By Karol Badohal and Supantha Mukherjee

WROCLAW, Poland/STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Poland’s third-largest city Wroclaw beat rivals last week to be home to the next multi-billion dollar Intel chip factory in Europe, with a two-year campaign promising subsidies, infrastructure, talent and a slice of American life.

In the face of an unprecedented semiconductor shortage, Europe is offering billions of euros in subsidies to reduce its dependence on Asia. In return, Intel is committing big sums and with Germany already bagging a 30 billion euro investment, Poland decided to crash the party.

Its eventual success can be seen as a lesson in perseverance.

The U.S. chipmaker said last Friday that it had decided to invest up to $4.6 billion in the new semiconductor facility near Wroclaw.

Interviews with half a dozen Polish government officials and company executives revealed previously unreported details on how a small city in southwestern Poland ticked all the boxes to get what its Prime Minister said was the largest greenfield investment in its history.

Poland initially impressed Intel executives with the speed in which it responded to queries and addressed concerns, Intel said.

“When we began the process, we hadn’t considered Poland,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told Reuters.

“As you are picking a location, imagine you are going on a date. You have a sense, oh they really want this to work,” Gelsinger said. “We definitely came away with a strong belief that the local government want to make this work.”

Poland started courting Intel in July 2021. Government and municipal officials met with the company repeatedly over the next two years, according to interviews with five officials and three Intel executives.

Two government agencies – the Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH) and the Industrial Development Agency (ARP) played a key role in the process, officials said.

Many meetings were conducted remotely due to COVID-19 restrictions, officials said. Marcin Fabianowicz, director of the PAIH’s investment centre later met with a representative from ARP and two senior Intel executives.

“After the first (in-person) meeting I was convinced Poland had a shot at getting the project,” he said. “The talks were warm and heading in the right direction.”

But when Intel announced its European investments in March 2022, Germany was awarded a major factory in Magdeburg while Intel told Poland it would only expand its existing facility in Gdansk.

Poland was undeterred, eventually clinching a deal in a two-day meeting last month, officials said.

“We never said something can’t be done,” Fabianowicz said.

Codenamed “Project IQ”, government and municipal officials worked confidentially on strategies to lure the chipmaker.

A team from an agency promoting the development of Wroclaw put together a presentation highlighting its quality of life, family facilities, schools, bike lanes, swimming pools and economic and demographic data.

Intel executives were also impressed by Wroclaw being home to Poland’s American football and basketball champions.

‘SNOWBALL EFFECT’

Intel’s new plant will be on a 285 hectare plot, beside another chip factory, the edible variety made by PepsiCo and a factory which makes windows.

The global shortage of semiconductors has impacted production of everything from cellphones to electric vehicles, a shortage likely to continue throughout 2023, according to the European Parliament, as it takes two to three years to build a new chip-making factory.

The land at Wroclaw is divided between two municipalities — Miekinia and Sroda Slaska.

The region will invest in new roads to the factory, electric buses, a water treatment facility and high voltage power lines, the mayor of Sroda Slaska Adam Ruciński told Reuters.

Intel has also been allowed to construct buildings 50 metres (54.68 yards) high, more than the usual 20 metres restriction, he said.

Poland is hoping to lure other companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, to invest in the country.

Talks with TSMC started last year, several officials said.

“We are at a point where we are getting our 5 minutes (of fame), so a lot of entities are interested,” said Jakub Mazur, deputy mayor of Wrocław. “The snowball effect with Intel entering will cause talks from the Taiwan direction to come back to us.”

($1 = 0.9157 euros)

(Reporting by Karol Badohal in Wroclaw and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing by Matt Scuffham and Elaine Hardcastle)

(Corrects acronym of project to ‘ELMED’ in paragraph 3)

TUNIS (Reuters) – The World Bank Group has lent Tunisia $268.4 million to finance an electrical interconnection project with Italy that will link energy networks between Tunisia and Europe, TAP state news agency said on Thursday.

The agreement ends a temporary pause in the bank’s work with Tunisia that followed comments by Tunisian President Kais Saied about migrants from sub-Saharan Africa earlier this year that were blamed for triggering racist harassment and violence.

The total cost of the project, known as “ELMED”, is about 850 million euros.

Italy is looking to become a European energy hub and creating a link to Africa to import electricity generated from renewable energy sources plays into its strategy to eliminate its gas dependence from Russia.

(This story has been corrected to amend the acronym of the project to ‘ELMED’ in paragraph 3)

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Writing by Clauda Tanios; Editing by Alison Williams and Alex Richardson)

(Reuters) – Lordstown Motors founder and former CEO Stephen Burns has sold his entire stake in the electric-vehicle maker, according to a regulatory filing.

The company in May implemented a reverse stock split to comply with Nasdaq’s minimum $1 listing requirement and appease investor Foxconn that had threatened to scrap a $170 million funding in the cash-strapped company.

Burns has sold his stake in three transactions between May and June, about 581,000 shares were divested before the reverse stock split and 791,572 shares after, the filing on Wednesday showed.

The EV startup declined to comment on the stake sale.

Earlier this month, Lordstown Motors said it planned to take legal action against Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn to ensure the planned purchase of nearly 10% of the company’s shares was not derailed.

Burns in 2021 resigned from the role of CEO alongside then Chief Financial Officer Julio Rodriguez following an internal investigation by the company board into claims made by short-seller Hindenburg.

Lordstown has acknowledged that it had overstated pre-orders for its electric trucks but rejected Hindenburg’s claims that the company had misled investors about production plans and exaggerated the potential of its technology.

(Reporting by Tanya Jain in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

By Stephanie Kelly and Nia Williams

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. crude oil inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub have risen to their highest in two years, as outages at Midwestern refiners crimp demand and higher flows from Canada add to supply.

Stockpiles at Cushing, the delivery point for U.S. crude oil futures, have climbed for eight consecutive weeks after falling earlier this year. Overseas demand for U.S. crude and an end to refinery outages should reverse the build, said analysts.

“We’re going to be sending more (oil exported) abroad,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Futures Group. “The supply side continues to remain tight if you look at the big picture.”

A spate of unexpected refinery outages in the Midwest have added to the inventories, which rose to 42.1 million barrels in the week to June 9, the highest since June 2021, Energy Information Administration data showed.

IIR Energy was tracking 579,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil offline in May in the central U.S., double the 256,000 bpd offline the same month a year ago, said Hillary Stevenson, a senior director at the company.

Outages at BP Plc’s and Cenovus Energy Inc’s 160,000-bpd Toledo, Ohio refinery and Phillips 66’s 149,000-bpd Borger, Texas refinery likely have contributed to higher Cushing stockpiles, Stevenson added.

Slightly higher flows from Canada also added to the supplies, with Enbridge Inc’s 702,000-bpd Flanagan South pipeline showing elevated flows in May and so far in June, said John Trischan, senior research manager of oil transportation at Wood Mackenzie.

Canadian crude may have been sent toward Cushing as feedstock for a restart of the Toledo refinery, which had a fire last year, said Matt Smith, lead oil analyst for the Americas at Kpler.

(This story has been corrected to fix attribution in paragraph 7)

(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly, Nia Williams and Arathy Somasekhar; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

By John McCrank

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nasdaq’s eye-popping $10.5 billion bet on the little known financial software company Adenza will help the exchange operator vastly expand the market for its products, from risk management and regulatory software to anti-financial crime technology. Nasdaq said on June 12 it would buy Adenza from private equity firm Thoma Bravo, and its stock sank over 10% that day as investors reeled from sticker shock. Nasdaq shares are currently down around 12% since the deal was announced.

However, some experts including a major Nasdaq investor and two sources familiar with the deal said in interviews the acquisition was in line with Chief Executive Adena Friedman’s push to transform Nasdaq into a financial technology company and the price might eventually prove justified.

By one metric, Nasdaq paid around what Thoma Bravo spent on creating Adenza through the merger of two software firms, the sources familiar with the deal said. Nasdaq also hopes to cut overlapping costs, which would boost profitability and make the deal look cheaper, one of the sources said. As part of Nasdaq, Adenza would get access to new banking clients in the United States and Europe as well, allowing it to drive revenues more than it could on its own, analysts said.

With Adenza, Nasdaq’s recurring revenues, which investors like for their predictability, will comprise around 77% of overall revenues, up from 71%. As Nasdaq’s recurring revenues have increased, so too has its valuation, which went from one of the lowest in the exchange sector prior to 2017 when Friedman took over, to one of the highest now, said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Andrew Bond.

“This acquisition doesn’t veer off from Nasdaq’s strategy or what Adena’s been pursuing since she’s been the CEO,” Bond said. “The cross-sell opportunities are significant.”

Still, analysts said the upfront price is steep and the deal is risky. Nasdaq, which had a market cap of around $28 billion before the deal was announced, is paying for the acquisition with a roughly even split of stock and cash. That dilutes existing shareholders and increases its debt load. Moody’s downgraded Nasdaq’s debt to BBB from BBB+ on the deal.

“It does seem like they’re buying a high-quality asset but ultimately they’re paying a pretty high price,” Morningstar analyst Michael Miller said.

Nasdaq said it believes it is paying an appropriate price.

MOVING TO FINTECH

Nasdaq and many of its peers have been morphing into financial technology firms, largely through deals, as regulatory and nationalist pushback effectively killed big cross-border exchange mergers, and as trading volumes fell after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, stunting transaction-based revenues.

A director at one of Nasdaq’s largest shareholders, whose firm supports the Adenza deal, said there were few good companies left that could be synergistic to Nasdaq. Adenza was one of the largest, with a compound annual growth rate of 15% and a profit margin above 50%.

The acquisition “diversifies and stabilizes the sources of the revenue,” the shareholder said.

Nasdaq is paying around 31 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for Adenza. The sources close to the deal said that is in line with what Thoma Bravo paid combined for regulatory software firm AxiomSL and financial software maker Calypso, which it merged into Adenza.

Between July and December last year, Thoma Bravo cut $30 million of costs out of Adenza, mostly consisting of overlapping positions and real estate. One of the sources said once Nasdaq also cuts out costs, the multiple will be closer to the mid-20s. In addition, Nasdaq could squeeze out additional revenue as it has done with previous acquisitions.

Nasdaq, for example, bought Verafin in February 2021 for $2.75 billion. Verafin had over 3,500 small and mid-sized banks and credit unions using its cloud-based platform to help detect, investigate, and report money laundering and financial fraud. In April, Nasdaq said it signed up its first big tier-1 bank with more than $1 trillion in assets, for the product, and said that win would make it easier to sign up other big banks.

Nasdaq will find cross-selling opportunities in Adenza’s stable of bank clients, analysts said. They said clients for Adenza’s Calypso offering include tier 3 banks with under $10 billion in assets and tier 2 banks with $10 billion to $100 billion in assets. Its AxiomSL products are aimed at tier 1 banks, especially in Europe, which have assets of $100 billion or more, analysts said.

(Reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and David Gregorio)

By Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) -Cosmo Energy Holdings’ shareholders approved a “poison pill” takeover defence on Thursday, in a controversial vote that excluded certain activist shareholders and has implications for hostile takeover attempts in Japan.

It marks the second so-called majority-of-minority vote on a poison pill in Japan. They prevent specific shareholders from voting, a practice some governance experts say could serve as a new weapon against shareholder activism.

Cosmo, Japan’s third-biggest oil refiner and 20% owned by a group led by prominent activist Yoshiaki Murakami, can now implement a poison pill to dilute the activists’ stake if the group buys more shares without, for instance, stating the purpose of the purchase.

The company reiterated at Thursday’s annual general meeting that the exclusion of Murakami from the vote is justified to “reflect the will of general shareholders”, who it says could be pressured into selling their shareholdings because effective control by the activists “would damage corporate value”.

Murakami’s group, which called for a spin-off of Cosmo’s renewable energy business and a consolidation of its refineries, said in a statement after the meeting that the vote lacked justification and is invalid.

“It is completely unacceptable for management to refuse to allow unwelcome shareholders to exercise their voting rights,” it said.

The activist group has previously warned that such a “forcible and oppressive” voting method would only raise the risks of management entrenchment and potentially set back corporate governance in Japan.

Cosmo shares reversed direction to fall after the vote results, closing down 3.4%.

The company said it plans to announce details of the vote on Friday.

‘Majority of minority’ conditions are typically applied to protect general shareholders in a buyout by a controlling shareholder, but have never been used outside Japan to prevent certain shareholders from voting, Stephen Givens, a corporate lawyer based in Tokyo, said.

Governance experts point to concerns that such votes would fly in the face of shareholder equality and embolden companies in Japan to hang on to much-criticised cross-shareholdings as a defence against hostile takeovers.

“The notion that elected directors can on their own authority pick and choose which shareholders may vote stands shareholder democracy on its head,” Givens said.

The Cosmo voting also comes as Japan is in the midst of hammering out a code of conduct to spur mergers and acquisitions. Drafts state that the ‘majority of minority’ votes “may be permitted only in very exceptional and limited cases”, noting that such votes could discourage even desirable takeovers.

The first such vote, at newspaper printing presses manufacturer Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho, was backed by the Supreme court in 2021. The company had excluded its top shareholder who at the time had a stake of about 40%.

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by David Dolan and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

(Reuters) -Accenture fanned concerns about dwindling IT spending on Thursday with a quarterly revenue forecast that was below Wall Street estimates, sending its shares down more than 5%.

CEO Julie Sweet said clients were “holding back on small deals” in the face of an uncertain economic outlook, mirroring remarks from Cognizant Technology Solutions last month.

Accenture forecast current-quarter revenue in the range of $15.75 billion to $16.35 billion. Analysts on average expect revenue of $16.35 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

The company blamed the weakness on its business catering to the tech, media and communications industries, which have sharply dialed back spending in recent months to cope with slowing growth. Revenue for that group fell 8% in the third quarter.

North America – Accenture’s biggest market – also performed poorly in the March to May period, with revenue growth slowing there to a near three-year low of about 2%.

Indian outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services also said in April that a recovery in the U.S. had not materialized as expected and had, in fact, worsened.

More pain could be in store for IT companies as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell hinted on Wednesday at the likelihood of further interest rate hikes, after one of the most aggressive policy tightening cycles on record.

Cognizant stock was down 2.5% in early trading, while U.S. listed shares of Infosys fell 0.5%.

Overall, Accenture’s revenue rose 3% in the third quarter to $16.56 billion, in line with estimates. Adjusted profit of $3.19 per share beat estimates of $3.04 per share.

Unlike other tech executives, Sweet said she does not expect generative AI to be a big growth driver next year, focusing instead on companies finishing their migrations to the cloud.

“We feel really good about the bigger (digital) transformational deals continuing next year because there’s so much work to do,” Sweet said.

(Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)