Japanese film A Pale View of Hills will have a theatrical rollout in the UK from March 13 next year, after a busy festival run from Cannes, to Toronto, London, Shanghai and Taipei, among others.
The film will also open in Taiwan’s…
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Google’s AirDrop workaround is doing something screwy with Wi-Fi.
Samsung hosted its annual National Skills & Repair Competitions, celebrating the top Mobile Experience (MX) and Consumer Electronics (CE) technicians from across Canada and the U.S. The events highlight Samsung’s ongoing commitment to delivering a customer-first care experience, while investing in the development and advancement of its technical workforce.
“We were pleased to see our Canadian Authorized Service Centres participate alongside our U.S. counterparts in this year’s competition,” said Frank Martino, Vice President, Corporate Service, Samsung Canada. “Initiatives like this foster cross-border collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the continued enhancement of the exceptional service and support that define our brand across North America.”
Samsung’s National Skills & Repair Competition is designed to strengthen the foundation of Samsung’s authorized service network by advancing technician skills in both technical repair and customer service. Through hands-on challenges that test speed, accuracy and soft skills, technicians sharpen the capabilities that directly impact the customer experience. This investment helps bring faster, more reliable service across all channels, from carry-into in-home services, reinforcing Samsung’s commitment to quality, convenience and care at every touchpoint.
“We commend the Samsung Care team for their ongoing focus on exceptional customer service across their entire network of technicians serving all their product categories,” said Michelle James, CTIA Vice President of Strategic Industry Programs. “We are proud the WISE Certification team was invited to participate in this annual Technician Repair Competition held at Samsung Electronics America’s North American headquarters, and we applaud all of the technicians who earned their spot in this nationwide.”
At the seventh annual Samsung CE Care Skills Competition, 10 finalists from across the U.S. and Canada gathered to compete for the prestigious Top Tech title. The finals, held at Samsung’s Technical Training Center in New Jersey, featured the best of the best Samsung technicians from their respective areas.
The competition challenged participants to simulate real-world customer service scenarios, including diagnose an issue as if they were working in a customer’s home, replace part, with an emphasis on speed and accuracy and engage in a customer-based scenario to demonstrate effective communication and problem-solving skills.
“I want to thank Samsung for the opportunity to compete on a national scale and be able to bring home an accolade as prestigious as this. This is the ultimate culmination of a journey living for the singular purpose of service excellence,” said Alex Nahum, skills competition winner from Samsung Electronics America.
“The competition was a good experience to confirm I’m on the right track and that I am providing the best service possible and the customer is being taken care of,” said David Seiko, skills competition winner from Samsung Electronics Canada. “I thank Samsung for offering this opportunity to see their headquarters, to see their team and see how it all works.”
The Top Canadian winners from the competition included:
| Consumer Electronics |
| David Seiko from SUMMER BREEZE APPLIANCE LTD |
| Jeffrey Lu from J&M APPLIANCE SERVICE LTD. |
| Aamir Mahmood from ARS REPAIR AND INSTALLATION
Michel Vo from ALBERTA APPLIANCE SERVICE LTD Michael Feng from HE UNIVERSAL APPLIANCE SERVICE LTD |
To learn more about Samsung Canada’s branded service and service network visit https://www.samsung.com/ca/support/Home-Appliance-Service/
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What do you get if you mix together tech billionaires, performance-enhancing drugs and a Spac merger? The answer is a surprisingly intriguing investment case, albeit one pumped up with risk.
On Wednesday, The Enhanced Group, best known as the creator of the future “steroid Olympics”, said it would list its shares in the US via a merger with a US blank cheque company sponsored by a Chinese businessman. It expects negligible revenue until its inaugural games next year. Nonetheless, Enhanced plans to go public at a mooted enterprise value of $1.3bn.
Enhanced’s primary backer, German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer, has built what looks like a sporting league running live events, plus a DIY pharmacy. It can sell media rights to competitions such as the Enhanced Games, which will be held in Las Vegas next year, where athletes under the care of doctors are permitted to take drugs otherwise banned in mainstream athletics. Alongside this, it can peddle medicines such as “peptide hormones” and “metabolic modulators” through online prescriptions and over-the-counter ventures.
That fits with the zeitgeist. Longevity is increasingly a pet project of Silicon Valley. Enhanced’s backers include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr, tech investor Balaji Srinivasan and Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal. True, there is some controversy over the games themselves: it is not yet clear what treatments for athletes cross ethical and safety barriers and which do not.
Fans may not be overly perturbed by that, as long as they are watching feats of extraordinary skill and strength. And perhaps they will be wowed enough by what they see to buy the pills and supplements that their boosted heroes are ingesting. Enhanced projects $357mn of revenue by 2028, evenly split between media, prescriptions and over-the-counter products. Its valuation would be less than 10 times that year’s forecast ebitda. Hims & Hers Health, a US online provider of sexual health and hair loss treatments, trades at more than 20 times, according to LSEG.
One question for investors is when Enhanced’s current backers might make a dash for it. Angermayer’s firm and its affiliates will be the biggest shareholders and will keep control through a dual-class structure. Insiders can sell some of their shares a month before the 2026 games and all of them 18 months after the event. But investors in a new $40mn financing will get to sell a slug of their existing holdings immediately, equivalent to four times their new contribution.
While enhanced athletes may beat the regular kind, it remains to be seen whether Enhanced can beat the Spac pack. The median return on Spac mergers completed on US exchanges since 2020 is minus 85 per cent, according to ListingTrack, with fortified projections rarely getting real results. Only 2 per cent of those closed in 2024 are above their listing price. Whatever the financial equivalent of a metabolic modulator is, this company will need a double dose.
sujeet.indap@ft.com
Former England pacer James Anderson has said that England will be in two minds over whether to continue with their all-pace strategy used at the Optus Stadium in Perth, or switch up their tactics for the Gabba Test starting December 4.
Anderson…
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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Indian business tycoon Prateek Gupta has denied funnelling millions of dollars to his wife or sprawling group of companies, the missing cash that Trafigura alleges disappeared as part of a huge fraud scheme.
The commodities trading house claims to have lost around $600mn when it became the victim of a “systemic fraud” that it alleges was perpetrated by Gupta and companies he controlled. Trafigura is suing the businessman in London’s High Court.
Gupta claimed on Thursday that he had no knowledge of where the money had gone, telling the court: “I cannot recollect the exact breakdown.”
“So you just lost hundreds of millions of dollars and you can’t remember where it went, is that right?” said Nathan Pillow KC, a lawyer representing Trafigura.
“I don’t have an answer to that,” said Gupta in response, giving evidence via video link on the second day of his testimony as a defendant.
“You don’t, do you, because you’re lying about it,” said Pillow, to which Gupta responded: “I’m not lying.”
Gupta argues that Trafigura’s former star nickel trader, Socrates Economou, orchestrated the scheme, which involved the transportation of purported nickel shipments that in fact contained various low-value materials. Economou staunchly denies he had any knowledge of the arrangement at the time.
Gupta, based in Dubai, denied when questioned that he had given the money to his wife or to other senior officials in his group of companies.
In response to Pillow’s suggestion that he had been “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, by using the money from Trafigura to “pay off other creditors in your business empire”, Gupta said: “No, I don’t agree with that.”
Gupta said in his witness statement that his company, UD Group, had been facing depleted cash reserves in early 2021, when the arrangement was ongoing.
Gupta claimed in court on Thursday that “substantial” sums went towards shipping costs and interest payments, but could not otherwise outline where the money paid by Trafigura for purported nickel shipments had gone.
Giving evidence in the case this week, the businessman repeatedly claimed that he did not oversee the day-to-day operations of the arrangement.
The trial continues.
