Hello friends and Coins2Day readers.
Wall Street futures are having a good morning. European markets are also higher, and Asian stocks rallied to close out the week.
Saudi Arabia is mourning its longtime monarch today. King Abdullah died at the age of 90, passing the leadership title to his 79-year-old brother Salman. The Kingdom is nearing the end of the second generation of male children of the country’s founder, Abdul Aziz, raising questions of who will take over leadership in coming years.
Here’s what else you need to know to start your day.
1. Box trading goes live.
Box, the online storage provider, will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. The company, run by 29-year-old founder Aaron Levie, priced its initial public offering shares at $14, valuing the company at about $1.67 billion. The IPO is one of the most hotly anticipated technology debuts in recent months after it had faced delays earlier last year.
2. Liberia gets its first shipment of Ebola vaccines.
An experimental Ebola vaccine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), is finally making its way to Liberia. The pharmaceutical maker is hoping to enroll 30,000 people in its first large-scale trials of the vaccine, which was developed with unprecedented speed. However, the rapid decline in Ebola cases in the country will make it difficult to determine the antidote’s efficacy. Liberia’s Ebola infection rate dropped to only eight cases last week from a high of 300 a week in September, according to the World Health Organization.
3. Is McDonald’s selling enough Big Macs and McFlurries?
McDonald’s announces its fourth-quarter earnings this morning, capping off a rough year for the fast food chain. The company has faced food safety scandals in Asia and rising competition from “fast casual” restaurants like Chipotle in the U.S. McDonald’s (MCD) still the world’s largest restaurant company, thought its been losing market share, sales and suffering through an identity crisis. (Read more about its struggles in Coins2Day’s November magazine story.)
4. A $15.4 billion acquisition creates the UK’s largest mobile network.
Hutchinson Whampoa, the Li Ka-shing-owned conglomerate, is shelling out an up to $15.4 billion (10.25 billion pounds) in cash for the UK-based Telefonica’s O2 unit. Combined with Hutchinson’s Three network, the two will create the UK’s largest mobile network. Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, has been investing heavily in European infrastructure companies. He also purchased UK-based Eversholt Rail Group earlier this week in a deal valued at $3.3 billion.
5. Uber agrees to play by Delhi’s rules.
The ride-sharing company will once again start up service in Delhi after Uber was banned a month ago after a driver allegedly raped a passenger. This time around Uber will comply with the city’s regulations, which apply to all taxi cabs. The company will have to paint its cars white and apply for a radio taxi license, even though it says it “will remain a technology company and aggregator.”
