Uber is getting into the scooter-rental business.

 

The ride-hailing company said Monday that it is investing in Lime, a startup based in San Mateo, California.

 

“Our investment and partnership in Lime is another step towards our vision of becoming a one-stop shop for all your transportation needs,” Rachel Holt, an Uber vice president, said in a statement.

 

Uber will add Lime motorized scooters to the Uber mobile app, giving consumers another option for getting around cities, especially to and from public transit systems, Holt said.

 

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

 

Lime co-founders Toby Sun and Brad Bao wrote in a blog that Uber’s “sizable investment” is part of a $335 million fund-raising round led by GV, the venture-capital arm of Google parent Alphabet Inc. They said Alphabet is among several new investors. The money will help Lime expand and develop new products.

According to the company website, customers can rent Lime scooters in more than 70 locations in the U.S. and Europe and leave them parked for the next customer to ride. The company is looking to buy tens of thousands of motorized foot-pedal scooters to expand its reach.

 

The scooters aren’t without their critics, however, who consider them a nuisance and a hazard to pedestrians. Officials in cities like San Francisco have been torn between promoting cheap and relatively non-polluting transportation and keeping sidewalks safe and clear of clutter.

 

For Uber, the Lime investment follows its purchase for an undisclosed sum of Jump Bikes, which rents electric bicycles in a half-dozen cities including San Francisco, Chicago and Washington.

 

San Francisco-based Uber Technologies Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi aims to turn Uber into the Amazon.com of transportation, a single destination where customers can go to hitch a ride in a car and on other modes of transportation — even buy rides on city buses and subway systems. Uber also has a food-delivery service.

 

Rival Lyft is looking for new rides too. Last week, it bought part of a company called Motivate that operates Citi Bike and other bike-sharing programs in several major U.S. cities including New York and Chicago. It will rename the business Lyft Bikes. Terms of that deal were not disclosed either.

 

While the often brightly colored rental bikes are becoming a more common sight in the U.S., they have already gained widespread use in China and parts of Europe.
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President Donald Trump is threatening to “respond” after several major U.S. drug companies raised prices of some widely prescribed medicines.

“Pfizer and others should be ashamed that they have raised drug prices for no reason,” Trump tweeted Monday. “They are merely taking advantage of the poor and others unable to defend themselves while at the same time giving bargain basement prices to other countries in Europe and elsewhere.”

Pfizer hiked the cost of about 40 different drugs earlier this month, including Viagra for male impotence, Lipitor for treating high cholesterol, and the arthritis drug Xeljanz.

Trump, who campaigned on promises to lower drug prices, said in May that some companies were volunteering to cut prices.

Pfizer said the list price of medicines do not include discounts and rebates, and that customers generally do not pay full price at the drug counter.

It also said it makes more than 400 different drugs and is cutting prices on some of them.
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Behind a row of sealed red incubator doors in a new facility in northern China, about 400,000 chicks are hatched every day, part of the rapidly modernizing supply chain in China’s $37 billion egg industry, the world’s biggest.

As China overhauls production of everything from pork to milk and vegetables, farmers raising hens for eggs are also shifting from backyards to factory farms, where modern standardized processes are expected to raise quality and safety.

That’s an important step in a country where melamine-tainted eggs and eggs with high antibiotic residues have featured in a series of food safety scandals in recent years. It is also spurring demand for higher priced branded eggs over those sold loose in fresh produce markets.

“These days if you’re a small farmer, your eggs won’t get into the supermarkets,” said Yuan Song, analyst with China-America Commodity Data Analytics.

Tough new regulations on treating manure and reducing the environmental impact from farms have also pushed many small farmers out.

Most egg producers now have between 20,000 and 50,000 hens, said Yuan, a significant change even from two years ago. The remainder with less than 10,000 birds are likely to be shut down soon as local governments favor larger producers that can be more easily scrutinized.

High-tech hatchery

Those rapid changes are driving investments like the 150 million yuan ($22.60 million) hatchery in Handan, about 400km (250 miles) southwest of Beijing.

The highly automated plant, owned by a joint venture between China’s Huayu Agricultural Science and Technology Co. Ltd. and EW Group’s genetics business Hy-Line International, is the world’s biggest hatchery of layer chicks, or birds raised to produce eggs rather than meat.

By producing 200,000 females a day, or around 60 million layers a year (one day a week is for cleaning), it can meet demand from larger farms who want to buy day-old-chicks in one batch, said Jonathan Cade, president of Hy-Line International, based in West Des Moines, Iowa.

“That’s the best way to start off with good biosecurity,” he said. When the birds on one farm are the same age, they are less likely to spread disease.

Imported, latest-generation equipment helps speed up the throughput of the hatchery. An automatic grading machine, which can handle 60,000 eggs an hour, sorts eggs into two acceptable sizes before they enter incubators — uniform eggs produce similar sized chicks that will have the same feeding ability.

Once hatched, female chicks go to automated beak-clipping machines that process around 3,500 an hour.

Only 20 staff will be needed in the new plant, compared with around 100 in Huayu’s older hatchery, said Huayu chairman Wang Lianzeng.

Fierce competition, disease

Efficiency is important in an industry which is not expected to see much volume growth. The Chinese already eat more eggs per capita than almost everyone else, about 280 a year or almost one billion a day across the country, so consumption is unlikely to rise much.

Breeders like Huayu are trying to grow by taking market share from others. In addition to the new Handan hatchery, it is building another in Chongqing, which will bring annual production to 180 million chicks.

Layer inventory last year was around 1.2 billion, according to the China Animal Agriculture Association.

Huayu is also looking into breeding layers and building hatcheries in South-East Asia and Africa, said Wang, the chairman.

Key to industrial-scale facilities will be managing the risks of disease. Prices and demand for eggs and poultry plunged last year, after hundreds of people died from contracting bird flu, even though the disease left flocks largely unscathed.

Although that has created new opportunities for large players to expand after others were forced to exit, the impact of a disease outbreak on intensive operations is significantly higher.

Huayu itself has recently suffered from outbreaks, with high rates of poultry disease Mycoplasma synoviae (MS) in China’s breeding flocks last year, said Wang. The disease can reduce egg production in layers.

Wang said biosecurity is the major advantage in the new hatchery, which uses advanced ventilation and environmental controls to keep new chicks healthy.

“When you enter the hatchery, you wouldn’t know you’re in a hatchery,” he said, referring to the smell typical in older facilities.

Disinfection is used at every step along the chain and workers follow strict procedures on hygiene, he added.

A safe environment with very high standards of biosecurity is important in raising chicks, said Wang.

With such pressures on production, improving animal welfare is unsurprisingly not a priority, said Jeff Zhou, China representative for Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), a nonprofit.

China has no animal welfare regulations, although some companies have begun voluntarily to phase out the painful beak-trimming practice, including Huayu rival Ningxia Xiaoming Farming and Animal Husbandry Co. Ltd.

Xiaoming is also supplying male chicks from its hatcheries to local farmers to rear for meat in free-range environments, according to CIWF. Huayu sells its male chicks as food for snakes, which are farmed in China for traditional medicine.
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The possibility of more Western sanctions against Moscow is the key risk for the Russian economy, as much as 21 percent of which has already felt the impact of existing sanctions, Russia’s Analytical Credit Ratings Agency said in a report Tuesday.

Western sanctions are expected to weigh on Russia’s oil-dependent economy in the longer run, having dented incomes of Russian households, the Kremlin-backed ACRA said.

The West first imposed economic and financial sanctions against Moscow in 2014 for its annexation of Crimea and its role in the Ukrainian conflict.

Russia has responded with counter-sanctions, banning imports of a wide range of food from countries that had targeted Moscow.

Later, sanctions against Russia were expanded, putting extra pressure on Russia’s economy and the ruble.

“The risk of widening of anti-Russian sanctions remains one of the key risks that the Russian economy could face this year,” ACRA said.

New sanctions listed by ACRA might target more companies, Russian state debt or even disconnect Russia from the international SWIFT payment system.

For now, Russia’s international reserves, which stood at nearly $456 billion as of late June, “fully cover external debt, which is vulnerable to wider sanctions,” ACRA said.

“Sanctions should not be named the key factor that limits economic growth in Russia in the mid-term … The impact of sanctions on growth rate could turn out to be more pronounced in the long term for both companies and the economy in general,” ACRA said.

Western sanctions have hit Russian companies that account for 95 percent of the country’s oil and gas industry revenues.

Restrictions imposed on Russian oil and gas companies in 2014 will affect their oil output in 2020s, ACRA said.

Sanctions have also hit Russia’s major state-owned banks, which account for 54 percent of banking assets. But the sanctions’ impact on the financial health of companies and banks has been less pronounced than that of the country’s economic policies, ACRA said.

Moscow’s response to the sanctions, which limited imports, has inflated prices for a number of goods.

“Counter-sanctions have resulted in price growth and a decline in households’ incomes by 2-3 percentage points in 2014-2018,” ACRA said.
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World fish production is expected to grow over the next 10 years despite a slowdown in both farmed and wild caught fish, the U.N.’s food agency said.

In a new report on global fisheries, the Food and Agricultural Agency predicts world fish production will grow to 201 million metric tons by 2030 — an 18 percent rise over current levels.

This is despite the amount of wild caught fish leveling off and the number of farmed fish slowing down after decades of rapid growth.

“The fisheries sector is crucial in meeting FAO’s goal of a world without hunger and malnutrition, and its contribution to economic growth and the fight against poverty is growing,” FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said.

But the report said future growth depends on sustainable and stronger fishing management, and successfully fighting such problems as pollution, global warming and illegal fishing.

The report said nearly 60 million people are employed in the world’s fishing industry, with China being the biggest producer and exporter of fish.

The European Union, United States and Japan are the world’s top three consumers of fish and users of fish products.
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