Citigroup Inc. (0R01.L)
| Previous close | 70.43 |
| Open | 42.87 |
| Bid | 0.00 x 0 |
| Ask | 0.00 x 0 |
| Day's range | 42.80 - 42.87 |
| 52-week range | 42.80 - 42.87 |
| Volume | 5,606 |
| Avg. volume | N/A |
| Market cap | 98.945B |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.92 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 9.07 |
| EPS (TTM) | 4.72 |
| Earnings date | N/A |
| Forward dividend & yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-dividend date | N/A |
| 1y target est | N/A |
- Bloomberg
Oil Rallies After Saudi Oil Minister Urges OPEC+ Supply Caution
(Bloomberg) -- Oil traded above $62 a barrel in New York after Saudi Arabia’s oil minister urged caution from producers as they gathered virtually.West Texas Intermediate added 1.8%, while Brent also climbed. OPEC+ should keep its powder dry, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at the start of the ministerial meeting. He urged caution and vigilance from oil producers.Saudi Arabia and Russia, the most influential members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, held talks on Wednesday to seek common ground on production as Riyadh urged caution and Moscow sought to increase supply, a delegate said.Click here for TOPLive coverage of the OPEC+ meetingOil started the day strongly amid gathering tensions in the Middle East after Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed attacks on Saudi targets. The rebels, who are backed by Iran, said they bombed an airbase in Saudi Arabia’s southwest with a drone and hit a Saudi Aramco crude facility in Jeddah. Aramco and Saudi officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.But the crux of the market’s focus Thursday will be on OPEC+. Crude has rebounded this year after the group and its allies slashed output to drive a rebalancing of the market following last year’s virus-induced slump. The aggressive supply management has helped to drain inventories, while worldwide demand is recovering with the roll-out of vaccines. That’s spurred expectations that OPEC+ will now loosen the taps.Read more: OPEC+ Silence Has Oil Market Second-Guessing Next Move“The challenge is perfecting the timing of output hikes,” said Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at UBS Group AG. “Demand will increase in the coming months, but it could happen in April, or it could happen later on.”Veteran OPEC-watchers expect some extra barrels from the group, and there’s little chance output will be held at current levels, but delegates said several options are still on the table.There are two elements to the debate: first, will the cartel proceed with a 500,000-barrel-a-day collective output hike in April? Second, how will Saudi Arabia phase out the extra supply reduction of 1 million barrels a day it’s been making voluntarily?Heading into the meeting, traders will be mindful that Saudi Arabia has developed a liking for bullish surprises. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman triggered a surge in prices at the January session by springing a unilateral production cut on an unsuspecting market. Citigroup Inc. has advised its clients not to make bets on this OPEC meeting as “there are too many wildcards,” according to Ed Morse, global head of commodities research.The backdrop to the gathering is a slew of indicators that energy consumption is on the mend in key economies, alongside pockets of lockdown-related weakness. Among recent positive figures, data showed U.S. commutes are slowly returning to normal, while India’s fuel demand could rise to a record. At the same time, Europe’s roads remain quieter than normal.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
China Revs Up Grand Chip Ambitions to Counter U.S. Blacklistings
(Bloomberg) -- In just two decades, China sent people into space, built its own aircraft carrier and developed a stealth fighter jet. Now the world’s youngest superpower is setting out to prove its capabilities once more -- this time in semiconductors.At stake is nothing less than the future of the world’s No. 2 economy. Beijing’s blueprint for chip supremacy is enshrined in a five-year economic vision to be unveiled during a summit of top leaders in the capital this week. It’s a multi-layered strategy both pragmatic and ambitious in scope, embracing aspirations to replace pivotal U.S. suppliers and fend off Washington, while molding homegrown champions in emergent technologies.China wants to build a coterie of technology giants that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., conferring the same priority on that effort as it accorded to building atomic capability. While specifics of that endeavor won’t emerge for months, comments by government officials, Party mouthpieces like the People’s Daily and state think-tanks provide important clues about the envisioned road map.Read more: Xi Mobilizes China for Tech Revolution to Cut Dependence on WestThe approach entails making do over the next five years or so with aging semiconductors that are adequate for electric cars and even military applications, but can’t run advanced smartphones and similar devices. That buys China time to focus on fields like so-called third-generation chipmaking in which no country yet dominates and -- Beijing hopes -- create an array of indigenous giants in areas including machinery, software and new materials. The ultimate goal is to groom local alternatives to global linchpins like Cadence Inc. and Synopsys Inc. in design software and Europe’s ASML Holding NV in chipmaking gear.“Semiconductors are a crucial sector in the information era that will lead the future of economic development,” Science & Technology Minister Wang Zhigang said at a press conference last week. “At the same time, China will strive to achieve self reliance and strengthen our own capabilities.”The World Is Short of Computer Chips. Here’s Why: QuickTakeChina’s efforts gained urgency because the Biden administration is escalating a battle against what it called “techno-autocracies.” That could extend or even expand blacklistings that banned key transactions with corporations from Huawei Technologies Co. to ByteDance Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. To a country that imports $300 billion of chips annually, a worsening global shortage drives home the risk of relying on potentially hostile suppliers for the building blocks of everything from artificial intelligence to sixth-generation networking and autonomous vehicles.It will take years for local companies to match foreign counterparts in manufacturing and design expertise, during which there’s no ready answer to the dominance of Japanese and American names in chipmaking equipment. Chinese companies will still only supply 35% of its domestic demand by the end of this decade, IDC analyst Mario Morales estimates.They’ll also have to contend with Washington. The U.S. signaled it intends to go ahead with a Trump administration-proposed rule to secure the technology supply chain next month, a move that gives the Department of Commerce broad authority to prohibit transactions involving “foreign adversaries” like China.“The United States and its allies should utilize targeted export controls on high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment ... to protect existing technical advantages and slow the advancement of China’s semiconductor industry,” the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, headed up by former Google chairman Eric Schmidt, recommended to Biden and Congress this week.Huawei, the country’s largest technology company by revenue, underscores the leverage Washington wields. Once the world’s biggest smartphone maker, Huawei was forced to sell its Honor division and run at close to minimum production capacity after it lost access to chips from the likes of TSMC under American regulations.Read more: China Said to Plan Broad Chip Sector Support to Fight Trump“It just stimulates the Chinese community to accelerate their internal developments and eventually they may come out even stronger,” said Luc Van den hove, president of the Imec research center in Leuven, Belgium, which focuses on innovation in semiconductor technology. “And I think that’s certainly a risk of trying to keep the two worlds further apart.”Read more: Biden Putting Tech, Not Troops, at Center of U.S.-China StrategyBeijing had set aside at the start of its last five-year plan around 1 trillion yuan ($155 billion) for potential investment in semiconductors over five to 10 years, according to McKinsey. It will now continue to bankroll research and investment in coming years, Wang said last week. China will increase fiscal support for scientific research and encourage leading companies to join national programs, he added. That should galvanize the much larger influx of private capital needed to produce genuine breakthroughs.It’s an approach that’s worked before for the internet, where a mix of government and private capital helped build the likes of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing Inc. In February, the state-backed Global Times reported smartphone makers Xiaomi Corp. and Oppo acquired stakes in Jiangsu Changjing Electronics Technology Co., exemplifying the sort of private-sector involvement Beijing’s counting on.When it comes to the chips, “we will see more support relative to private firms, because they play a bigger role in those sectors,” said Wendy Leutert, GLP-Ming Z. Mei Chair of Chinese Economics and Trade at Indiana University.Read more: The U.S.-China Conflict Over Chips Is About to Get UglierIn the meantime, up-and-comers such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Tsinghua Unigroup can help tide the country over a deficit of mobile processors, memory and telecom modules should Washington close off supply routes. They will mainly operate mature processes of 14 nanometers and older, sufficient for all but the most exacting applications such as smartphones, high-performance computing and graphics processors. Meanwhile, global leader TSMC is ramping up for mass production of 3 nm chips in 2022, about five or six generations ahead.At the same time, they’ll act as focal points for the country’s most capable brains to work on stop-gap measures such as advanced packaging that can improve chip computing power in the absence of more sophisticated U.S. technology. The hope is that such fine-tuning buys time for the homegrown development of advanced technologies, such as in 7-nanometer chips and silicon design software.Some of the key local players in that space include Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Co. and Naura Technology Group Co., who are working on equipment that can someday replace ASML’s extreme ultra-violet lithography or EUV machines -- a prerequisite for any advanced chipmaking.Local startups like Empyrean are trying to replicate the similarly indispensable software tools licensed by Synopsys and Cadence, employed by most of the world’s chip designers from Intel on down. Even in the commoditized realm of memory, a subsidiary of state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup is spending billions on mass production to challenge Samsung Electronics Co. and Micron Technology Inc.What Bloomberg Intelligence SaysTSMC may lose market share in China in the next three years to local contract chipmakers such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International. These Chinese peers are accelerating advance-node technology development and will likely gain orders from local chip designers such as Will Semiconductor and Unisoc, which are trying to avoid dependence on U.S. technology due to bilateral trade tensions and the risk of sanctions.- Charles Shum and Masahiro Wakasugi, analystsClick here for the research.Read more: China Still Buying $300 Billion of Chips From U.S., ElsewherePresident Xi Jinping has pledged an estimated $1.4 trillion through 2025 for technologies ranging from wireless networks to AI. A big chunk of that is geared toward semiconductors.Chinese firms such as Tsinghua will be responsible for building half the world’s 30-odd new fabrication plants or fabs in the next two years alone. It’s already spending 2.4 times more than the U.S. on semiconductor equipment, much of it made by American companies, Morales wrote in a report.The World Is Short of Computer Chips. Here’s Why: QuickTakeThe bet is that its corporations can compete if they accelerate research into burgeoning, adjacent fields like AI and quantum computing now. That’s where third-generation chips come in. Those are mainly made of materials such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, can operate at high frequency and in higher power and temperature environments, with broad applications in fifth-generation radio frequency chips, military-grade radar and electric vehicles.The country may secure first-mover advantage, even if traditional silicon-based semiconductors will continue to account for the vast majority of global use for the foreseeable future, Citigroup analysts have said. U.S.-based Cree Inc. and Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. are just beginning to grow this business, while Chinese rivals such as Sanan Optoelectronics Co. and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp. have made inroads.The country’s other chipmakers, which include SMIC, Will Semiconductor Ltd. and National Silicon Industry Group Co., benefit more broadly from the state support.“The investment commitment that China is making ensures that the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem will continue to play an important role in the progress of our industry and the overall IT market,” said IDC’s Morales.(Updates with China’s comment on research in the 12th paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Sea Predicts Sales Doubling as Online Shopping Boom Persists
(Bloomberg) -- Sea Ltd. expects e-commerce revenue to double in 2021, sustaining its torrid pace of growth as Southeast Asia’s most valuable company counts on regional online shopping demand to persist after the pandemic.Revenue rose to $1.6 billion in the last three months of 2020 from $777.2 million a year earlier, Singapore-based Sea said Tuesday in a statement. Net loss widened to $523.6 million from $283.8 million.Sea, backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., has emerged as a stock-market sensation since its initial public offering in New York in 2017, as investors bet the company can establish itself as a leader in e-commerce and gaming in Southeast Asia. Among companies valued at $100 billion or more, the stock is the No. 1 performer in Asia since the start of last year and only trails Tesla Inc. globally.It’s also trying to establish fintech as a third growth driver. Sea said Tuesday it’s acquired Composite Capital Management, a Hong Kong-licensed global investment management firm. The company will deploy $1 billion toward Sea Capital, a newly established platform to manage its overall investments. Composite Capital founder David Ma -- a former partner at Chinese private equity giant Hillhouse -- becomes Sea Capital’s chief investment officer, reporting to Sea Chief Executive Officer Forrest Li.“Sea’s growth prospects remain promising, riding on the growing digital economy in the region,” Citigroup analysts led by Alicia Yap wrote. “Guidance could prove conservative.”Here’s a Tech Bubble That Makes Tesla Look Cheap: Tim CulpanKey InsightsThe pandemic is helping to spur demand at Sea’s e-commerce business Shopee, with fourth-quarter sales increasing 178% to $842.2 million. Sea forecast 2021 revenue at Shopee of $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion, up from $2.2 billion in 2020.Hit mobile game Free Fire is fueling growth at Sea’s digital entertainment service Garena, whose sales last quarter rose 71.6% to $693.4 million. Sea forecast Garena’s annual bookings -- sales plus changes in deferred revenue -- will increase to $4.3 billion to $4.5 billion in 2021.Its e-wallet service gained traction, with payment volume exceeding $2.9 billion for the quarter and $7.8 billion for the full year. Sea is trying to build financial services into its third growth pillar.Get MoreSea Ltd 4Q Adjusted Ebitda Misses EstimatesFourth-quarter sales and marketing expenses climbed 95% to $665.2 million, led by digital financial services.For 2020, Sea posted total digital entertainment bookings of $3.2 billion.Annual revenue at Garena rose 77.5% to $2 billion.Market ReactionSea’s American depositary receipts ended mostly unchanged after surging as much as 11% Tuesday.(Updates with fund’s chief and analyst’s comment from the fifth paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
