Business news in brief

PayPal, Amazon talk on payment deal

Amazon.com and PayPal Holdings have discussed letting shoppers pay for Amazon purchases using PayPal accounts, highlighting how the digital-payments company can attract new partners since its 2015 split from Amazon rival eBay Inc.

"We have been in conversations with Amazon," PayPal Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman said. "We're closing in on 200 million users on our platform right now. At that scale, it's hard for any retailer to think about not accepting PayPal."

There are no details to announce, but Schulman said the conversations have focused on "how to use one another's assets to the mutual benefit of our customers."

A spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon declined to comment.

While Amazon's most loyal shoppers generally have their payment information saved as part of the Amazon Prime program, some shoppers might prefer the convenience of using PayPal as a primary digital wallet, said Paul Condra, analyst at Credit Suisse. That might produce more sales for Amazon, which also may benefit customers in Europe where credit cards are less prominent, he said.

-- Bloomberg News

Rules in place, Lyft to roll in Missouri

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The ride-share company Lyft announced that it will start providing services in Springfield, Mo., just hours after the Missouri House gave initial approval to statewide regulations for app-based transportation companies.

Lawmakers showed support last week in a voice vote for a bill requiring ride-share companies to pay a $5,000 licensing fee, conduct driver background checks and vehicle inspections, and exempt such companies from paying local or municipal taxes.

Uber and Lyft say statewide regulations could enable them to expand throughout the state, and Uber has promised up to 10,000 jobs if the legislation passes. Lyft began offering rides in Springfield through the app on Thursday.

There was little opposition to the proposal.

Springfield will be the first city in Missouri to welcome Lyft after a 2014 lawsuit by the St. Louis Metropolitan Taxi Commission pushed it out of the city. The company decided to move to Springfield after a recent municipal ordinance passed outlining regulations similar to the proposed House bill, according to a news release.

Uber currently operates in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and Columbia.

-- The Associated Press

Facebook testing 'stories' tool in Ireland

Facebook hasn't been shy about copying Snapchat, its smaller social-media rival. Now it's unveiling the biggest and boldest clone so far: a feature resembling Snapchat's Stories, directly within the Facebook application.

Snapchat Stories are short annotated videos and photos that people post to their audiences, viewable for 24 hours only. The feature was already knocked off by Instagram, Facebook's photo-sharing app, in August -- and that version is now used by 150 million people daily, about as many as use the Snapchat application.

Facebook's adoption means that the tool will be exposed to a global audience of 1.8 billion, including many who haven't yet been introduced to Snapchat. That has the potential to stunt the smaller company's growth just as parent Snap Inc. readies an initial public offering, expected as soon as March.

Last year, Facebook bought Masquerade, an app that puts fun filters and special effects on selfies and videos like Snapchat does.

Facebook, which is now testing the stories tool in Ireland and plans to roll it out more widely, didn't cite Snapchat competition as a reason for adding it.

-- Bloomberg News

Toray to sell pills for cat kidney disease

Toray Industries Inc. said it will sell medicine to treat chronic kidney disease in cats as the popularity of feline pets grows in Japan.

The Tokyo chemical maker said in a statement that it has received approval to make and sell the drug, Rapros, which will go on sale in Japan in April. Taken orally, the medicine is the first in the world to help limit the deterioration in kidney function in cats, rather than just ameliorating the symptoms of the disease, according to the company.

While dog ownership has fallen in recent years in Japan, the number of pet cats has risen by 1 percent since 2012 to 9.85 million. Dog ownership slid 14 percent over that period, data from the Japan Pet Food Association show. Chronic kidney disease is found in 30 percent to 40 percent of felines that are 10 years or older, according to Toray.

"We're in an unprecedented cat boom that's even given rise to the word 'nekonomics,'" Toray said, using a portmanteau that combines the Japanese word for cat with economics. The popularity of cats was estimated to have an economic effect topping $20 billion in 2015, according to research by Katsuhiro Miyamoto at Kansai University.

-- Bloomberg News

Quarter bright, Alibaba raises forecast

Alibaba Group Holding raised its full-year sales forecast after quarterly results beat estimates, as Chinese spending stays strong and the company wrings revenue from fledgling areas such as cloud computing, entertainment and search.

China's biggest e-commerce company increased its projection for fiscal 2017 revenue growth to 53 percent, from 48 percent previously. That may help assuage investors concerned that a deceleration in the world's second-largest economy is curtailing Alibaba's main online commerce business.

Despite a fairly stagnant user base of about 443 million, Alibaba benefited from a record Nov. 11 Singles' Day spending spree, and gained a larger share of online advertising from rivals such as Baidu Inc. It also more than doubled sales from cloud computing in the December quarter. As transaction growth slows, Alibaba is generating more revenue from merchants by selling them services to draw in buyers, and expanding its Netflix-like entertainment arm.

"The growth is mostly coming from the strong performance in Alibaba's digital entertainment platforms, its ability to make money from cloud computing," said Ray Zhao, a Shenzhen analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. "Investors will have a huge reaction to the revenue forecast raise."

Alibaba, which gets most of its revenue from its home market, wants to accelerate its globalization this year, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang told analysts on a conference call Friday. Other priorities include pushing deeper into rural China, and pitting its burgeoning cloud business against the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.

-- Bloomberg News

SundayMonday Business on 01/30/2017

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