[Quest:] Hello, I'm Richard Quest, there's more QUEST MEANS BUSINESS in just a moment. Amazon's Prime Day is delivering protests in spades. Competition is taking a shot at Amazon, too. And it is Cricket Marketing World Cup. We will look at the sponsors who want to claim victory. As you and I continue. This is CNN. And on this network, the facts and the news always come fast. President Trump is defending his racist tweet about four Democratic women of color insisting it wasn't racist at all. He is now accusing the Congresswoman of hating America, adding, "If don't like it, they can leave." Trump earlier said the lawmakers all American citizens should go back to their home countries. E.U. Foreign Ministers held crisis talks on the Iran nuclear deal today. They decided to give diplomacy more time, even as Britain warns the small window to save the deal is closing. Iran says it won't resume full compliance until Europe honors its commitment to shield Tehran from U.S. sanctions. The Congo says it has confirmed a case of Ebola in the City of Goma, a major transport hub and home to more than a million people. Until now, the disease has mostly been confined to smaller villages. Almost 1,700 people have died in the outbreak since last August. The World Health Organization says it thinks it caught the case early enough to prevent Ebola from spreading throughout Goma. And the former South Africa President Jacob Zuma has denied corruption allegations at a government inquiry in Johannesburg. It's the first time Zuma has been questioned about alleged corruption of state resources. Mr. Zuma told the committee, he is the victim of a character assassination conspiracy by his enemies. Amazon's Super Bowl of shopping has arrived. It's the fifth annual Prime Day, and it started on Monday. Amazon says this year you get more deals, you have more time, but it doesn't say its backlash is bigger, too. Workers worldwide are striking over pay on working conditions. Activists are protesting against Amazon's involvement in the U.S. deportation efforts. CNN's Clare Sebastian is following it. Not surprising, really, isn't it? If Amazon is going to trumpet its big day and garner all the publicity, then workers who have grievances are going to take advantage.
[Clare Sebastian, Cnn Business Correspondent:] Yes, Richard, you know, we've seen it from the past, we've seen the scattered protest around fulfillment centers and things like this. But it really feels like this year, it's taken on a whole new energy. We're seeing all kinds of different groups out there protesting all kinds of different grievances from workers' rights to climate change to Amazon's alleged involvement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's also global, it's all across the U.S., we've seen workers in Germany walk out, we've seen protests in the U.K. But this, don't forget is a really big deal for Amazon this day. Prime now has about 100 million members, this is a huge driver of growth, and so they've carried on, Richard, they've carried on investing in the day and marketing it as best they can.
[Sebastian:] When it came to marketing this year's Prime Day, Amazon did not shop around for the cheapest options.
[Taylor Swift, Musician:] I want to say thank you so much to Amazon for having us all.
[Sebastian:] Taylor Swift headlining the live-streamed Prime Day concert, celebrities like Will Smith and Mark Wahlberg appearing in ads.
[Mark Wahlberg, Actor:] You don't need to go shopping anymore, you just go to Amazon Prime.
[Sebastian:] Is it the day work is an event?
[Unidentified Male:] Absolutely, that's why we keep growing it.
[Sebastian:] Prime Day is now five years old and has grown to a full 48 hours. The deals are exclusive to Prime members of which there are already more than a 100 million across 18 countries.
[Unidentified Male:] More people are now in a monogamous relationship, if you will, with Amazon vis-a-vis Prime then voted in the 2016 election or attend church.
[Sebastian:] Prime Day is now Amazon's biggest sales event of the year, bigger than Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but this year, it's not just about the many items getting shipped out of centers like this. The company is facing backlash on a number of fronts. From its team of workers to concerns it's simply gotten too big. Give me a sense of how you view the regulatory questions around the company at the moment?
[Unidentified Male:] I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
[Sebastian:] One thing they are thinking about, this Prime Day brings the first-ever walkout at a U.S. Fulfillment Center. This group of workers in Minnesota which has protested in the past that employees have set unrealistic targets leading to stress and injury.
[Unidentified Male:] We have a lot of redundancy in place for it. We have over 175 fulfillment centers globally to make sure that Prime numbers are not disrupted during this event as well. But we take, you know, concerns of our employees obviously very seriously as well. But I'm really actually proud of the working conditions in our fulfillment centers.
[Sebastian:] Why do these concerns keep coming up?
[Unidentified Male:] Most of these are from the outside, it's obviously very hot political environment as well.
[Sebastian:] And the backlash is also coming from the competition even as they launch their own sales to rival Prime Day. Target is advertising Summer deal days, emphasizing no membership required and eBay has gone a step further with the tongue and cheek ad featuring a teenager called
[Unidentified Male:] Alexa?
[Amazon Alexa, Artificial Intelligence:] Yes?
[Sebastian:] Even calling their event a crash sale promising extra deals if Amazon's website crashes as happened in 2018.
[Alexa:] They mostly have deals on a bunch of random stuff nobody really wants.
[Unidentified Male:] Unlike some of the competitors, this time of year, the sales and the deals that we're featuring are not products that are sitting on our warehouses that are collecting dust that we have to liquidate.
[Sebastian:] In an e-commerce market where one company controls almost half of all sales, Amazon's annual shopping festival has made it a pretty big target. So, Richard, the walk-out in Minnesota by around a 100 Amazon employees, that got underway at the top of the hour, this is significant not because of its size, it's just a 100 employees and one of about 110 fulfillment centers in the U.S. But it's significant because notoriously seen that it's been hard for workers in the U.S. to organize. These workers, I've spoken to one of them, say that they hope that this will embolden others in the U.S. to do the same. A scathing response there from Amazon to all of these protests. They say these groups are candoring misinformation to work in their favor.
[Quest:] Right, but are they having any effect, these I mean, it's not surprising, Clare, that workers would take the moment of greatest opportunity to make the greatest protest.
[Sebastian:] Not surprising at all, Richard, and especially given the political climate at the moment, we've seen a lot of the 2020 candidates taking on Amazon, the right guys to round this is pretty strong right now. But I mean, the numbers speak for themselves, there's just a few walk-outs and around 175 fulfillment
[Quest:] All right
[Sebastian:] Centers worldwide. So, as the Amazon exec told me in the piece, they have a lot of redundancy, they're not worried about this, they say.
[Quest:] Right, quick poll. Have you bought anything yet on Prime Day?
[Sebastian:] I have a couple of things waiting to pull the trigger, I have to admit, I haven't quite done it yet.
[Quest:] Oh, I haven't, I couldn't find no, I've been life is too short, all right, thank you. Wall Street is reacting to reports that Symantec and the Broadcom have called off takeover talks. Symantec shares are looking at a steep slump. At the moment, they're down sharply, Broadcom is up and Symantec is down 12 percent. Reports suggest the deal broke down, Symantec said it wouldn't accept a buyout for less than $28. Anna Stewart is with me. Look, but they always said they won't accept more, so what happened here that they held to their 28, that there was no wiggle room available?
[Anna Stewart, Cnn Reporter:] Well, it did seem from media reports that actually, they had agreed over $28 a share, but over the weekend during due diligence, they uncovered some nasties and they decided to bring that down. And Symantec is not happy. But what's really interesting, Richard, is the fact that this was a deal that really made sense for Symantec as a company undergoing all sorts of problems. And one analyst today said it's a major head scratcher, and frankly, most analysts had the value for this for this deal at $24 $28, at the very highest, but actually that was above most.
[Quest:] So what's the thinking on why this fell apart? I mean, assuming Symantec are not lemmings that want to do serious damage to themselves?
[Stewart:] Well, either this is just the art of the deal, and we will
[Quest:] Oh, you think
[Stewart:] See it come back to the table
[Quest:] Really?
[Stewart:] Oh, it's not over yet, oh, it's never over, oh, this is just the beginning, I suspect?
[Quest:] Oh, really?!
[Stewart:] Oh, yes! But then you see the new interim CEO, has only been there since May, he's called Richard Hill and he is very famous for wanting to turn things around, and he's made a big deal about saying he can turn this around. So, a lot of analysts out there wondering whether he just wants to make sure that he can fix it rather than flip it because that's what he said he would do. There are part that actually firms are involved, a couple on the board, but frankly, they're not going to get nearly as good a deal from a private equity firm than Broadcom which had all these synergies. This was a deal that made sense.
[Quest:] So, if you're a betting woman which you're not
[Stewart:] Of course not
[Quest:] But if you were a betting woman, do you think this has got more to go?
[Stewart:] I think it's got more to go, but they need to be quick as Broadcom's got other targets that it's looking at buying. TIBCO for example is on a massive software acquisition spree, it's obviously traditionally a chipmaker, but it's really trying to diversify away from hardware into software at a $19 billion software acquisition last year.
[Quest:] But why did this one make sense? Why did Broadcom and Symantec make such sense? Though the street liked it, the deal looked like it should work, why?
[Stewart:] The balance, I would say was more it made more sense for Symantec than Broadcom. For Broadcom, there are several other options out there that it could see synergies with its new acquisition from last year. So, for Broadcom, there's much more out there, there are many more options on the table. For Symantec, I would say there are less. This was a good deal for Symantec. But for Broadcom, it's interesting why they're trying to diversify into software because they were trying to do this when the Qualcomm deal dream that fell too.
[Quest:] Yes
[Stewart:] Help administration
[Quest:] Yes, help administration
[Stewart:] Absolutely not but since then the Huawei ban has really bitten hard for Broadcom.
[Quest:] Right, but now Huawei's ban has seems to have been alleviated
[Stewart:] No, only seems, but straight after the ban, they said they were going to lose $2 billion a year in annual sales. And it's so unclear, yes, we don't know what the fall-out will be. But certainly they're diversifying they're diversifying away from chips towards software makes sense.
[Quest:] Good to see you, thank you very much, indeed. The high-tech nation and its low-tech energy and why South Korea is struggling to switch to renewables. In a moment.