The Daily Update: 29 March

The latest updates from the JSE and NYSE over the past 24 hours.

South Africa

Barloworld Limited- Voluntary Trading Update

• The company experienced a 14.9% increase in revenue compared to the prior period, with revenue reaching R16.5 billion.
• The Industrial Equipment and Services segment performed exceptionally well, with a 41.8% increase in revenue to R10.2 billion.
• Barloworld's Equipment Eurasia division generated $179 million in revenue, down 39% from the prior period.
• Barloworld's Russia business saw revenue decrease by 53% to $116.2 million, but operating profit from core trading activities was only down 37%.

The U.S.

Elon Musk

• Elon Musk and a number of other AI researchers have written an open letter to pause giant AI experiments.
• We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Apple

• Apple has introduced Apple Pay Later to allow consumers to pay for purchases over time.

Google

• Google has announced a partnership to combine its artificial intelligence language models with software from startup "Replit" that helps computer programmers write code, in a bid to compete with similar products from Microsofts GitHub & OpenAI.

Microsoft

• Microsoft has rebuilt Microsoft teams from the ground up, promising users two times faster performance.
• Microsoft calls this a reimagining of Teams from the ground up.
• With this Microsoft says joining meetings should now be 2x faster, while switching between chats and channels will be 1.7x faster. In addition, the company also redesigned the overall user experience.
• Microsoft also today announced that Teams now has 280 million monthly active users up from 270 million in January 2022.
• The company plans to make this new version of Teams available to all users later this year, but it is now rolling out to Windows users who opt into the companys Public Preview program.

Credit Suisse

• Credit Suisse whistle blowers have said that the bank has been willfully helping wealthy American citizens dodge U.S taxes for years.
• The bank pleaded guilty in 2014 to criminal charges for knowingly and willfully helping US clients hide offshore assets and income.
• The bank appears to have violated that agreement, per a new report by the Senate Finance Committee that details ongoing abuse since then.

JPMorgan

• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon will be questioned in a civil lawsuit over JPMorgans relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.