2025-10-20 14:45

By Promit Mukherjee and David Ljunggren OTTAWA, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Canadian firms feel conditions are slightly better than earlier in the year but they are unlikely to boost investments or hiring given the dampening effect of U.S. tariffs, a Bank of Canada survey showed on Monday. Sign up here. The quarterly business outlook survey is closely watched by the BoC and economists to gauge what Canadian firms expect in terms of inflation, sales and hiring. Tariffs and trade tensions continue to weigh on the outlooks of many firms, the survey said, adding that while business sentiment had continued to improve from the lows seen in early 2025, it remained moderate. The business outlook indicator, a summary of business activity, prices and costs, and capacity, rose to -2.28 in the third quarter from -2.40 in the previous quarter. The survey, conducted between August 7 and September 3, noted firms did not expect sales growth to strengthen over the coming year as tariffs continue to scuttle demand. That said, the balance of opinion on future sales has improved marginally. The share of firms expecting a recession over the next year increased slightly to 33% from 28% in the second quarter. Concerns around a downturn were primarily responsible for offsetting the improvement in business sentiment, the BoC said. Firms will not invest additional capital for building capacity and many are putting new investments on hold while their hiring intentions remain subdued, the survey said, citing the impact of tariffs. The BoC issued the survey just days before it is due to announce its latest decision on rates and release quarterly economic projections. Money market bets show that is almost a 77% chance of a 25 basis point rate cut. One-year ahead inflation expectations are around 3% in the third quarter, almost similar to the previous quarter, but firms are widely reporting cost pressures. Businesses still expect their input prices to increase at a faster pace over the next 12 months compared with the past 12 months, it said, adding that wage growth over the next 12 months continued to trend lower. A separate survey by the central bank on consumer expectations showed 64.1% of Canadians expect a recession over the next 12 months, down from 64.4% in the second quarter. (Reuters Ottawa editorial) Keywords: CANADA CENBANK/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/bank-canada-says-firms-outlooks-remain-subdued-amid-trade-tensions-2025-10-20/

2025-10-20 13:05

(Reuters) - Sterling snapped a three-day winning streak against the dollar and fell versus the euro on Monday, as concerns over the British economy weighed on sentiment. Economists expect Wednesday's UK services inflation data to undershoot the Bank of England's projection, with a mild bearish impact on the pound. Sign up here. “That (inflation data) can modestly move the needle to the dovish side in the British swap curve and weigh on the pound this week,” ING forex strategist Francesco Pesole said. Sterling dropped 0.10% to $1.3427. It hit $1.3471 on Friday, its highest level in almost two weeks. The greenback edged up against the yen but was flat versus the euro on Monday as investors shifted their focus to political developments in Japan and the euro area, while lingering concerns about U.S. credit risks kept weighing on sentiment. Last week’s UK jobs data prompted some analysts to argue that ongoing disinflation and signs of labour market loosening could contribute to an erosion of sterling’s valuation relative to the euro. However, renewed concerns about a potential trade war between the U.S. and China weighed on the single currency and affected market expectations for the European Central Bank rate outlook, leading traders to almost fully price in an additional ECB easing move by next summer. The British currency dropped 0.10% versus the single currency to 86.85 pence. It was at 86.75 pence early last week. On Tuesday last week, after jobs data, the euro recorded its biggest daily rise against the pound in more than four weeks. Short-dated British government bond yields fell sharply as markets priced more chances of BoE rate cuts, weighing on the British currency Yields on 2-year gilts dropped 2.5 bps to 3.86%. They hit 3.81% last week, their lowest levels in 2-1/2 months on Friday. Gilt outperformance recently paused and will probably require further disinflationary momentum from this week's key economic data while investors await the November budget, analysts said. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/sterling-snaps-3-day-rising-streak-versus-dollar-awaits-inflation-data-2025-10-20/

2025-10-20 12:24

BEIJING, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Chinese electric vehicle battery giant CATL (300750.SZ) , opens new tab saw net profit growth accelerate in the third quarter, even as it faced increased competition from smaller rivals. Net profit rose 41.2% to 18.5 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) in the July-September period from a year earlier, picking up from a 33.7% increase in the second quarter, according to a stock filing on Monday. Sign up here. Revenue rose 12.9% year on year to 104.2 billion yuan, up from a 8.3% gain in the second quarter. CATL still leads the pack in global EV battery usage, though its share fell to 36.8% in the first eight months from 37.7% in the year-ago period, according to SNE Research. By comparison, Chinese EV maker BYD (002594.SZ) , opens new tab, which also manufactures batteries in-house, took up 18% share of the global market versus 16.2% a year earlier, buoyed by an expansion in the European market. CATL, which supplies automakers including Tesla (TSLA.O) , opens new tab, Volkswagen (VOWG.DE) , opens new tab and Xiaomi (1810.HK) , opens new tab has also continued overseas expansion, with its new plant in Hungary expected to start production by early next year. However, Beijing issued new export controls on lithium battery parts that will require exporters to seek permits from November, casting uncertainty over CATL's future efforts to venture into overseas markets. ($1 = 7.1230 Chinese yuan renminbi) https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-battery-maker-catl-posts-faster-profit-growth-third-quarter-2025-10-20/

2025-10-20 12:23

Oct 20 (Reuters) - Egypt's Petrojet has been awarded a $1 billion preliminary contract to develop the second phase of the Hassi Bir Rekaiz oil field project in Algeria, Egypt's ministry of petroleum said on Monday. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/egypts-petrojet-given-1-billion-algerian-oil-project-contract-ministry-says-2025-10-20/

2025-10-20 11:56

AWS outage affects major websites and apps globally Issue originated in US site known for outages Service improved, then problems recurred before recovery Gaming and financial platforms among those impacted by AWS issue SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Amazon.com cloud service returned to normal operations on Monday afternoon, the company said, after an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web's most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Still, Amazon (AMZN.O) , opens new tab said some AWS services had a backlog of messages that would take a few hours to process. Sign up here. AWS hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, and the disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. Users on Monday afternoon had complained of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom. It was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown. Amazon did not address a request for more clarity about why that particular data center keeps being impacted. The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data. ROOT CAUSE IS NETWORK HEALTH MONITOR Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network", Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Shortly after 3 p.m. PT (2200 GMT), Amazon said, "all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours." Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers. "When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later," Birman told Reuters. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's (MSFT.O) , opens new tab Azure and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms - ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems - that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services. "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank (LLOY.L) , opens new tab, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone (VOD.L) , opens new tab and BT (BT.L) , opens new tab were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners. Wall Street was largely unfazed, sending Amazon shares 1.6% higher to $216.48. FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Apps like Reddit (RDDT.N) , opens new tab, Roblox (RBLX.N) , opens new tab, Snapchat (SNAP.N) , opens new tab and Duolingo (DUOL.O) , opens new tab had all been affected. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN.O) , opens new tab and trading app Robinhood (HOOD.O) , opens new tab all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber (UBER.N) , opens new tab rival Lyft (LYFT.O) , opens new tab was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-reports-outage-several-websites-down-2025-10-20/

2025-10-20 11:55

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Mexico's economic growth is set to recover slowly in 2026 from this year's virtual stagnation amid higher inflation risks, a Reuters poll showed. Latin America's second-biggest economy behind Brazil is picking up following a pause in the first half of 2025 caused by weaker public spending and elevated uncertainty over U.S. tariffs. Sign up here. Key drivers are hopes for a successful renegotiation of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico (USMCA) trade deal and an expected short-term boost from the soccer World Cup to be hosted in the three countries in 2026. Still, already implemented U.S. levies and the threat of more tariffs globally will continue limiting Mexico's economy while trade negotiations drag on, particularly in most affected sectors like the automotive industry. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is forecast to expand 1.3% next year after 0.5% in 2025, according to the median estimate of 33 economists polled October 13-17. That would be an improvement from consensus forecasts of 0.0% and 1.2% in a July survey, respectively, as the central bank continues to pursue gradual policy easing. Besides some extra monetary stimulus from rate cuts and greater private sector confidence on trade agreements, infrastructure projects are already gaining pace, said Marcos Arias, senior economist at GBM. "In addition, Mexico will be one of the host nations for the World Cup, an event that, in itself, always serves as a catalyst for economic activity," he added. But inflation is set to continue running close to the upper limit of the central bank's target of 3% plus or minus a margin of 1 percentage point. Median estimates for annual increases in Mexico's consumer prices were little changed, at 3.8% in 2025 and 3.7% in 2026 compared to 3.9% and 3.7% respectively in July's poll. Risks on this front are biased to the upside given a narrowing "output gap" or industrial spare capacity, said Jose Sanchez, Mexico chief economist at HSBC. "This, combined with tariffs on Chinese imports, could begin to inject upside pressures in some prices," he added. Mexico's Congress is holding off approving proposed tariff hikes on products from China and other Asian countries while the government holds talks with them and considers changes to the initiative. Of 11 participants who answered an extra question on risk to their inflation forecasts, a majority of nine said it was more likely to be higher than they currently expect over the coming year rather than lower. Asked a similar question on Mexico's economic growth, six participants said the risk to GDP growth was weaker than they expect while five said stronger, suggesting persistent worries about the outlook for trade. "It is unlikely U.S. tariffs (on some Mexican sectors) will be reversed, and the sectoral decline is expected to persist in the coming months, affecting employment," said Jesus Lopez, deputy head of research at Banco Base. (Other stories from the Reuters global economic poll) https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-economy-set-recover-slowly-next-year-amid-higher-inflation-risks-2025-10-20/