Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 1

Monitoring the coronavirus COVID-19 spread, TAITRA has been under pressure for several weeks to make a judgment call on Computex Taipei 2020, Asia's largest IT trade show. The popular yearly event is routinely attended by TweakTown and many technology exhibitors, buyers, analysts, and media from all over the world.

Last night in Taipei, TAITRA finally made its call. Computex 2020 will be postponed from its planned date of June 2 till June 6, 2020, until September 28 till September 30, 2020 - six months out from now and around four months out from its original date. That means the event is getting cut down from its usual five days to just three days. Computex is usually spaced out over the greater Taipei area with halls in Xinyi and Nangang, as well as hotels in the Xinyi area.

Computex 2020 will be scaled down and held in just one hall - Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2 (TaiNEX 2). It is unclear at this stage if exhibitors will be allowed to exhibit their goods from hotel suites, as is usually the case.

You can't escape hearing about coronavirus COVID-19 in the news virtually 24/7, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Google searches for "coronavirus" have absolutely skyrocketed in recent weeks.

Using the last 90 days on Google Trends and looking at Worldwide searches, we can see that things started to ramp up a bit in late January 2020 but died down throughout February. Google searches for coronavirus began steadily rising in the second half of February, and have reached fever pitch in the second week of March.

Leading the charge in Google searches in Italy, where the most interest in coronavirus searches takes place in the first country to go under lockdown over the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak.

Supermarket shelves in Australia are virtually bare of essentials, where it first started with toilet paper -- and quickly saw things like bottled water, frozen goods, pasta, and more ripped from shelves over coronavirus panic.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the Australian government will be prosecuting those who stripped supermarket shelves of essential items, with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) also says these people could be linked to criminal enterprises. Mr Dutton told 2GB in Australia: "We will come down on them like a ton of bricks... I believe they are the ones who have created this pattern of hoarding".

Dutton continued: "They (Australians) are following the behaviour of people who aren't purchasing for themselves - they're doing it for profit, and reasons that are unacceptable. If you have photos, or registration numbers, or if you have instances ... photos, intelligence or information, I want you to call Crime Stoppers".

The New York Stock Exchange has announced that it will be temporarily closing its trading floor, shifting to a world of fully electronic trading after 2 people have tested positive for coronavirus.

NYSE will start its all-electronic trading on March 23, with the NYSE equities trading floor, NYSE American Operations trading floor in New York, and the NYSE Arca Options trading floor in San Francisco to have all humans removed. The NYSE had screenings at its Big Board, with 2 people testing positive for coronavirus, ushering in the all-electronic trading push from the NYSE.

This is the first time in the history of the New York Stock Exchange that the physical trading floor of the Big Board has been shut down independently, while electronic trading flows. The NYSE has shut down a couple of times in history, the last of which was 9/11 and before that during World War II.

We all know that coronavirus COVID-19 is wrecking havok on the world in multiple ways, but now we have an analyst who thinks it is the perfect time for Apple to acquire Disney. Yeah... Disney, and yeah... Apple.

Rosenblatt Securities Director Bernie McTernan has thought about what would happen if Apple were to acquire Disney, during a recent chat with Yahoo Finance. He had some interesting facts that he bought up, and with coronavirus COVID-19 bringing markets down and changing the way consumers consume content right now, Apple could make a big move on the board and acquire everything giant Apple.

Yahoo Finance talked about Apple having the ability to "possibly take advantage of those struggles" that Disney is going through right now, with Disney stock plummeting 40% in the last month alone.

It looks like things could go from (really) bad to unbelievably bad when it comes to the flow-on effects of coronavirus COVID-19.

Coronavirus could crash the entire US housing market causing trillions of dollars in damage, and affecting hundreds of millions of Americans. The latest data from Google Trends is a big indicator towards this, with Google searches of "unemployment benefits" shoot up.

As you can see from the Google Trends data on US-based users searches for "Unemployment Benefits" it has skyrocketed in the last week or so. But the issue is, it's not just searches for "unemployment benefits" that is concerning, because "can't pay rent" searches are surging, too.

The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) says that COVID-19 coronavirus, and the closures of countless schools worldwide, will have an affect on 776 million children.

UNESCO explains: "an unprecedented number of children, youth and adults are not attending schools or universities because of COVID-19". Governments in 100 countries have announced, or already implemented closures of schools -- where in 85 countries, schools nationwide have been completely closed, which has affected 776.7 million children.

There's no an updated list of digital education tools from UNESCO, something that includes digital learning management systems like ClassDojo and Google Classroom. There are also apps that have been designed for smart featurephones including KaiOS, and software with offline compatibility with Can't Wait to Learn, Kolibri, Rumie, and Ustad Mobile.

Uber is doing what it can to respond to the coronavirus outbreak, and it has recently announced its battle plan that is aimed at helping many restaurants.

Uber has announced that it will be launching daily marketing campaigns to push Uber Eats customers into purchasing food from local restaurants. On top of that, Uber has also said that it will waiver delivery fees from over 100,000 local restaurants in the United States and Canada. The goodness doesn't stop there, though. Uber will also be allowing restaurants to choose daily payments to Uber Eats instead of normal weekly payments.

There will also be 300,000 free meals that can be claimed by first responders and healthcare workers on Uber Eats. For workers that are currently participating in keeping local restaurants afloat, Uber is offering two weeks of pay to drivers and delivery people who have unfortunately tested positive for COVID-19. Uber also recommends that it's customers select the 'non-contact' delivery to minimize the chance of the virus spreading.

Since the coronavirus has become worldwide news, global panic buying from local stores has become the norm. With stock running low from local stores due to high demand, people are looking to buy online, and where do you think they are going? Amazon, of course.

All kinds of products that you would usually walk straight past cannot be found on the shelves in local stores, toilet paper, foods, essential items, and more are running low. Some people are giving up on going to the local stores, and turning to go purchase their goods online, Amazon is usually the first choice, and it seems that assumption is right as they are getting a lot more customers. According to Amazon, to keep up with the "significant increase in demand", Amazon will be hiring 100,000 more warehouse and delivery workers in the United States.

Amazon has said that it will also be paying current all workers in their respective countries an extra $2 per hour through the end of April. This pay bump represents an investment of $350 million across all of Amazon's warehouses in the US, Europe, and Canada. Amazon has also said that it's looking for new workers that are willing to fill full-time and part-time positions and that the company is happy to take anyone on board who has lost their job due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Apple is being slapped with fines left, right, and center recently, and now another billion-dollar fine has been slid across the company's desk. This time it's for engaging in anti-competitive agreements with wholesalers.

According to a report for The Guardian, Apple has been fined a staggering 1.1bn EURO ($1.2 billion USD) by French antitrust regulators for engaging in anti-competitive agreements with two wholesalers. Isabelle de Silva, the head of Autorite de la Concurrence, the watchdog for competition, said: "Apple and its two wholesalers agreed to not compete against each other and prevent resellers from promoting competition between each other, thus sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products."

The two companies that Apple worked closely with are Tech Data, and Ingram Micro. Both of these companies were also slapped with fines, Tech Data received a 76 million EURO fine ($84 million USD), and Ingram Micro received a 63 million EURO ($70 million USD) fine. The French regulator said that Apple aligned its prices with wholesalers, and selectively distributed stock to favored wholesalers. Apple also reportedly gave more stock to select wholesalers when products launched.