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Today’s Pickup: China increases U.S. pork exports after deadly viral attack on its local livestock

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Good day,

China has ramped up its pork trade with the U.S. after a year of trade tariff tensions between the two countries. This is in response to a deadly virus that spread across Chinese hog herds, forcing the country to cull more than 10 million pigs to stop the disease from spreading. China is the world’s largest consumer of pork, and a sudden cutback in supply has led the country to depend heavily on imports. Though China had drastically reduced pork imports from the U.S. by 47 percent last year, it now has purchased 23,800 metric tons of pork – the largest weekly purchase since April 2017.

Did you know?

Floodgate Ventures, one of the earliest backers of Lyft back in 2010, are potentially looking at a return on investment of 9,500%, with the value of stake expected to open publicly at $72 per share.

Quotable:

“Cities occupy 2 to 3 percent of our planet’s surface, yet they consume 70 percent of all energy.”

– Soren Kvorning, president for Asia Pacific at Danfoss, a Danish engineering firm

In other news:

Turkey’s Yildirim sets financing in bid for long beach shipping terminal

Chairman says port operator, which is bidding against three investment funds, has met with U.S. security officials reviewing the deal. (WSJ)

The world’s largest oil company and petrochemical company merge

The long awaited Saudi Aramco acquisition of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) is finally here. (Oilprice)

Daimler and Geely team up to build Smart cars in China

Under the agreement announced Thursday, the next generation of swmart cars will be assembled at a plant in China with sales starting in 2022. (CNN)

Electricity comes from coal, so EVs aren’t cleaner than gas cars, right?

It depends on where you live, but in many locations, renewable energy sources are growing. (InsideEVs)

Its time for Uber and Lyft’s white collar workers to step up

Following mass worker action in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego this week, an anonymous Uber employee published an open letter in unequivocal support of the disgruntled contractors. (Gizmodo)

Final thoughts:

Reports have surfaced that Saudi Arabia intends to push oil prices to at least $70 per barrel this year to increase cash flow into its economy. Officially, the country does not have a specific price target, but has noted that it wants to balance global supply and demand by propping up oil prices. In this context, Saudi Arabia is cutting its oil export to countries and is also reducing its output for the month of March and April to under 10 million barrels per day (bpd), slightly below its OPEC output target of 10.3 million bpd. This is in contrast to President Trump’s demands on keeping the prices low and output high, and also shows the indifference of the Saudi officials to the shale oil production in the U.S., which has been consistently high over the year.

Hammer down everyone!