Speaking after talks with Chinese officials in Geneva, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters the two sides had agreed on a 90-day pause on measures and that tariffs would come down by over 100 percentage points to 10 per cent.

“Both countries represented their national interest very well,” Bessent said. “We both have an interest in balanced trade, the US will continue moving towards that.”

Bessent was speaking alongside US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer after the weekend talks in which both sides had hailed progress on narrowing differences.

The Geneva meetings were the first face-to-face interactions between senior US and Chinese economic officials since US President Donald Trump returned to power and launched a global tariff blitz, imposing particularly hefty duties on China.

Since taking office in January, Trump has hiked the tariffs paid by US importers for goods from China to 145 per cent, in addition to those he imposed on many Chinese goods during his first term and the duties levied by the Biden administration.

China hit back by putting export curbs on some rare earth elements, vital for US manufacturers of weapons and electronic consumer goods, and raising tariffs on US goods to 125 per cent.

The tariff dispute brought nearly $600 billion in two-way trade to a standstill, disrupting supply chains, sparking fears of stagflation and triggering some layoffs.

Financial markets have been looking out for signs of a thaw in the trade war and Wall Street stock futures climbed and the dollar firmed against safe haven peers on Monday as the talks boosted hopes a global recession might be avoided.

• Reporting by Emma Farge and Olivia Le Poidevin; Editing by Dave Graham, of Reuters.
• Further reading: How could Trump’s new tariffs impact Australian SMEs?

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Andrea Martonelli and Max Graf are among more than 30 doctoral students working with Dr Mathieu Barthet, a senior lecturer in Digital Media, to explore computational creativity and generative AI. Together, they have set up a futuristic studio where music meets cutting-edge tech.

“It’s like extended reality, XR, is a way of extending the physical reality that we live in,” Dr Graf told Reuters while showcasing ‘Netz’, his virtual instrument.

Netz is played through an augmented-reality headset that tracks gestures to create corresponding outputs, like notes or chords.

Martonelli plays the ‘HITar’, an advanced guitar with AI sensors, which reads his movements to make drum and synthesiser sounds. While the presence of AI in music-making can be traced back to the 1950s, recent groundbreaking advances in generative AI, with robots now making music as digital pop stars, have divided opinions in the industry.

Made popular last year by the ChatGPT language system, generative AI is capable of creating content including original sounds, lyrics or entire songs on its own, but artists often use simpler AI to enhance their sound. UK alternative rock singer-songwriter YUNGBLUD told Reuters he believes AI could help his music go “to another direction”.

Other musicians worry that the technology could go too far. “I feel if you need AI to help me write a song, especially when it’s for a likeness, that’s not cool,” Amy Love from alternative rock duo Nova Twins said, referring to artist’s voices being artificially generated and adding that using dead artists’ voices is “not on”. In November, the Beatles released Now and Then, billed as their last song and featuring the voice of John Lennon extrapolated with AI from an old recording. Warner Music said in November it was partnering with the estate of deceased French singer Edith Piaf to re-create her voice using AI.

While labels and streaming companies partner to market the technology, many experts say AI raises legal and ethical concerns. “Unlawful development is what would put the sort of the opportunities of generative AI at risk,” Abbas Lightwalla, director of global legal policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), said.

But regulation of generative AI is only in its early stages. “I think AI can have its place in the music production chain, again if it’s guided in the right way and if we ensure that the musicians keep a certain amount of control, and performers, as well,” Dr Barthet said. “But there might be situations where (AI) generated music works for new things that have not even emerged yet, new virtual worlds.”

Reporting by Alessandro Parodi, Olivier Sorgho and Matthew Stock; additional reporting by Sarah Mills; editing by Angus MacSwan, of Reuters.

This story first appeared on our sister publication Inside Retail

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Days later he was back working, seeking investment for his own company Nulink, a blockchain-based payment company, and sent pitches to start-up accelerator Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency fund.

“As counterintuitive as it may sound, this layoff left me in a really good position,” the 24-year-old said. “Because I don’t have to pay back the sign-on bonus, I get four months of pay, and now I have time to focus on my own project.”

Szerman is part of a wave of would-be entrepreneurs who are emerging from the ashes of the mass job losses seen in Silicon Valley in the second half of 2022, according to venture capitalists.

US tech giants including Meta, Microsoft, Twitter and Snap have purged more than 150,000 staff, according to Layoff.fyi, which tracks technology job losses.

While overall venture capital (VC) financing fell 33 per cent globally to about $483 billion in 2022, early-stage funding was robust, with $37.4 billion raised in so-called angel or seed rounds, in line with the record level seen in 2021, according to data from research firm PitchBook.

Day One Ventures, an early-stage venture fund in San Francisco, launched a new initiative in November to fund start-ups founded by people who had been laid off from their tech jobs, touting the slogan “Funded, not Fired”.

The program aims to cut 20 cheques for $100,000 by the end of 2022. Day One said it had received over 1000 applications, most of them from people who were cut loose by Meta, Stripe and Twitter.

“We’re investing $2 million in 20 companies – if we just find one unicorn it almost returns the fund, which I think is a really unique opportunity for us as fund managers,” Masha Bucher, co-founder at Day One Ventures, said.

“Looking at the last economic cycle, companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox have been created in crisis.”

Hot: gaming and AI

Also in November, multi-stage fund Index Ventures, which has bankrolled Facebook, Etsy and Skype, launched its second Origins fund, which will invest $300 million in early-stage start-ups.

Silicon Valley investor US Venture Partners and Austrian VC firm Speedinvest have meanwhile earmarked a similar amount for newly founded companies.

Investors highlighted gaming and artificial intelligence among hot areas of interest.

“With advances in game design, new innovations like cloud gaming, and the emergence of social networking in this sphere, gaming has really transcended into mainstream culture,” Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures, said. “In every period of economic uncertainty, there is opportunity – to reset, re-prioritise and re-focus energy and resources.”

Dotcom bubble 2.0

Szerman said his project was rejected by Y Combinator, while he hasn’t heard back from Andreessen Horowitz yet, though he added that other early-stage venture capitalists had expressed interest.

“I told the investors we’ll chat in two or three months,” he added. “I’ll focus on scaling the system now.”

Some investors compared the 2022 downturn to the dotcom crash of the early 2000s, when dozens of overvalued start-ups went bust, flooding the market with talent and helping to spark a wave of new companies such as Facebook and YouTube.

“Many great companies have been created in relatively dark times,” Harry Nelis, managing partner at investment firm Accel, who sees a new generation of risk takers emerge among the swathe of people left unemployed, said.

Some industry players say former Big Tech employees are uniquely placed to start their own companies, having seen first-hand how some of the biggest firms in the world operate, and enjoying ongoing access to their network of highly skilled colleagues.

One former Googler has sought to help others like him looking for life after technology giants. In 2015, Christopher Fong, who spent almost a decade working for the tech titan in California, launched Xoogler, a project designed to help former employees hoping to start their own companies. Since then, the group’s membership has since swelled to more than 11,000.

Fong told Reuters that experience in Big Tech firm gave founders a “strong brand that can be leveraged to meet investors, potential customers, and recruit team members”.

Reporting by Martin Coulter in London, Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Pravin Char, of Reuters.

This story first appeared on our sister publication Internet Retailing

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“You’ve got some front runners making small steps of progress but fundamentally the big picture is that the industry is wildly underperforming,” Sarah Kent, chief sustainability correspondent of The Business of Fashion, told Reuters.

Fashion brands face increasing pressure from consumers and governments to show they are doing better on the environmental front, with heightened scrutiny from younger generations, in particular.

It its second annual report, the Business of Fashion Sustainable Index 2022, the online publication analysed publicly-disclosed information of companies in three categories – luxury, sportswear and high street fashion.

Puma led the report with the highest score, scoring 49 points out of 100, followed by last year’s leader, Kering, which continued to lead rankings of luxury players. Levi Strauss, H&M Group and Burberry – a new addition to the study this year – were next in the rankings.

Lowest scoring companies were all newcomers to the list, with sportswear and high street fashion companies at the bottom.

“There are signs of progress but it’s largely incremental – we’re not seeing the big transformational leaps that we really do need to see over the next eight years in order to get from where we are today to an industry that is operating at a level that is not going to blow through the ambitions of the Paris climate agreement, or other key industry targets,” Kent said.

The risk is that companies could lose their cultural relevance and destroy long-term value, as regulators and consumers become increasingly critical of inflated claims, the report said.

Out of six topics, which included workers’ rights and materials, the companies overall scored highest for progress in reducing emissions while the least amount of progress was made in reducing waste.

The industry needs to develop alternative business models, the report suggested.

“This is a really gnarly challenge for big executives at any fashion company – how do you figure out a way to satisfy your shareholders and demonstrate that you can continue to drive financial growth without driving growth in production, without continuing to make more and therefore extract more and therefore create more waste?” Kent added.

Dragging down the overall scores was the enlarged scope of this year’s report, which doubled the number of companies from last year’s 15.

“More companies meant worse outcomes, almost across the board,” Kent said.

Reporting by Mimosa Spencer; editing by Diane Craft, of Reuters

This story first appeared on our sister publication Inside Retail

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In response, a growing group of start-ups and established logistics firms has created a multi-billion dollar industry applying the latest technology to help businesses minimise the disruption.

Interos, Fero Labs, KlearNow Corp and others are using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge tools so manufacturers and their customers can react more swiftly to supplier snarl-ups, monitor raw material availability and get through the bureaucratic thicket of cross-border trade.

The market for new technology services focused on supply chains could be worth more than $20 billion a year in the next five years, analysts told Reuters. By 2025, more than 80 per cent of new supply chain applications will use artificial intelligence and data science in some way, according to tech research firm Gartner.

“The world’s gotten too complex to try to manage some of these things on spreadsheets,” Dwight Klappich, a Gartner analyst, said.

Interos, valued at more than $1 billion in its latest funding round, is one of the most successful in the nascent market. The Arlington, Virginia-based company says it has mapped out 400 million businesses globally and uses machine learning to monitor them on behalf of corporate customers, alerting them immediately when fire, flood, hacking or any other event causes a potential disruption.

Before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in February, the company had assessed the impact of an invasion. Interos said it identified about 500 US firms with direct supplier relations with companies in Ukraine. Further down the chain Interos found 20,000 US firms had links to second-tier suppliers in Ukraine and 100,000 US firms had links to third-tier suppliers.

Chief Executive Jennifer Bisceglie said after the war started 700 companies approached Interos for help in assessing their exposure to suppliers in Ukraine and Russia. She said the company is developing a new product to game out other hypothetical supply chain disruption scenarios, such as China invading Taiwan, for customers to understand their exposure to risk and where to find alternative suppliers.

Supply chain shocks are inevitable, Bisceglie told Reuters. “But I think we’re going to get better at minimising these disruptions.”

U.S. airline Delta Air Lines Inc, which spends more than $7 billion a year on catering, uniforms and other goods on top of its plane and fuel budget, is one company using Interos to keep track of its 600 primary suppliers and 8,000 total suppliers.

“We’re not expecting to avoid the next crisis,” Heather Ostis, Delta’s supply chain chief, said. “But we’re expecting to be a lot more efficient and effective than our competitors in how we assess risk when that happens.”

Meat, steel, shampoo

Santa Clara, California-based KlearNow sells a platform that automates cumbersome paper-dominated customs clearance processes.

That has been a lifesaver for EED Foods, based in Doncaster, England, which imports Czech and Slovak sweets and smoked meats for expat customers in Britain.

“Before Brexit we were very scared we would have to shut down,” Elena Ostrerova, EED’s purchasing manager, said. “But, instead, we are busy as never before.”

Ostrerova says her company is still growing at annual rate of 40 per cent after Brexit took effect in early 2020, partly because some competitors gave up rather than tackle the onerous new paperwork for importing from the European Union.

She said that KlearNow’s customs clearance platform keeps track of its hundreds of shipments from Central Europe, tallying totals on thousands of items, correcting mistakes on everything from country of origin to gross net weight, and providing an entry number – under which all the information about a shipment is contained – for the company hauling it to Britain.

“We have minimum human involvement,” Ostrerova said, pointing out that saves the company time and the cost of manual data input.

Berk Birand, CEO of New York-based Fero Labs, said the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for manufacturers to adapt to changing suppliers so that they can continue to make identical products, no matter the origin of the raw materials.

The start-up’s platform uses machine learning to monitor and adapt to how raw materials from different suppliers affect product quality, from varying impurities in steel to the level of viscosity in a surfactant, a key ingredient in shampoo. The system then communicates with plant engineers to tweak manufacturing processes so that product consistency is maintained.

Dave DeWalt, founder of venture capital firm NightDragon, which led Interos’ $100 million Series C funding round last year, says regulators are going to take much greater interest in supply chain risk.

“If you have a supply chain issue that could cost you major shareholder value, you’ll have a major responsibility, too,” DeWalt said. “I believe that’s coming in the near future.”

Major logistics firms are also deploying machine learning to boost their competitiveness. US truck fleet operator Ryder System Inc uses the real-time data from its fleet, and those of its customers and partners, to create algorithms for predicting traffic patterns, truck availability and pricing.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Autotech Ventures has invested in both KlearNow and newtrul, which aggregates data from transport management systems in America’s highly fragmented trucking sector to predict pricing changes.

“Mapping your supply chain and interconnectivity at the individual part level is the Holy Grail,” Autotech partner Burak Cendek said.

Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Bill Rigby, of Reuters

This story first appeared on our sister publication Inside Retail

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One of the world’s biggest garment makers, Vietnam reported more than 26,000 new infections on Sunday, or about double the peak last year, when factories supplying brands such as Nike, Zara, Apple and Samsung were shut for months.

But, unlike nine months ago when the Delta variant was spreading through a mostly unvaccinated population, now millions of factory workers have been fully vaccinated and the Omicron variant is proving less severe, the government said.

“The risk of widespread lockdowns is very low this year as Vietnam has successfully carried out its COVID-19 vaccination campaign,” Dang Duc Anh, director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, told Reuters.

Vietnam has been relaxing curbs in recent months, with schools re-opening last week and the government saying on Sunday it would lift restrictions on arriving international passenger flights.

More than 76 per cent of the population has received at least two vaccine doses, up from 3.3 per cent early in September last year, the health ministry says.

The American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi, which represents U.S. businesses and last year urged the government to ease its curbs, is anticipating a better 2022, Adam Sitkoff, its executive director, said.

“I do not expect to see additional countrywide lockdowns as serious cases in most parts of the country are at a manageable level and the authorities have learned that economy-crippling restrictions are not sustainable,” Sitkoff told Reuters.

The government is targeting economic growth of 6 per cent to 6.5 per cent this year, up from 2.5 per cent in 2021.

Smooth factory operations in Vietnam, the second biggest exporter of clothes and footwear to the United States after China, will also help free up supply chain bottlenecks that are pushing up inflation around the world.

“If Vietnam can maintain a strong production capability and factory output, this will really support the global supply chain, in particular for sectors like agriculture, textiles and electronics consumers,” Duc Minh Nguyen, a partner at accounting firm EY, said.

Shifting supply chains

Over the last decade Vietnam has emerged as one of the most attractive alternative production hubs for companies looking to reduce their exposure to China.

That trend is expected to continue, if Vietnam can emerge relatively unscathed from the current Omicron wave and Beijing keeps up its tough lockdowns to suppress infection.

“Vietnam will be a key beneficiary of shifting supply chains, particularly in regards to low value-add manufacturing relocating out of China and electronics,” Raphael Mok, head of Asia country risk for Fitch Solutions, said.

Vietnam won praise early in the pandemic for curbing infections with its tight controls, but a flare-up last summer caused by the Delta variant kept millions of workers at home amid lockdowns in Ho Chi Minh City and neighbouring industrial provinces.

In September, at the height of the lockdowns, businesses began considering moving production elsewhere.

Lululemon, a Canadian clothing retailer, shifted production out of Vietnam in September. Nike, which sources half its footwear from the southeast Asian nation, cut its 2022 sales forecast due to factory closures there.

Now, 90 per cent to 95 per cent of garment and textile workers have returned to work after the Lunar New Year holiday, said Truong Van Cam, deputy chairman and general secretary of the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association.

Vietnam’s factory workers, who earn on average $330 per month, are hoping to make up for earnings lost last year.

“Things are pretty smooth now … there are many orders that need delivering so we can work overtime to earn more,” Nguyen Van Hoang, 28, who works at a leather factory in Ho Chi Minh City, said. “I don’t think factory lockdowns will become a thing in the future.”

Ninh Thi Ty, chairwoman of Ho Guom Group, which makes garments for firms such as CK, Mango, Zara and H&M, said that she expected the government would soon designate COVID-19 an endemic illness.

“More lockdowns would hurt businesses like ours, as we wouldn’t be able to deliver products to customers,” Ty, whose garment factories employ 6000 workers in Vietnam, said.

Reporting by Khanh Vu and Phuong Nguyen; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, of Reuters.

This story first appeared on our sister publication Inside Retail

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The survey of 2250 small business owners across nine countries including the United States, Brazil, Singapore and Canada suggests cryptocurrencies may be starting to go mainstream as a means of payment.

Visa also surveyed 1000 adults in the United States, along with 500 adults from each of the nine countries.

“I think more people are feeling more confident with crypto,” Jeni Mundy, Visa’s global head of merchant sales and acquiring, said in an interview.

Despite their rising popularity among retail and professional investors, cryptocurrencies are not widely used to pay for goods and services, in part because of their frequent fluctuations in value.

On Monday, Bitcoin fell more than five per cent, tumbling under the $40,000 level for the first time since September.

Small businesses outside North America are more open to accepting digital currencies, including Bitcoin, as forms of payment.

Visa found that more than 30 per cent of small business merchants in the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Singapore and Brazil plan to offer customers the option to pay using crypto in the coming months. Digital currencies have taken off in each of those jurisdictions, despite varying regulations.

In contrast, 19 per cent of small businesses in the United States and just eight per cent in Canada expect to offer crypto as a payment option in 2022.

Almost three-quarters of businesses surveyed worldwide reported that accepting new forms of payments is “fundamental” to their business growth. For many smaller companies that are moving into new forms of digital payments, adopting crypto may be a natural evolution, said Mundy.

They are asking “what other forms of payment can we take? And what other forms should we be considering?” she said.

The other countries in the survey include Germany, Ireland and Russia.

(Reporting by Hannah Lang in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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The move, announced in a blog post on Wednesday, represents a divergence in responses among the big tech giants to demands by news publishers, which have blamed the companies for destroying their advertising business.

Australia Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he had a “constructive discussion” with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, adding the talks with the company on the proposed media payment law would continue.

“[Zuckerberg] raised a few remaining issues with the government’s news media bargaining code and we agreed to continue our conversation to try to find a pathway forward,” Frydenberg said in a tweet.

The Australian federal government has said it plans to put the legislation, which effectively force Google and Facebook to strike deals with media companies or have fees set for them, to a vote in the coming weeks.

Google has also threatened to shut down its search engine in the country to avoid “unworkable” content laws even as it has secured deals with publishers in the United Kindgom, Germany, France, Brazil and Argentina for its Google News Showcase product.

On Wednesday, Google reached a landmark global deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal and two-thirds of Australia’s major city newspapers, to develop a subscription platform and share advertising revenue.

Facebook said the proposed legislation “fundamentally misunderstands” the relationship between itself and publishers, arguing that news outlets voluntarily post their article links on Facebook, which helped Australian publishers earn about AU$407 million in 2020 through referrals.

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, tweeted on Wednesday that the relationship was not as voluntary as it seems, and most publishers feel obligated to be on Facebook due to its dominance.

Facebook, which has long been criticised for allowing misinformation to flourish on its platforms, now finds itself in a peculiar position of also blocking the news media that has provided a fact check on false content.

“Nobody benefits from this decision as Facebook will now be a platform for misinformation to rapidly spread without balance,” a spokesman for Australian television network Channel Nine said. “This action proves again their monopoly position and unreasonable behaviour.”

As of this week, Australian users will not be able read or share news content on Facebook news feeds, and Australian news publishers will be restricted from posting or sharing content on Facebook pages.

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