Earnings season. Duke Energy, Barrick Gold, Marriott, Tencent and ICA Gruppen are among companies reporting their earnings today.

Aramco suffers but makes a profit. The net profit of Saudi Arabian Oil (Aramco) fell by 73.4% due to lower oil prices, but remains healthy at $6.6 billion. The Saudi Arabian thus escaped the losses announced by other oil majors, but without having made significant accounting adjustments to integrate potentially degraded oil prices for the medium / long term. And if it makes efforts on its costs and investments, it will nevertheless distribute $18.75 billion in dividends in Q2.

Twitter enters the TikTok arena. Twitter has approached ByteDance to express its interest in TikTok's US operations, also coveted by Microsoft, according to several well-informed sources. The Wall Street Journal reveals the existence of preliminary discussions. In this singular dossier where politics has come to collide with economics under pressure from the White House, uncertainty is still great.

Berkshire has his back to the wall. Berkshire Hathaway bought back more than $5bn worth of shares in Q2, which ended with pre-tax profits of $5.5bn, down more than 10%. Warren Buffett's holding company suffered from its exposure to sectors that were slashed on the stock market, such as energy and transport. Not flamboyant, but not awful.

Aveva on the offensive? According to information from the Bloomberg agency, Aveva would negotiate the takeover of OSIsoft, in which SoftBank is a shareholder. The amount of the transaction could reach $ 5 billion. Aveva's majority shareholder is Schneider Electric. OSIsoft is a Californian software publisher whose PI System solution is used in the industry to exploit large volumes of data in real time.

Pressure. According to the Wall Street Journal, Qualcomm is pressuring the U.S. government to lift restrictions on the sale of components to U.S.-blacklisted Chinese group Huawei Technologies.

In other news. Huawei will no longer produce Kirin chips from mid-December because Taiwan Semiconductor has stopped supplying components because it is afraid of US sanctions. Fitch downgrades Rolls-Royce's debt to speculative grade, to "BB+". Anders Opedal is going to take orders from Equinor. Roche fails on etrolizumab for colitis maintenance treatment. Novavax is collaborating with Takeda Pharmaceutical on its Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Kardex takes a minority stake in Rocket Solution.