“It’s still hard to believe that a company would spend $2.2 billion to build a mine and then write it off,” he said.
