Chinese ride-hailing firm raises $5.5B
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has raised more than $5.5 billion from investors, scoring the single largest round of funding on record to bankroll an expansion beyond China and into driverless-vehicle technology.
Didi, based in Beijing, disclosed the financing in an emailed statement but not the backers who joined this round. People familiar with the matter said last week that the investors would include SoftBank Group Corp., Silver Lake Kraftwerk, China Merchants Bank Co. and an arm of Bank of Communications Co.
The round was said to have raised the 4-year-old startup's valuation to about $50 billion, up from a previous $34 billion after its acquisition of Uber Technologies Inc.'s China business.
That price tag surpasses smartphone-maker Xiaomi Corp.'s and makes Didi the world's most valuable startup after Uber. The deal grants much-needed ammunition as Didi continues to fight Uber and Alphabet Inc. in automated driving.
-- Bloomberg News
Gauge for U.S. startups bounces back
After a prolonged retrenchment, startups in the U.S. are finally seeing better days.
The Bloomberg U.S. Startups Barometer rose 0.6 percent from a year earlier, marking the first year-over-year increase since the end of 2015. Bigger funding totals and more exits buoyed the index.
Snap Inc. and MuleSoft Inc. are among the companies that went public in recent weeks. Initial public offerings give investors a chance to cash out and reinvest their money into younger businesses, making them a leading indicator of the funding environment for startups.
"We think there will be anywhere from 30 to 35 venture-backed IPOs this year," said Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, which manages $4 billion of investments. "By all measures, it feels like it'll be a much better year."
Companies choosing to remain private have also helped the index. Rising deal sizes have been driven by mega financing rounds, including $1 billion raised by Airbnb Inc. and $300 million raised by WeWork Cos.
-- Bloomberg News
Microsoft connects LinkedIn to software
SEATTLE -- Microsoft is adding links between its business-focused software and LinkedIn, the biggest move yet to make use of the company's largest-ever acquisition.
LinkedIn now boasts more than 500 million registered users, Microsoft said recently, up from 467 million in October when LinkedIn released its last quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company. Microsoft's $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced in June, was finalized in December.
Beginning in July, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 software for salespeople will draw on LinkedIn's trove of workplace data, allowing users to bring in resume information and other details to inform interactions with potential customers.
Another tool, aimed at hiring managers, will loop in LinkedIn profile information and the site's recruiting tools within Dynamics.
Scott Guthrie, who leads Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise unit, announced the plans in a blog post.
-- The Seattle Times
Report: 'Ransomware' cyberattacks up
Cyberattacks involving "ransomware" -- in which criminals use malicious software to encrypt a users' data and then extort money to decrypt it -- increased 50 percent in 2016, according to a report from Verizon.
And criminals increasingly shifted from going after individual consumers to attacking vulnerable organizations and businesses, the report said. Government organizations were the most frequent target of these ransomware attacks, followed by health care businesses and financial services, according to data from security company McAfee, which partnered with Verizon on the report published last week.
Instances of ransomware attacks have grown along with the market for bitcoin, the digital currency that is most commonly how cybercriminals demand ransoms be paid because of its anonymity.
While overall most malware was delivered through infected websites, increasingly criminals were turning to phishing -- using fraudulent emails designed to get a user to download attachments or click on links to websites that are infected with malware -- to carry out attacks. A fifth of all malware raids began with a phishing email in 2016, while fewer than 1 in 10 did the year before, according to the report.
-- Bloomberg News
File-sharing firm reaches profit mark
Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a key metric that investors are watching as the file-sharing software-maker moves closer to becoming a public company.
"It's rare for software companies to be operating at our scale with our level of profitability and to be growing at the rate that we are," Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The measure does include compensation costs, such as stock or options issued to employees as part of their salary.
Dropbox in the past year has been touting milestones that mark the company's long march to greater financial maturity. Last June at the Bloomberg Technology Conference, Houston said Dropbox was free-cash-flow positive, and earlier this year he announced revenue had topped $1 billion on an annualized basis. Dropbox said it was the fastest any software-as-a-service company had ever reached that mark.
The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2007, has been meeting with bankers to discuss plans to sell shares in an initial public offering, people familiar with the talks said in March.
-- Bloomberg News
Washers augur slower China home sales
The production of washing machines is foreshadowing the future of China's roller-coaster property market and signaling that government cooling measures are beginning to bite.
New-home sales growth by volume probably slowed in April to less than a third of the pace in March, according to a Bloomberg leading index tracking appliance output in China.
Washer output is a predictor because each machine correlates almost one-to-one with completed new homes, and data on the appliances suggest the government's campaign to prevent a housing bubble is getting results. In February, the central bank vowed to strictly limit the flow of credit into speculative housing purchases. At least 64 cities recently announced new or tougher property-buying restrictions.
"The rapid increase in home sales is simply unsustainable," said Liu Feifan, a property analyst at Guotai Junan International Holdings Ltd. in Shenzhen.
Kopi Li and Teresa Huang, analysts at Bloomberg Global Data in Hong Kong, developed the leading indicator after noticing the high correlation between washing machine output and home sales volumes. Their gauge tracks output of the appliances in one month, using industrial production data from China's National Bureau of Statistics, to project home sales the next month.
"Homebuyers need to buy washing machines for their new apartments, whether they plan to live in them or rent them out," Li said.
Home sales volume growth will slow to 14 percent year-on-year in April, from the 45 percent gain that had been projected in March, Global Data's estimates suggest. Analysis of previous periods when authorities imposed restrictive policies shows growth may slow to as little as 3 percent, Huang said.
-- Bloomberg News
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