The Index was down -1.89% (or -54.66 basis points). Six of the 25 RDWI members gained value last week from 0.57% (AbbVie) to 8.64% (Alibaba). Nineteen of the 25 RDWI members lost value last week from -0.02% (Alphabet/Google) to -20.16% (Volkswagen AG).
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Silver Spring, Maryland, last week converted the confirmatory trial of Leqembi to a traditional approval for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease. Leqembi was developed by Eisai Co., Ltd., Tokyo, and Biogen, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leqembi was conditionally approved by the FDA in January 2023. It is part of a class of Alzheimer’s drugs that target amyloid, a sticky plaque in the brain that some researchers believe plays a role in driving the disease. Leqembi is the first anti-amyloid treatment that the FDA has fully approved and the first to clearly slow cognitive decline in patients with early Alzheimer’s by 27% in clinical trials.
Agribusiness firm Syngenta, Downers Grove, Illinois, announced last week that it opened its Seeds R&D Innovation Center in DeKalb County, Illinois. The Center includes a 32,000 ft2 building for laboratories and more than 18,000 ft2 of seed processing space, along with research fields across an 88-acre campus. The Center is targeted at facilitating collaborations with the broader agriculture industry and supplementing the work of more than 5,000 Syngenta R&D employees around the world. There are 150 Syngenta Seeds R&D production sites worldwide. The company invests $1.4 billion annually in seed R&D.
LG Electronics, Seoul, South Korea, announced last week that it has established its first overseas R&D lab for home entertainment products. The 40,000-ft2 R&D lab in Cibitung, West Java, Indonesia, is located near the company’s existing TV manufacturing facilities which serve as a production hub for the company’s Asian market and 40 km away from the capital city of Jakarta. LG expects the regional lab to allow the company to run its business more effectively from product development to delivery to end users. LG expects to have 500 staff in the facility by 2025.
The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), London, U.K., has released the requirements that aim to set a global baseline for sustainability-related disclosures. The U.S., through unfinished Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules, is expected to take a softer touch following pushback from investors, companies, and lawmakers. As a result, the European Union (EU) may require more disclosures from U.S. companies. The ISSB has worked closely with authorities from the U.S., China, Japan, the EU, and the U.K. to develop its rules as a global baseline and work on how those rules interact with others.
Analysts last week revealed that the Biden administration is preparing to restrict Chinese companies’ access to U.S. cloud-computing services. New rules, if adopted, would require U.S. cloud-service providers, such as Amazon.com and Microsoft (the two leading providers) to seek U.S. government permission before they provide cloud-computing services. Current services use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips. This move comes after China announced last week that it would impose export restrictions on metals used in advanced chip manufacturing.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna, Austria, last week said Japan’s plan to release slightly radioactive wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean was provisionally approved. The IAEA said the release “would have a negligible effect on the environment.” IAEA representatives will be onsite in Fukushima for decades to come to monitor the discharges. Japan has stored the wastewater collected from the disaster cleanup in more than 1,000 tanks and is running out of storage space. Japan plans to release more than 1.3 million tons of this wastewater over the next 30 years.
The Philippines’ Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Manila, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Washington, D.C., announced last week that they have launched a development and testing facility for fuel cell technologies in Bicutan, Taguig City, the Philippines. The new R&D and testing center will develop local components for the fuel cell including a membrane and an electrode catalyst. DOST has allotted $200,000 for the facility while the DOE has given $630,000 for the R&D through 2024.
Minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting in June revealed that future interest rate increases are likely following the pause seen in the Fed’s June meeting. Analysts expect the Fed to raise the interest rates to a range between 5.25% and 5.50% in July — a 22-year high. Inflation and economic activity did not ease as much as Fed officials needed to justify another pause.
U.S. utilities are selling off their wind and solar farms to free up money to make investments in the power grid. Duke Energy, Charlotte, North Carolina; American Electric Power, Columbus, Ohio, and Consolidated Edison, New York City, have each announced or finished deals in recent months to sell renewable energy projects. Each has said they will use the proceeds to modernize the power lines and other electricity infrastructure.
R&D World’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in R&D. The top 25 industrial R&D spenders in 2020 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2020 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (10 companies), automotive (6 companies), and ICT (9 companies) which invested a cumulative total of nearly 260 billion dollars in R&D in 2019, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spending in the world by government, industries, and academia combined, according to R&D World’s 2021 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D World Index are tabulated from NASDAQ, NYSE, and OTC common stock prices for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the online publication of the R&D World Index
