TOP 5 STOCKS & Stock Market News – FEBRUARY 24, 2021 – CAPITAL STREET FX

 

TOP 5 STOCKS –

1.HYUNDAI MOTORS – Hyundai Motor Co will replace battery systems in some 82,000 electric vehicles globally due to fire risks, a problem which combined with an earlier recall is likely to cost the automaker an estimated $900 million. 

Most of the latest recall applies to its best-selling electric car, the Kona EV, which was first recalled in October for a software upgrade after a series of fires.

But in January, one of the recalled vehicles caught fire and South Korean authorities launched a probe into whether the first recall had been adequate.

LG Energy Solution, a division of LG Chem Ltd which manufactures the batteries, said in a statement that Hyundai Motor has misapplied LG’s suggestion for fast-charging logic in Hyundai’s battery management system and that the battery cell should not be seen as the direct cause of the fire risks.

The new recall applies to roughly 76,000 Kona EVs as well as some Ioniq EV and Elec City models.

There have been some 15 cases of fires involving the Kona EV – 11 in South Korea, two in Canada and one each in Finland and Austria, according to the transport ministry. 

Hyundai said in a statement that of the total 1 trillion won in estimated recall costs, some 38.9 billion won was due to the first recall.

Shares of Hyundai Motor and LG Chem were trading down 3.7% and 1.9% respectively in afternoon trade compared to a 2% fall for the broader market. 

2. LinkedIn:-  LinkedIn, Microsoft Corp’s professional networking site, said on Tuesday it had resolved a technical glitch on its platform, after thousands of users reported difficulties in accessing the website.

Downdetector, an outage tracking website, showed there were close to 26,000 incidents of people reporting issues with LinkedIn.

Earlier in the day, LinkedIn said an issue across its platform was causing certain functional requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly and that it was working on a fix.

California-based LinkedIn helps employers assess a candidate’s suitability for a role and employees use the platform to find new job.

Downdetector only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage might have affected a larger number of users.

3. SPACEX :– Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX has raised about $850 million in equity financing, the private rocket launch service said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

The private space company had raised $1.9 billion in August in its largest single fundraising round, according to financial software and data provider PitchBook.

The latest round reportedly lifted the valuation of the company whose investors include Alphabet Inc and Fidelity Investments to about $74 billion. 

Earlier this month, a prototype of SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded during a landing attempt after a high-altitude test launch.

The SN9 prototype was a test model of the heavy-lift rocket being developed by the company to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

4.APPLE :-Apple Inc is planning to increase its dividend according to Chief Executive Tim Cook, CNBC reported on Tuesday, citing the shareholder meeting.

The company’s shareholders also approved compensation for Apple executives for fiscal 2020, the report said. 

Shareholders will not vote until next year’s annual meeting on Cook’s September grant of 333,987 restricted stock units, his first major stock package since 2011, which took effect at the start of Apple’s fiscal 2021. 

It grants him stock units with a possibility to earn as many as 667,974 more if he hits performance targets. 

Apple, the biggest U.S. listed public company by market capitalization with a value of $2.1 trillion, has thrived during the pandemic even though it had to temporarily shut several stores.

The company’s board had declared a cash dividend of $0.205 per share of the company’s common stock in the holiday quarter.

 5.TWITTER:– Twitter said on Tuesday it had taken down 373 accounts which it said had ties to Russia, Armenia and Iran and had breached its platform manipulation policies.

The company said it had taken down 238 accounts operating from Iran for various violations of its policies.

Twitter said 100 accounts with Russian ties were removed for amplifying narratives that undermined faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow planned to look into the grounds for Twitter blocking the accounts, TASS news agency reported.

Twitter also said 35 accounts with ties to Armenia were taken down, adding that they had been created to target Azerbaijan.

“The 373 associated accounts across the four networks were permanently suspended from Twitter for violations of our platform manipulation policies,” the company said in a blog post.