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Trade Wars
Stryker Hit With Suspected Iran-Linked Cyberattack
Medical technology giant Stryker is experiencing a global outage across its systems, with staff and contractors reporting that the logo of an Iran-linked hacking group has appeared on login pages. The outages began shortly after midnight on the East Coast, according to people familiar with the matter. Staff found that remote devices running Microsoft’s Windows operating system—such as cellphones, laptops and others configured to connect to Stryker’s technology systems—had been wiped. A successful attack on a major U.S. company would be a significant escalation in a cyber conflict that has been expected to follow the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign in Iran, which began on Feb. 28.
A Stryker spokesperson confirmed the disruption. “Our teams are actively working to restore systems and operations as quickly as possible. Stryker has business continuity measures in place, and we’re committed to continuing to serve our customers,” the spokesperson said. Stryker is one of the world’s largest medical technology companies, producing devices and equipment used in hospitals and surgical settings, particularly in orthopedics and neurosurgery. The Kalamazoo, Mich.-based firm makes products ranging from joint replacement implants and surgical instruments to hospital beds and robotic-assisted surgery systems. It reported $25.12 billion in revenue for 2025, and employs about 56,000 people globally.
Read more at The WSJ
Volkswagen Slashes 50,000 Jobs After Profits Collapse By Nearly Half
The Volkswagen group had a bruising year in profits and plans to cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 — a dramatic escalation of its cost-cutting programme after net profit slumped 44% to €6.9bn in 2025, the carmaker's worst result since the diesel emissions scandal nearly a decade ago. Revenue stagnated at around €322bn, while operating profit almost halved to around €8.9bn, according to Europe's largest carmaker.
Although Volkswagen grew in Europe, this was not enough to compensate for declines in China and North America. The Group delivered around 8.98 million vehicles worldwide in 2025 — a decrease of 0.5%. Despite the weak annual results, the Group has recently been somewhat more stable. In the final quarter, business developed better than before. Volkswagen had previously reported a loss of more than €1bn in the third quarter due to special charges at Porsche. The Group now expects profitability to improve again in 2026. The operating margin is expected to rise to between 4.0 and 5.5%, after falling to 2.8% in 2025.
Read more at EruoNews
Where The Auto Supply Chain Is Most Threatened By The Iran War – CNBC
The auto industry keeps getting hit by supply constraints at a time when it is making some of the biggest transitions in its more than century-long history. The war in Iran could be just the latest of those issues. Though the region is not a major maker of automotive parts, it does produce key resources such as oil and aluminum. About 20% of the world’s oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a major shipping artery that is bordered on two sides by Iran and Oman.
High oil prices stand to drive up the cost of petrochemicals, which is what plastics are made of. Some estimate that about 30% of the parts on a car are plastic. Diesel and jet fuel prices are rising as well, which puts pressure on shipping and freight. That region is also a large producer of aluminum, particularly in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Like plastic, aluminum has become an increasingly important material for car manufacturers, in part because it is lighter than steel. The concern for automakers and suppliers is that even though the region is not a large producer of auto parts per se, it could be a chokepoint for key materials that form those parts.
Read more at CNBC
Nvidia To Make 'Significant Investment' In Thinking Machines Labs, Provide 1 Gigawatt Of AI Chips
Nvidia (NVDA) on Tuesday announced that it is forging a partnership with AI company Thinking Machines Lab that will see the chipmaker provide upwards of 1 gigawatt's worth of its next-generation Vera Rubin chips to the company. In a joint statement, Nvidia and Thinking Machines said the processors will be deployed early next year. The deal also calls for the two to "design training and serving systems for Nvidia architectures and broader access to frontier AI and open models for enterprises, research institutions, and the scientific community."
Under the terms of the deal, Nvidia is also making a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines to "support the company's long-term growth." The firms didn't reveal the amount of the investment. Nvidia has been on a dealmaking spree as of late. On March 2, it announced agreements with Coherent (COHR) and Lumentum (LITE) to build optics technologies. In February, the company said it was entering a massive multiyear, multi-generational partnership with Meta (META). OpenAI also revealed that Nvidia would invest $30 billion in the company as part of its $110 billion fundraising round.
Read more at Yahoo Finance
Oracle Stock Jumps As Strong Q3 Earnings Answer Wall Street AI Buildout Concerns
Oracle posted robust third-quarter earnings and assured analysts that the company does not plan to raise any additional debt in 2026 beyond what was already announced. Oracle did better than investors expected on crucial key performance indicators. Here are the takeaways:
- Faster-than-expected revenue growth. In the company’s fiscal 2026 third quarter, revenue rose 18% to $17.2 billion, $270 million more than the FactSet forecast. The company also expects 19% revenue growth in the current quarter.
- Adjusted earnings beat. Adjusted per-share earnings in Q3 were $1.79, nine cents per share ahead of the FactSet consensus. Oracle’s adjusted earnings-per-share forecast for Q4 2026 of $1.93, a penny per share higher than consensus.
- More than fourfold increase in remaining performance obligations. Oracle’s Q3 remaining performance obligations, a measure of future revenue, rose 325% to $553 billion.
- Higher Q3 capital expenditures with unchanged forecast. In the third quarter, Oracle reported $18.6 billion in capital expenditures, 19% more than analysts’ consensus, according to Bloomberg. For fiscal 2026, the company maintained its CapEx outlook for $50 billion.
Read more at Forbes
Airbus Reveals Two Next Gen NATO Rotorcraft Studies
Airbus Helicopters has revealed two advanced rotorcraft designs it is pursuing for the ongoing NATO Next Generation Rotorcraft Capabilities (NGRC) initiative, complementing proposals being drawn up by rival OEMs Leonardo Helicopters and Sikorsky under the program’s Study 5 phase. Each company may present up to two solutions for evaluation before a draft request for proposal, planned for this May, is issued.
Of the two renderings published one is described by Airbus as a “high-performance conventional helicopter,” and the other, as a “novel high-speed compound concept.” The second appears to leverage the additional wings and propellers of Airbus’ Racer (Rapid And Cost-Effective Rotorcraft) technology demonstrator, which reached 240 knots in level flight in April 2025. Airbus stresses that its two concepts are “highly connected and will share commonalities in terms of maintenance, training, weapons and systems,” with “modularity and simplicity… core tenets of the Airbus NGRC proposal.”
Read more at AIN Online
Toyota Nears Completion Of $531M Texas Rear Axle Plant
Workers in hard hats and vests roam across the factory floor, while others build assembly lines and man welding stations. Robotic arms whir through endurance tests. Piles of metal parts and cardboard boxes sit in loading bays, prepared to produce 500,000 rear axles each year for Toyota’s Sequoia, Tundra and Tacoma trucks. Toyota’s newest San Antonio investment isn’t running full-throttle, but the electric hum of machinery and construction still blankets all 500,000 square feet of the new Southside factory.
The Japanese car manufacturer is installing equipment and hiring hundreds of workers before it starts commercial production. The car manufacturer has been in San Antonio for more than 20 years. It announced plans for a new factory in 2024 and broke ground later that year. The new plant will produce rear axles. Toyota will keep roughly 40% of the axles it produces in San Antonio at its Tundra- and Sequoia-producing plant and ship 60% to Mexico for production of its Tacomas in Guanajuato and Baja California. The rear axle plant will cost Toyota around $531 million and the company is in the midst of hiring 411 new workers for the facility.
Read more at San Antonio Report
Can America’s Mineral Wealth Be Unlocked Without Smelters?
One of the biggest hurdles in America’s race to secure supplies of critical minerals is a lack of capacity to extract metals like copper, silver and rare-earth elements from the country’s abundant ores and heaps of old electronics. A new company launched by the former head of Glencore’s recycling business and two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists says it can separate metals and rare earths from electronic waste and mined ores without the massive amounts of energy and chemicals consumed in traditional smelting and refining methods. The company, Valor, is an attempt to commercialize a breakthrough in metallurgy called electrochemical liquid-liquid extraction.
It was developed by scientists Xiao Su and Johannes Elbert. They have teamed with Kunal Sinha, who oversaw Glencores’s global recycling operations as well as the mining company’s critical minerals investments in North America. Elbert, Su and colleagues described their electrochemical liquid-liquid extraction process two years ago in a peer-reviewed paper in scientific journal Nature Chemical Engineering. They basically created a collection of molecular magnets called ligands made to bind to specific elements and figured out how to switch them on and off to catch and release minerals from streams of brine, ore, mine tailings or e-waste. To pluck the silver from a slurry of ground-up computer chips, for instance, the ligand made to bind to the precious metal is activated with a current of electricity and then turned off to release the silver for reuse. Valor can repeat the process over and over applying different ligands until all of the target minerals have been extracted from the feedstock.
Read more at the WSJ
As Fukushima Memories Fade, Japan Embraces A Nuclear-Powered Future
Resource-poor Japan was once one of the world's biggest proponents of nuclear power, which provided roughly 30% of the country's electricity from 54 reactors. The Fukushima disaster saw public opinion swing dramatically against nuclear, and all reactors were ordered to be shut down for safety inspections and upgrades. In 2012, the government even decided to phase out nuclear energy. That decision was reversed two years later, but reactor restarts have been slow and many have been shut permanently.
Now Tokyo's staunchly pro-nuclear leader Sanae Takaichi, buoyed by a thumping election win, is pushing to accelerate restarts and advance new nuclear technologies to wean the country off costly imported fossil fuels. The restart of one of the seven reactors at the world's biggest nuclear plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, in January was a milestone. That said, only 15 of 33 reactors in Japan that remain operable are back online. A slim majority of people - 51% - are now in favour of the restarts, an Asahi newspaper survey last month found. That's up from 28% when it began polling on the issue in 2013. The most supportive are young people aged 18 to 29 - at 66%.
Read more at Reuters
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