Beiersdorf

Otto Group Raises €325M via Schuldschein

The Otto Group successfully raised €325 million through a heavily subscribed Schuldschein (debt certificate) placement, significantly exceeding an initial target of €100 million. The issuance included tranches with three-, five- and seven-year maturities, with the five-year tranche being the largest. Institutional investors from domestic and international markets participated, and all tranches were placed at the lower end of the interest range. According to Otto, the proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes and to optimize the company's maturity profile, strengthening its long-term financing structure amid improved operating performance.

Alibaba launches Qwen3.8-Max AI model

Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8‑Max, a 2.4‑trillion‑parameter multimodal foundation model that uses a Mixture‑of‑Experts design (activating about 95 billion parameters per request) and supports context windows up to one million tokens. Positioned as an “always‑available” colleague, it handles text, images, documents and video and emphasizes autonomous, long‑running tasks—Alibaba reported an internal software‑engineering project completed in 10–16 days and said the model outperformed many human teams and rival models. Published Arena.AI benchmarks ranked it the top Chinese model for text tasks (though behind some Anthropic/US models) and showed comparable results to Anthropic’s Fable 5 in some tests. Alibaba plans to release model weights next week and simultaneously launched QwenWork, and its shares rose after the announcement.

Beiersdorf: Nivea struggles, company ups brand investment

Beiersdorf's half-year results published on 2026-08-03 show Nivea becoming the company's main problem area. Organic revenue fell sharply (‑6.8%), and the company is increasing investments in the Nivea brand in response. The report highlights a clear deterioration in performance for the long-standing mass-market brand and signals a strategic shift toward higher brand investment to address the decline.