US MARKETS:

S&P 500 futures up 0.2% to 2,995.75
Brent Futures up 0.2% to $63.38/bbl
Gold spot down 0.5% to $1,417.81
US Dollar Index up 0.3% to 97.52

GLOBAL NEWS:

Earnings season. Hermès, Banco Santander, UBS, Lindt, Kuehne und Nagel, UPM, Edenred, Faurecia, Ingenico in Europe. Visa, Coca-Cola, United Technologies, Texas Instruments, Lockheed Martin, Chubb and Biogen in the United States.

5G modems. Apple is in advanced negotiations with Intel to buy back its smartphone modem chips for about $1 billion. In April, Intel announced that it would abandon 5G modem chips shortly after Apple and Qualcomm signed a compromise, ending an old dispute in the chip business.

Continental slips. Automotive equipment manufacturers are once again to be watched on the stock market after yet another warning from German group Continental. "The main reason is the continued decline in global production of passenger cars and commercial vehicles," the group said, believing that global automotive production will fall by 5% this year while it had previously expected stability. The group is both a major equipment manufacturer (world leader in braking, for example) and a tire manufacturer competing with groups such as Michelin.

Over-the-counter flu vaccine? Sanofi has signed an agreement with Roche to obtain Tamiflu's exclusive rights to prevent and treat influenza in the US self-medication market. It is the French lab that will be in charge of negotiations with the American drug agency to switch to OTC treatment. Roche will continue to market Tamiflu elsewhere in the world, but Sanofi will retain the right to initiate the first negotiations to convert it into a self-medication product in a number of other countries. No financial terms were communicated.

On a case-by-case basis. Donald Trump seems ready to ease the situation with Huawei, by allowing some American companies to trade with the Chinese giant, to avoid losing big contracts. But the White House also indicated that the managers of major technology companies supported its approach towards the Chinese group. Licenses could be granted on a case-by-case basis.

The sanction will fall. The FTC is expected to announce this week an agreement worth nearly $5 billion with Facebook following its investigation into the use of personal data of social network users, according to consistent sources. The group will also be subject to a number of obligations, in particular the presence of a supervisory committee on the use of personal data within its own board of directors.

BAIC strengthens its relationship with Daimler. The Chinese Beijing Automotive Group (BAIC) has acquired a 5% stake in Daimler, which welcomes the investment. The German itself has held a 9.6% stake in BAIC since 2013. This investment confirms rumors that circulated a few weeks ago.

Great upheaval. SNC-Lavalin will refocus on engineering by exiting the turnkey fixed-price contracts business and examining its options on the resources division. By doing so, the Canadian company is divesting itself of its least profitable activities. An investor day scheduled for early fall will allow him to detail his projects and financial objectives. In the short term, SNC-Lavalin is issuing a severe warning on its 2019 objectives, which will be "significantly lower than previously anticipated", with second quarter results further burdened by massive goodwill depreciation. The project is detailed below by the interim CEO.

In other news. Some Australian shareholders of BHP are reportedly campaigning for an external candidate for the position of CEO, Reuters learned. TD Ameritrade is looking for a new CEO. Whirlpool is raising its earnings forecast thanks to strong cost control and rate increases. Microsoft has planned to invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI. British Airways (International Consolidated Airlines) pilots voted to strike by a large majority for salary reasons, without giving a precise date at this stage. Fitch Ratings has lowered Boeing's A-rating outlook from stable to negative due to the B737 MAX. AMS has not necessarily given up on Osram.