Corporate governance - Vigil

Five years after its kickoff, SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund is being battered by the tech selloff, making for an embarrassing performance that lags behind the overall stock market since its launch. 

Chinese companies like Alibaba Group Holding are embracing buybacks and one-off dividends, handing cash to shareholders as they seek to shore up their battered stock prices and signal confidence in the long-term outlook.

Blackstone, one of the world’s largest asset managers, announced Monday that it hired former Canada Pension Plan Investment Board executive Janice Lin as head of its real estate in Canada. For the past two years, Ms. Lin was chief investment officer at retirement home operator Revera Inc.

The charge was expected and came alongside robust oil and gas trading profit during a period of extreme volatility. Shell’s first-quarter profit on a net current-cost-of-supplies basis—a figure similar to the net income that U.S. oil companies report—was $5 billion, compared with $4.3 billion a year earlier when performance rebounded from low pandemic energy demands.

Meghan Meger and Geoff Newton have been appointed co-heads of BMO Private Wealth Canada and will begin their new roles on June 1.

Netflix has been hit with a shareholder lawsuit in a U.S. court in California accusing the streaming entertainment company of misleading the market about its ability to keep adding subscribers in recent months.

Shopify’s board unanimously recommended shareholders vote in favour of the new structure, along with the stock split. Investors should applaud this evolution. In a 2019 report, Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations chair Yvan Allaire said sunset clauses have “gained salience as institutional shareholders and various agencies try to curtail, rein in and put a time limit on the relative freedom that a dual-class of shares provides to entrepreneurs and family corporations.”

Some U.S. companies are warning that Covid-19 lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere in China are denting sales, disrupting operations and putting added strain on supply chains that could be felt well into the summer.

The three-year-old company has been a “pandemic winner,” with rapid growth accelerated by employees largely working from home and connecting remotely to their workplaces. “It’s sad to say it but COVID has extremely benefited our company,” chief executive officer and co-founder Avery Pennarun said in an interview.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are set to address The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council this week, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended geopolitics and amplified economic challenges that have emerged because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As Suncor shares lagged its peers, U.S. investment firm Elliott Management saw an opportunity and built a 3.4-per-cent stake. Last month the hedge fund said it would like to see a handful of new directors join the company’s board, as well as management and strategic reviews.

Rogers is scrambling to rescue its $26-billion takeover of Shaw by lining up a suitable buyer for Shaw’s wireless carrier Freedom Mobile after Canada’s competition watchdog vowed to take steps to block the merger of the country’s two largest cable networks.

Mark Bristow, the chief executive officer of Barrick Gold Corp., says he has no intention of buying Kinross Gold Corp., putting an end to speculation that the big Canadian gold miner was poised to pounce on its struggling competitor.

Yet stakeholder capitalists, “while assertive about the obligations of firms in many areas, have been utterly silent” on instances of concentrated corporate power, say Denise Hearn, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, and competition lawyer Michelle Meagher, co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project.

VW CEO Herbert Diess told reporters during an earnings call on Wednesday that the company wants to boost electric-vehicle investment in North America in particular as the fallout from the war and the pandemic continue to weigh on growth in other regions.

The 63-year-old Mr. McCain and his family, backed by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, acquired Maple Leaf in 1995 from a British holding company and transformed a collection of regional businesses into a leading North American food producer, with 13,500 employees at 21 facilities. On his watch, Maple Leaf’s market capitalization more than tripled to $3.5-billion.

The Ottawa-based tech firm also announced it will be acquiring San Francisco startup Deliverr for US$2.1-billion, the company’s largest acquisition in its history in a bid to expand its warehousing and delivery services. The Globe reported last month that Shopify expected to finalize the deal ahead of the company’s earnings call.

Mr. Musk said he plans to stage an initial public offering of Twitter in as little as three years of buying it, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal is expected to close later this year, subject to conditions including the approval of Twitter shareholders and regulators, the company has said.

A growing number of startups are emerging to challenge the status quo. Many of them are rooted in their founders’ experiences within the industry’s leading giant, Facebook’s  parent company, now known as Meta Platforms.

E-commerce stocks had maintained high values over much of the past two years, buoyed by bets on the public’s reluctance to shop in physical stores during the pandemic. But, as consumers gradually return to old habits and surging inflation raises questions about spending, analysts are cautioning that online traffic growth seen during the pandemic may not prove sustainable for companies such as Shopify, Amazon.com Inc. and Etsy Inc.

BP took a $25.5 billion pretax accounting charge related to its decision to exit its Russia holdings, including its stake in government-controlled oil producer Rosneft, by far the biggest financial hit tallied by companies pulling back from the country after its invasion of Ukraine.