Dell’s blockbuster $67 billion deal to acquire business technology giant EMC may have crossed a major hurdle on Thursday.
The European Union’s antitrust regulators are slated to approve the deal without demanding concessions, according to a Reuters report citing unnamed sources. The report said that European Union officials will issue a ruling on the acquisition by February 29.
The deal approval is noteworthy given that EU antitrust regulators haven’t been particularly sympathetic to giant corporations that they believe hinder competition. For example, the EU has expressed interest in breaking up Google (now Alphabet) goog over antitrust issues.
Meanwhile, investors and analysts have expressed concern over whether the deal will be able to close in light of a weakening and tight credit market.
Both executives at Dell and EMC have been vocal in recent weeks about the deal, saying that it’s on track to close.
EMC lead director William Green said last week that the deal will close “unless an act of god happens.”
For more on Dell and EMC watch our video:
Meanwhile, Dell chief integration officer Rory Read said this week in a letter to Dell employees that the company’s legal and government affairs teams “are working through all the required regulatory review cycles in the applicable countries.”
The letter by Read was filed with the SEC on Tuesday.
“I want to address some of the chatter over the past few weeks about possible financing headwinds with the transaction,” Read wrote. “I can assure you any suggestions our debt financing is in jeopardy are off-target and do not reflect our financing terms and the progress of our financing to date.”
McDonald’s mcd decision to revive all-day breakfast in October is proving to be deadly to some of the restaurant chain’s competitors.
Jack in the Box jack on Wednesday reported a smaller than expected quarterly profit and, without naming names, blamed McDonald’s for the shortfall in soft breakfast and lunch sales during the quarter ended Jan. 17.
“We believe a competitor’s messaging around its launch of all-day breakfast had some impact on our results, particularly in the 10:30 a.m. to noon period,” Jack in the Box said in its press release. “Jack in the Box sales in the last part of the quarter were lower than we anticipated as several competitors began promoting aggressive value offers.”
That competitor would be the Golden Arches themselves. The introduction in October of around-the-clock Egg McMuffins and hash browns helped Mickey D’s enjoy its best quarter in nearly four years, a welcome relief after two years of U.S. comparable sales declines. The stock last month hit a record high.
In contrast, Jack in the Box shares fell nearly 20% in after hours trading.
Late last month, the restaurant chain introduced several upgrades to its core menu, betting that an image for higher quality would help it fend off McDonald’s et al.
Jack in the Box, which also owns Qdoba, said revenue in the quarter came in at $470.8 million, below analysts’ forecasts for revenue of $475 million. Profit per share also missed expectations.
Some heads were bound to roll at Kohl’s kss after a weak holiday season.
Clearly irked by the department store’s anemic 0.4% increase in comparable sales over the holiday quarter, CEO Kevin Mansell cut three senior corporate positions as a way to shake up the retailer and put it back on track to hit the $21 billion sales mark in 2017 he promised Wall Street. Kohl’s stock fell 19% on the day it announced its holiday quarter sales numbers and lowered its profit forecast earlier this month.
It’s been a year and a half since Kohl’s announced its “Greatness Agenda” turnaround plan, and the Wisconsin-based retailer has middling results to show for it. Mansell conceded as much in an e-mail to staff last week obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which he explained the three senior job eliminations.
Sales during the key holiday quarter “fell far short of plan,” Mansell told staff in the e-mail, and Kohl’s is “not getting to the results we want as fast as we should.” Kohl’s spokeswomanJen Johnson confirmed the content of the email. “None of these moves signal any change in our strategic direction,” she told Fortune.
The three executives now gone are Krista Berry, executive vice president and chief digital officer; Bevin Bailis, senior vice president for communications and public relations; and Paul Calderon, senior vice president for store environment. The three positions will not be filled, Johnson told the Journal Sentinel.
To achieve that $2 billion sales bump, Kohl’s has tried to improve its private apparel labels, created a new loyalty program, and sped up the integration of stores and e-commerce. The company’s next phase calls for expanding its chain of outlet stores and opening smaller stores to get a bigger piece of urban markets.
Sales rose 1% to $19.2 billion in 2015, meaning that Kohl’s is far off pace from hitting its $21 billion goal. It is better than how Macy’s m has been faring, but well below numbers posted by J.C. Penney, jcp which appears to be clawing back market share from its rivals.
Mansell’s goal, as stated in the e-mail is to make Kohl’s “a faster, more agile organization.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Kohl’s was looking into options to avoid any potential fights with activist investors, including taking the retailer private.
Old Navy was for the longest time the bright spot in Gap Inc’s gps struggling portfolio, the brand that had held its own against everyone from Walmart wmt to H&M.
Gap’s largest brand, a power house behind 40% of sales, figured out long before both its major sister brands Gap and Banana Republic how to compete with fast fashion by shrinking production times and adding more trendiness into inexpensive clothes.
Now, all of a sudden, Old Navy has reported three straight months of deep comparable sales declines, its first such losing streak in four years, and a worrisome development for Gap Inc at a time it is trying to reinvent both Gap and Banana. Last month, comparable sales at Old Navy fell 6%, capping an awful quarter for both the brand and the company at large.
Old Navy’s reversal of fortunes started soon after former boss, star retail executive Stefan Larsson left last fall to become CEO of Ralph Lauren, leaving the brand in the hands of Jill Stanton, an executive vice president at Old Navy, on an interim but still ongoing basis. The loss of Larsson has worried investors for months. Shares have fallen nearly 40% in the last six months. The stock rose a bit on Monday after hours after Gap’s earnings per share forecast was a bit better than Wall Street expected.
The Gap brand’s comparable sales have only managed to grow once in the last 24 months, while Banana has cratered in recent months. So it’s not a given that Gap Inc will suddenly snap its slump in the coming months. Gap Inc CEO Art Peck has promised investors that the efforts to fix Gap and Banana will start to pay off this spring, having borrowed from the many lessons at Old Navy in recent years. Let’s hope for their sake those are still lessons worth learning.
Google parent-company Alphabet is testing at least two wireless charging systems for its electric-powered self-driving cars.
Documents filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission reveal Google goog is testing two wireless charging systems for its self-driving cars, reported IEEE Spectrum. Startup Hevo Power received permission in February 2015 to install an experimental charger at Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Momentum Dynamics received permission in July, according to the filings.
Google wouldn’t comment to Fortune except to say it tests a variety of technologies.
This isn’t the first wireless charging system Google has tested. Back in 2011, the company tested a prototype of Plugless, a wireless charging system developed by Evatran. The Hevo and Momentum Dynamics systems appear to be the first tested on the self-driving prototype Google introduced in June 2015.
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Wireless charging could help accelerate the adoption of individually owned electric vehicles. However, Google has a different motivation. The company probably won’t sell its self-driving cars to individuals. Instead, it will likely deploy its self-driving cars as a transportation service that users can order via an app.
For example, Google self-driving cars—which don’t have pedals or a steering wheel, only sensors and software—could be stationed in various clusters around a town or closed campus. Each corral of self-driving cars could be outfitted with wireless charging, which would eliminate the need for a human attendant to plug the cars in.
Google hasn’t provided detailed plans for its self-driving car program, which started in 2009. Google has said it wants to commercialize self-driving cars by 2020. Chris Urmson, director of the program, has repeatedly talked about the self-driving cars being used by children, the disabled, or others who might not be able to drive a car manually—another reason to use wireless charging.
Google blames humans for self-driving car crashes
Other companies are pursuing wireless charging, including Qualcommqcom. Evatran’s Plugless, which has completed field trials with Google, Hertz, SAP, and Duke Energy, began selling directly to EV owners in the U.S. and Canada in March 2014. Plugless supports wireless charging for the Chevy Volt, Nissan LEAF, and Cadillac ELR EVs. Chinese automotive parts manufacturer Zhejiang VIE Science andTechnologyCompany recently invested $3.2 million into Evatran as part of a $10 million Series B funding round that will help it expand in North America and China.
Meanwhile, Tesla has developed a different kind of charger that doesn’t require a person to plug it in. The metal snake-like charger prototype, which Tesla showed in a video in August 2015, automatically connects to the all-electric vehicle.
When serial entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, an Iranian-American who co-founded space contractor SGT, went on a spiritual retreat years ago in the South of France, his soul searching kicked off a new found fascination with nuclear technology.
Ghaffarian isn’t the only successful businessman to suddenly become intrigued by new forms of nuclear energy. Microsoft MSFT co-founder Bill Gates plowed millions into a nuclear startup called TerraPower, while Amazon’s amzn CEO Jeff Bezos funded nuclear fusion startup General Fusion. Microsoft’s other co-founder Paul Allen became smitten with another nuclear fusion startup called Tri Alpha Energy.
While nuclear startups are quite rare compared to those that make mobile apps, connected devices, or data algorithms, dozens of ambitious nuclear startups are now vying to be the next big thing in nuclear energy. At stake is a chance to commercialize a much needed energy source that doesn’t contribute to climate change and which could help revive a struggling nuclear industry.
The result of Ghaffarian’s French introspection is a nuclear startup called X-energy, and you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it. The company has been operating under the radar since 2009, and working on designs for a safer and smaller nuclear reactor that uses a technology first developed in Germany decades ago.
The company was outed last month by what could be a game-changing $40 million grant from the Department of Energy to build its advanced nuclear energy reactor. X-energy was one of only two companies to receive the government financing, and the firm competed against over a dozen companies, many well-established billion-dollar corporations.
The company doesn’t receive all of the funds outright, but will have access to the money as, or if, milestones are met. The grant also requires cost-sharing, and Ghaffarian, who has already invested $20 million of his own money into X-energy, has agreed to provide millions of dollars more.
X-energy plans to spend the funds on doubling its staff to about 30 people, and continuing development of its reactor designs and fuel creation process. Through the grant, X-energy will also work with a handful of partners on the tech, including Oregon State University, Idaho National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The economics behind clean energy:
For Ghaffarian—and for the tech billionaires, too—the intrigue into nuclear energy tech is largely about advancing technology that can have a big impact on a difficult, world-changing, problem. Despite that the energy markets are vast industries, investing in new nuclear technology is by no means a fast and easy way to make money.
Ghaffarian tells Fortune that his interest in the nuclear tech is “philanthropic” and is “about giving back.” Indeed, the DOE grant is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the roughly billion dollars needed to get a new type of nuclear reactor to market. But Ghaffarian, and X-energy’s President Harlan Bowers, are hopeful the DOE recognition will also lead to interest from new investors and new partners.
X-energy is working on a type of nuclear reactor called a pebble bed modular reactor. The pebbles are in reference to tennis-ball-sized spheres of graphite, which house tiny pellets of uranium that are coated in ceramic. Inside the company’s reactor they’ll pile up about 170,000 of these pebbles, which is enough to start a nuclear reaction, and generate heat.
An image of a cross section of the pebbles in the pebble bed nuclear reactor.
Most of those older giant nuclear reactors you hear about use water to cool uranium rods. The fuel rods need a constant flow of water across them to keep them cool. If the water is removed for whatever reason, the reactor can overheat and meltdown. And that’s really bad.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster was caused when a massive earthquake shut down the water cooling system at three reactors in Japan. The utility eventually started pouring sea water onto the overheating reactors but by then it was too late and radioactive materials had been released.
Instead of using water, X-energy’s pebble bed reactor will flow helium across the pebbles to keep the temperature down. But in addition to a different coolant, X-energy’s Bowers says the form of uranium they will use (Uranium 235) starts to cool down at a certain temperature threshold, so it can essentially self-regulate itself.
Currently X-energy is designing its reactors at a much smaller scale than the typical gigawatt-scale nuclear plant. Each X-energy reactor, called the Xe-100, will generate 50 megawatts of electricity, or 125 megawatts of heat, just a fraction of what a gigawatt nuclear reactor would produce. But multiple Xe-100’s could be strung together to make much larger nuclear generators.
An image of the helium coolant of the Xe-100, from startup X-energy.X-energy
Because the tech is modular and safer than traditional nuclear, Ghaffarian and Bowers envision that it could be used by not just utilities for the power grid, but also companies that want to generate heat and electricity independent of the grid. Ghaffarian hopes that the tech could be deployed in the developing world where power grid access is a distant dream.
You’re probably wondering if the pebble bed tech is so great, why haven’t former efforts over the years come to fruition? Many groups in Germany, South Africa, the U.S. and China have tried over the years, and indeed built reactors, but scientists haven’t been able to commercialize the technology economically or without technical issues.
Of course all of X-energy’s ambitions are still just that. The company is only at the conceptual design phase, and will need many more years to complete its designs.
If the company gets its funding, in maybe seven to nine years, it plans to engage with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which doles out licenses to build reactors. X-energy plans to start operating a demonstration reactor within the next twenty years, or by 2035.
The long timelines and huge funding challenges are one of the main reasons there aren’t more nuclear startups out there. It takes a brave, and stubborn, entrepreneur to tackle a project that will take 20 years to commercialize.
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