Philip Morris International raised its 1 bln pound bid for UK pharma group Vectura, beating Carlyle’s sweetened offer. Shareholders that shun tobacco may prefer the buyout firm. But PMI has more strategic know-how and Carlyle could sell in a few years. Price should be decisive.

The Saudi oil giant’s ultimate boss, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, wants it to help fund the kingdom’s pivot away from crude. A strong first half makes it easier to do that and pay dividends. Unlike last year, Aramco can also meet its various demands without debt spiking.

MELBOURNE, Aug 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Citigroup (C.N) Chief Executive Jane Fraser has done a decent job offloading the U.S. megabank’s Australian retail operations. National Australia Bank (NAB.AX)is paying A$1.2 billion($880 million) for the division, thereby generating some standout statistics for the seller.

The deal values the unit at more than 8 times trailing earnings in the 12 months to the end of June, compared to the less than 7 times Citi’s own worth currently commands. And it’s a juicy 1.25 times book value, whereas Citi as a whole trades at a lowly 80% of net assets.

It’s a small operation for Citi, though, accounting for less than 1% of earnings. NAB won’t do too badly: Expected cost savings alone are enough to cover three-quarters of the purchase price, although Citi’s Australian mortgage book is shrinking, integration costs look high and NAB reckons the deal will only “marginally” improve returns. The bragging rights belong in New York. (By...

HONG KONG, Aug 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Shein, the highly Instagrammable Chinese fast-fashion company, is being hauled over the coals. The company, estimated 12 months ago to be worth $15 billion, failed to make UK-mandated public disclosures about its working conditions and had stated falsely that it relies on factories certified by international labour standards organisations, according to a Reuters exclusive read more .

Unlike Zara's owner Inditex (ITX.MC) and H&M (HMb.ST), Shein is a private company so doesn’t have to reveal much about its operations. And accusations of wrongdoing don’t necessarily hit the top line. British online fashion retailer Boohoo’s (BOOH.L) revenue surged 32% in the three months to the end of May, about two months after U.S. authorities decided to investigate claims of poor supply-chain work practices.

That’s not the only number to focus on, though. Thanks in part to growing concern read more from activist investors, Boohoo’s...

Sexual assault allegations have embroiled the $534 bln e-commerce firm, already under scrutiny for antitrust and other issues. Alibaba prizes strong internal controls and hires more female executives than domestic peers. The industry’s toxic culture is overdue a reckoning.

HONG KONG, Aug 5 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Japan’s largest auto marques are showing their strength. Toyota Motor (7203.T) and Honda Motor (7267.T) beat estimates read more on Wednesday; Honda lifted its full-year profit guidance by 18%. Even long-battered Nissan Motor (7201.T)rode the wave, with global sales up 63% in the three months to the end of June, helping it post an unexpected profit and hike its earnings outlook.

Commodity prices and a global chip shortage are issues, but the trio is managing them better than U.S. rivals like General Motors (GM.N) read more , whose stock fell almost 8% after reporting earnings on Wednesday.

That makes the liquidity buffers the Japanese carmakers accumulated during the pandemic stand out. Toyota had 5 trillion yen ($46 billion) in cash and equivalents at the end of the quarter, down from 7 trillion yen a year earlier but well above its pre-Covid-19 average and double GM’s stash. Honda’s stack looks high, too. With Tokyo...

MUMBAI, Aug 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Nykaa is adding a shimmer to Indian tech listings. Former investment banker Falguni Nayar’s mostly online beauty store is growing fast by selling lipstick, epilators and sneakers to a loyal band of millennials in far-flung cities where it can often be tricky to find good products. The company ekes out a profit too. That stands it apart from money-losing compatriots Zomato (ZOMT.NS), Paytm, and PolicyBazaar, which are all racing to debut in a red-hot market. And it makes Nykaa’s mooted up to $4.5 billion valuation for its initial public offering look less dolled up.

The nearly decade-old firm houses close to 4,000 brands from domestic luxury names Forest Essentials to high-end foreign ones like Bobbi Brown. It processed 19.5 million orders in the year to the end of March, with a respectable average order value of $37 in fashion. Users flock to the site to learn about the latest beauty trends, and a network of over 1,300 influencers...

MUMBAI, Aug 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Nykaa is adding a shimmer to Indian tech listings. Former investment banker Falguni Nayar’s mostly online beauty store is growing fast by selling lipstick, epilators and sneakers to a loyal band of millennials in far-flung cities where it can often be tricky to find good products. The company ekes out a profit too. That stands it apart from money-losing compatriots Zomato (ZOMT.NS), Paytm, and PolicyBazaar, which are all racing to debut in a red-hot market. And it makes Nykaa’s mooted up to $4.5 billion valuation for its initial public offering look less dolled up.

The nearly decade-old firm houses close to 4,000 brands from domestic luxury names Forest Essentials to high-end foreign ones like Bobbi Brown. It processed 19.5 million orders in the year to the end of March, with a respectable average order value of $37 in fashion. Users flock to the site to learn about the latest beauty trends, and a network of over 1,300 influencers...

Businesses from United Airlines to BlackRock want employees to get the shot or stay away. But bosses that face both staff shortages and low levels of vaccine take-up have less sway. Leaving mandates to companies will most hurt people already bearing the brunt of the pandemic.

WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - A possible cold is coming onto a healthy U.S. jobs market read more . Payrolls grew by 943,000 positions and the unemployment rate dropped 0.5 percentage points from June to 5.4% in July, the Labor Department said on Friday. But the Delta variant of Covid-19 is already causing people to cut back on eating at restaurants and travel.

Leisure and hospitality, the hardest hit sector in the pandemic, saw the biggest gains. Hotels, restaurants and the like added 380,000 jobs last month. But those industries are starting to see strains from the more contagious Delta variant read more .

Reservations at restaurants were down 10% on Wednesday compared with the same period in 2019, according to OpenTable. A week earlier, the drop was 4%. Daily passengers at U.S. airports had a five-day streak of over 2 million, the longest since travel nearly stopped last year, before falling below that level this week, data from the Transportation...

Businesses from United Airlines to BlackRock want employees to get the shot or stay away. But bosses that face both staff shortages and low levels of vaccine take-up have less sway. Leaving mandates to companies will most hurt people already bearing the brunt of the pandemic.

NEW YORK, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The IPO market might be cooling, but Weber (WEBR.N) and Traeger (COOK.N) suggest it’s not frozen. The grill makers’ shares opened more than 20% above their initial public offering price and have climbed since. Both make a tangible product and are growing. And unlike the highly volatile Robinhood Markets (HOOD.O) read more , which listed last week, they’re relatively easy to value.

Weber went public on Thursday with shares opening 21% higher than the downsized IPO price of $14 read more . That gave it a market valuation of $5 billion. Traeger went public last week, and shares have since increased two-thirds from its IPO price, giving it a $3.4 billion valuation, above what Breakingviews estimated. Traeger’s enterprise value of more than 3 times estimated sales for this year, versus 2 times at its larger rival, could make sense if investors see it as a luxury product.

While the norm for this year has been new stock issues...

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The Asian Development Bank has a plan to close coal-fired power plants early. That should hurt miners like Glencore, which is benefitting from record prices. But even if the ADB plan comes off, Ed Cropley argues, the $60 bln group has a copper-bottomed hedge.

LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - When WeWork’s much-hyped office-sharing edifice started crumbling in 2019, founder Adam Neumann was the obvious person to blame. In “The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Startup Delusion”, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell portray the ambition and recklessness of the Israeli entrepreneur with great detail and colour. But the authors’ main achievement is to subject Neumann’s many enablers – investment bankers, fund managers, venture capitalists and the media among them – to proper scrutiny.

An office-leasing startup touted as a technology company, WeWork, also known as The We Company, had raised more than $10 billion at private-market valuations peaking at $47 billion by the time it tried to go public in 2019. A charismatic founder, Neumann, aimed to “elevate the world’s consciousness”. He regularly served tequila shots to employees and investors, according to Brown and Farrell. Neumann smoked pot so avidly on a private jet that flight...

LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - When WeWork’s much-hyped office-sharing edifice started crumbling in 2019, founder Adam Neumann was the obvious person to blame. In “The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Startup Delusion”, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell portray the ambition and recklessness of the Israeli entrepreneur with great detail and colour. But the authors’ main achievement is to subject Neumann’s many enablers – investment bankers, fund managers, venture capitalists and the media among them – to proper scrutiny.

An office-leasing startup touted as a technology company, WeWork, also known as The We Company, had raised more than $10 billion at private-market valuations peaking at $47 billion by the time it tried to go public in 2019. A charismatic founder, Neumann, aimed to “elevate the world’s consciousness”. He regularly served tequila shots to employees and investors, according to Brown and Farrell. Neumann smoked pot so avidly on a private jet that flight...

Founder Adam Neumann led the hyping-up of the office-sharing upstart, once purported to be worth nearly $50 bln. But he was far from alone. “The Cult of We” by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell exposes how banks, return-chasing investors and the media danced around the red flags.

LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Fortress Investment has thrown down an undersized gauntlet to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The SoftBank Group-owned (9984.T) investment firm, Canadian pension fund CPPIB and the real estate arm of Koch Industries on Friday marginally lifted their bid for Britain’s WM Morrison Supermarkets (MRW.L) from 254 pence to 272 pence. CD&R has until Aug. 9 to respond.

It’s not obvious it should. The Fortress group’s raised bid, which follows a fifth of Morrisons shareholders turning their noses up at the previous one, will produce a humdrum 13% internal rate of return five years hence even if it can sell out at the same 9 times EBITDA multiple at which it buys in, Breakingviews calculations suggest read more . Raising that return might require a tougher approach to Morrisons’ property assets and employee relations than the seller is comfortable with. Still, Morrisons’ 278 pence share price implies CD&R’s interest is not yet in the...

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The Asian Development Bank has a plan to close coal-fired power plants early. That should hurt miners like Glencore, which is benefitting from record prices. But even if the ADB plan comes off, Ed Cropley argues, the $60 bln group has a copper-bottomed hedge.

HONG KONG, Aug 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The Chinese food delivery giant is getting a bigger-than-expected fine. The country's powerful antitrust watchdog plans to dock roughly $1 billion from Meituan (3690.HK) for forcing merchants to sell exclusively on its platform, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday citing unnamed sources. That would come to about 6% of 2020 revenue, higher than the 4% that peer Alibaba (9988.HK) had to pay, suggesting Beijing may be even angrier at Chief Executive Wang Xing than Alibaba founder Jack Ma, after Wang posted a poem read more from the Qing Dynasty era hinting at frustrations with the government.

Meituan's market value has halved since a February peak to $168 billion. Analysts at China Merchants Securities expected Meituan, also under pressure to hike pay for delivery drivers and provide better labour protections, would fall back into the red this year, logging an adjusted net loss of around $2 billion. And that was before the...