Order Reprints Illustration by Elias Stein
QuantumScape’s amazing rise continued this past week, like a gift from a market Santa. Shares of the electric-vehicle battery maker closed at $131.67, up another 39% after rallying 29% on Monday. The stock gained almost 70% over one week, and 390% since going public in late November.
On Tuesday, Quantum stock was worth $59 billion, based on fully diluted 448 million pro forma shares outstanding. The company passed rivals, including LG Chem, Samsung SDI, and Panasonic, in market value. One exception: China’s Contemporary Amperex.
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QuantumScape’s amazing rise continued this past week, like a gift from a market Santa.
The attack that may have exposed 18,000 SolarWinds’ customers also brought a lot of attention to the importance of cybersecurity. That had Wall Street analysts revising their views of the industry and the stocks.
Order Reprints Illustration by Elias Stein
Walmart, a tech stock? After more than a year of testing, the retailer said that it would expand a pilot program using Gatik’s autonomous box trucks to operate a two-mile route between a distribution center and a Walmart store in Bentonville, Ark. Since July, a safety driver has accompanied the trucks. Now, 70,000 miles later, the trucks will go it alone.
Self-driving has slowly been arriving. Tesla recently rolled out a beta version of its FSD short for full self-driving software, and XPeng showcased self-driving software.
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Walmart’s No Tesla, but That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Try Autonomous Driving
Order Reprints Illustration by Elias Stein
Give RingCentral credit: It has guts. The company, a provider of cloud-based communications services, is launching RingCentral Glip, a video and chat app that competes not only with Zoom Video Communications, but also Cisco Webex (which recently announced its own upgrades), Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts, plus collaborative software provider Slack Technologies.
RingCentral bought Glip in 2015, when it was primarily a collaborative communications tool like Slack, which is being taken over by Salesforce.com. The new version.
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Give RingCentral credit: It has guts.
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Order Reprints Illustration by Elias Stein
In suing Facebook this past week, the Federal Trade Commission cited a “yearslong course of anticompetitive conduct.” The FTC wants the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, two acquisitions that the commission signed off on years ago. Facebook called the effort “revisionist history” and said that it would send a “chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final.”
Don’t feel too bad for corporate deal makers, though. Investment bankers are a hearty bunch who have persevered for decades. Even after the FTC.
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Will the FTC’s Suit Against Facebook Stifle M&A? Probably Not.