UK competition watchdog clears £3.7 billion Aviva-Direct Line deal
The Competition and Markets Authority, which launched an initial investigation into the deal in May, said it would not refer the deal to an in-depth probe.
Aviva and Direct Line inked an agreement in December to create one of London's largest listed insurers, rivalling Legal & General and the Asia-focused Prudential in terms of market value.
The combined company, representing Aviva CEO Amanda Blanc's most ambitious corporate transaction to date, would have a more than 20% share in both home and motor insurance in the UK, analysts said at the time the deal was announced.
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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
Trump keen for US to manufacture iPhones; here's how India is doing it
A new iPhone factory in an out-of-the-way corner of India looks like a spaceship from another planet. Foxconn , the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world's iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli. The sleek buildings rising on the 300-acre site, operational but still growing, are emerging evidence of an estimated $2.5 billion (€2.1 billion) investment. This is what US president Donald Trump wants Apple to do in the United States. What is happening in this part of India shows why that sounds attractive and why it will probably not happen without sustained government financial support to revive US manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers. READ MORE In India, Apple is doubling down on a bet it placed after the Covid-19 pandemic began and before Trump's re-election. Many countries, starting with the US, were eager to reduce their reliance on factories in China. Apple, profoundly dependent on Chinese production, was quick to act. Analysts at Counterpoint Research calculated that India had succeeded in satisfying 18 per cent of the global demand for iPhones by early this year, two years after Foxconn started making iPhones in India. By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of iPhones in India. This newest factory is the largest of several making Apple products in India. Its full frame is still rising from red dust. Cranes are at work above the skeletons of high-rise dormitories for female workers. But about 8,000 people are already at work on two factory floors. Soon, there should be 40,000. The effects on the region are transformative. It's a field day for job seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple's factory towns in China is coalescing in India's heartland. Businesses are selling Foxconn the goods and services it needs to make iPhones, including tiny parts, assembly-line equipment and worker recruitment. Some of the firms are Indian; others are Taiwanese, South Korean or American. Some were already in the area, while others are setting up in India for the first time. The changes spurred by Foxconn are rippling broadly through Bengaluru, a city of eight million people that had a start in the 20th century as home to India's first aerospace centres. But its manufacturing base was pushed aside, first by call centres and then by flashier work in microchip design and outsourced professional services. Going back to the factory floor, as they're doing in Devanahalli, is what Trump wants US workers to do. To see the changes afoot here is to understand the allure of bringing back manufacturing. Wages are rising 10 to 15 per cent around the Foxconn plant. Businesses are quietly making deals to supply Foxconn and Apple's other contractors. A factory that makes plastic parts for bank cash machines hosted a team from Foxconn for a tour. A foundry that makes yarn-spinning machinery was hoping it might start making the metal bits Foxconn might need in its new factory. Neither Foxconn nor Apple replied to requests for comment about their operations in India. India has been working toward a breakthrough like this for a long time. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called hydroelectric dams, steel plants, and research institutes the 'temples of modern India'. How the wealthy are buying up land to avoid inheritance tax Listen | 22:03 In 2015, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced a 'Make in India' policy. Since 2020, his government has committed $26 billion to subsidising strategic manufacturing goals. India's most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the US, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half of its workers are involved in farming. With India's population peaking, it needs about 10 million new jobs a year just to keep up. It also wants to achieve the kind of financial power and technological autonomy that China found as it became the factory of the world. One problem is that India's electronics factories still import the most valuable of the 1,000 components that go into a finished iPhone, like chips and camera modules. Sceptics disparage India's success with the final assembly of iPhones as 'screwdriver work,' complaining that too little of the devices' value is made in India. But the government, dangling subsidies, is persuading companies like Apple to source more of those parts locally. It is already getting casings, specialised glass and paints from Indian firms. Apple, which opened its first Indian stores two years ago, is required by the Indian government to source 30 per cent of its products' value from India by 2028. Indo-MIM, an Indian company with a US-born boss, is the kind that contributes to the neighbourhood forming around Apple's production and also benefits from it. At a plant near Devanahalli, in southern Karnataka state, Indo-MIM's engineers perform metal-injection moulding for hundreds of companies worldwide. It makes parts for aircraft, luxury goods, medical devices and more. The company is already making jigs or brackets for use in the Foxconn plant. In addition, a 'critical mass' of speciality firms means that Indo-MIM no longer needs to make many of the tools it uses to make its products, said Krishna Chivukula, its chief executive. 'You don't want to have to make everything yourself,' he said, adding that it means Indo-MIM can concentrate on what it does best. Chivukula said the workforce made Devanahalli fertile ground for factories. 'The people here are very hungry,' he said. 'They're looking for opportunity, and then on top of that, millions of them are engineers.' Still, despite the surplus of engineers, companies are bringing in talent from East Asia. Prachir Singh, an analyst for Counterpoint, said it had taken 15 years to figure out what would work in China and five years to import this much of it to India. Centum is an Indian-origin contract manufacturer, like Foxconn is to Apple. Centum makes circuit boards that go into products like air-to-air missiles, forklifts and fertility scanners. Nikhil Mallavarapu, its executive director, said the company was in talks to customise testing equipment for the Foxconn factory. Newly hired engineers and other professionals are pouring into the area. Many moved hundreds of miles while others must commute hours a day to get to work. Some rise at 3:30 am to make the 8am shift. But India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables. Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory's day shift. She holds a master's degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck. It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn's ambitions for India possible. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind US factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there. Josh Foulger has recruited lots of motivated Indian workers like Sneha. He heads the electronics division of Zetwerk, an Indian contract manufacturer with factories in Devanahalli that sees itself as a smaller competitor to Foxconn. He said he routinely got 700 job applications a year from local tech schools. It is a matter of scale: Karnataka state alone, he said, has a population half the size of Vietnam's. All of India's 'states are very keen on getting manufacturing,' said Foulger, who grew up in southern India and made his home in Texas before moving back to India, where he set up shop for Foxconn. India has jobs for engineers and managers and all the way down the ladder. 'Manufacturing does a very democratic job' of meeting the demand for good jobs, he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times . 2025 The New York Times Company
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
Trump makes tariff threat to trade partners as deadline looms
Donald Trump has threatened to increase levies on Japan and has cast doubt that the US would reach a deal with its Asian ally, as he escalated his trade rhetoric days before his pause on some steep tariffs is set to expire. The US president said he would impose new levies on countries that failed to agree a trade deal by July 9th, when the 'reciprocal' tariffs unleashed in April are set to resume. He also singled out Tokyo, a crucial trading partner that had been among the first countries to seek a deal with Mr Trump after he shocked global markets in April by launching a global trade war on 'liberation day'. 'We've dealt with Japan. I'm not sure we're going to make a deal. I doubt it,' Mr Trump said. READ MORE 'I'll write them a letter to say 'we thank you very much, and we know you can't do the kind of things that we need, and therefore you pay a 30 per cent, 35 per cent' or whatever the number is that we determined,' he said. 'Because we also have a very big trade deficit.' Japanese markets fell on Wednesday, with the exporter-oriented Nikkei 225 index declining 0.8 per cent and the benchmark Topix losing 0.3 per cent. The yen edged down 0.1 per cent against the dollar. The comments from the president suggested Mr Trump remained willing to take a hard line on negotiations with trading partners, despite backing down on his higher global tariffs earlier this year in the face of deep market turmoil. The US imposed a tariff of 24 per cent on all imports from Japan on Trump's so-called liberation day on April 2nd, before temporarily lowering it to 10 per cent for 90 days to allow talks to take place. Mr Trump claimed at the time that he would sign 90 deals during the 90-day hiatus, although only the UK has struck a new trade agreement with the US. The threat to increase tariffs on the world's fourth-largest economy will heighten fears that Mr Trump will reignite a global trade war if his officials fail to line up countries before his own deadline next week. The president told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that he was not considering extending next week's deadline for any countries to allow talks to continue. He has accused Japan of being 'spoiled' and refusing to commit to buying more American rice or to allow US-manufactured cars into its market. Cars are the principal driver by value of Japan's large goods trade surplus with the US, which stood at $63 billion for the most recent financial year, followed by industrial machinery and electrical machinery. Japan's largest imports from the US were power generation machinery, energy and cereals. Japan already faces a 10 per cent tariff on most of its exports to the US, but Japanese cars and car parts are also subject to a 25 per cent border tax tariff. Steel and aluminium face a 50 per cent levy. US and Japanese trade officials have been locked in intense negotiations since earlier this year. Japan is slowly accepting that it will not be exempt from automotive tariffs, according to one person familiar with the talks, but it wants a guarantee that any deal struck will be final. 'Japan is digging its heels in with an insistence that the US agrees that, whatever the deal is, this really is it, and there will not be any further tariff hikes. Japanese companies need to know exactly what the tariff will be and start planning for that, and so Tokyo is negotiating for a deal that represents a covenant the US will stick to,' said the person. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Irish Times
Car makers sound alarm as China turns off tap on mineral supplies
China has spent several years trying to corner much of the global market for minerals and materials used in high-tech and manufacturing industries. It has been a point of concern for many of the world's car makers for some time that China is all but a monopoly when it comes to the supply and refinement of the likes of lithium, crucial for electric car batteries. Now, that dominance is being asserted as China has, up to a point, turned off the tap when it comes to the supply of rare-earth metals, many of which are crucial to the making of combustion-engined and hybrid cars as well as electric vehicles (EVs) . So tight has supply now become that Japanese car maker Suzuki has said it will pause production of its popular Swift small car until supply restrictions ease. CLEPA, the organisation that represents Europe's car component and parts suppliers, has said the restrictions in rare-earth metals, such as dysprosium, represent a significant threat. In a statement, CLEPA's secretary general Benjamin Krieger said: 'With a deeply intertwined global supply chain, China's export restrictions are already shutting down production in the European supplier sector.' Could this lead to another crunch in car production, similar to that seen in 2021 and 2022 when Covid restrictions and a global shortage of microchips sent the car industry into a spiral? It may well do. The VDA, the German umbrella organisation that represents that country's car industry, has warned that China's restrictions could cause car factories to 'grind to a halt'. READ MORE Speaking to CNBC, VDA president Hildegard Muller said: 'The Chinese export restrictions on rare earths are a serious challenge for the security of supply, and not just in the automotive supply chains. Although some licences have now been granted, this is currently not enough to ensure smooth production. A further problem arises from the slow clearance of exports for which a valid export licence has been granted. If the situation does not change quickly, production delays and even production stoppages can no longer be ruled out.' The situation became serious enough in May that it broke down the corporate rivalry between General Motors, Toyota , Hyundai and Volkswagen sufficiently that those companies came together to form a lobbying group called the Alliance For Automotive Innovation, which wrote an open letter to the US government. It said: 'Without reliable access to these elements and magnets, automotive suppliers will be unable to produce critical automotive components, including automatic transmissions, throttle bodies, alternators, various motors, sensors, seat belts, speakers, lights, motors, power steering and cameras.' Previously, the world's car makers were criticised for not acting swiftly enough to shore up the supply of microchips when the supply of that technology became severely restricted. Tech companies such as Apple and Samsung saw the problem coming over the horizon much sooner and acted to bulk up on inventory This left many car makers out in the cold and forced to cut or even stop production, or to build cars with fewer high-tech features. There seemed to have been a thaw in recent months, as both China and the EU sought to work together to circumvent the so-called Trump tariffs It's not just high-tech features which are affected by this shortage, however. While batteries and touchscreens certainly use their share of rare-earth metals, you'll also find them – including the likes of platinum, palladium, and rhodium – in catalytic converters, oil pumps, stereo speakers and windscreen wiper mechanisms. There's another significant difference this time around. Whereas the semiconductor microchip shortage affected the whole world, this time China appears to be specifically targeting not only car makers, but other industries which rely on the supplies of these materials, possibly in an effort to increase the export success of its own companies. It marks yet another step change in the relationship between the EU and China's car makers. That relationship had become exceptionally frosty in the wake of the EU imposing stiff tariffs on China's electric cars, amid claims and counter-claims of state subsidies and low-cost 'dumping'. There seemed to have been a thaw in recent months, as both China and the EU sought to work together to circumvent the so-called Trump tariffs , but this rare-earth restriction could indicate a new phase of China's expansionist industrial policy. The likes of BYD and MG (the latter long since owned by China's Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corporation) are looking to duck around European tariffs both by building factories in the EU and Turkey (BYD's Hungarian factory begins producing its first cars later this year) as well as ramping up the numbers of plug-in hybrid cars – which are not affected by tariffs – that they sell. BYD, in particular, has announced major ambitions for European sales, including plans to become the biggest-selling brand in the UK and elsewhere. It's backed up those ambitions by taking advantage of stumbling Tesla sales, picking up customers disgruntled by Elon Musk's controversial public and political actions. BYD's vice-president, Stella Li, has previously said she wants the company to effectively become a European car maker, with more than one factory in Europe, 'putting jobs and investment into the community'. China's move to restrict exports is also a form of response to the inconsistent trading policies of the current Trump administration That may be of cold comfort to those currently employed by rival car makers who now can't access the supplies and materials they need, especially if it turns out that rather than the restrictions being merely the result of sclerotic bureaucracy, China is weaponising the supply chain specifically to damage rival economies and companies. Both Nissan and BMW have said they can foresee production restrictions if the tightness of supply continues, although both Volkswagen and Mercedes have said they have plans in place to source materials from other countries. With China having a 60 per cent chokehold on the world's supply of rare-earth metals, that may prove easier said than done. Mercedes has pointed out that it is working on new designs, especially electric motors developed by its UK-based subsidiary YASA, that use far fewer rare-earth metals, and in some cases which don't use any at all. China's move to restrict exports is also a form of response to the inconsistent trading policies of the current Trump administration in the US, and is effectively a form of leverage against higher tariffs. Reuters reports that the 'big three' US car makers – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis Group (a European-based conglomerate, but it owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram commercial vehicles) – had all been granted export licences for some rare Earth metals. It remains to be seen if these new export agreements will allow Ford to restart production of its Explorer SUV (the large US-market car, not the compact all-electric European model of the same name, which is made in Cologne), which had been paused.
