Russia to continue buying diamonds through state fund in 2025
The Russian budget for 2025-2027 has set aside $1.55 billion for the purchase of precious metals and gems.
Oil prices are likely to keep rising toward $100 a barrel while a cool-off in commodity prices won’t last, leaders of key firms said at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. The head of Royal Dutch Shell Plc said governments will need to help companies cut customer emissions.
Earlier, one of Deutsche Bank AG’s top shareholders signaled his backing for consolidation in Europe’s financial services industry, arguing that the continent’s lenders need scale to compete globally. Billionaire investor Michael Novogratz said he prefers Bitcoin to buying gold.
The three-day event kicked off on Monday, with billionaire investor Ray Dalio and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers telling the Forum the U.S. is headed for a period of overheating and inflation that could threaten the recovery.
The Qatar Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Investment Promotion Agency Qatar and Media City Qatar are underwriters of the Qatar Economic Forum, Powered by Bloomberg.
Indian billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla, who oversees the $46 billion Aditya Birla Group spread across 36 countries, is no longer keen to acquire any firm with a globally diversified supply chain as protectionism and the pandemic increasingly curb the movement of products and people.
“We wouldn’t look at a company or a business where you source in one corner of the world and sell in another corner of the world,” Birla told Haslinda Amin in an interview during the Forum. “That’s a reset that has happened on account of growing protectionism.”
Volkswagen AG’s chief executive officer predicts that the rise of autonomous-driving technology will ultimately be even more important than the transition to battery power.
“This change will transform the industry more than EVs or electrification does,” Herbert Diess said in an interview at the Forum. “The car becomes so different when it’s driving autonomously.”
VW is working toward offering autonomous driving in key markets worldwide and spending about 2.5 billion euros ($3 billion) a year on boosting its software capabilities. The company announced last month that it plans to offer a highly automated version of its hippie-era microbus. It is reviving the vehicle as an electric van and will start test drives in Hamburg this year.
Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive officer of Glencore Plc, told the Forum that Chinese efforts to cool commodity markets, including releasing metals from its strategic stockpile, will be short lived.
Glasenberg said China’s efforts are a “short-term phase” and that the country will have to move to restock strategic supplies that it feeds into the market in order to cool prices. Glasenberg said he expects commodity prices to stay strong for a good while longer, with both China and the U.S. stimulating their economies.
For the first time in over a decade China has pledged to release metals stockpiles if it needs to. While planned sales to end users in China could help boost domestic supply, analysts have questioned the country’s ability to influence any uptick in copper demand seen elsewhere.
Ben van Beurden, chief executive officer of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, said the company can probably fulfill stringent new targets for its carbon emissions: at a push, he can see a “pathway” to cutting them 45% by 2030, as mandated recently by The Hague.
But he cautioned that it would a “different story” if the oil major is obligated to tackle emissions by its customers — known as Scope-3. Shell can go some of the way by innovating new products and tweaking its business model, van Beurden said, but the “lion’s part” will come down to government policies. These could include measures that encourage the adoption of electric vehicles.
“This is not a challenge for one company,” van Beurden said at Forum on Tuesday. “It is a systems challenge that we all have to embrace.”
Qatar has received interest from prospective investors in its project to expand liquefied natural gas production amounting to double what it was seeking, said Energy Minister Saad Al-Kaabi.
Royal Dutch Shell PLC, TotalEnergies SE and Exxon Mobil Corp. were among the companies that submitted bids to partner on the project, he said. The project will lift Qatar’s annual LNG output to 110 million tons from 77 million tons, and LNG buyers have offered to receive “double what we require,” he said.
The leaders of some of the world’s biggest oil companies said crude prices are likely to keep rising as a lack of investments affects future supply, joining major commodity traders and banks in predicting the current rally has more room to run.
There’s “quite a chance” crude will reach $100 a barrel, TotalEnergies SE Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said at the Forum.
The energy transition means there has not been enough investment in oil and gas projects and that could push prices higher, Qatar’s Energy Minister Saad Al-Kaabi said.
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