Category: 3. Business

About a million Ford diesel cars were sold in the UK with serious defects in components supposed to curb toxic exhaust emissions, the high court has been told.

The highly polluting vehicles were produced and sold between 2016 and 2018 after Ford’s engineers became aware of the issues, and many were never formally recalled or fixed, lawyers said.

The claims came in evidence submitted in the legal action on behalf of 1.6 million diesel vehicle owners against five car manufacturers, including Ford, for allegedly using “defeat devices” to cheat emissions tests for nitrogen oxides (NOx).

Parts of the emissions control systems as calibrated by Ford were discovered to become less effective when “poisoned” by sulphur in fuel during driving, the court heard. In 2017, when tested in service, 27 out of 27 Ford vehicles with Euro 6 engines failed the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) emissions tests.

Cross-examining Marcus Davies, Ford’s former calibration manager, in the high court, Thomas de la Mare KC said that the systems had not been “sufficiently tested” and that “the scale of the problem” amounted to “one million vehicles affected”. It was a “generic issue affecting the best part of a million cars”, de la Mare claimed.

Davies played down the 1m figure. “It’s not every vehicle that would have this problem,” he said.

New software was implemented in production lines from 2018, and some Ford customers whose cars were serviced at official dealers also received a software update to address the problem, but there was no wider recall, the court was told.

De La Mare said: “You must have appreciated that the update would not rectify the situation.”

Davies replied: “It would improve it.”

“But not make it compliant with the NEDC,” de la Mare replied.

In the broader case, the claimants argued that Ford had deliberately calibrated its engines to pass certification tests rather than reduce real world driving emissions.

Referencing the manufacturer’s own internal documents, Ben Jaffey KC, for the claimants, said that as far back as 2012 there was “a very clear recognition that Ford wasn’t using EGR [the exhaust gas recirculation system to reduce NOx] as much as possible”.

Jaffey said: “The reality is that it was shaped to the requirements of the test and not much else?”

Davies said: “It was calibrated in part to the requirements of the NEDC.” Changes to trap more NOx “would have been at the expense of the capture of other gases”.

Documents shown in court also showed that NOx emissions from a Euro 5 transit van surged well beyond regulatory limits when the engine was tested inadvertently in sixth gear. The NEDC tests were normally carried out in fifth gear.

However, in real-world driving, Jaffey said, the vans’ gear shift indicator encouraged drivers to switch up to sixth gear, where the system to reduce NOx was ineffective, when the van reached speeds of 100km/h (62mph). “It’s hardly Grand Theft Auto, is it?” he said.

The Ford models included as sample vehicles in the trial include the Mondeo, C-Max Fiesta and Focus cars as well as Transit vans.

Ford denies having created defeat devices, and in its written submissions described the claim as “scientifically illiterate”.

Its lawyers said that “a reduction in the effectiveness of NOx control may be a necessary, reasonable and justifiable engineering compromise to maintain overall system stability, protect components from damage, or control other, potentially more harmful, emissions”.

The three-month hearing that opened last month is examining vehicles sold by Ford and five other manufacturers – Mercedes, Renault, Nissan and Peugeot/Citroën.

The “Dieselgate” scandal came to light after US scientists said in autumn 2015 that many of Volkswagen diesel engine cars had been equipped with software meant to deliberately falsify emissions tests.

Millions of vehicles around the world were affected by the alleged misconduct, leading to car owners facing costs that collectively ran into hundreds of millions of euros. It is estimated to have led to thousands of deaths and cases of asthma in children.

The trial continues.

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Third Quarter Earnings Call for Light. Today’s event will be in Portuguese and will be translated into English. If you would like to listen to the English language audio, you can click on the Interpretation button at the bottom of your screen. We’d like to inform you that this event is being recorded and it will be available at the company’s Investor Relations website along with the materials used in this presentation, which can be downloaded there. [Operator Instructions]

Before we continue, I would like to state that any remarks during this presentation about the company’s business perspectives, projections, operational and financial goals are simply based on the directors’ beliefs and assumptions. They are based on information that is currently available for the company. Remarks about the future are not a guarantee of performance as they involve risks and assumptions and refer to future events that, therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that the general economic conditions, industry conditions and other operating factors may affect the company’s future results and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements.

After that disclaimer, we will begin the company’s presentation with Mr. Alexandre Nogueira, CEO, who will make his opening remarks; and then we will hear from Rodrigo Tostes, CFO and Investor Relations Officer, who will talk about the company’s results.

Mr. Alexandre will begin. Go ahead, sir.

Alexandre Ferreira
CEO & Member of Executive Board

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to

“The assertions and innuendos in the article are completely false,” an Alibaba representative said. “We question the motivation behind the anonymous leak, which the FT admits that they cannot verify.”

The Alibaba representative called the article a “malicious PR operation” that appears to “undermine President Trump’s recent trade deal with China”.

Alibaba employees, according to the report, also transferred knowledge about “zero-day” vulnerabilities to the PLA.

Newsfrom Japan

Economy
Technology

Nov 15, 2025 14:33 (JST)

By Alexandre Rajbhandari

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. acquired 17.9 million shares of Google parent Alphabet Inc. during the third quarter, while further trimming its holdings in Bank of America Corp. and Apple Inc.

Berkshire’s Alphabet stake, representing 0.31 per cent of the outstanding shares, according to a regulatory filing Friday, was worth about $4.9 billion as of the market close.

Shares of Alphabet rose 1.7 per cent to $281 in extended trading at 5:05 p.m. in New York.  

Buffett, 95, who plans to step down as chief executive officer at year-end, has been finding ways to deploy some of Berkshire’s cash pile, which rose to a record $382 billion at the end of the quarter. The Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate recently reached a deal to buy Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s petrochemical business for $9.7 billion and acquired a $1.6 billion stake in UnitedHealth Group Inc.

Berkshire also added 4.3 million shares of insurer Chubb Ltd., boosting the value of that holding to $8.8 billion at the end of the quarter.

Still, the company was a net seller of equities during the period, offloading $6.1 billion of stocks. 

Berkshire trimmed its Apple stake by 15 per cent, leaving it with a holding valued at $60.7 billion as of Sept. 30. The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker still accounts for almost a quarter of Berkshire’s equity portfolio. 

The conglomerate sold 37.2 million Bank of America shares, leaving it with a 7.7 per cent stake in the Wall Street firm.

Berkshire also exited its position in US home builder D.R. Horton Inc., while it continued to add to its holding in Lennar Corp.

The widest gap for more than two decades has opened up between the forecasts of the three main international organisations that track the world’s crude markets, causing confusion about global oil demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), the Opec group of oil producers and the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) all reported their monthly oil statistics this week. The divergence between their forecasts for oil demand in 2026 reached 1.8mn barrels of oil a day (b/d), the equivalent of France’s oil consumption and the biggest gap since 2002.

The gap has gradually widened over the past two years, raising questions about the trajectory of the world’s oil demand as countries transition to clean energy.

The oil market has been caught this year between fears of a supply crunch — stoked by US sanctions on two of Russia’s largest oil companies in October — and warnings of a longer-term glut driven by rising US shale output and an economic slowdown.

Brent crude touched $82.63 a barrel in January before resuming its downward trend, then spiked again in June after tensions flared in the Middle East. The benchmark was trading at about $64 a barrel on Friday.

The IEA is the most bearish about demand in 2026, putting it at 104.7mn b/d. Opec is the most bullish, with a forecast of 106.5mn b/d. The EIA is between the two, at 105.2mn b/d.

Traders had been puzzled by the divergence, said Tamas Varga, an analyst at PVM, an oil broker. “These quite significant differences in views caused confusion, in that traders just simply did not know who to believe, did not know which number is accurate,” he said.

He added that there had traditionally been a strong correlation between oil stock levels and prices, so if the forecasts of stock levels diverged, “you can’t really figure out what the price could be in the future”.

There are multiple possible causes for the differences in the forecasts, including a greater share of the world’s oil falling under sanctions, and a lack of visibility about how much oil is being put into strategic storage by China, amid an off-again, on-again trade war with the US.

One oil market observer, who asked not to be named, said that Iran, under US sanctions, might be trying to hide a share of its oil production, causing problems with the data, while Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS, said that since the first Trump administration, China had held back some data, concealing the true size of its stocks, making it harder “to have the full picture”.

Adding to the confusion, said Martijn Rats, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, there were now 1.13mn b/d of oil in the IEA’s model that were “unaccounted” for. These are barrels that have been produced, but do not appear to have been consumed or stored.

“Historically, nine out of 10 times when you have unaccounted oil, you see revisions to demand as more data comes out,” he said.

He noted, however, that the missing barrels had grown from 110,000 b/d in 2024 to nearly 2mn barrels in August before falling back. The IEA said the unaccounted barrels were the result of a time lag in the data, but Rats suggested that the numbers were now so large, they might be distorting the view of demand growth.

“There’s lots of conflicting data, it’s a fog, but the fog is telling you these numbers are not jiving and the underlying demand might be better than we thought,” he said.

He added that if demand growth was 200,000 b/d a year stronger than previously thought, it would have big implications for the sector.

“Then you are back to the historical trend and you are thinking very differently about the impact of the energy transition on growth. Maybe less is changing than you thought,” he said.

The IEA said that while it was confident of its forecasts, its demand figures may be subject to revision because the number of countries that regularly published data on oil supply and demand had fallen in recent years, “to the detriment of market transparency and stability”.

There was also an underlying political divide among the institutions, said David Wech, chief economist at Vortexa, an energy data company.

“There is, overall, a certain trend in terms of energy transition and related aspects of climate change . . . it’s highly likely that Opec is wanting to give a positive outlook on the market, while it is possible that the IEA is, perhaps deliberately or emotionally, more on the conservative side.”

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Private markets have been attracting increasing regulatory scrutiny, and for good reason.

It’s not just that the level of disclosures is less than what is required in public markets. Or even that valuations of private market assets are more based on models rather than public pricing, robbing regulators of market signals that could inform their work. It’s because private markets have become so big.

By value, global private assets under management came to just over $13tn in 2023, having more than doubled in size over the previous five years, according to a recent report by financial data firm Preqin. It estimated that this figure is on track to almost double again by 2030. The vast majority of these holdings are private equity assets, though the growth of private credit has been explosive. To put these numbers into perspective, Bain & Company estimates that the total assets under management in the global asset management industry for 2023 totalled $115tn.

But while the lack of data transparency makes it hard to say anything with confidence, it’s not obvious that this growth poses immediate direct risks to the banking system. Good data as to how much banks lend to private market entities in general, or even private credit firms specifically, is scarce. However, the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report from April 2025 highlighted a Moody’s report that estimated bank exposure to private credit funds was $525bn at the end of 2023.

That $525bn sounds a lot. But global banks are huge. As Moody’s puts it, exposures are moderate with private credit loan commitments about 3.8 per cent of total loans on average in 2023. So sure, private credit managers could start making terrible loans that default but this scenario doesn’t look like it would immediately blow up the banking system — although the use of “synthetic risk transfers” which enable banks to transfer credit risk on diverse loan pools to investors (typically credit funds and asset managers) may complicate the picture.

If there is a problem, it looks more likely to crop up in the insurance sector. Private credit now accounts for more than 35 per cent of total US insurer investments and close to a quarter of UK insurer assets.

Private equity-owned insurers in particular have proved effective at improving capital efficiency — taking more risk with each dollar of capital. This could come through some combination of regulation-shopping the jurisdiction of their reinsurance operations, lending to affiliates, or engaging in wholly-owned portfolio securitisation.

It could also come from building out investment operations so they can take more substantial exposure to private credit — which can offer substantial illiquidity premia, the additional return that can come when taking on the risk of holding an asset that is not easily sold.

How risky is this? Well, the private credit holdings of insurers overwhelmingly carry investment grade credit ratings — signalling exceptionally low prospective default risk. However, it is an open question whether ratings by different credit rating agencies all deserve equal trust — especially those ratings that are issued privately without public disclosure. Colm Kelleher, chair of UBS, has accused insurers of ratings shopping, calling the phenomenon “a looming systemic risk”.

Moreover, a recent analysis from Moody’s shows that while a ninth of US life insurers’ fixed income holdings by value carry private ratings, this share jumps to more than half of their so-called Level 3 holdings. Level 3 holdings are assets that are the least liquid, hardest to value and priced using models that rely on internal assumptions. And, according to the credit rating agency, US insurers’ less-liquid private asset portfolio was skewed to lower-rated holdings at year-end 2024.

Recent high-profile company failures like First Brands and Tricolor — characterised as credit cockroaches by Jamie Dimon — provide a warning of the potential downside. The JPMorgan chief executive quipped that if you see one cockroach, there are probably more.

But given the wave of new money that has moved into loans and bonds, borrowers have been able to raise finance in both public and private markets at attractive rates. Default rates have been low — even taking into account that some financially stretched businesses have found private lenders willing to restructure their credit into cash-lite payment-in-kind loans.

Market prices suggest that there is little prospect of an economic downturn sufficient to impede debtors’ timely payment of principal and capital any time in the foreseeable future. If correct, insurers will continue to profit from their greater capital efficiency. So will ordinary people. Increased competition has pushed insurers to offer better terms for those seeking fixed or variable rate annuities for retirement income.

So tilting the scales away from resilience and towards profitability could prove to have been exactly the right thing to do for insurers. But we’ll have to see how they fare in the next credit downturn to find out.

toby.nangle@ft.com

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China’s exports of tomato paste to industry powerhouse Italy have collapsed this year after an outcry over alleged use of forced labour in Xinjiang and complaints about misleading origin labelling by some Italian companies.

The western Chinese region of Xinjiang dramatically increased tomato cultivation and processing in recent years, but slumping sales to Italy and other western European markets have left it sitting on a vast stockpile of unsold paste, industry analysts say.

Italian farming association Coldiretti has led a high-profile campaign to defend the national staple red fruit against an influx of Chinese paste costing less than half of that made from their farmers’ crops.

“This is an important victory,” said Francesco Mutti, chief executive of the eponymous maker of Italian tomato-based ingredients including passata, pulp and purée. “It is a very positive signal.”

Scrutiny of the tomato supply chain in Europe has heightened since some companies in Italy — the world’s largest exporter of finished tomato ingredients ready for consumers — were found to have mixed Chinese tomato paste into wares promoted as Italian.

Tomato News, which tracks the global processing industry and trade, estimates China has a stockpile of 600,000 to 700,000 tonnes of tomato paste — equivalent to roughly six months of its exports.

While China’s total tomato paste exports by volume fell 9 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2025, sales to western EU countries dropped 67 per cent, and Italy’s purchases were down 76 per cent, Tomato News said.

“Clearly Europe has become a difficult place to export to,” said Martin Stilwell, president of Tomato News.

Chinese customs data shows the value of processed tomato exports to Italy plunged to less than $13mn in the first nine months of 2025 from more than $75mn in the same period of last year.

Tomatoes, which were introduced to China after European colonisation of the Americas, play a relatively minor role in Chinese cuisine. One of the Chinese names for the fruit can be translated as “foreign aubergine”, while the other means “western red persimmon”.

But China has turned Xinjiang, home to the mainly-Muslim Uyghur minority, into a low-cost, export-oriented tomato paste production hub spearheaded by large state companies, one of which is a subsidiary of the paramilitary Production and Construction Corps that helps run the region.

China processed 11mn tonnes of fresh tomatoes into paste in 2024, up from 4.8mn tonnes in 2021, according to Tomato News. With European demand collapsing, the Asian nation has more than halved the volume of the fruit processed to an expected 3.7mn tonnes this year, Stilwell said.

“They are struggling to sell, which explains why they have to cut back — otherwise they would merely be building inventory in China,” he said.

Xinjiang’s tomato industry has been dogged by allegations of use of forced Uyghur labour. In 2021, the US banned tomato paste imports from Xinjiang, citing such concerns.

Beijing says the accusation that forced labour is used in Xinjiang is “entirely a lie fabricated by anti-China forces” that has been “debunked by facts”.

The influx of Chinese tomato paste into Italy came under the spotlight in 2021 when the Carabinieri police raided a leading processing company and seized tonnes of canned tomato concentrate that included Chinese paste but was falsely labelled “100 per cent Italian”.

A BBC documentary last year alleged some Uyghur prisoners and detainees were forced to harvest tomatoes that may have wound up, via Italy, on UK supermarket shelves. The report prompted retailers fearful of a scandal to put pressure on Italian processors not to use Chinese paste.

“If you imagine that Italy has 80 companies related to processing and transformation of tomatoes, three or four or five did these dirty tricks,” said Mutti, whose company only uses Italian tomatoes. The scandal had “created double damage” by forcing down prices and undermining consumer trust in Italian brands, he said.

Additional reporting by Thomas Hale in Shanghai. Data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong

CuriosityStream (CURI) just reported a 46% jump in revenue for the third quarter, fueled largely by explosive growth in its AI training data licensing business. The company also declared a dividend for the fourth quarter.

See our latest analysis for CuriosityStream.

CuriosityStream’s pivot into AI data licensing and the latest quarterly results have caught investors’ attention, with the share price rallying 188.6% year-to-date and a stunning 199.3% total shareholder return over the past twelve months. Momentum remains strong in the short term, which suggests the renewed growth narrative is resonating even as the company navigates evolving revenue streams.

If CuriosityStream’s transformation story intrigues you, now’s a great time to broaden your search and discover fast growing stocks with high insider ownership

With the stock’s rapid ascent this year and ambitious revenue forecasts ahead, the big question is whether CuriosityStream is still trading at a discount or if the market has already priced in all that future growth.

With CuriosityStream shares closing at $4.56 and the narrative’s fair value set at $6.17, current pricing suggests meaningful upside for those who believe in the company’s growth blueprint. Strong catalysts and forecast improvements frame an ambitious but debated valuation, driven by specific company milestones.

Surging demand for high-quality, rights-cleared video for AI training is driving a transformative new licensing revenue stream for CuriosityStream. Management cited recurring and growing partnerships with large-scale AI companies. This is establishing a durable, high-margin revenue base that is expected to fuel both top-line and earnings growth.

Read the complete narrative.

Is this growth run just getting started? The most popular narrative highlights bold assumptions for future revenue, profit margins, and share count. There’s a projection buried within that could flip expectations for years ahead. Curious what strategic shifts and industry forces are steering this bullish price target? Delve into the full narrative to see the math behind the market optimism.

Result: Fair Value of $6.17 (UNDERVALUED)

Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what’s behind the forecasts.

However, persistent subscription declines and the unpredictable nature of AI licensing revenue could easily disrupt CuriosityStream’s current growth trajectory.

Find out about the key risks to this CuriosityStream narrative.

While analysts see upside based on growth and future potential, the current price-to-sales ratio of 4x stands out. This is higher than the US Entertainment industry average of 1.7x and well above the fair ratio of 1x. Such a gap suggests investors today could be paying up for optimism, which increases the level of valuation risk if growth stalls. Does the market know something others do not, or are expectations running ahead of reality?

See what the numbers say about this price — find out in our valuation breakdown.

Simply Wall St performs a discounted cash flow (DCF) on every stock in the world every day (check out CuriosityStream for example). We show the entire calculation in full. You can track the result in your watchlist or portfolio and be alerted when this changes, or use our stock screener to discover 879 undervalued stocks based on their cash flows. If you save a screener we even alert you when new companies match – so you never miss a potential opportunity.

If you want to dig deeper or see things from your own perspective, you can put together your own CuriosityStream story in just a few minutes. Do it your way

A great starting point for your CuriosityStream research is our analysis highlighting 3 key rewards and 2 important warning signs that could impact your investment decision.

Don’t wait on just one trend. Smart investors know opportunity loves company, so consider jumping on market shifts before the crowd does and elevate your strategy.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

Companies discussed in this article include CURI.

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