| Previous close | 86.83 |
| Open | 85.48 |
| Bid | 87.14 x 1100 |
| Ask | 87.80 x 1000 |
| Day's range | 85.34 - 88.04 |
| 52-week range | 35.53 - 88.04 |
| Volume | 9,345,066 |
| Avg. volume | 10,830,222 |
| Market cap | 163.174B |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.56 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 11.47 |
| EPS (TTM) | 7.64 |
| Earnings date | 14 Jul 2021 - 19 Jul 2021 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 1.40 (1.60%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 29 Apr 2021 |
| 1y target est | 92.14 |
- Bloomberg
Wall Street Giants Get Swept Up by India’s Brutal Covid Wave
(Bloomberg) -- About 8,300 miles east of Wall Street, on a stretch of Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road, sits what was once the heart of the global financial industry’s back office.Before the pandemic, this cluster of glass-and-steel towers housed thousands of employees at firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and UBS Group AG who played critical roles in everything from risk management to customer service and compliance.Now the buildings are eerily empty. And with case counts soaring across Bangalore and much of India, work-from-home arrangements that have sustained Wall Street’s back-office operations for months are coming under intense strain. A growing number of employees are either sick or scrambling to find critical medical supplies such as oxygen for relatives or friends.Standard Chartered Plc said last week that about 800 of its 20,000 staffers in India were infected. As many as 25% of employees in some teams at UBS are absent, said an executive at the firm who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. At Wells Fargo & Co.’s offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, work on co-branded cards, balance transfers and reward programs is running behind schedule, an executive said.While banks have so far avoided major disruptions by shifting tasks to other offshore hubs, India’s Covid crisis has exposed a little-discussed vulnerability for companies that have spent decades outsourcing functions to the country. India’s outbreak is intensifying even as vaccinations fuel economic recoveries in other parts of the world, heightening fears of a back-office bottleneck at a time when Wall Street firms have rarely been busier.“This is not a local, India-only problem, this is a global crisis,” said D.D. Mishra, senior director analyst at researcher Gartner Inc. The current wave will be “significantly bigger” and organizations with India-based staff “will need to take action to plan for and mitigate if needed,” Mishra and his colleagues wrote in a note last week.Nasscom, the key lobby group for India’s $194 billion outsourcing industry and its almost 5 million employees, has downplayed the threat to operations. But Mishra and fellow analysts at Gartner say they’re fielding a daily flood of calls from anxious global clients asking about the Covid-19 situation.India’s total coronavirus infections have risen to 21.5 million, of which about a third were added since mid-April. The state of Karnataka, whose capital is Bangalore, reported almost 50,000 new infections for a second straight day, with 30% of all results throwing up a positive result.Experts have warned the crisis has the potential to worsen in the coming weeks, with one model predicting as many as 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July, quadrupling from the current official count of 234,083. A model prepared by government advisers suggests the wave could peak in the coming days, but the group’s projections have been changing and were wrong last month.In Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, the three main bases for the financial giants’ operations, infection rates have reached such alarming levels that local governments have ordered stringent restrictions on movement.While the crisis has hit swathes of the nation’s $2.9 trillion economy, the latest wave has notably affected the twenty-something segment of the population that dominates outsourcing companies and is hard to replace. Most of them are English-speaking, technically-skilled workers.Continuity PlanningFor now, back-office units are marshaling part-time workers or asking employees to perform multiple roles and re-assigning staff to make up for those who are absent. They are scheduling overtime, deferring low-priority projects and conducting pandemic continuity planning exercises for multiple locations should the virus wave intensify.A Wells Fargo employee said some work is getting transferred to the Philippines, where staff is working overnight shifts to pick up the slack. The San Francisco-based bank employs about 35,000 workers in India to help process car, home and personal loans, make collections, and assist customers who need to open, update or close their bank accounts. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.An employee at UBS said that with many of the bank’s 8,000 staff in Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad absent, work is being shipped to centers such as Poland. The Swiss bank’s workers in India handle trade settlement, transaction reporting, investment banking support and wealth management. Many of the tasks require same-day or next-day turnarounds. A UBS representative didn’t respond to a request for comment.With uncertainty surrounding how soon the Indian government will contain the crisis, one executive who asked not to be identified likened the situation to flying blind without any idea how many employees will be affected from one week to the next.Rebalancing Loads“We are looking carefully at how we can rebalance loads,” Standard Chartered Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters said on an earnings call last week, noting that some work has been routed to Kuala Lumpur, Tianjin and Warsaw. “In any case, we think we are very well provided for.”Barclays Plc CEO Jes Staley said some functions were shifted to the U.K. from India. Call volumes have increased and people are distressed, he said, adding that signs of pressure was something to watch for. The bank has 20,000 employees in India.Last year, when a sudden lockdown ordered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw these banks scrambling to keep their operations running, the European Banking Authority said the push to outsource support functions “exposed these banks to operational risks.”After asking their employees to work from home en masse last year, most of them have continued to operate at near 100% work-from-home levels. Natwest Group Plc’s workforce in Bangalore, Delhi and the southern city of Chennai -- accounting for a fifth of its global total -- is completely set up to work from home.Management BandwidthSimilarly, thousands of Goldman employees are working from home, doing high-end business tasks such as risk modeling, accounting compliance and app building. A representative for the bank said workflows can be absorbed by the wider team if needed and there’s been no material impact so far.Citigroup Inc. said there’s currently no significant disruption, while Deutsche Bank AG said employees were working seamlessly from home. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. detailed relief efforts they are undertaking, but didn’t elaborate on the impact on their operations. Last week, HSBC Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Noel Quinn said he’s “watching it closely” and ruled out any material impact at this stage.Besides worrying about disruptions to operations, employee well-being and securing medical help are also taking up a lot of management bandwidth at every large outsourcing unit.At a recent all-hands, virtual corporate strategy team meeting at Accenture Plc, for instance, the talk wasn’t about the usual pay-raises or promotions. Instead, worker after worker demanded flexibility, reduced workloads and no-meeting Fridays, an executive said, asking not to be named discussing internal company matter.Their size has become a hindrance, one executive said, but it’s not clear where else they can go for talent and scale, he added.“We are telling clients they need to relax service levels and reduce expectations for the coming few weeks,” said Mishra, the Gartner analyst. “This not a normal situation.”(Updates infections and deaths in eighth and ninth paragraphs.)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.
- Zacks
Credit Suisse & Others Tighten Lending Terms in Archegos Collapse
Banks like Credit Suisse (CS), Morgan Stanley (MS), Nomura (NMR) and UBS Group (UBS) are tightening lending terms of some of their hedge fund clients to prevent events like the Archegos collapse.
- Bloomberg
Jessica Alba’s Honest Co., Investors Raise $413 Million in IPO
(Bloomberg) -- The Honest Co., the personal care brand co-founded by actress Jessica Alba, raised $413 million in an initial public offering priced within a marketed range.The company and its shareholders on Tuesday sold about 25.8 million shares for $16 each, according to a statement confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. The shares had been marketed for $14 to $17, with the company offering 6.5 million shares and existing investors selling 19.4 million.The company has a market value at the IPO price of about $1.45 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fully diluted to include employee stock options and restricted stock units, that value rises to more than $1.7 billion.Founded in 2011, Honest has grown into a national brand and has partnerships with retail giants including Target Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. The Los Angeles-based company specializes in baby products such as diapers and wipes, which accounted for 63% of last year’s sales, as well as household cleaning supplies and personal care items.Now the company’s chief creative officer, Alba owns 5.65 million shares. She didn’t plan to sell her shares in the offering, according to the filings. The share sale gives her a stake valued at about $90 million.Investors selling some of their shares in the IPO included private equity firm L Catterton, Institutional Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst, the filings show.Childhood AilmentsAlba has said she sought to find products with fewer harsh chemicals following childhood struggles with allergies and asthma. She became particularly concerned about ingredients in baby products and said in a recent filing that she tried to appeal to lawmakers for chemical legislation reform.Honest’s business touches on several trends that have become more prominent during the coronavirus pandemic, including a focus on wellness and elevated demand for cleaning products. Those have buoyed top-line results for household-goods companies such as Procter & Gamble Co., the maker of Pampers diapers and Tide laundry detergent.Los Angeles-based Honest generated sales last year of about $301 million, a 28% increase over 2019. It lost $14.5 million in 2020.Boom FadingAlready, though, the pandemic boom for consumer-products makers is starting to fade. P&G has acknowledged that rising costs are pressuring results, toilet paper maker Kimberly-Clark Corp. recently cut its earnings forecast and Clorox Co. last week missed Wall Street’s estimates for quarterly sales. In addition to shifting demand, manufacturers are grappling with higher commodity and freight costs.Honest said in the filing that it’s working to manage disruptions to its supply chain, but it anticipates “sustained market turmoil” as a result of the pandemic and its economic impact. “If the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic continue for an extended period of time, our ability to meet the demands of our consumers may be materially impacted.”The offering is being led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Jefferies Financial Group Inc. The shares are expected to begin trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol HNST.(Updates with statement in second 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.
