Company briefs: Toyota

Toyota Motor may shift electric-vehicle production to the US if demand continues to grow, a top executive said, the latest sign that the Japanese carmaker is joining peers in embracing the technology.

Toyota would consider production at an existing or new factory in the United States in response to a sustained increase in American consumers' appetite for battery-powered vehicles, said Mr Bob Carter, the company's executive vice-president for sales in the US, in an interview on Wednesday. "When the consumer demand is there, when the business model is there, we'll build it," he added.

BLOOMBERG

---

Facebook

Facebook executives used the company's annual developer conference to tout new tools for businesses to power the future of digital commerce.

The social network on Wednesday introduced a handful of programming updates aimed at helping firms use WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook's messaging and photo-sharing apps, to lure new customers and keep existing ones. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that while the pandemic has forced the company to hold the normally glitzy in-person F8 conference as a virtual event, it has also let executives refocus on ways developers could innovate on Facebook's platforms.

BLOOMBERG

---

AMC

AMC Entertainment Holdings' cult-like status among social media retail investors saw its shares vault into the ranks of some of the world's most valuable companies.

The company has gone from a small cap to a large cap in the space of a few months. A 95 per cent gain amid a retail trading frenzy for so-called "meme" stocks on Wednesday left the movie theatre chain with a market capitalisation of US$31.3 billion (S$41.4 billion). That makes it more valuable than half of the companies in the S&P 500 Index.

BLOOMBERG