10 things you need to know in markets September 19

Liverpool
v Paris St Germain at Anfield, Liverpool, Britain on September
18, 2018 — Paris St Germain’s Edinson Cavani
reacts.

Action
Images via Reuters/Carl Recine

Good morning! Here’s what you need to know in markets on
Wednesday.

1.
Amazon said on Wednesday it had launched activities in Turkey,
offering products across 15 categories to customers across the
country. “We are committed to building our business
in Turkey in the coming months by expanding our selection and
delivery options,” Sam Nicols, country manager for Amazon.com.tr
said in a written statement.

2.
SunPower Corp on Tuesday said some of the solar cells and panels
it produces overseas will be excluded from the Trump
administration’s 30% import tariffs, sending the company’s shares
up 15%. The company has publicly lobbied for
its products to be exempt from the tariffs, arguing the funds it
was spending on duties were being diverted from investments in
American jobs in research and development and domestic
manufacturing.

3.
Asian stocks rose and US Treasury yields hovered near four-month
highs on Wednesday, as investors looked past the latest
escalation in the US-China trade conflict, seen by some market
participants as less severe than expected. MSCI’s
broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.15%.

4.
Turkey’s Akfen Renewable Energy is to build 13 wind and solar
power plants with a total investment of $530 million, Akfen said
on Wednesday. In a written statement it said it
would provide $167 million of the investment from its own
resources with the remaining $363 million provided by a loan from
six Turkish and foreign banks: EBRD, Isbank, Vakifbank, Garanti
Bank, Yapi Kredi Bank and KfW IPEX-Bank.

5.
WeWork said it surpassed JP Morgan, the biggest US bank, as the
largest tenant of Manhattan office space, a milestone
highlighting growing demand for flexible leases.
WeWork, a provider of co-work spaces with flexible leases that
now has more than 50 locations in Manhattan, said in a blog post
on Monday it signed a lease for 258,344 square feet at 21 Penn
Plaza. The move makes it the largest private occupier of office
space on the island with more than 5.3 million square feet.

6.
Danske Bank will on Wednesday lift the lid on how billions of
euros from Russia and ex-Soviet states flowed through its
accounts in Estonia, the latest scandal to highlight Europe’s
inability to tackle alleged money-laundering.
Regulators are eagerly awaiting the Danske Bank report, which
will mark a critical milestone for the Danish lender and follows
calls by Brussels for a new European Union watchdog to crack down
on financial crime.

7.
Nestle, Unilever, and Coca-Cola are among bidders for
GlaxoSmithKline’s Indian Horlicks nutrition business, expected to
fetch more than $4 billion, four people familiar with the matter
said. Initial bids were due on Monday and the three
consumer goods giants are seen as frontrunners for a business
that offers a significant footprint in a fast-growing emerging
market.

8.
Tencent Music Entertainment, China’s biggest music-streaming
company, has halved the amount it is seeking to raise in a US
listing to about $2 billion, according to three people close to
the deal. The subsidiary of Chinese tech giant
Tencent Holdings two weeks ago filed confidentially with the US
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), three people with
knowledge of the matter said, in what will be one of the biggest
listings in New York by a Chinese company this year.

9.
China’s Premier has struck back at claims by US President Donald
Trump that Beijing has been engaged in currency manipulation to
bolster its competitiveness amid the escalating global trade
war. Li Keqiang – China’s second most powerful
official – used a keynote speech at a World Economic Forum event
in the industrial city of Tianjin to vow not to pursue a policy
of currency devaluation to counteract tariff measures imposed by
the Trump administration.

10.
Britain’s competition regulator referred Sainsbury’s £7.3 billion
takeover of Asda to an in-depth review on Wednesday because their
stores overlapped in hundreds of local areas.
Reuters reports that the Competition and Markets Authority said
on Wednesday that shoppers could face higher prices or a worse
quality of service in places where both chains had shops.