US-China trade talks: Has a deal been done?
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It's almost like the death of

of a company, right? Because if you look at our app stores, it's completely destroyed by negative reviews. Every day it's going to O and O and O.

We tell you why that is happening because of a revenge hack by a disgruntled former employee and how a tea plantation is trying to tackle climate change in a cost-effective way. But first, let's start in London, in the UK. After 20 hours of intense negotiations, there's finally a sign of truce between the US and Chinese officials who have been locked in a high-stakes trade battle.

President Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to declare that our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me. Well, a bold claim coming from him. But here's the Chinese trade official Li Chenggang on this.

China and the United States have, over the past two days, conducted professional, rational, in-depth and candid exchanges. It is hoped that progress made at the London meeting will be conducive to strengthening trust between China and the United States, and that the meeting also adds positive energy to global economic growth.

A positive energy to global economic growth is what people are hoping and wishing for. But how this has happened and what exactly does this mean? The BBC's North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, is joining us from New York. Michelle, I know it's a big task, but could you just remind us briefly about those crucial moments that have happened in the past few months between U.S. and China?

So ever since Donald Trump came back to office, he has very much had China in the crosshairs of his tariff policy. And from the very beginning, we saw tariffs placed on China over the fentanyl issue. We've seen tariffs over...

individual sectors, whether it's the auto industry or whether it's steel and aluminium, and then additional tariffs on China specifically, which were announced on April 2nd when the big global tariffs were unveiled.

There was threats of retaliation and that led the US to increase tariffs on China, threatening up to 145%. What that effectively did was create a stalemate of all trade between the US and China because at that rate it became sort of, you know...

not financially viable to continue. And so then there was this meeting in Geneva about a month ago to try and kind of establish a truce. And that was successful. And tariffs came back down to a more manageable kind of level of around 50, 55%.

But then the US started accusing China of withholding rare earths. And in return, the Chinese accused America of export controls on chips. And so things began to ratchet up. And that's why this summit in London was called kind of seen as neutral territory to try and cool temperatures. And that seems to have been achieved.

And what do we know of what happened in that meeting? Because details are still sketchy about this framework that they've agreed on.

Yeah, and we still don't know those details. I mean, we just have at this point the comments from the negotiators themselves saying that we've kind of agreed a framework. And then you have that post from Donald Trump on Truth Social saying that magnets and rare earths will sort of be supplied up front and that the U.S. would meet its commitments, including allowing Chinese students to study at American colleges and universities.

There was no mention, though, of export controls on American chips to China. So we'll have to see whether or not that kind of makes it into any final framework. And again, as they say, this deal still needs to be kind of rubber stamped, if you like, by Donald Trump and by Xi Jinping.

So where we are at for now, Michelle, stay with us, because earlier we spoke with Bert Hoffman, a former World Bank country director for China. He's now a professor at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute. I asked him if these negotiations have actually delivered the big turnaround that some people are suggesting.

Geneva was the turning point, and then there was some messiness in implementing whatever was agreed in Geneva. And I think there was some confusion. The Chinese had just started a rare earth licensing procedure. And frankly, there were so many requests for licensing that ran into delays. The U.S. interpreted that as...

slow balling the licensing for to hurt the United States, which I don't think was necessarily the case. But the United States brought up a few measures, the Huawei chips that could not be used by others outside China.

The chips design software was going to be banned to export to China. So that was a little bit tit-and-tat because there was not clarity on what actually was agreed in Geneva and what the process forward was going to be. Now in London, I think there is the clarity on that process and there is the clarity on what would be the next steps and how the process of negotiation would go.

A lot of these details are yet to come out. But let's talk about rare earths and other critical minerals that have been central to these negotiations. Now, China has huge reserves of them. What kind of leverage they've given to China in these negotiations?

Well, they have a lot of leverage, and China knew that, and I think they have now shown that they can exercise it. The rare earths, they're of various kinds. They're actually not that rare, but the processing capacity is quite rare, and most of it is in China. One of the critical items made by rare earths are magnets that are being used in electronics, in electric vehicles, and

also in inter-component ballistic missiles and other drones. So very critical for production of many kinds, both civil and military. Those are the ones that were now under the licensing system, and that made the US very nervous. And I think that was the thing that they wanted to get out of the way first. I don't know quite what they have agreed, but I think both sides have agreed that they would smoothen out this licensing system. China will not abolish it,

because they say, look, we want to not have military use of these magnets, but we would have a licensing system and speed it up so that everybody that needs it in normal industry can get it. What in turn has China been looking for? Because

This post by President Trump talks about Chinese students getting easier access to U.S. universities. And he said, we will provide to China what was agreed to in our talks in Geneva, possibly relaxing some of those controls on Chinese export to the U.S.?

What I believe China has gotten is everything that was put up as measures after Geneva. And that includes the visa for Chinese students, but it also includes the ban on the export of chips design software, which was announced after Geneva. And the third was the ban on

Huawei selling its chips abroad because the US said Huawei has used illegally software from the United States which they were not supposed to do. Looking at these talks and the way it has happened in the past few months, you've been the World Bank country director in China. How

do you look at the way China has handled this? Is there a sense that perhaps the U.S. underestimated how China would respond to the tariff threats? I think you're right. I mean, I think China did agree to meet

the terror threat head on. And that's what caused the initial escalation, if you recall, from 34% to 80% to 145%. And China matched along the way. That was something that the US probably didn't expect. What China was looking for was in the end what they now have, and that is a consultation back

that they can regularly talk about issues that come up in trade and economics. I think that has been positive for China. The U.S., though, they will get some level of tariffs that is higher than was prevalent under the Trump one and then the Biden administration. Eventually, does it end here? Or do you think it's just a temporary pause between the world's two biggest economies?

I think there will be more issues that will come along the way and the issues of national security along the side. That's why establishing a mechanism to deal with those issues is so important.

That was Bert Hoffman, former World Bank country director for China. Michelle Flury is still with us. Now, Michelle, we talked about the US-China, the macroeconomics of it. But let's talk about domestic politics and economics for President Trump, because these tariffs were also being looked at by American consumers quite closely, if this will lead to any price rise. And we had consumer inflation data that was out earlier today. What does it tell you?

Yeah, so the data was actually much better than people expected. It showed that inflation in America ticked higher, but that it was pretty muted despite tariffs. I mean, the background to this is that you've had businesses warning for months now that prices could go up because of these tariffs. So far, this data really shows that the impact has been very limited, at least for now. Perhaps this is because companies

companies are still working off those stockpiles they built to kind of get ahead of tariffs. There were some areas where you did see a bit of sort of price declines. Clothing was one, new cars was another, but that is not expected to last.

Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. We'll let you go there. BBC's North America business correspondent, Michelle Flory from New York. Let's get in. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell to look at it from the investor lens. Russ, what's been the reaction of the conclusion of this round of talks from the investors? Hello, Davina. Not very much, but they've really been expecting this. Remember, the American stock markets and global stock markets bottomed on the 8th of April when

When President Trump first called for delays in the imposition of reciprocal tariffs, we then had Geneva. So markets were really been looking for this, hoping for this. And now, as we've just been hearing, it's not necessarily a final deal. And the two countries are still grappling for geopolitical control. So there's an awful lot of work still to be done in that respect. So the big rally and the fact there's more work to be done, markets have kind of gone, yeah, OK, fine.

Yeah, but is it also, yeah, OK, taco, which is Trump always chickens out, isn't that the acronym given to him? This is Trump being Trump. I was trying not to mention that, Davina. Again, this is what markets have been expecting. They've been looking for a deal. They've been looking for an aggressive opening stance from the U.S. president.

But he still said that in his social media posts, we are getting a total of 55% tariffs. China is getting 10%. The relationship is excellent, all in caps. Well, you know his post. But the other thing that I think is important is that

Thank you.

Is this going to help calm things down or is just business as usual? I think it's very difficult for companies. And this is the key thing. It's easy for me to talk about share prices and things on screens. But if you're running a company, having to take long term investment decisions, hiring, investment, the temptation must be, if you're having to pay attention to every presidential social media post, to do nothing because he might just change his mind tomorrow. And that's the big danger. What you do need now is this period of, OK,

Deal done. Let's stick to it. That will help avoid the worst case of a global slowdown. But the more talk there is, the more confusion there is, the less companies will do, the greater the risk of a slowdown. Absolutely. Russ, be with us because this conversation continues. I'm going to shift to another one where you talked about uncertainties of businesses. Now, this story is about a founder's worst fear, where years of work is wiped out in minutes.

That's exactly what happened to Indian hyper-delivery startup Kirana Pro, which lost all its critical app data after an internal sabotage by a former employee. The cybersecurity breach left over 50,000 customers suddenly cut off from the services they relied on. So earlier I spoke with the company's founder, Deepak Ravindran, who told me what happened.

Basically, what happened is that on 24th of May, we came to know that our systems are not working and started getting notifications that our servers and internal code is getting deleted. So we realized that it's a hack. Initially, we thought it's an external hack. And then the investigation started. We got in touch with GitHub as well as Amazon AWS.

And GitHub reached us back with the result that it's deleted by one of our internal employees. So somebody inside your company deleted all app code and logged all of you out of the system? Yes, that's correct. And it's been more than now 15 days. What's been the cost of this? Yeah, it's almost like a death of a company, right?

because if you look at our app stores it's completely destroyed by negative reviews like it's now two star right now every day it's going to and low and low towards uh i mean i'm publicly apologizing for the customers for the fact that you know this happened internally we are actually really there

55,000. Are you confident that those 55,000 customers would come back? Well, it is going to be a debatable scenario. The only positivity outcome would be the fact that we are releasing a new version with better features. So hopefully the product can speak for itself and bring us more customers. We are introducing something called cheat codes.

The feature which let you activate a discount code called Sorry. And once you type in the Sorry code, you get a discount of 90% on the product. But you're a startup. I mean, these kind of attacks have been seen in big companies as well. They're vulnerable, in fact. But you are a startup working with limited amount of funding. How does this impact your budget for the year? And would you have to seek fresh investments then?

Yes, so we had raised the money, which is roughly around $1.5 million. So we will definitely implement two things in the company for security purposes. One is that we are a scrappy startup that we are just five months old right now. So we didn't have even a proper HR in place.

nor does the legal formalities alongside onboarding our employee in terms of everything. We didn't add that structure in place. So that is one thing that we kind of fixed right now because we hired an HR. Secondly, we will definitely have security personnel in charge in the company, like somebody who can be appointed on the security side of things. But in hindsight, could you have done more to prevent this?

It's not my first company, it's my fourth company. So I should have done a better job with the representative as the company as a for-fed CEO. So going forward, I will definitely take care of things and make sure that these events will never happen in the company. And those people who have invested in your startup, there must be a pressure from them as well, isn't it? Yeah. So the biggest pressure is that customers are lost.

customers are lost in the sense, you know, customers are moving to other platforms. Like, it's a highly competitive market, right? E-commerce is a highly competitive market. Every day, new innovations are happening. That much user base was highly affected. Like, 99% of the code was wiped off.

and hardly anything in terms of data recovery. So writing that entire code, which was invested of over $200K and writing that from scratch is a Herculean task for the company right now. For the 14 days right now, we are non-stop, non-sleep days and we are hard working, right? We didn't have any off days on Saturday, Sunday. We are working every day. So this shouldn't happen to anybody.

I request and recommend everybody to take care of security measurements inside the company and outside the organization. By when do you think the app would be up? We are trying our level best to launch this week itself. Right now, the entire company is focused upon that.

That was Deepak Ravindran, founder of Kirana Pro. Russ, what a nightmare for any company. And this reminds me about how even UK retail giant Mark & Spencer faced a cyber attack, which lost it for 46 days. And they had to pause their online orders only resuming this week. In Mark & Spencer's case, the attack has gone in through a subsupplier rather than through an inside job. And the inside job is probably even harder to defend against.

But it does show the dangers operationally, financially and ultimately reputationally to a company. If there's a cyber attack and customers feel that their interests have not been well defended or the company's not communicated well, very difficult things to deal with. Invest as best you can. And if something does go wrong, you have to be very transparent, very clear, very quickly. Absolutely. Deepak is hoping some of those customers will come back. We'll wait and see.

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You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.

Now to Ghana, where the government is actually urging nurses and midwives to call off a strike over pay and working conditions. The walkout has left hospitals stretched and patients waiting, with many pregnant women facing long delays for care. Here's one patient who told the BBC how she's been affected.

We waited a while and then a doctor came and she told us the midwives are on strike. So those coming for gyne and then weighing and those types should go. But all the pregnant women here and those who have given birth through CS should wait. They will take care of us. So that's what we are here for. We are waiting for them to take care of us.

Well, difficult times there. Our reporter Thomas Nardi is joining us from Ghana's capital, Accra. Thomas, just tell us what exactly has happened? What's the issue here? Well, the Nurses and Midwives Association of Ghana started the strike last week with partial withdrawal of services over the government's failure to implement their conditions of service agreement.

with the previous government. The new government which assumed office in January had proposed that the agreement be implemented next year because it wasn't budgeted for this year and said if it is even implemented, it could cost nearly $200 million, which has the potential of derailing the national budget. They also said that the implementation of the agreement itself has been delayed because of a court injunction by a faction of the nurses.

who were not happy for not being included in the negotiation process. But this has been rejected by the health workers. They say that the issue has been resolved and they should have been budgeted for this year. Well, we heard from a patient a moment ago. So this is definitely a challenging time for hospitals that are trying to operate under these conditions. It has literally brought Ghana's healthcare sector down.

to its knees. Over 100,000 nurses and midwives are participating in the strike. So it has disrupted the health care delivery in the country. The government has even appealed to retired nurses and midwives to step in. I visited the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, which is one of the main government health facilities in the capital.

Some patients were being turned away because of increasing pressure. Doctors have had to double as nurses and midwives. I spoke to Reverend Dr. Matthew Owusu-Buama, head of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the hospital. Here is what he had to say. With the absence of the midwives, it has stretched the doctors beyond their capacity to

So the doctors would have to be doing the work that the midwives, most often, usually would have done, checking the urine of the pregnant women, blood pressure monitoring. And indeed, all the midwifery nursing care services, the doctors now have taken that upon themselves, in addition to their regular clinical service provision. And that is very challenging. But the question is how long, and I don't think it can last forever,

So I asked Philemon Japong from the Nurses' Union how his members feel about the impact of the strike on patients. Let's listen to what he has to say.

I'm devastated because what we love to do is to give care. And when you have people who are sick and can't be cared for because someone has neglected to take care of the carer, it's rather unfortunate. We are hoping that we will cross this road quickly so that we can go back and give the care that we need to give to our patients. So we negotiated for these conditions of service in 2024 May. It's supposed to last for two years.

And one year down the line, it's not being implemented. It shows that time value of money nurses and midwives are losing. But Thomas, the government is also operating in one of the tightest budgets ever. Is there any end in sight here? Is there a middle road? There's no end in sight at the moment. The government has presented a proposal to the nurses and they are currently considering it, but they haven't responded to the proposal yet. So we are still waiting.

Right. We'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us, BBC's Thomas Nadi from Ghana there. Now, Russ, I want to talk about the bromance between US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk that had been disrupted. Elon Musk has expressed regret on social media for his recent posts about President Donald Trump saying they went too far.

Do you think the relationship is back on track with this? I think it's probably too early to say that. I mean, the president did make threats about cancelling contracts for some of Mr. Trump's companies like SpaceX. His big, beautiful tax bill still contains plans to reduce or abolish subsidies for electric vehicles. So if the romance is really back on, then you may see the president give ground on that. But he hasn't given any intention of it yet. But I think Mr. Musk has probably looked at his share price, looked at the importance of some of these subsidies and government contracts and said,

decided he may need to be a little bit more careful with what he says. Well, he's also given a deadline or sort of a timeline for his robo-taxis launch in Texas and Austin, saying it's going to be June 22nd now. So is Elon Musk firmly back on the driver's seat, one might call it, for his business? I think that's what Tesla shareholders want to see after the way the share price has been so volatile and the setbacks that they've had in terms of losing market share.

The difficulties in getting the Model Y range out and the political blowbacks, I think that's what they want to see. And from a pure investment perspective, Tesla's stock market valuation is $1 trillion. BYD of China has a market capitalization of $150 billion. But...

But BYD makes more money. So Tesla's shareholders are clearly expecting great things, not just from the car business, but things like robo-taxis, cyber trucks and robotics. So the robo-taxi is a key part of justifying that very high stock market valuation going forwards.

Absolutely. And talking about another company and another sector, clearly is aviation sector. And this one news is from Australia earlier in the day, where Jetstar Asia, it seems, is shutting down, which is a Singapore-based budget airline. And it is, of course, part of Qantas from Australia. So the Qantas airline, how...

How are you reading this? Is the era of affordable lines over then? No, I think it's just an indication of how fiercely competitive this business is within the Asian air routes we're talking about here. Big players like AirAsia, Scoot, Orline and lots of little local players. Three things ultimately do accompany in competition.

customer dissatisfaction or regulation, and in this case, it's competition, and Qantas decided to redeploy the money back on its core business rather than getting broiled in this very, very messy competitive affair on the Asian routes.

Absolutely. We'll let you go with that. Thank you so much for joining us, Ross Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell over there. All of these stories and much more on our sister program at Midnight GMT, Business Matters, where we'll be looking at US-China trade talks in detail. Thank you for being with us.