Cashing in on Taylor Swift's wedding trash

**Leanna Byrne** (0:01)
If traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is restricted, what's that going to do to the oil price? It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Why SK Hynex nosedived in Korea after its big debut in New York last week, and we talked to the artist who sold rubbish from outside of Taylor Swift's wedding.
President Donald Trump has just said the US is reinstating a naval blockade on Iran and would be reimbursed 20% on all cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had earlier claimed the strait was closed, sending oil prices higher as shipping through the area slowed to a trickle. Fiona Cicotta is Senior Market Analyst at Stone X. Fiona, where's the oil price at now?

**Fiona Sincotta** (0:46)
So prices are up around 4%, but Brent is still below the $80 a barrel level, so still considerably below those sort of May highs of $115 a barrel.

**Leanna Byrne** (0:56)
All right, well BBC Verify has been examining exactly what is happening to shipping through the strait. Here's its correspondent Shruti Menon.

**Shruti Menon** (1:04)
So we've been monitoring ship movements using publicly available maritime tracking data from a website called Marine Traffic and also collating data from Kepler, which is a maritime intelligence firm that tracks vessels. What we've seen is a drop in commercial traffic after Iran said that ships could no longer transit the strait. So in the last day, only a handful of commercial vessels appear to have attempted the passage. So that's eight vessels that we have identified. Six of them were dark transits, which means that the vessels transited the waterway with their location transponders off.
Some of the vessels that I'm monitoring today have changed course before later continuing the voyage. So while there does appear to be some movement, traffic remains largely restricted and far below what it was last week.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:05)
Why might a ship switch off its tracking signal?

**Shruti Menon** (2:08)
Switching off what we call its automatic identification system. It is basically a mechanism where a ship can be publicly tracked, its identity can be revealed publicly, its position is revealed and its course is known on these publicly available websites. Usually ships go dark for various reasons, sometimes because of equipment issues. But in this instance, it's largely due to security reasons. And once they do go dark, we can't independently identify or verify where they are or which direction they are traveling in until the signal comes back.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:47)
That was Shruti Manon from BBC Verify.
Now, there was another big AI public listing on the New York tech stock market, the NASDAQ, last week. The South Korean high-powered memory chip company SK Hynex surged 13% when it debuted its secondary listing. But today, its primary market listing on South Korea's KOSPI took a massive tumble. Fiona Sincotta, you're still with me. What happened there?

**Fiona Sincotta** (3:12)
So yeah, a couple of things really could have caused this. First of all, profit-taking. SK Hynex is around 170% in South Korea exchange this year. There are also some nerves surrounding the AI trade and whether it has actually run too far and whether this huge AI spending that we're seeing is sustainable. Then we could also have been seeing some international trading strategies where breakages look to sell out of the SK Hynex in one country in order to buy into another.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:41)
What can we see in the NASDAQ today? Is it doing okay there?

**Fiona Sincotta** (3:45)
Yeah, we've seen it's actually falling today, but it's only down around 5%.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:51)
All right. Okay. So not as bad as the Cospi. It's interesting, isn't it? Does this happen when there's an initial pop and a rollback? There's been so many AI listings these days and it seems as if there is sometimes a little drop afterwards.

**Fiona Sincotta** (4:03)
That's right. I mean, there's a huge, I think we are seeing a lot of volatility surrounding AI stocks at the moment because they have had quite a big run. We've had that SpaceX IPO as well. We've had, as you mentioned, the SK Hynex also. So we are seeing these big swings as the market does weigh up whether there is too much going on with the AI trade and whether it's been a bit over-invested.

**Leanna Byrne** (4:26)
All right, Fiona Sincotta, Senior Market Analyst at Stonex. Thank you so much.
Volkswagen's boss has confirmed it may need to axe an extra 50,000 jobs in an internal memo. It's the first time Oliver Bloom has addressed the possible additional cuts, which would bring the total to 100,000. Potentially making it one of the largest job-cutting programs in corporate history. The company's supervisory board met on Thursday, but failed to agree on the radical staff reduction plans. To India now, where Delhi is making an aggressive push towards electric vehicles. It's become the first city in the country to phase out petrol scooters, bikes and three-wheeled auto rickshaws from next year. Arundhade Mukherjee reports from the Indian capital on how drivers feel about this ambitious plan.