Business

US President Donald Trump on Sunday hailed a framework agreement between the United States and Iran aimed at ending hostilities in the Gulf that have reduced commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz to a trickle for more than three months. The deal, scheduled to be signed on Friday in Switzerland, reopens the strait to shipping without tolls, lifts the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and allows Tehran to resume oil exports under limited sanctions relief. The framework also extends the current ceasefire for at least 60 days while launching broader talks on Iran's nuclear program. Yet, unlike reopening a highway after a car wreck, restoring prewar oil, gas and container traffic through this vital chokepoint faces significant hurdles. Greek maritime risk management agency MARISKS wa...

SpaceX is at the center of attention on financial markets on Friday as the company makes its stock-market debut.    The Elon Musk-led rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company raised as much as $75 billion (€65 billion) by selling nearly 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, according to a statement the firm released on Thursday. That makes it the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history, breaking the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019, when the oil giant went public and raised $26 billion. The listing instantly turns SpaceX into the seventh-biggest publicly traded US company, valuing it at a whopping $1.8 trillion. SpaceX wants to use the proceeds from the IPO to fund its ambitious projects such as installing AI data centers in space and missions to Mars.Da...

Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on Friday after his SpaceX aerospace and artificial intelligence (AI) firm made its stock market debut on Friday. Shares pushed well past their opening price of $135 (roughly €117) in the hours after the initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq. The shares closed up just over 19% at around $161 at the end of their first day of trading, valuing SpaceX at around $2.1 trillion and giving Musk an estimated net worth of around $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes magazine. At one point shortly after 1 p.m. in New York (1700 GMT/UTC), the shares had been hovering around the $173 mark, a rise of almost 28% equating to a market capitalization of around $2.26 trillion for the Texas-based space and satellite company, before falling again slightly b...

Swiss voters will soon have the chance to have their say in a referendum on the Civilian Service Act, asking whether the number of people moving from the army to civilian service should be reduced, as well as on a far-right initiative to cap the population at 10 million dubbed the "No to 10 million" initiative. The question at the heart of the populist initiative, to be voted upon on June 14, is how many people should live in Switzerland. The far-right Swiss People's Party (SVP), which proposed it, wants to ensure that the permanent population does not exceed 10 million after 2050. A similar initiative by the SVP failed 12 years ago. Economic interests at stake The issue is not only about nationalism, psychology and xenophobia but also about economic interests. From an economic perspe...

It has all the ingredients of a Hollywood script: two ambitious tech nerds locked in a high-stakes battle for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI), complete with surprising plot twists. Take Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who recently called on the AI industry to pause development, warning that humanity could lose control of the technology. What made the statement remarkable was its timing: just days earlier, his company had filed paperwork with the US securities regulator, the SEC, to launch an IPO — a first public sale of company shares on the stock market. Anthropic's move caught rival OpenAI off guard. ChatGPT's owner only announced its own plans to go public a week later. The timing looks well-chosen. Stock markets are buoyant, and AI is everywhere. Anthropic is currently val...

On Wednesday, German Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder arrived at Toyota's fuel cell factory in a German BMW iX5 Hydrogen, only to later depart in a Japanese Toyota Crown FCEV. The choice of cars was, of course, no coincidence, with both vehicles generating electricity from hydrogen in a fuel cell. Car makers BMW and Toyota are currently jointly developing the third generation of this drive technology. Three BMW employees have specifically moved to Japan to participate in the undertaking. Both companies are contributing components to help develop a more compact and efficient fuel cell. Once this stage is complete, BMW will manufacture this drive technology in an Austrian factory and Toyota will do the same at a Japanese production site. BMW plans to launch its first hydrogen series mo...

Germany's chemical sector stands as a core pillar of the nation's economy, ranking third after automotive and mechanical engineering. It generates hundreds of billions in annual revenue and directly employs about half a million people.   The industry, however, has been beset by crisis in recent years, weighed down by high energy costs, growing regulatory burdens, a persistently weak economy, and intense competition from abroad. Chemical production requires large amounts of energy, not just electricity but also heat, steam and pressure. So, when energy prices rise, it erodes firms' global competitiveness and profitability. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the resulting loss of cheap Russian gas, German chemical companies have faced some of the highest e...

Russia may celebrate its "no-limits" partnership with China — a phrase coined when President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met just before the Ukraine war — yet those relations are increasingly one-sided. Although bilateral trade softened last year as a result of lower oil prices, Russia’s goods exports to China have nearly doubled since February 2022, when Moscow's full-scale invasion began.  In 2024, Russia shipped roughly $129 billion (€111 billion) worth of goods to China — the overwhelming majority in crude oil, coal and natural gas sold at steep discounts. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air calculated that China has bought more than €319 billion ($372 billion) of Russian fossil fuels since the conflict began, giving Moscow vital hard currency to fund its military amid...

German lawmakers in the Bundestag on Thursday voted in favor of a proposal to cut aviation tax, raising hopes the move could make flying slightly cheaper in the country. If it’s approved by the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, the tax will be lowered from July 1 to the level it was at before the last increase in May 2024. Depending on the length of the flight, the tax will drop between €2.50 and €11.40 ($2.90 to $13.25) per flight. The measure is expected to reduce federal tax revenues by approximately €350 million per year. “We are, of course, grateful for this signal to reverse the latest tax increase, but that does not yet mark a turnaround,” Kay Lindemann, the Lufthansa Group's representative for policy and regulation, told DW. The aviation tax accounts for only a portion ...

Walk into a bakery or a bookshop in Bavaria's Chiemgau region, and you might spot a customer paying with what looks like play money — colorful banknotes printed with grasshoppers, ladybugs and other insects.  "An estimated 10 to 15% of customers pay this way," one bookseller told DW. The locals call it the "Chiemgauer" — and it's a currency they invented themselves.  Quirky as it sounds, it underpins a micro financial system that has been running for more than two decades — and has recently evolved into a tool for cutting carbon emissions in this picturesque corner of southeastern Germany. A classroom experiment that got out of hand The Chiemgauer was born in 2003 at a local high school, where economics teacher Christian Gelleri and a group of students were looking for a way to suppor...