Bullets

Current business highlights

The total value of building permits issued by Canadian municipalities increased 7.4 percent to $8.7 billion in December. For 2019 overall, municipalities issued $102.4 billion worth of permits, up 2.6 percent compared with 2018. —Statistics Canada

Total household debt in the U.S., including mortgages, auto loans, credit card and student debt, climbed to $14.15 trillion US in the fourth quarter of 2019, eclipsing the previous peak at the height of the recession in Q3 2008 by $1.5 trillion US. —Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The top five companies in the S&P 500 index are all tech companies — Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook — and account for just under 20 percent of the total index. The collective value is nearly $5 trillion US of the S&P 500 total valuation of almost $27 trillion US. —Statista

The global download games market is expected to reach $15.8 billion US in 2020, growing by 5.2 percent year-onyear. — Leagueofbetting.com

A report reveals that 44 percent of U.K. small businesses in the manufacturing sector predict growth for the first quarter of 2020, up from 39 percent from the previous quarter and up from 26 percent in Q1 2019. —Hitachi Capital Business Finance

U.S.-based electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla sold a total of 367,561 units in Germany last year, while Volkswagen sold close to 80,000 electric cars. —Kryptoszene.de

U.S. homebuilding surged to a 13-year high in December as housing starts jumped 16.9 percent to an annual rate of 1.608 million units last month, the highest level since December 2006. The percentage gain was the largest since October 2016. —Fordaq

AIA’s overall Architecture Billings Index (ABI) score of 52.5 for December reflects an increase in design services provided by U.S. architecture firms (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). During December, both the new project inquiries and design contracts scores were positive, posting scores of 58.7 and 53.4 respectively. —American Institute of Architects

28 March/April 2020 Amazon’s market share in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market amounted to 33 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, more than the combined market share of its three largest competitors — Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. In Q4 2019, global cloud infrastructure service revenues amounted to $27 billion US, bringing the total for the year to $96 billion US. —Synergy Research Group

By 2040, the labour market in Germany will have a shortage of ten million people compared to today due to demographic change. To compensate for the consequences, 77 percent of industrial decision-makers already rely on “colleague” robots that interact with humans. —automatica Trend Index

In November 2019, the Brazilian exports of wood-based products (except pulp and paper) declined almost 19 percent in value compared to November 2018, from $301 million US to $244.9 million US. —ITTO

Housing sales in India’s nine key property markets fell 30 percent annually during Q4 2019 despite the government having launched several measures to revive buyer sentiment. As against 91,464 units sold during the quarter last year, only 64,034 homes were sold across the nine markets in Q3 this year. —IIFL

Employment in Canada increased by 35,000 (0.2 percent) in January, all in full-time work. The unemployment rate fell 0.1 percentage points to 5.5 percent. The additional employment in January contributed to gains totaling 268,000 (1.4 percent) since January 2019. All of this increase was the result of growth in full-time employment. —Statistics Canada

The U.S. economy added 225,000 new jobs in January, bringing the total to 6.6 million new jobs since January 2017. —U.S. Department of Labor

The total transaction volume for all services booked through Uber, growing to $65 billion US last year was up from $49.8 billion US in 2018 and $34.4 billion US the year before that. However, Uber spent $4.6 billion US on sales and marketing and $4.8 billion on R&D, which, combined with other costs and expenses, resulted in an operating loss of $8.6 billion US. —Uber/Statista