Current Affairs

Mapping The Biggest Companies By Market Cap in 60 Countries

Tech giants are increasingly making up more of the Fortune 500, but the world’s biggest companies by market cap aren’t so cut and dry.

Despite accounting for the largest market caps worldwide—with trillion-dollar companies like Apple and contenders including Tencent and Samsung—tech wealth is largely concentrated in just a handful of countries.

So what are the biggest companies in each country? We mapped the largest company by market cap across 60 countries in August 2021 using market data from CompaniesMarketCap, TradingView, and MarketScreener…read more.

Alberta introduces new rules, passport amid COVID crisis

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, facing a COVID-19 crisis that is threatening to collapse its health system in just over a week, has reintroduced limits on gatherings along with elements of a vaccine passport system.

Alberta is also asking for help from other provinces to use their intensive care beds and staff while prepping its triage protocols, which would see doctors forced to choose who gets life-saving treatment and who does not.

The United Conservative government declared Wednesday a state of public health emergency.

“We may run out of staff and intensive care beds within the next 10 days,” Kenney said…read more.

 

Chinese firm buys Canada mRNA vaccine tech in US$500M deal

Chinese biopharma firm Everest Medicines Ltd. will license an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine from Canada’s Providence Therapeutics Holdings Inc., as companies try to bring the most effective inoculation platform into China despite its apparent resistance to western shots.

Everest will gain rights to Providence’s vaccine in Greater China and countries including Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, it said in a statement Monday. It will pay US$100 million cash upfront for access to the vaccines and mRNA technology, and up to US$100 million in profit-sharing, the statement said. The deal includes another payment of up to US$300 million in stock if further products are developed using Providence’s mRNA technology platform.

While almost 1 billion people have been fully vaccinated in China, the country is still lacking an mRNA shot, with most of the population inoculated with inactivated vaccines from Sinopharm Group Co. and Sinovac Biotech Ltd., which studies have found to be less effective. A deal by Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co. to sell BioNTech SE’s mRNA shot in mainland China has yet to be approved by regulators, suggesting it may not be easy to bring in a foreign mRNA vaccine, partly because of political sensitivities…read more.

Amazon likely front-runner for multiyear NFL Sunday Ticket deal, sources say

Amazon is in talks to acquire the rights for the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” package and is seen as the front-runner by others involved in talks with the league, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amazon has a serious interest in the multiyear package of out-of-market games, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Amazon in May agreed to pay about $1 billion per year to become the exclusive provider of Thursday Night Football games beginning next year. That deal made Amazon Prime Video the first-ever streaming service to own an exclusive NFL broadcast package.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on “Sunday Ticket” discussions…read more.

The SEC’s “Really Sketchy Behavior”

That’s how Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong described the SEC’s latest crypto crackdown. According to Coinbase, the Wall Street regulator has sent the crypto exchange a “Wells notice” regarding its upcoming lending product, Lend.

  • Wells notice = a threat to take legal action. In this case, the SEC says they’ll sue Coinbase if and when it launches Lend.
  • Lend would let Coinbase users earn interest by lending digital assets (specifically, a stablecoin called USD Coin) to others.

In a blog post and a nowadays-mandatory Twitter thread, Coinbase executives said they don’t understand what grounds the SEC is suing them on, and that the SEC has refused to loop them in…read more.