Hello team, and welcome to Thursday. At least, I think it’s Thursday. Days don’t really carry a lot of meaning at the moment.

1. ANZ Bank has suspended its dividend due to the coronavirus crisis, as profits tumbled 60 per cent. It’s the first major bank to do, also taking a $1 billion charge in anticipation of a wave of bad loans. “The Board agrees with the regulator’s guidance that deferring a decision on the 2020 interim dividend is prudent given the present economic uncertainty and that making a decision at this time would not have been appropriate,” Chairman David Gonski said.

2. The NSW government, which has announced a slight rollback of coronavirus restrictions as of tomorrow, says there could be more scope to continue relaxing them. “I have confidence if we all stick together and make these changes in May there will be other opportunities for us in the near future to have greater freedoms and greater opportunities to get back to some of the things we were used to doing before the restrictions came into place,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian said at a press conference this morning.

3. After what feels like an eternity, it seems supermarkets are finally catching up to the massive demand spikes which followed the initial coronavirus outbreak. Woolworths and Coles are lifting further product restrictions, including on a number of packaged goods. At Coles, this means you can once again stock up on loo roll. What a moment. We’re back, baby!

4. And despite the damage to social cohesion and civilisational integrity, the panic buying surge was certainly profitable for the supermarkets. Coles reported a 13% upswing in sales over the first three months of the year – the strongest sales growth in the company’s history. Chief executive Steven Cain went on to say these dazzling numbers had “not been the case” through April. Given both Coles and Woolies have gone on big hiring drives recently to meet the surge in demand, the next earnings announcement might be interesting.

5. Some people are taking advantage of their time at home for personal development. LinkedIn Learning, the platform’s education arm, reported 15% growth in April. The course enjoying the biggest quarantine-related boost was (maybe obviously) Working Remotely, followed by a slew of others ranging from time management to mindfulness to Microsoft Teams. Personally, I have developed no new skills, but good on those who have.

6. Several retailers which have either shut their stores entirely or reduced capacity through the coronavirus are turning their physical locations into “dark stores”. This means their shops become small fulfilment centres for online orders. We spoke to some experts, who agree that the coronavirus may have confirmed for some retailers that perhaps they don’t need their big, expensive high street locations anymore.

7. Australia Post is hiring 600 additional casual workers as demand for parcel delivery continues to rise. The service says it has averaged nearly 2 million parcels a day since before Easter. As with the supermarkets, it will be interesting to see if this persists to any degree beyond the shutdowns.

8. Facebook’s stock surged 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, after the company announced surging user numbers and better-than-expected financial earnings for the first quarter. The company says stay-at-home orders have sent people onto Facebook’s platforms in huge numbers, though it did report “significant reduction in the demand for advertising” in the last three weeks of the quarter, for obvious reasons. “We expect that we will lose at least some of this increased engagement when various shelter-in-place restrictions are relaxed in the future,” the company said.

9. Tesla on Wednesday reported a surprise first-quarter profit despite factory shutdowns. The company’s stock price spiked as much as 8% in after-hours trading following the news. “Despite global operational challenges, we were able to achieve our best first quarter for both production and deliveries,” the company said. However, Tesla Semi deliveries will be delayed until 2021 as the carmaker focuses on scaling up Model Y production, the company said.

10. Interesting: whereas our government says it will integrate Apple’s coronavirus tracing technology into the COVIDSafe app, the British government is less keen. The UK has explicitly rejected Google and Apple’s contact-tracing API, instead choosing to develop its own framework for tracking the spread of the coronavirus. The government specifically clashed with Google and Apple over their privacy standards for the joint API — which requires data processing to be decentralised.

BONUS ITEM

Despite the lovely Tesla earnings above, Elon Musk seems unhappy about stay-at-home orders.

Maybe that opinion is better thought-out than his earlier prediction of how the coronavirus pandemic would unfold in the US. Maybe.

As always, if you have any tips or things you think Business Insider should know about – feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected]

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