"These new bounceback loans carefully target that extraordinary level of state support at those who need it most… and the £50,000 cap balances the risk to the taxpayer with the need to support our smallest businesses."

Those were the words spoken by UK finance minister Rishi Sunak to parliament this afternoon, which he hoped will boost confidence in small- and medium-sized businesses after complaints that his first scheme left them behind. 

He spoke a few hours after Prime Minister Boris Johnson, addressed the media outside his official residence at 10 Downing Street, as he returned to work after several weeks suffering from COVID-19. 

In our video today, correspondent Stefan de Vries talks to tulip farmers in the Netherlands who are similarly upbeat about businesses surviving the global pandemic, despite huge losses in the short term. 

But it's not all coronavirus news today. We spoke to Matthew Howett about the report his Assembly Research team has produced into the importance of improving the broadband available around Europe, as soon as possible.

Happy reading, 

Patrick Atack

Digital business correspondent 

P.S. Did you know we send this briefing by email, too? You can sign up to receive it here.

Uber Medics, which gives health and social care workers 25 percent off trips with the ride-hailing app Uber, has now been activated in at least 20 countries including the UK, Germany and Italy. 

Sportswear firm Adidas has warned there will not be a speedy return to expected profit margins during the rest of the year, as it revealed first-quarter operating profit fell to $70 million, well short of the $285 million experts had predicted. 

Stricken airline Norwegian Air updated its warning, saying today that if shareholders and creditors don't accept a plan to swap debt for equity, which would also give the green light to a $255 million injection from the Oslo government, it could run out of money in mid-May. 

Chinese start-up Inceptio Technology, which is developing self-driving trucks, has raised $100 million in its latest funding round, according to Reuters. The firm has deals with several Chinese car makers, including Dongfeng Automobile and Foton. 

At least 60 German companies have called for coronavirus recovery funds to be tied to climate action, warning against a drop in fuel duty or emission limits. ThyssenKrupp, Bayer, E.ON, Allianz, and Deutsche Telekom are among the signatories. 

China's industrial sector reaped $52.43 billion in March, which marks a decline of 34 percent compared with the same period in 2019. But the dip is shallower than previous months, with industrial output falling by 38 percent in January and February. 

U.S. coffee shop chain Starbucks has entered what it calls a strategic partnership with Sequoia Capital China, and the two firms will pursue co-investments in the tech sector in China. 

Web retail giant Amazon has begun to use video calls to verify merchants hoping to sell their products on the site. The retailer has previously faced criticism for allowing fraudulent sales and counterfeit produce. 

German car maker Volkswagen has reopened its Wolfsburg factory, the biggest car plant in Europe. Its 8,000 staff will go back to work, but with only 10 percent of production capacity expected, so the company can adjust to new working conditions including social distancing.

Dutch flower growers are looking ahead to next year's crop, as the business falters this year because of COVID-19.

Matthew Howett is principal analyst and founder of Assembly Research. He spoke to CGTN Europe about the report he's written on the importance of gigabit-capable broadband around Europe. 

A number of recommendations have been made in your report. Which ones do you think stand out as being the most important? 

Well, I think, crucially, these are recommendations for government and for policymakers. And so the ones most targeted to them, I think, are the ones around removing the remaining barriers that the fixed and mobile broadband providers feel are still in place, which is preventing them from going further with their roll-outs. 

So we're talking about things like reforming planning laws to make it easier for them to put up masts and dig up the streets or it's relaxing the taxation regime that exists for new fiber lines. At the moment, those are taxed quite heavily and the operators feel this is a disincentive for them to roll out further. So I think it's looking at which [of] those remaining barriers can be removed to incentivize a further commercial roll-out.

So it's almost a wish list of what's needed by the UK government if the Huawei roll-out on gigabit broadband can be done by 2025 successfully? 

Well, there is a very ambitious target to bring gigabit connectivity to everyone by 2025. And the operators, the private operators stand ready to do that. What they want are these changes from government and, to some extent, the regulator, to make it easier for them to do that, do that on time and cost-effectively. That's what we're asking for – to get that enabling environment from the policymakers so that we can see the roll-out of this infrastructure.  

How much is the coronavirus pandemic concentrating minds and businesses in terms of superfast broadband needed if more people will work from home in the future?  

Well, I think we've all come to realize during this pandemic just how crucial it is to have that critical national infrastructure in place. Many of us have been working from home, learning from home, and even having to socialize from home. All relying, of course, on the broadband connection. So I think that has brought home how important it is to have that infrastructure in place and also for it to be there for the economic recovery that many countries around the world will need to experience once we come through this.  

The report highlights the need for extra investment and regulations by the UK government. So explain specifically what Huawei would like to see? 

Well, Huawei obviously is a partner to the industry in rolling out gigabit connectivity and I think what they are saying is 'look at the work that we've done in other markets to enable gigabit-capable connections.' And there are a number of lessons that can be learnt from successful deployments, whether that's elsewhere in Europe – countries like France, Spain – or if it's looking further afield to countries in Asia, where these gigabit-capable networks have been deployed. The message to policymakers is that they're not starting on a blank sheet of paper here. Other countries have gone before us. And so there are lessons to be learnt.  

There's a warning in the report that any delay could lead to missed opportunities which would equate to between $11 billion and $36 billion lost in productivity benefits. So how do you qualify these substantial figures?

Well, there have been a number of estimates in the past few years around the contribution of gigabit connectivity to the UK economy. And that range goes all the way up to hundreds of billions of pounds. We look to the most conservative estimate based on a combination of fixed infrastructure from players like Openreach, City Fiber, and Virgin Media, along with operators offering 5G fixed-wireless-access service. And combining the various estimates, we expect that to be around about a 50 billion [$62 billion] contribution to productivity in the UK if these networks get delivered on time by 2025. If we start missing that target, even one or two years, then we start to experience the loss of productivity that we talked about that maybe 10 to 29 billion pounds worth of lost productivity if those networks don't get built according to the time scale that the government is committed to talking about. 

But loss of productivity, how does the impact of the coronavirus pandemic affect those calculations?

We haven't modeled anything differently based on the pandemic, but I think it is fair to say that the reliance on the economy to bounce back quite quickly is very important, not just the UK, but for many other countries, too. And I think while, you know, broadband policy may not be the number one item on the government's to-do list, when it gets back in full swing, it absolutely needs to be up there with all of the other sectors as being one that contributes to the economic development of the country and can provide that recovery because a lot of these businesses are going to move online, as we've seen during the past few months.