Four years ago, Ford and South Korean battery maker SK On struck a deal to form a joint venture and spend $11.4 billion to build factories in Tennessee and Kentucky that would produce batteries for the next generation of electric F-Series trucks. The factories live on; the joint venture will not. SK On, a subsidiary of SK Innovation, said Thursday it reached an agreement with Ford to end the joint venture.
Zuckercorp has already warned of "notably larger" spending in 2026, but the company earned "only" $62 billion in profit last year, up from $39 billion in 2023. So even if it used all of its near-liquid assets - as of Q3, Meta had about $44.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and other marketable securities - and plowed every dollar of profit into bit barns for the next few years, Meta would be hard pressed to pull this off.
Case in point: SoftBank, which is investing tens of billions into OpenAI and committing dozens more to build AI data centers and infrastructure, just launched a joint venture with the ChatGPT maker in Japan that will localize and sell the AI company's enterprise tech to companies in the country. And the first customer of this joint venture is going to be SoftBank itself.
Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks is selling a 60% stake in its mainland China coffee shop business to Chinese private equity firm Boyu Capital in a deal valued at about $4 billion. Expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2026, the deal comes amidst rapid expansion of Chinese competitors such as Luckin Coffee and Cotti Coffee, while promising to reshape the coffee retail landscape in Starbucks' second-largest market behind the United States.
Wanka Online Inc. has announced a capital increase in its joint venture, Suzhou Jinglan Cloud Technology Co., Ltd., with the introduction of a new investor, Suzhou Huanxiu Lake Xincheng Phase II Industrial Investment Fund. This capital increase, amounting to RMB60.0 million, aims to expand the joint venture's mobile advertising business and support its rapid growth. Despite the changes in shareholding structure, Wanka Online will maintain its controlling interest, ensuring continued consolidation of the joint venture's financial results into its own statements.
The formation of Horizon Global comes at a "dynamic moment" for the ad industry, according to Bob Lord, interim CEO of the new joint venture. Agencies are contending not only with the rise of technology like generative AI, but also increased category consolidation that is lending competitors even greater scale. Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, for example, are on the path to forming the world's largest ad-holding group after agreeing to a finalized consent order from the Federal Trade Commission on Friday.