Trusted by more than 23,000 companies
As of April 2021, ANT Group, a Chinese fintech company which spun off from Alibaba's Alipay, was valued at about 200 billion U.S. dollars, which made it the highest valued unicorn globally. A unicorn is a privately held company with a market valuation of one billion U.S. dollars or more. As of April 2021, there were over 590 unicorns globally, with the majority based in the United States and China.
The ANT Group
Headquartered in Hangzhou, China, Ant Group a subsidiary of the Chinese Alibaba Group, is the nation’s largest payments provider and a leading technology company globally. As of April 2021, the industry with the highest valued unicorns in China was the finance and insurance industry, to which the market value of Ant Group contributed significantly.
Unicorns in the U.S. and China
China and the United States remain the locations with highest volume of unicorns worldwide, as well as the highest valued unicorns. While the Chinese market dominated the global unicorn scene in terms of the market values of its unicorns, the United States surpasses them in terms of the number of unicorns within the country.
Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo was the most-followed athlete on the photo-sharing platform Instagram with over 3332 million followers. Ronaldo is also the overall most-followed person on Instagram, as well as on Facebook. Second-ranked Lionel Messi had over 256 million Instagram followers.
Athletes on social media
Athletes are celebrities in their own right and have long since managed to make social media work for them. Many athletes use social media to connect with fans, but this is only one of the benefits of social media usage: most professional sportspeople have advertising and sponsorship contracts and social media provides them with an outlet to promote their preferred brands even further. Instagram posts of top athletes are big business. In January 2020, the average media value of an Instagram post by Cristiano Ronaldo was 985,441 U.S. dollars. In second place was Messi, whose posts were worth more than half a million dollars.
Social media marketing
Due to the visual nature of the platform, Instagram is a particularly attractive channel for brands and marketers to promote their products. According to an industry survey, Instagram is the second-most popular social media platform used by marketers worldwide. The leading benefits of using social media for marketing purposes are increased exposure and traffic.
As of September 21, 2021, the share price of Evergrande Group at the Hong Kong Exchange stood at 2.27 Hong Kong dollars, a significant decrease compared to a year before. The Chinese real estate developer has a liquidity crisis coming from its two trillion in debt obligations which threatens its future existence.
The United Kingdom recorded the highest electricity prices for industries with an annual consumption of 20,000 to 70,000 megawatt hour in the European Union, at 14.43 euro cents per kilowatt hour. This was followed by the Netherlands. By comparison, Germany had the highest electricity price for industries with an annual consumption between 500 and 2,000 megawatt hour, at 17.81 euro cents per kilowatt hour, while figures for the UK stood at 16.48 euro cents per kilowatt hour.
As of September 17, 2021, 25 percent of voters in Germany intended to vote for the social democratic SPD party in the upcoming federal election, set to take place on September 26, 2021, with a further 22 percent saying they will vote for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. The CDU have won the highest share of the vote in the previous four elections under the leadership of Angela Merkel, but will head into the 2021 election under the leadership of a new leader, Armin Laschet this time. Throughout most of this period, the CDU have been the most popular party in Germany, with the Green (die Grünen) party overtaking them briefly in early 2021.
Laschet losing ground
Although he inherited a relatively healthy polling position from Angela Merkel in January 2021, Laschet's time as CDU leader has proved challenging. A stalling vaccine rollout amidst rising Coronavirus cases at the start of 2021 damaged the reputation for competence the CDU had built through its pandemic response in 2020. There was also an additional leadership challenge from Markus Söder the leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party (the CSU), which laid bare some of the divisions within the CDU camp. Although Laschet saw off this leadership challenge, by May, the Green party had started to lead in the polls. During the Summer of 2021, the CDU managed to regain their lead in the polls, although Laschets favorability rating was starting to decline. Between June and September 2021, the share of voters who preferred Laschet as Chancellor fell from 34 percent to 18 percent, while the SPD leader Olaf Scholz saw the share of voters who preferred him for Chancellor rise from 26 to 53 percent.
The most important issues
According to the most recent survey on what Germans found to be the most important issues facing the country, the environment was selected by 38 percent of voters as an important issue. Throughout 2020 and most of 2021, the Coronavirus pandemic was seen as the biggest problem facing Germany, although even during this time the environment has consistently been seen as an issue for German voters. Although they may not win the election, the Green party and their leader Annalena Baerbock, could enter government as a coalition partner to the SPD or CDU, and are likely to request a greater commitment to environmental issues from the next Chancellor in return for their support.
Between March 4 and March 11, 2020, the S&P 500 index dropped by twelve percent, descending into a bear market. On March 12, the S&P 500 plunged 9.5 percent, its steepest one-day fall since 1987. The index began to recover at the start of April, and as of January 20, 2021 had reached a new record of 3,849.62.68. As of September 15, 2021 the S&P 500 stood at 4,432.99 points.
Coronavirus sparks stock market chaos
Stock markets plunged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with investors fearing its spread would destroy economic growth. Buoyed by figures that suggested cases were leveling off in China, investors were initially optimistic about the virus being contained. However, confidence in the market started to subside as the number of cases increased worldwide. Investors were deterred from buying stocks, and this was reflected in the markets – the values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite also dived during the height of the crisis.
What is a bear market?
A bear market occurs when the value of a stock market suffers a prolonged decline of more than 20 percent over a period of at least two months. The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe concern and sent stock markets on a steep downward spiral. The S&P 500 achieved a record closing high of 3,386 on February 19, 2020. However, just over three weeks later, the market closed on 2,480, which represented a decline of around 26 percent in only 16 sessions.
The statistic shows the number of health clubs in the United States from 2008 to 2021. The number of fitness facilities in the country has fallen sharply in recent years as a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As of July 2021, there were around 32 thousand health clubs in the United States.
Volkswagen was the best-selling car brand in August 2021, based on new registrations in the European Union. Volkswagen's car sales came to around 75,000 units that month, a decline of almost 14 percent year-on-year.
Chip shortage upends recovery
EU car sales dipped by almost 20 percent between August 2020 and 2021, most likely as a result of low production levels caused by a shortage of microchips. The European car market had shown signs of a recovery in recent months after contracting significantly between March and August 2020 with car sales in the 27 European markets tumbling to their lowest level in April 2020 at 270,682 units before bouncing back to around 580,000 in May and almost 1.1 million in July, just six percent lower than 2019's figures. In 2020, the worst-hit countries included Croatia, Portugal, and Bulgaria, where car sales declined by more than 35 percent year-on-year. Germany returned to its position as the largest market for passenger cars in Europe after being briefly overtaken by France in June 2020. As the brand with the highest market share in Germany, Volkswagen also managed to keep its leading position in the EU car market.
Sales lost during pandemic
In August 2021, customers in the 27 European Union member states bought some 326,000 fewer vehicles than during the same month two years earlier. Volkswagen Group's namesake brand reported lost monthly sales of almost 40,000 units. While Kia managed to sell more cars in 2021 than in 2019, Toyota witnessed the highest stability, with sales falling from some 44,000 units in August 2019 to just under 43,000 units in August 2021.
After 100 percent of ballots have been counted in the Russian parliamentary election that took place in September 2021, five political parties had a chance to occupy 225 seats in the State Duma via party lists (with a threshold of five percent). These were United Russia with 49.82 percent of the votes, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF, with 18.93 percent), the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR, with 7.55 percent), A Just Russia - For Truth (7.46 percent), and New People (5.32 percent). Furthermore, 198 seats in the lower house of the Russian parliament would be taken by United Russia candidates that were elected in single-mandate constituencies, as well as nine from KPRF, eight from A Just Russia - For Truth, five self-nominated candidates, two from the LDPR, and one each from Civic Platform, Rodina, and Party of Growth.
Based on the estimated value of chain retail sales in 2021, Walmart was the leading retailer in Mexico, with 28.7 billion U.S. dollars worth of sales in this country. Among the leading retailers operating in Mexico was also the convenience store retailer Oxxo, with chain retail sales estimated to be 9.2 billion U.S. dollars. Unlike the market leader Walmart, Oxxo is a Mexican retail company.
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