United Kingdom

Shell said Wednesday that its refining margins surged 75 percent in the third quarter compared with the second, as the Middle East and Ukraine wars hit supplies. The margins, which reflect the spread between the price of crude oil and the fuels derived from it, reached $42 per barrel in the July-September period, up from $24 per barrel between April and June, the British energy giant said in a trading statement ahead of full third-quarter earnings. According to Bloomberg, that $42 level is far above the previous record set in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Kathleen Brooks, research director at trading group XTB, described the move as an unprecedented widening of the refining spread, with pump prices, particularly for diesel, hitting record highs. While crude oil volumes from the Middle East have recently risen, production and export of refined products in the region remain heavily disrupted, and Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure have prompted Russia to ban exports of certain products, notably gasoline and diesel. Shell's share price was up 0.6 percent in London midday deals, outperforming the FTSE 100 stocks index, which was down 0.6 percent.

Shell expects its indicative refining margin for the third quarter to have jumped to $42 per barrel, up from $24 per barrel in the second quarter, a record high that the UK-based major disclosed on Wednesday in its third quarter 2026 update note ahead of full results on October 29. The surge comes as global refining margins have soared on limited fuel flows from the Middle East and Russia's ban on diesel exports, which have compounded a global fuel crunch and taken an estimated 7-8 million barrels per day of refined petroleum products off the market. Shell's refinery utilization rate fell from 102% in the second quarter to an estimated 93% to 97% in the third quarter, as low water levels on the Rhine River hit utilization at the Rheinland refinery in Germany. Trading in the gas and fuel divisions is expected to be in line with the second quarter, while gas production guidance was lifted to 740,000 to 780,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from 631,000 boe/d, including the completed acquisition of Canadian producer ARC Resources. Separately, Norway's Equinor guided on Wednesday for higher-than-expected earnings in its marketing, midstream, and processing division, citing unusually strong European refining margins and optimization in third-party LNG trading to push profits above the $400-million guidance.

AstraZeneca has opened a new US$1b global research and development center in Kendall Square, Massachusetts, consolidating its US work in oncology, cell therapy, chronic and rare diseases, and obesity into a single expanded hub. The site uses robotics and AI-enabled automation to support the company's research programs and broader drug development efforts. AstraZeneca is a GB-based biopharmaceutical group with a £185.5 billion market cap that spends heavily on discovering and developing prescription medicines. The company said the center tightens the link between early science and late-stage assets, which could affect how quickly it refines drug candidates and retires weaker programs. Investors will be watching for Phase II or Phase III readouts in obesity, COPD and key oncology programs over 2027 to 2029 as markers of whether the build-out is translating into a more resilient portfolio mix.

HSBC Holdings has been questioned by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority over its decision to base a new global AI hub in Singapore, with the central bank inquiry focusing on why the AI centre was located outside Hong Kong despite the city being one of HSBC's key markets. Separately, HSBC has been appointed as one of six banks helping the UK Debt Management Office arrange the country's first digital gilt issuance. The Singapore AI hub and the UK digital gilt role both feed into HSBC's digital transformation push, which the bank frames as a core tool for cost and capital efficiency. Locating the hub outside Hong Kong may worry investors who see Hong Kong and mainland China as the anchor for HSBC's Asian wealth focus, especially with regulators asking questions.

eDreams ODIGEO announced a strategic collaboration with Alexa+, Amazon's next-generation AI assistant, to power travel discovery and booking. The integration uses eDreams ODIGEO's proprietary Model Context Protocol technology to connect its travel platform and operational voice to Alexa+, letting customers find and book flights, hotels, and car rentals through natural-language conversation. The company said the deal opens a new acquisition channel as its travel subscription model expands toward a goal of 13 million subscribers by March 2030. eDreams ODIGEO Chief Technology Officer Carsten Bernhard said conversational artificial intelligence is the latest major technological wave and a powerful accelerator for the business. The collaboration follows the Alexa Plus Partner summit held in Seattle last July, where eDreams ODIGEO was featured in the CTO Innovation Series hosted by Amazon Alexa.

Spotify announced Wednesday that it is expanding audiobook access to over 180 markets worldwide, covering regions across Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The rollout begins today and will continue over the coming months, bringing audiobooks to more than 750 million users and sharpening Spotify's competition with music streaming providers and audiobook apps like Audible. Previously, audiobooks were available primarily in English-speaking markets such as the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as in Germany. Spotify said it has more than 350,000 titles for its new markets and has expanded its collection to over 120 languages, with users in Spain gaining access to over 45,000 titles in Spanish. The company is working with more than 300 publishers worldwide, including Planeta and Mondadori, to increase titles across markets. Premium subscribers can listen to 12 hours of audiobooks in eligible countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, Chile, Norway, and Peru, while a standalone Audiobook+ subscription offers a 15-hour allowance, and individual titles can be purchased directly. Spotify is also adding an Audiobook+ add-on for student plans in select regions in November; since its launch last year, Audiobook+ has gained over 1 million subscribers and generated over 100 million in annual recurring revenue. The company noted that monthly listeners of audiobooks grew by 40% over the past year and listening hours rose by 30%.

Shell PLC raised its third-quarter integrated gas production forecast to 740,000 to 780,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, up from its previous guidance of 570,000 to 630,000 boepd. The British energy major produced 631,000 boepd in the second quarter, partly reflecting the acquisition of ARC Resources. Shell also forecast an indicative refining margin of $42 a barrel for the quarter, up sharply from $24 a barrel in the second quarter, while its indicative chemicals margin is expected to fall to $208 a tonne from $270 a tonne. The company warned that weaker chemicals margins and higher cash outflows could weigh on its results. Shell is due to report third-quarter results on Oct. 29.

Bridgepoint Group Plc raised its 2026 earnings forecast after a third-quarter revaluation of ProEnergy, an asset held in its Energy Capital Partners V fund, lifting both its 2026 performance related earnings and its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation above current consensus. Bridgepoint holds a 13% share of the fund's carried interest, and it expects performance related earnings to make up about 37-39% of total income for the year to December 2026, while ECP V's money multiple is expected to rise to over four as at Sept. 30. Over the medium term, the company now expects performance related earnings to be 25-30% of total income, up from the 20-25% it guided to at its July 17 interim results, and it expects an EBITDA margin of around 60% in 2026 and 2027. Chief Executive Raoul Hughes said Bridgepoint could now introduce a new capital distribution policy while maintaining the necessary firepower to invest in the business, targeting total capital returns of 40%-60% of Cash from Profits over five years through an annual ordinary dividend of 40%-45% of earnings per share paid quarterly plus additional ordinary or special dividends or share buybacks. The company expects cash receipts of about £1.1 billion from co-investments and performance related earnings through 2030, exceeding the roughly £500 million received over the past five years, and it declared a second interim dividend of 5.0 pence per share for the third quarter alongside the 4.8 pence interim dividend announced in July, with quarterly dividends beginning in 2027. Bridgepoint reached its €28 billion fundraising target for the 2024-2026 cycle one quarter early, with Bridgepoint Direct Lending IV closing at €5.1 billion and ECP VI closing at $8.1 billion, while Bridgepoint Europe VIII has raised €7.8 billion of commitments and is expected to be fully allocated later this year at its €8.65 billion hard cap. Shareholder and fund investor approvals for the Kayne Anderson Real Estate acquisition announced on June 29 have been received, with the transaction expected to close on Jan. 4, 2027, and the guidance covers Bridgepoint Group and excludes KARE.

Shell said Wednesday it expects about $300M in third-quarter upstream exploration well write-offs, alongside higher integrated gas production and refining margins. Upstream production is forecast at 1.735 million to 1.835 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, while integrated gas production is expected to rise to 740,000-780,000 boe/d and LNG liquefaction volumes are forecast at 7.2-7.6 million tonnes. In the second quarter, the European oil and gas major produced 631,000 boed, compared with over 900,000 boed before the US and Israel started a war on Iran in February. Shell's indicative refining margin is expected to rise to $42 a barrel in Q3'26 from $24 a barrel in Q2'26, with Trading & Optimisation expected to remain in line with the previous quarter. The update follows CEO Wael Sawan's Tuesday remark that oil flows from the Middle East have rebounded to roughly 80% of pre-war volumes, and last month's agreement to farm into two BP offshore exploration projects, taking a 30% interest in BP's Conifer prospect in the U.S. Gulf and a 50% stake in the Tupinamba block in Brazil's Santos Basin, with financial terms not disclosed.

Institutional stablecoin settlement moved onto four live production rails within a single month, with stablecoin-linked card spending reaching $1.2 billion in September 2026, roughly triple the year-earlier figure, according to PaymentScan data cited by CoinDesk. SoFi and Mastercard went live on September 22 with SoFiUSD, the first stablecoin issued by a U.S. nationally chartered bank deployed for live card-settlement production, with $25 billion in annualized card volume migrating to blockchain-based settlement on Mastercard's global payments network. Visa is already operating at a $20 billion annualized run rate for stablecoin settlement as of September 8, a 15x increase from $1.3 billion a year earlier and up from $7 billion in April, while Stripe announced October 1 that it is expanding its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by year-end, up from 18. The Solana DvP standard, launched October 5-6 with JPMorgan advisory input, cuts settlement finality from T+2 days to roughly 400 milliseconds and cost from $50-500 to less than one cent, though it launched with no production settlement volumes yet. Separately, the DTCC's tokenization service, supported by a working group of over 50 firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and State Street, is planned for October launch, and OKX closed a funding extension at a $25 billion pre-money valuation with backing from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures, and Qube Research.

BHP said Tuesday it agreed to sell its Kambalda nickel concentrator plant, along with a package of tenements and mineralization rights in Western Australia, to Gold Fields for an undisclosed sum. BHP called Gold Fields a reliable and credible operator that will evaluate options for the long-term use of the concentrator and offer employment to people directly supporting the asset. BHP suspended operations across its entire Nickel West business in early 2024 as metal prices plunged amid global oversupply, taking a $2.5B impairment on its nickel assets that year. Australia has since designated nickel a critical mineral, making the industry eligible for billions of dollars in government support. BHP said it will review the suspension by February 2027, assessing options including divestment, continuing temporary suspension, restart, or closure.

The United Kingdom has named six large banks as a pilot group to issue digital government bonds, with operations expected to begin in early 2027. The trial falls under the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox framework, a program for testing the settlement and trading of securities using distributed ledger technology, or DLT. HSBC is among the institutions taking part in the testing. The digital government bond is called the Digital Gilt Instrument and is seen as a major step in applying tokenization technology to the UK government bond market.

Major cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced on the 6th that it has completed a strategic investment from Circle, Ripple, SC Ventures under Standard Chartered, and asset manager Cube Research and Technologies, at a pre-money valuation of $25 billion, or just under 4 trillion yen. The investment is an extension of the March round led by Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. OKX framed the move as an effort to bring together companies handling each segment of the financial infrastructure, including stablecoin issuance, liquidity, collateral and custody, to build a next-generation on-chain market in which these core elements work in concert. Founder and CEO Star Xu said the funds would serve as capital for tokenizing real-world assets, adding that the exchange is a starting point and is evolving into a broader global financial technology platform.

Halliburton and TotalEnergies have signed new agreements in Venezuela, deepening Western oil companies' push into the country's 303 billion barrels of crude reserves. Halliburton signed two memoranda of understanding with Brazil's Eneva and engineering firm WESCA to deploy digital technologies and subsurface interpretation tools for field evaluation and development planning in the Orinoco and Maracaibo basins. TotalEnergies' deal with PDVSA includes the Travi light crude field in Monagas state, reversing its 2021 withdrawal from the Petrocedeno joint venture. The moves follow a U.S. agreement signed on 2 September by Energy Secretary Chris Wright covering 65 billion barrels of proven reserves across 17 fields, a 100-year concession that President Donald Trump called "the biggest oil deal in world history." Chevron has raised Venezuelan output from 40,000 barrels per day to 250,000 bpd, with CFO Eimear Bonner projecting a 50% increase to 420,000 bpd by the end of 2028, while BP has opened a permanent Caracas office and secured a license for Phase 2 of the offshore Loran gas field.

Multiply Labs announced a $75 million Series B round, bringing its total capital raised to over $100 million since its founding in 2016. The round was led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong with NantWorks, joined by new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne, and Strange Ventures, alongside returning investors Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, Fifty Years, Ora Global, and Founders Fund. The San Francisco-based physical AI company automates biologics manufacturing with robotic clusters that integrate into existing instruments and processes without requiring a new facility, delivering a 74% reduction in cost per dose and up to 100 times more throughput than manual manufacturing. Beginning with cell and gene therapy and now expanding to advanced biologics including antibodies, viral vectors, and mRNA, the platform is owned and operated directly by pharmaceutical and biologics companies rather than run as an outsourced service. Multiply Labs will use the capital to expand manufacturing capacity, accelerate its product roadmap, and scale its team across engineering, regulatory, and commercial functions as it moves from clinical-stage deployments toward commercial-scale production.

Avio USA broke ground on its first U.S. manufacturing facility, an approximately 900,000-square-foot solid rocket motor plant in Hurt, Virginia, that will add significant domestic capacity for U.S. missile and munitions production. Located at the Southern Virginia Multimodal Park, the facility will give Avio USA the capacity to produce thousands of solid rocket motors annually for U.S. tactical missile programs, and the company expects to create roughly 1,500 high-quality technical jobs in Southern Virginia. Avio USA is a subsidiary of Avio S.p.A., the Rome-based rocket and space propulsion group, and operates under a DCSA Special Security Agreement; CEO James Syring said the goal is to be an independent, open-source merchant supplier able to support multiple customers and programs. HITT Contracting is leading construction as general contractor, with completion expected by late 2028 and production anticipated to begin in early 2029, supporting solid rocket motor requirements across the U.S. defense industry, including programs for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo said the successful completion of the company's capital raise provided the resources for the investment, which will expand U.S. solid rocket motor manufacturing capacity and establish a lasting American presence for Avio.

BP plc is conducting a company-wide review of its asset portfolio to identify and dispose of assets that do not fit its strategic objectives or dilute margins, management said on its latest earnings call. Assets will be judged on capital efficiency and their ability to generate returns, with the aim of improving the quality of earnings and cash flow over the long term. The sale of the Gelsenkirchen refinery and BP's decision to sell its Austria mobility and convenience business underscore that approach, and the company said it will invest only in projects expected to deliver competitive returns. BP does not view the sell-off of non-core assets as merely a cost-cutting program, but as a way to free capital tied to complex, lower-return assets and reinvest the proceeds in higher-margin businesses. Separately, ConocoPhillips said on its second-quarter earnings call that it had reached its $5 billion asset-sale target ahead of schedule, while Phillips 66 is reshaping its portfolio around core markets through retail asset sales in Germany and Austria, the idling of the Los Angeles refinery and the completed acquisition of Lindsey Oil Refinery and logistics operations in April 2026.

BAE Systems has received a contract from Lockheed Martin to deliver high-performance electronic warfare systems for F-35 Lightning II fighter jets. Under the contract, BAE Systems will manufacture and deliver EW systems for F-35 Lots 20-22 and provide systems to retrofit and modernize older aircraft. The AN/ASQ-239 EW system provides the F-35 with electromagnetic spectrum superiority, giving the jets instantaneous bandwidth, high-speed signal processing and advanced algorithms to detect threats and respond quickly. BAE Systems has delivered more than 1,500 EW systems for the F-35 and designs and manufactures them at its facilities in Austin, Texas and the New Hampshire cities of Manchester, Merrimack and Nashua. Amber Dolan, Vice President of F-35 Solutions at BAE Systems, said the company is laser-focused on scaling production and delivering software-based capabilities to meet the rapid pace of conflict.

Netlist shares surged 18% in early trading Tuesday after Micron Technology agreed to pay $600M for a five-year license to Netlist's patent portfolio, covering server DIMMs and high-bandwidth memory technologies. The deal also settles all pending legal proceedings between the two memory makers. Under the plan, Micron will pay Netlist $30M per quarter, starting with the fourth quarter of 2026 and ending with the third quarter of 2031. Netlist CEO C.K. Hong said the agreement further validates the value of the company's AI memory technologies. Separately, Netlist entered into a securities purchase agreement and a lock-up and release agreement with Micron, under which Micron purchased 10M shares of Netlist for $1M, with 20% of those shares released from disposition and transfer restrictions on each of the first, second, third and fourth anniversaries of issuance and the remaining shares released on the fifth anniversary.