Stock futures fell in pre-market trading as traders considered details of President-elect Joe Biden’s newly unveiled stimulus proposal and weighed the likelihood of the package getting advanced quickly through Congress. COVID-19 concerns also flared anew as stay-in-place restrictions tightened across parts of Europe, and new data showed U.S. retail sales unexpectedly fell for a third straight month in December.

Contracts on all three major indexes traded lower Friday morning, extending declines from a day earlier. Both the Dow and Nasdaq hit record intraday highs Thursday before closing lower.

Late Thursday, Biden outlined his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief proposal, which

Vaio has launched a new series of ultraportable laptops, E15 and SE14 laptop in its bid to return to the Indian market. Vaio, once owned by Sony, is starting its second innings with two lightweight laptops which come with full-HD IPS displays and run Windows 10 Home. The laptops come preloaded with Microsoft Office 365 and have top-firing speakers, along with Dolby Audio and Smart Amplifier.

Vaio is brought back to India by Hong Kong-based Nexstgo Company under a licensed agreement with Japan-headquartered Vaio Corporation. In India, they

Stock futures were mostly higher Thursday after a report said President-elect Joe Biden could unveil a Covid-19 relief package of about $2 trillion.

Here are some of the top movers during premarket trading on Thursday.

1. BlackRock BLK | Up 1.06%

Shares of BlackRock  (BLK) – Get Report rose Thursday after the money manager posted fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations. 

BlackRock posted fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $10.18 a share, beating analysts’ estimates of $9.14. Assets under management at BlackRock rose to a record $8.68 trillion in the fourth quarter.

2. Johnson & Johnson JNJ |

Vietnam has emerged as a low-cost manufacturing base in Asian supply chains, beating India and even China in indicators, including foreign direct investment (FDI) policy and foreign trade and exchange controls, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

In fact, Vietnam’s rise as an alternative manufacturing hub to China predates a trade war between Washington and Beijing in recent years, it says in a report. Vietnam’s

Qualcomm Inc. announced Wednesday morning that it plans to purchase Nuvia, a computing-design company, for $1.4 billion.

The company expects to leverage Nuvia technology to strengthen its 5G offerings. Qualcomm
QCOM,
-1.06%
said in a release that Nuvia has “industry-leading expertise in high performance processors, systems on a chip (SoC) and power management for compute-intensive devices and applications.”

Gold jewellery retailer Malabar Group has urged the government that tax rate, including import duty on gold and GST, should be reduced to 7% to curb large-scale gold smuggling in the country. This would also boost gold trade and strengthen consumer confidence and demand for gold jewellery.

Malabar Group chairman MP Ahammed said the government should create an enabling environment for the jewellery retail trade to introduce MRP pricing in the segment without any pricing break-up in terms of GST or other taxes. MRP-based billed transactions,

An escalating trade war with China and a global pandemic in 2020 could have been devastating for semiconductor companies — yet it didn’t turn out that way.

What pessimists missed this year was the sheer size of the transformative digital wave and the secret deals that kept Chinese markets open to American vendors despite public trade frictions.

Those dynamics are likely to accelerate in 2021.

When the Trump Administration in 2019 blacklisted Huawei, the world’s largest telco equipment company, many American semiconductor leaders were understandably worried. The Chinese behemoth had become an $11 billion customer. Those sales seemed lost.

One