The European Airbus group said that it expects the commercial aircraft market to gradually recover to pre-pandemic levels between 2023 and 2025. The company sees the narrow-body airliner segment as the driver of the recovery. "The civil aviation market is beginning to gradually recover to the levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic," said Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, "so we want to give our...

HSBC, the second-largest bank in Europe and the sixth-largest in the world by assets ($2.9 trillion), announced yesterday that it is leaving "mainstream" retail banking in the US. HSBC USA has total assets of $204bn and serves 2.4m customers in the US, including retail, corporate and affluent. The bank said it will sell 90 of its 148 total retail branches in the US, close 35-40 and leave only...

Chinese technology corporation Xiaomi has presented data on financial results in the first quarter of this year. As follows from these data, the corporation's net profit for the reporting period amounted to 6.07 billion yuan ($949 million), which is higher than experts' expectations. Experts of Bloomberg forecasted net profit in the amount of 5.3 billion yuan. Compared with last year's figures,...

Climate activists have won a landmark court victory over Anglo-Dutch Shell, effectively forcing the company to accelerate its plans to cut carbon emissions and reduce them by 45% as early as 2030. On May 26 a Dutch court ordered Shell, one of the largest oil and gas companies and the largest trader of oil and gas in the world, to accelerate its plans to cut emissions. According to the court...

The German Federal Antitrust Authority has announced the launch of two investigations into Google. The agency is probing the company's possible abuse of its dominant position in several related markets as well as its terms of service for user data. The investigations include Google's German and Irish divisions, as well as its parent corporation Alphabet. The agency said that the first...

US energy companies Cabot Oil & Gas and Cimarex Energy, which specialise in shale oil and gas production, announced a merger. It is a "merger of equals". Cimarex shareholders will receive four Cabot shares for each of their shares, so they will hold 50.5% of the combined company and Cabot shareholders will hold 49.5%. The market capitalisation of the combined company, based on the share price...

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has given final approval for the merger of UK telecoms operators Virgin Media and O2. The merger was announced a year ago by their parent companies, the Anglo-American Liberty Global and the Spanish Telefonica. The deal was negotiated over five months and will result in the creation of the UK's largest integrated telecommunications company providing...

The European Commission has fined financial institutions UBS, UniCredit and Nomura a total of €371m for collusion in the European primary and secondary government bond markets. The EU authorities found that seven investment banks violated European law. In addition to those listed above, Bank of America, Natixis, RBS (now NatWest) and WestLB (now Portigon) were also involved in the collusion....

International automotive alliance Stellantis (comprising Italian-American Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French PSA Peugeot Citroen Group) and one of the world's largest electronics component manufacturers, Taiwanese Foxconn, announced a strategic partnership. Under the Mobile Drive project, Foxconn will supply Stellantis with the electronics and software that the alliance uses to manufacture...