Yaskawa Electric robots are pictured at a trade show in Tokyo, Japan, November 29, 2023. REUTERS/Sam Nussey Acquire Licensing Rights
TOKYO, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Japanese robot maker Yaskawa Electric (6506.T) is considering investing around $200 million in the United States, its president said, with an eye to making its industrial robots there for the first time.
The investment would follow other manufacturers from allied nations moving to build capacity in the U.S. as Washington tries to boost high-end manufacturing and strengthen its control over supply chains amid trade tension with China.
While Japanese rival Fanuc (6954.T) is a leading maker of factory robots for the automotive industry in the U.S., Yaskawa hopes to ride a wave of automation in other sectors.
Manufacturing locally “gives our customers a sense of security and reliability,” President Masahiro Ogawa said in an interview.
The more than 100-year-old company has previously said it is looking to invest more in the U.S. The potential scope of the expansion is reported here for the first time.
Yaskawa is the world’s top maker of servo motors, a type of high-precision motor that is widely used in chipmaking tools.
The company, which already makes components in Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, is considering expanding U.S. production to modules which incorporate its motors, Ogawa said.
The U.S. views securing access to cutting-edge semiconductors as a priority, with its leading chip equipment makers including Applied Materials (AMAT.O) and Lam Research (LRCX.O).
Foreign manufacturers building out capacity in the U.S. include automaker Toyota Motor (7203.T) and chipmakers TSMC (2330.TW) and Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).
Yaskawa, whose shares have risen by about a third year-to-date giving it a market capitalisation of around $10 billion, is looking at possible subsidies to fund some of the cost of the expansion, Ogawa said.
Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Christopher Cushing
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Nov 27 (Reuters) – Activist investor Elliott Investment Management on Monday said it was ready to nominate directors at Crown Castle International and push for the ouster of the wireless tower owner’s executives and board members, whom it blames for years of underperformance.
The hedge fund in a letter released on Monday said the company needs “comprehensive leadership change.” It said it was ready to appeal to other shareholders to make changes to the 12-member board, signaling a possible proxy fight next year.
It also wants the company to review its fiber strategy, including considering a possible sale of the business.
It is the second time the U.S. hedge fund is publicly pressuring the company after it urged management to rethink its fiber infrastructure strategy and criticized the company’s returns in 2020.
Elliott, which said it now owns a $2 billion stake in the real estate investment trust, said operational underperformance and flawed capital allocation contributed to a sagging share price.
“We are prepared and intend to make our case directly to shareholders with a majority slate of alternative directors at the company’s 2024 annual meeting,” Elliott managing partner Jesse Cohn and senior portfolio manager Jason Genrich said in the letter.
Shares of Crown Castle climbed more than 6% in premarket trading.
“Crown Castle suffers from a profound lack of oversight by the Board, which has contributed to its irresponsible stewardship and flawed financial policy,” Elliott said.
The hedge fund criticized Crown Castle for having “disregarded our data-driven analysis” and said “our recommended changes were neither made nor taken seriously.”
“The company’s strategy, led by CEO Jay Brown since 2016, has been a failure, as demonstrated by the breathtaking magnitude of its underperformance,” the letter said.
Crown Castle did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Providence and Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Mark Porter
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A telecom antenna of Spain?s telecom infrastructure company Cellnex is seen in Madrid, Spain, April 27, 2022. REUTERS/Susana Vera/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
LONDON, Nov 22 (Reuters) – Mobile phone tower operator Cellnex (CLNX.MC) will accelerate asset sales in a bid to get an investment grade credit rating by the middle of next year and is preparing for a wave of consolidation in the sector, CEO Marco Patuano told Reuters.
The Spanish company, which has grown through acquisitions since listing in 2015, changed direction last year when rising interest rates forced it to re-focus on cutting debt by selling non-core assets and simplifying the business.
Patuano said he expected cash generation at the company would accelerate drastically in two or three years, when capital expenditure (capex) commitments reduce and assets are mature enough to generate higher returns.
“Capex is (now) absorbing all the cash generating. 2024, big capex. 2025, big capex, and then there is a cliff. In 2027, you’re generating a lot of cash. You can’t imagine, a lot of cash,” Patuano said.
At that time, Cellnex envisages consolidation among the six largest European tower operators, provided market conditions are favourable.
“(In) Europe (what) will happen is that there are six tower operators today. And tomorrow, I think there will be less than six,” Patuano said.
Patuano raised the possibility of reviving his predecessor’s 2022 bid for Deutsche Telekom’s towers business – now known as GD Towers. “When the time will be mature, (it) could be a very appropriate use of resources,” he said.
CAPITAL MARKETS DAY IN MARCH
In March, Cellnex plans to announce a new strategy to take it through to 2026, incorporating longer-term capital allocation targets.
Since taking the helm in June, Patuano has conducted a review of the company’s portfolio to identify core assets and potential disposals.
“In Ireland and Austria we are considering the possibility of a full disposal,” said Patuano, who already agreed the sale of a minority stake in Cellnex Nordics operations in September.
According to a report published in October by Kepler Cheuvreux, Cellnex’s units in Ireland and Austria have enterprise values of 1.05 billion euros ($1.15 billion) and 1.41 billion euros respectively.
Cellnex aims to reduce its leverage ratio below six times its core earnings in 2024 to try to improve its credit rating.
The Spanish company is also planning to invest about 150 million euros in acquiring the land where its towers sit.
“In the next couple of years, we should improve even more the cash from operations,” said Patuano, adding land acquisition was one of the ways to achieve that.
The company is committed to increasing shareholder remuneration in coming years, through dividend payments and share buybacks.
“If you invest in infrastructure, you’re not looking for growth without yield, you’re looking at yield with a decent growth, which is better than the inflation,” Patuano said.
($1 = 0.9168 euros)
Reporting by Andres Gonzalez and Amy-Jo Crowley
Editing by Anousha Sakoui and Mark Potter
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Nov 13 (Reuters) – The cyber hack of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s U.S. broker-dealer was so extensive on Wednesday, even the corporate email stopped working and forced employees to switch to Google mail, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The blackout left the brokerage temporarily owing BNY Mellon BK.N $9 billion, an amount many times larger than its net capital, a measure of resources at hand to promptly satisfy claims.
Those details and what happened next, some of which are reported here for the first time, show how the ransomware attack pushed the firm owned by China’s largest bank close to the brink. And they serve as a wakeup call for the financial sector and raise some concerns about the resilience of the $26 trillion Treasury market.
ICBC’s (601398.SS) New York-based unit, called ICBC Financial Services, got a cash injection from its Chinese parent to help pay back BNY, and it manually processed trades with the custody bank’s help, Reuters reported on Friday.
ICBC told market participants on an industry call on Friday afternoon that it was working with a cybersecurity firm, called MoxFive, to set up secure systems that would allow it to resume normal business on Wall Street, according to the sources. But ICBC expected that process to take at least until Monday, they said.
In the interim, the firm had asked its clients to temporarily suspend business and clear trades elsewhere, the sources said. Other market participants, meanwhile, looked through their own books to see whether they had any exposure and sought to reroute trades, one of the sources said.
ICBC Financial Services could not be reached for comment. ICBC did not respond to a request for comment.
On a notice on its website, the brokerage said it has been “progressing its recovery efforts with the support of its professional team of information security experts.” It said it had cleared Treasury trades executed on Wednesday and repo financing trades done on Thursday.
Moxfive executives did not respond to requests for comment.
The ransomware attack, claimed by cybercrime gang Lockbit, comes at a time of heightened worries about the resiliency of the Treasury market, which is essential to the plumbing of global finance. After upheavals there – most recently during the pandemic in March 2020 – threatened financial stability, U.S. authorities launched a broad review of its functioning.
While market participants and officials have said the impact of the ICBC hack on Treasury market functioning was limited, the full extent of it is not yet understood. There is some debate, for example, about whether it had affected a major auction of Treasury bonds on Thursday.
Nevertheless, market participants said the attack is likely to add a new aspect to the regulatory review, as it brings cyber threats into sharper focus. It could also boost a Securities and Exchange Commission’s push to have more Treasury trades go through central clearing, where a third-party acts as a seller to every buyer, and buyer to every seller.
Darrell Duffie, a Stanford finance professor who has studied the market in depth and consults with regulators, said other firms in ICBC’s situation might not have enough capital readily available to meet a large shortfall and default.
“Any default that could follow an event like this, if not centrally cleared, could propagate into a chain reaction of default events,” Duffie said. “This hack makes even more evident the important financial stability benefits of broader central clearing.”
The hack is likely to become a key topic of conversation at a major Treasury market conference on Nov. 16.
MID-SIZE BROKER
ICBC Financial Services is not huge by Wall Street’s standards. The company had about $24.5 billion in assets as of June 30, with $480.7 million of net capital, according to financial information posted on its website. It also had credit lines from affiliates of $450 million as well as the ability to borrow overnight funds from an affiliate.
It mainly offers settlement and financing services for fixed-income securities, such as repurchase agreement (repo), where assets such as Treasuries are used as collateral to raise short-term cash.
It told market participants on Friday’s call that its clients include four independent brokers and half a dozen algorithmic traders, according to the sources. Reuters could not learn the identity of its clients.
One of the sources described the business as mid-sized, explaining that “the biggest players in Treasuries are not clearing at a firm like that.”
Even so, the attack that paralyzed its systems threw a wrench in the market’s gears when word of the hack spread through Wall Street. One of the sources said some market participants scrambled to sort out whether they had any exposure and rerouted their trades to other firms.
$9 BLN OVERDRAFT
When ICBC’s trades got stuck, it became BNY Mellon’s issue, too, since it is the sole settlement agent for Treasury securities. The bank played a crucial role in helping sort through the mess, deploying a manual process to clear trades one by one, the market participants said.
ICBC’s inability to access its systems meant securities from the Chinese firm’s repo trades were getting delivered to BNY for settlement, but no cash was coming in from the broker-dealer, one of the sources said.
That effectively meant BNY was loaning ICBC the cash, secured by Treasuries, according to the source. That’s when ICBC’s parent injected capital into the unit, allowing BNY to be paid, the source said.
ICBC told market participants on the call, which was organized by the industry group SIFMA, that the transfer had been more than what they expected was needed for current trading volumes, the source said.
SIFMA declined to comment.
Once the firm gets its new system up and running, others on the Street are likely to do their own review to make sure it is safe, which might add time for the business to return to normal, the sources said.
ICBC told market participants Friday that they were also hoping to have a secondary email system set up soon.
Reporting by Paritosh Bansal; editing by Edward Tobin
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
An illuminated Google logo is seen inside an office building in Zurich, Switzerland December 5, 2018. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 10 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, as the fast growing artificial intelligence chatbot startup seeks capital to train models and keep up with user demand, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The investment, which could be structured as convertible notes, according to a third source, will deepen the existing partnership Character.AI already has with Google, in which it uses Google’s cloud services and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to train models.
Google and Character AI did not respond to requests for comment.
Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI allows people to chat with virtual versions of celebrities like Billie Eilish or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants. It is free to use, but offers subscription model that charges $9.99 a month for users who want to skip the virtual line to access a chatbot.
Character.AI’s chatbots, with various roles and tones to choose from, have appealed to users ages 18 to 24, who contributed about 60% of its website traffic, according to data from Similarweb. The demographic is helping the company position itself as the purveyor of more fun personal AI companions, compared to other AI chatbots from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
The company previously said its website had attracted 100 million monthly visits in the first six months since its launch.
Character.AI is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, which could value the company at over $5 billion, sources said. In March, it raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at $1 billion valuation.
The talks with Google are ongoing and terms of the deal could change, said the sources, who requested anonymity as the discussions are private.
Google has been investing in AI startups, including $2 billion for model maker Anthropic in the form of convertible notes, on top of its earlier equity investment. Anthropic uses Google’s cloud services as well as its latest version of TPUs.
That is part of a recent trend in which big tech cloud services providers are striking deals with AI companies to entice them to use certain cloud or hardware in the computer-intensive race to build models and serve consumers, including Microsoft (MSFT.O) investments in OpenAI and Google and Amazon’s (AMZN.O) bets on Anthropic.
U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said at an event in San Francisco last week that the agency is looking into cloud provider investments in AI startups to examine any anti-competitive behaviors.
Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York, additional reporting by Anna Tong and Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Bill Berkrot
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Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC)’s logo is seen at its branch in Beijing, China, March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 9 (Reuters) – A ransomware attack on Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) disrupted some trades in the U.S. Treasury market on Thursday, the Treasury Department said, although the impact on the market was unclear.
In ransomware attacks, hackers encrypt an organization’s systems and demand ransom payments in exchange for unlocking them. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.
While ransomware attacks have been soaring across a range of sectors in recent years, they have rarely disrupted a major financial market. Thursday’s incident is likely to raise questions over market participants’ cyber security controls and potentially draw regulatory scrutiny.
The Financial Times reported earlier on Thursday that the U.S. Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) told members that ICBC (601398.SS) had been hit by ransomware that disrupted the U.S. Treasury market by preventing it from settling trades on behalf of other market players.
“We are aware of the cybersecurity issue and are in regular contact with key financial sector participants, in addition to federal regulators. We continue to monitor the situation,” a Treasury spokesperson said in a response to a question about the FT report.
ICBC, China’s largest commercial lender by assets, was beginning to restore services as of Thursday afternoon, the newspaper said, citing people briefed on the ransomware attack, which paralyses computer systems unless a payment is made.
The Treasury market appeared to be functioning normally on Thursday, according to LSEG data.
“In general, the event had a limited impact on the market,” said Scott Skrym, executive vice president for fixed income and repo at broker-dealer Curvature Securities.
SIFMA declined to comment. ICBC was not immediately available to comment.
According to the data platform Statista, globally organizations detected 493.33 million ransomware attack attempts last year. Cyber criminal group Lockbit was the most prolific ransomware operator throughout 2022, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru and Pete Schroder in Washington; Additional reporting by Zeba Siddiqui and Gertrude Chavez; Editing by Michelle Price, Lisa Shumaker and Diane Craft
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) delivers remarks at the Belmont Water Treatment Center during a visit to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 9 (Reuters) – Two U.S. senators plan to introduce a bipartisan bill on Thursday that would require private equity firms to make public how much they invest in China and other countries of concern.
The bill, set to be introduced by Democratic Senator Bob Casey and Republican Senator Rick Scott, is the latest effort to track U.S. investments in China.
“The American people deserve to know where and how their savings are being invested,” Casey said in a statement.
The United States has sought to crack down on U.S. investment in China over fears U.S. dollars and know-how are aiding Beijing’s technological advances to modernize its military.
U.S. private investment firms have poured more than $80 billion into China between 2018 and 2022, some via pension plans, according to Casey’s office.
The new congressional measure would require private equity funds to annually disclose assets invested in China, Iran, Russia and North Korea to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which would then be required to make public a report based on the information.
It would also require disclosure of certain information about private security sales.
Rick Scott’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Casey has also co-sponsored a measure that would require government notification of investments in certain sensitive technology sectors in China. That measure has been added as an amendment to the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and may or may not survive reconciliation with the House’s version.
The new bill also comes in the wake of an executive order on outbound investment to prohibit some U.S. investments in China in semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and require notification of others. The order has not yet been implemented.
Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Sharon Singleton
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
The Arm Ltd logo and a rising stock graph are seen in this illustration taken March 6, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 8 (Reuters) – Semiconductor company Arm Holdings (O9Ty.F), on Wednesday gave a fiscal third-quarter sales outlook below Wall Street estimates, with the company attributing the forecast to a large deal that will likely land later than expected.
Arm’s shares dove 8% to $50 in extended trading after the news.
But the company, which sells designs and other intellectual property for creating computing chips that power most of the world’s mobile phones, also forecast fiscal full-year sales that beat Wall Street expectations, powered by a wave of companies designing new chips amid a boom in artificial intelligence applications.
Arm became publicly listed again in September after Japan’s SoftBank Group (9984.T), which still owns more than 90% of Arm, sold off some of its shares. One issue that the company is grappling with is new accounting rules that affect how it must recognize revenue from large, multi-year license deals.
In a shareholder letter, Arm’s top executives said that “revenue recognition profiles for future agreements are subject
to change.”
Analysts said that the unpredictability raises questions about Arm’s valuation, which, at more than $65 billion after its initial public offering, was far higher relative to its anticipated annual revenue than any other chip company.
“There are still questions about whether there is a sustainable growth narrative for this company,” said Ben Bajarin, chief executive and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. “The quarter looked good, but the guidance didn’t look good – we don’t really understand what the customer cycle looks like.”
‘STRONG DEMAND’
Arm Chief Financial Officer Jason Child told Reuters that the below-expectations guidance for the current fiscal third quarter but higher full-year forecast was because the company now expects a major licensing deal to land a quarter later than initially expected.
“These are very, very large deals that require lots of complicated approvals that go to the highest levels and it’s organizations that can take a while and that’s hard for us to predict,” Child said in the conference call Wednesday.
Arm said it forecast a fiscal 2024 revenue range with a midpoint of $3.02 billion, above analyst expectations of $2.95 billion, according to data from LSEG. For the current fiscal third quarter, Arm expects a revenue range with a midpoint of $760 million, below analyst estimates of $767.84 million, according to LSEG data.
For Arm’s second fiscal quarter ended in September, revenue jumped 28% to $806 million, ahead of an average estimate of $744.31 million, according to LSEG data. Adjusted profit of 36 cents per share beat expectations of 26 cents per share.
Arm has been working to expand from its stronghold of mobile phone chips into other areas such as data center servers and personal computer chips. Reuters last month reported that Nvidia plans to use technology from Arm in a major new challenge to Intel (INTC.O) in the personal computer market.
Arm has two primary revenue streams: the upfront licensing fees it charges for access to its chip designs and other intellectual property, and a royalty that it collects on each chip sold that was made with its intellectual property. Arm has said it aims to increase its royalty revenues by moving into parts of the chip market where chips sell for higher average prices.
Arm said that royalty revenue for the fiscal second quarter declined to $418 million, below analyst expectations of $420.3 million, according to data from Visible Alpha. Licensing and other revenue for the second quarter was $388 million, above expectations of $326.9 million, according to data from Visible Alpha.
Child told Reuters that Arm’s second quarter royalty revenues still reflected a chip glut that affected the chip industry broadly.
“We expect our royalty numbers to flip to positive (growth) this quarter,” Child told Reuters.
It reported a net loss of $509 million in the quarter, driven by employee stock compensation costs. The company said its initial public offering generated a large one-time expense for previously granted shares and that future employee stock compensation costs are expected to be between $150 million to $200 million per quarter.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Lisa Shumaker
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LONDON, Nov 3 (Reuters) – The troubles faced by co-working titan WeWork (WE.N) are darkening the outlook for the world’s largest business hubs, where rising office vacancies are already heaping pressure on investors set to refinance big-ticket mortgages next year.
Media reports on Wednesday suggested the New-York listed flexible workspace provider – once privately valued at $47 billion – was weighing a petition for bankruptcy next week.
Backed by Japan’s SoftBank, WeWork aimed to revolutionise the office market by taking long leases on large properties and renting the space to multiple smaller businesses on more flexible, shorter arrangements.
But like other landlords, it has struggled to persuade some customers since the pandemic to swap working from home for the office at its 650-plus locations worldwide – a trend that has shaken confidence in the sector.
Global office vacancies are expected to climb, hurting rental prospects in cities like New York and London, eight industry executives, investors, lenders and analysts said.
Some leveraged property investors could struggle to earn enough rental income to service rising debt costs, they said.
“The loss of any tenant, especially during a time of relatively slow office leasing, will have a negative impact on office building cashflows and values,” said Moody’s Analytics’ Commercial Real Estate Industry Practice Lead, Jeffrey Havsy.
“This will add to the negative sentiment in the marketplace and make financing harder, especially those buildings that need to refinance in the next 12-18 months,” he said.
A WeWork spokesperson told Reuters the firm was in talks with landlords to address “high-cost and inflexible lease terms” and was striving to remain in the majority of its locations and markets.
The number and volume of real estate loans due for refinancing in 2024 is unclear because many deals are struck privately between borrower and lender, Ed Daubeney, co-head, debt and structured finance, EMEA, at real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle, told Reuters.
Analysts estimate the global commercial property lending market is around $2 trillion in size, roughly split 50:50 between banks and alternative lenders in the United States and 85:15 in Europe.
Several experts contacted by Reuters predicted a year of reckoning for property investors and lenders in 2024, with time running out for those turning a blind eye to assets that would be in breach of key lending terms if revalued today.
The value of all global real estate – residential, commercial, and agricultural land – was $379.7 trillion in 2022, Savills said in a report in September, down 2.8% on 2021.
TRANSACTION SLUMP
Real-estate loan refinancings have already been complicated by a plunge in transactions, which are crucial in tracking changes in asset values.
MSCI’s Capital Trends report for Europe showed third quarter volumes down 57% on 2022 levels – the lowest since 2010.
What’s more, the gap between what investors believe assets are worth and what prospective buyers are willing to pay is between 20% and 35% in core office markets – “far worse than the height of the global financial crisis”, MSCI said.
MSCI said prices in Europe’s two largest office markets, Britain and Germany, would have to fall another 13%-15% to bring market liquidity back to its long-run average.
Global lenders to UK real estate holding and development companies, which supplied credit risk assessments to data provider Credit Benchmark in October, said those firms were now 9% more likely to default than they estimated 12 months ago.
U.S. industrial and office real estate investment trusts (REITs) were seen 35.8% more likely to default, versus expectations a year ago.
RE-LETTING
WeWork has 3.25 million square feet of space in central London, with a total annual rent roll of 192 million pounds ($234 million), Jefferies said in a September note. Its biggest U.S. markets are New York and California, where it operates 49 and 42 sites respectively, according to WeWork’s website.
Industry sources said some of its most popular locations could be taken over by rivals at similar rental rates, minimising cashflow issues for landlords.
But flexible workspace demand in Britain is still 11% below pre-pandemic levels, the Instant Group’s 2023 State of the UK Flex Market report in September showed.
Lenders might view the WeWork debacle as a cautionary tale, sources said, potentially requiring borrowers to inject more equity into their properties to reduce the loan-to-value ratio.
But such a request could be problematic if the quantum and duration of rental income remain uncertain.
London office vacancies have surged to a 30-year high, Jefferies also said in September, with average lease lengths on central London offices sliding to six years from 11.6 years a decade ago, according to BNP Paribas Real Estate.
UK property company Helical said it was working on “next steps” for the space at one London property let to WeWork, after recouping rent it had failed to pay via a short-term licence arrangement.
Under-occupied urban offices are not only generating lower than expected rental income for owners but some are also ageing rapidly in a world increasingly sensitive to carbon consumption.
“We’re at a massive turning point in the real estate investment market globally,” Jose Pellicer, head of real estate strategy at M&G Real Estate, said.
“For the last 20 years, property yields have been higher than financing costs. But a far bigger percentage of a property return is going to have to come from growth in the 2020s.”
($1 = 0.9407 euros)
($1 = 0.8214 pounds)
Reporting by Sinead Cruise
Editing by Elisa Martinuzzi and Mark Potter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
A Peterbilt 579 truck equipped with Aurora’s self-driving system is seen at the company’s terminal in Palmer, south of Dallas, Texas, U.S. September 23, 2021. Picture taken September 23, 2021. REUTERS/Tina Bellon/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Nov 1 (Reuters) – Aurora Innovation (AUR.O) on Wednesday opened its first lane for driverless trucks connecting Dallas and Houston, supported by its commercial trucking terminal in Houston, ahead of a launch in 2024.
“Bringing our commercial-ready terminals and services online a year ahead of our planned commercial driverless launch between Dallas and Houston enables us to focus next year on integrating our driver-ready trucks into our customers’ operations,” said Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson.
Aurora said it would operate its terminals day and night, which will support more than 75 commercial loads for pilot customers.
The company will support its terminals with Command Centers which will include staff who monitor and guide the fleet.
Aurora’s move comes as federal investigations have been launched into General Motors’ (GM.N) autonomous vehicle unit Cruise, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles ordered Cruise’s self driving cars to be removed from state roads citing safety concerns.
Aurora’s portfolio of products includes Aurora Driver, its self-driving technology that can be employed across vehicle types, and driverless trucking subscription service Aurora Horizon.
Aurora has partnerships with Uber Technologies (UBER.N), Toyota (7203.T), Volvo (VOLVb.ST), and PACCAR (PCAR.O), among others.
Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.