Great Britain will not be changing its name after the UK economy shrank 20.4% in Q2, which annualizes at 59.8% (but things will improve in due course), and it didn't do badly in Q1, and growth resumed in June by 8.7%. 

Further technology challenges hit me personally today, first that I could not get through on my morning rendezvous with the Drupal team in India because my password had expired. By the time I got help from their Atlanta office, their late gathering had ended. Meanwhile, I got a rocket over switching my Bluehost hosting account to Wordpress—despite my having changed hosts to GoDaddy precisely to avoid switching to Wordpress, which my regular readers will recall we unsuccessfully tried last year. This is the closest I have come to figuring out why my personal website shows a 404 warning when I try to log on.

A further frustration is that the Blackbaud hack attack which gathered information on charitable donors turns out to have also breached the data of Harvard University, my alma mater, and Brown where my daughter-in-law and her brother studied and not just Oxford, which is my husband's, and the National Trust to which we donate. The charity site used to solicit donations paid off with a ransom the hackers in May to get back the data but of course, the miscreants may well have kept the lists.

Now for news from late Tuesday and Wednesday with a clutter of results. We are still locked out of our website so I rely on the kindness, not of strangers, but of TalkMarkets.com where I am posting to for exclusively instead.

China plays

*While we don't own Tencent any longer, its part-owners which we do own rose today on the TCEHY beat in earnings and sales, thanks to gaming up 40%. NPSNY, Naspers of South Africa gained 1.9% and Dutch PROSY, Prosus 4.65%. Each is a backdoor way to Tencent in which PROSY owns 31%. Tech is recovering today. However, the Trump ban on WeChat (a Tencent sub) will hit next month

*Carmaker NIO numbers were superb, with a 191% rise in new deliveries of electric vehicles in Q2, to 10,331. Revenues rose 147% year/yr to $526 mn which beat by $24.4 mn. Loss per share at 16 cents was 10 cents better than consensus. While NIO rose 9% at the opening it later fell on profit-taking after a fall on Wall Street Tuesday.

*Solar energy worldwide will suffer after an explosion at the GCL-Poly Energy plant which will take 10 months to repair has led to a shortage in polysilicon for solar modules, and a double-digit price hike. Polysilicon is melted and cut to make wafers for solar cells. The price rise will help other makers, and alternative energy plays like thermo-power Ormat, up 5.5% today to a YTD high of $64,

Rest of the World

*Compugen of Israel is up 7%+ on no news. CGEN is up but TEVA is down 1.2%.

*German electric ute company, E.on SE (EONGY) reported on its H1 results which were accompanied by a prediction that the bulk of the COVID-19 problems are over, at a level of about euros 150 mn in total. It now expects that it will see only a 2% drop in full-year EBITDA cashflow. In H1 the group's earnings before taxes came in at euros 2.2 bn down only by 100 mn from prior H1. Adjusted net income dropped to euros 933 mn from euros 1.05 bn in H1 2019. However, in parts of the network outside Germany sales were down by euros 250 mn from prior H1 at euros 1.7 bn from COVID-19 and Sweden's new regulations. GAAP revenues came in at euros 12.84 bn, up 91% from prior Q2. Eps hit 22 euros cents.

E.on also lined up for stimulus money which came in at euros 500 mn for infrastructure from Germany plus EU funding to come for switching to hydrogen as a power source rather than dirty fuels,

In the half, it also completed the takeover of Innogy which required that it sell operations in Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and former East Germany, which will produce cash payments of about euros 1 bn. Meanwhile, Innogy will offer synergies in operations of euros 1.62 bn in 2022-24. It is also using tech to cut costs of meter reading for customers in Germany and Britain, using Kraken systems. This is already paying off in lower costs for customer service up euros 14 mn to euros 457 mn from prior H1,

*Canadian CAE Inc. (CAE) which makes flight simulators for civil and military aviation and a bit for healthcare naturally saw its sales and profits fall in its Q1. Its stock fell 2.5% today on the news that its flight simulator sales dropped 60% in the June quarter as only two units were sold. The adjusted drop was only 33.3%, both from prior It also will cut its costs by C$100 mn over the next two years after the posted net loss came in at C$110.6 mn (US$83.4 mn) or 42 loony cents/sh. The year before it had a 23 loony cents profit per share. The drop was adjusted down to minus 11 loony cents per share.

However the consensus on Bay Street (S&P Capital) was for a loss of only 6 loony cents and sales of C$511 mn so this is a miss,. CAE expects that its H1 (including the current Q2) will be negatively impacted but that H2 will see more “positive inflection” as the pandemic ebbs,

*BAE Systems, BAESY is opening a new campus in Austin Texas for its US defense business, after it won a 5-yr US Air Force research contract worth $85 mn to develop a way for secure government networks to exchange data, and artificial intelligence. The share gained 0.33%.

*Gold was down Tuesday but is not out and rises can resume at any moment when things look dark again, like today with a 2% rise to $1954. The yellow metal fell 5.3% Tuesday, after Russia said it has a coronavirus vaccine, not necessarily true. Gold is up 27% YTD now. The buck is weak and yields low,

*Canada's Nutrien issued a notice to people worried about ammonium nitrate after the Lebanese disaster, NTR said it doesn't sell the product for agricultural use at all and it is only sold for mining in Alberta, where it is very carefully handled.

*Zacks, the Chicago chartists, chopped Bank of Nova Scotia BNS shares to strong sell but the stock went up today all the same, by 1.3% today to $44.30 (US).

*Glaxo with Sanofi of France is close to a deal for supplying Covid-19 vaccines to the British National Health Service. The total payment will be the equivalent of $625 mn. GSK makes the adjuvant which lets vaccine doses be reduced, and it is also the partner of Canadian Medicago which is growing virus-like particles in tobacco plants, as it is a private company owned by Phillip Morris international (PM) and a Japanese partner.

*Eduardo Garcia writes from Mexico that the drip feed sub of Orbia Advance Corp (MXCHF) signed an $85 mn contract for delivering systems to 35,000 farms in India. It used to be called Mexichem and its ticker symbol has not changed, but I expect it will when they do a US listing.

*Japanese drugmaker Eisai will be moving its headquarters to Nutley, New Jersey, leading to Japanese selling. ESALY is off 5.3% to $87.13 despite a general Tokyo rally.