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When Chevron won a new license to drill in Venezuela, it celebrated a return to one of the world’s richest oil regions, where it had operated for more than a century. Three months later, the company is in a bind.
The Trump administration has amassed the biggest American military buildup in the Caribbean since the 1980s to exert pressure on Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. has carried out airstrikes on alleged drug boats, killing dozens. Land targets could come next, President Trump has said.
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Collin Eaton
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Walmart’s CEO issued an AI wake-up call, saying the technology will wipe out some jobs and reshape the company’s workforce. Doug McMillon’s remarks—which echo those made by leaders at Ford, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon—reflect a rapid shift in how executives discuss the potential human cost of AI.
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Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of FanDuel, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time Monday, as the company tries to narrow the valuation gap between it and rivals including DraftKings.
Flutter said Monday that it’s planning to make the New York Stock Exchange its primary listing and will put that to a vote of its shareholders in May. Making the NYSE its home, rather than London, will help it get included in important U.S. indexes, the company said.
Launching Monday with the ticker FLUT, it’s targeting New York as its primary listing late in the second quarter and early in the third quarter.
Having a New York listing will also boost its profile in the U.S., help with recruitment and retention, and access “much deeper” capital markets.
Flutter CEO Peter Jackson spoke with Yahoo Finance about the company after it started trading on Monday. The total addressable U.S. sports betting market is expected to reach $40 billion by 2023 — but Jackson thinks that’s lowballing it. “I expect [$40 billion] will turn out to be conservative, because everything in America turns out bigger than you expect,” he said.
And when asked about betting on the Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, he said, “We’ll break records in a couple of weeks time.”
London-listed shares
FLTR,
drifted 0.3% lower on Monday, though the stock has gained 17% this year.
According to FactSet, DraftKings
DKNG,
trades on 8.2 times estimated fourth-quarter sales, compared to 2.6 times for Flutter Entertainment.
Flutter said it plans to retain its London listing, having already delisted from Euronext Dublin.
Flutter earlier this month said that FanDuel was the “clear number one sportsbook” in the U.S. during the fourth quarter.
Other Flutter brands include Betfair, PokerStars and Paddy Power.
Weston Blasi contributed.
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United Airlines Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it was rethinking its longer-term plans for Boeing’s biggest 737 Max jet, the Max 10, after the government’s grounding of dozens of Max 9s this month raised questions over whether the aircraft maker could still deliver planes on time.
United
UAL,
Chief Executive Scott Kirby said during the airline’s earnings call on Tuesday that it wasn’t canceling its orders for the Max 10. But he said the airline was taking the jet “out of our internal plans.”
“We’ll be working on what that means exactly with Boeing,” he said. “But Boeing is not going to be able to meet their contractual deliveries on at least many of those airplanes.”
United, during the call, said that it had 277 Max 10 jets on order for the rest of the decade. Of the 107 jets set for delivery this year, 31 were Max 9s. But Chief Financial Officer Michael Leskinen said was “unrealistic” to expect those jets to arrive as currently planned.
“Look,” he said. “The reality is that with the with the Max grounding, this is the kind of straw that broke the camel’s back with believing that the Max 10 will deliver on the schedule we had hoped for.”
He added: “It’s a great aircraft. But we can’t count on it. So we’re working on alternate plans.”
The decision on the Max 10 marks the latest blow to Boeing’s
BA,
reputation, as safety concerns pile up after a panel tore off a 737 Max 9 jet flown by Alaska Airlines earlier this month.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9s for inspections, leading to scores of flight cancellations for both United and Alaska
ALK,
United, when it reported fourth-quarter results on Monday, said it expected to lose money in the first quarter, following the impact of those cancellations. Still, shares were up on Tuesday on United’s full-year profit forecast.
The FAA over the weekend also recommended that operators of Boeing’s 737-900ER planes “visually inspect mid-exit door plugs to ensure the door is properly secured.” Regulators around the world grounded the 737 Max in 2019 after two fatal crashes.
Meanwhile, Ben Minicucci, the chief executive of Alaska Airlines, in an interview with NBC News published Tuesday, said inspectors found loose bolts on “many” of its Boeing 737 Max 9s after the mid-flight blowout.
“I’m more than frustrated and disappointed,” he said in that interview. “I am angry. This happened to Alaska Airlines. It happened to our guests and happened to our people. And my demand on Boeing is, what are they going to do to improve their quality programs in-house?”
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Distressed-debt giant Oaktree Capital sees big opportunities in credit unfolding over the next few years as a wall of debt comes due.
Oaktree’s incoming co-chief executives Armen Panossian, head of performing credit, and Bob O’Leary, portfolio manager for global opportunities, see a roughly $13 trillion market that will be ripe for the picking.
Within that realm is high-yield bonds, BBB-rated bonds, leveraged loans and private credit — four areas of the market that have only mushroomed from their nearly $3 trillion size right before the 2007-2008 global financial crisis.
“Clearly, the most acute area of risk right now is commercial real estate,” the co-CEOs said in a Wednesday client note. “That’s because the maturity wall is already upon us and it’s not going to abate for several years.”
More than $1 trillion of commercial real-estate loans are set to come due in 2024 and 2025, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
A retreat in the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield
BX:TMUBMUSD10Y,
to about 4.1% on Wednesday from a 5% peak in October, has provided some relief even though many borrowers likely will still struggle to refinance.
Related: Commercial real estate a top threat to financial system in 2024, U.S. regulators say
“There’s a need for capital, especially for office properties where there are vacancies, rental growth hasn’t materialized, or the rate of borrowing has gone up materially over the last three years. This capital may or may not be readily available, and for certain types of office properties, it absolutely isn’t available,” the Oaktree team said.
With that backdrop, the firm expects to dust off its playbook from the financial crisis and acquire portfolios of commercial real-estate loans from banks, but also plans to participate in “credit-risk transfer” deals that help lenders reduce exposure.
Oaktree also sees opportunities brewing in private credit, as well as in high-yield and leveraged loans, where “several hundred” of the estimated 1,500 companies that have issued such debt are likely “to be just fine” even if defaults rise, they said.
Another area to watch will be the roughly $26 trillion Treasury market, where Oaktree has some concerns “about where the 10-year Treasury yield goes from here” — given not only the U.S. budget deficit and the deluge of supply that investors face, but also how foreign buyers, once the “largest owners in prior years, may be tapped out.”
Related: Here are two reasons why the 10-year Treasury yield is back above 4%
U.S. stocks
SPX
COMP
fell Wednesday after strong retail-sales data for December pointed to a resilient U.S. economy, despite the Federal Reserve having kept its policy rate at a 22-year high since July.
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A tech employee’s recording of the meeting firing her from a sales role at Cloudflare
NET,
has spurred criticism of the company — and a broader conversation about the right way to let employees go.
Viewers have called the roughly 10-minute TikTok video, which went viral this week, “sad” and a “disaster.” Even Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince responded on X (formerly Twitter) that it was “painful for me to watch.”
In the video captioned, “POV: You’re about to get laid off,” former Cloudflare account executive Brittany Pietsch logs into a virtual meeting with an HR representative and a director at the company, both of whom she says she’s never met before. In a caption, Pietsch writes that she assumed they were meeting to let her go, because she had heard from coworkers who had been axed already.
In the video, the company reps say that Pietsch hadn’t met performance expectations, and that Cloudflare had decided to “part ways” with her. Pietsch’s response is what has pushed this clip to be shared all over social-media newsfeeds: She asks for an explanation for why she, specifically, is being let go by the company, particularly because she’s a new employee who hasn’t heard any negative feedback. She also asks why her manager isn’t a part of this termination meeting.
“Every single one-on-one [meeting] I’ve had with my manager, every conversation I’ve had with him — he’s been giving me nothing but ‘I am doing a great job,’” she says during the meeting. “I’m just definitely very confused and would love an explanation that makes sense.”
The director, who can’t be seen in the video, says he “won’t be able to go into specifics” on Pietsch’s performance.
In a statement to MarketWatch, a Cloudflare spokesperson clarified that the company did not conduct layoffs, and is not engaged in a reduction of force. “When we do make the decision to part ways with an employee, we base the decision on a review of an employee’s ability to meet measurable performance targets,” the Cloudflare statement said. “We regularly review team members’ performance and let go of those who aren’t right for our team. There is nothing unique about that review process or the number of people we let go after performance review this quarter.”
Pietsch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Company CEO Prince added on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the company fired 40 salespeople out of 1,500 in its go-to-market division. “That’s a normal quarter,” he wrote in his post. “When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not.”
But he also added: “We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them … We don’t always get it right.”
Many viewers seem to agree, as the video has drawn close to 200,000 views on TikTok and millions of views on X, along with going viral on Reddit.
“Total disaster on both sides,” lawyer Eric Pacifici said.
“Totally unfair to her,” wrote Austen Allred, CEO of the online-coding bootcamp Bloom Institute of Technology. “Pretty sad across the board.”
On LinkedIn, Pietsch gave her own response to the social-media uproar. She said that her manager was unaware that she was being let go, and that she asked questions during the meeting not to try and save her job, but rather to get greater clarity on why she had been singled out for termination.
“I’ll never be able to wrap my mind around it,” she wrote in the post. “We as employees are expected to give 2 weeks notice and yet we don’t deserve even a sliver of respect when the roles are reversed?”
It’s never easy to part ways with an employee, according to Molly, a human-resources consultant who runs the TikTok account HR Molly, which has 80,000 followers. She asked only to be identified by her first name for privacy reasons.
But that being said, it’s very important to treat affected employees with respect. That can include sharing as much information as possible about why the decision is being made.
“I tell people that even if you catch someone stealing, even that termination meeting should have a level of decency,” she said. “It seems like there’s a significant consensus that the meeting [in the viral video] lacked some dignity.”
It’s also important to understand these kinds of conversations will be difficult for an employee no matter what, Molly added.
“We know this impacts people and we know this is emotional and that it’s harmful. How can we do it in a way that creates the least amount of additional harm?” she said, noting that she picked up the concept from fellow TikTok creator and diversity consultant Ciarra Jones. “Companies need to prioritize the well-being of the employee that’s impacted.”
As for recording your layoff or firing meeting — that can be risky, Molly said, and downright illegal in states that require you to receive consent before doing so.
But companies and HR professionals would be wise to remind themselves that, in this day and age, it can happen, she said. And if a camera or tape recorder would change the way you handle an interaction, it’s a good sign to reevaluate.
According to its company website, Cloudflare has dozens of job postings for open positions across the company, including sales roles.
In her LinkedIn post, Pietsch said that she’s not very concerned about any backlash over the video that might impede her chances of getting another job.
“Any company that wouldn’t want to hire me because I shared a video of how a company fired me or because I asked questions as to why I was being let go is not a company I would ever want to work for anyway,” she wrote.
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Mark Zuckerberg cashed in on his company’s 2023 stock rally in a big way — selling nearly $428 million worth of shares in Meta Platforms Inc. over the final two months of the year.
The Meta
META,
co-founder and chief executive offloaded just under 1.8 million shares over the course of every trading day between Nov. 1 and the end of last year, according to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
The sales were in accordance with a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by Zuckerberg in July and saw him capitalize on Meta’s rebounding stock price, which soared 194.1% in 2023 — and nearly threefold since it hit a seven-year low in November 2022. By comparison, the S&P 500
SPX
and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP
indexes gained 24.2% and 43.4%, respectively, in 2023.
The moves also broke a two-year hiatus, dating back to November 2021, during which Zuckerberg did not sell any of his stock in the Facebook parent company, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news. Zuckerberg, who owns roughly 13% of Meta, is ranked the seventh-richest person in the world with a net worth of $125 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Nasdaq-listed Meta shares, which fell 0.5% on Wednesday to $344.47, are now roughly 11% off their all-time closing high of $382.18 from September 2021.
Representatives for Meta could not immediately be reached for comment.
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Nothing has changed our lives more this year than the advances made in artificial intelligence — and they have the potential to alter our lives in even more dramatic ways down the road.
So it’s a no-brainer that Sam Altman, co-founder and recently returned chief executive of the once-little-known OpenAI, should be named “Person of the Year” by Time Magazine when the selection is announced Wednesday.
Altman has already cracked Time’s shortlist, joining candidates from varied backgrounds, including world leaders like Xi Jinping and entertainment phenomenon Taylor Swift. The selection ultimately comes down to an “individual or group who most shaped the previous 12 months, for better or for worse.”
But Time has often given “agents of change” its yearly honor — just look at 2021 winner Elon Musk — and Altman certainly fits that bill.
No other innovation in the past year has had an impact in such disparate realms. OpenAI publicly launched its ChatGPT chatbot late last year, and as the technology grew viral in 2023, it upended the stock market, Silicon Valley and companies that wouldn’t normally be classified as technology businesses. The ensuing product development and surge in generative AI investment revitalized a tech industry that had sunk into the doldrums amid a pandemic hangover.
Admittedly, it will take time for companies to realize the true financial benefits of AI: Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
is among the few to generate serious money from the frenzy so far. But market researcher IDC predicted that global spending on AI, including software, hardware and services for AI-centric systems will reach $154 billion this year, up 27% from a year ago. That total could zoom above $300 billion by 2026.
Also read: One year after its launch, ChatGPT has succeeded in igniting a new era in tech
And AI isn’t only impacting the corporate world. The technology is already affecting our daily lives, and it will have even deeper effects going forward. Chatbots are getting smarter on websites, facilitating better customer service. They’re starting to alter the workplace as well, spitting out mostly coherent marketing copy, research and even, gasp, news articles — albeit with plenty of errors.
At first, ChatGPT seemed like a fun way to kill time or get homework help, but the chatbot and its ilk will seriously alter the working world, helping to eliminate perhaps millions of jobs. Morgan Stanley recently predicted that more than 40% of occupations will be affected by generative AI in the next three years.
Altman himself has been the face of OpenAI in the past year. He’s talked up the technology, but he also appeared at congressional hearings in May to discuss potential regulation of AI, testifying that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” His recent firing and quick rehiring by OpenAI and its small, nonprofit board late last month fueled a veritable media storm before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.
Time chooses its persons of the year for their impact, not because they’re saints. And Altman’s own story is not without controversy. The recent brouhaha over his leadership of OpenAI is believed to have been caused by a deep schism over the ethics of AI development. The board seemingly wanted more guardrails and precautions, and feared that rushed development could irrevocably doom mankind.
Read in the Wall Street Journal: How effective altruism split Silicon Valley and fueled the blowup at OpenAI
Altman, who also wooed Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
to become an investor in OpenAI, emerged the victor in the upheaval with his own company’s altruistic board. Had Altman truly been fired from OpenAI, Microsoft was planning to hire him, and nearly every employee at OpenAI was ready to quit and follow him there. While OpenAI faces plenty of competition, including from Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOG,
GOOGL,
Google, Altman should continue to be the face of AI development, for good and for bad, even as he has advocated industry regulation.
The debut and influence of ChatGPT and follow-on AI products are having the biggest impact on tech development since the invention of the iPhone. Altman is at the center of it and leading the charge. Whether he can keep the lid on Pandora’s Box or not depends on many factors, but he and the company he leads are clearly driving a new tech movement that affects us all, whether we like it or not.
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BERLIN—Bayer Chief Executive Bill Anderson said the company would bounce back quickly from a recent spate of bad news, and warned that a breakup of the pharmaceutical and agricultural company was no universal cure for its ailments.
A stream of negative news has rekindled calls from investors for Bayer to unlock value by spinning off its units into separate businesses. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, Anderson said the company couldn’t be distracted from the tough restructuring to fix the businesses.
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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OpenAI has reached an “agreement in principle” for Sam Altman to return to his post as chief executive officer alongside a new board, just days after his ousting, the company said on Wednesday.
In a posting on X, the tech group behind ChatGPT said former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor will serve as chair, joined on the board by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora co-founder and CEO and current director Adam D’Angelo.
The…
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Updated Nov. 20, 2023 6:34 am ET
SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft said it is hiring Sam Altman to helm a new advanced artificial-intelligence research team, after his bid to return to OpenAI fell apart Sunday with the board that fired him declining to agree to the proposed terms of his reinstatement.
Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella posted on X (formerly Twitter) late Sunday that Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder who resigned Friday in protest over Altman’s ouster, will lead its team alongside unspecified colleagues. Nadella said Microsoft was committed to its partnership with OpenAI and that it would move quickly to provide Altman and Brockman with “the resources needed for their success.”
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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Kyle Vogt resigned as chief executive of autonomous-vehicle company Cruise late Sunday, following the recent suspension of Cruise’s operations on public roads.
“Today I resigned from my position as CEO of Cruise,” Vogt, who co-founded Cruise and oversaw its 2016 acquisition by General Motors Co. GM, tweeted Sunday night. “The last 10 years have been amazing, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped Cruise along the way.”
He…
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OpenAI announced Friday afternoon that CEO Sam Altman has departed the company, saying the executive “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
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OpenAI said Friday that Sam Altman is no longer its chief executive, with the ChatGPT parent adding that said Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a blog post.
In a tweet Friday, Altman said he “will…
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Groupon Inc. shares were tumbling more than 20% in Thursday’s extended session after the discounting marketplace announced a new rights offering and acknowledged “challenged” business conditions.
The company said in a Thursday afternoon release that its board approved an $80 million fully backstopped rights offering to all holders of its common stock. The rights offering will occur through the distribution of nontransferable subscription rights to purchase common stock at a price of $11.30 a share.
Groupon
GRPN,
also posted third-quarter results, showing revenue down to $126.5 million from $144.4 million a year prior and slightly below the $129.7 million FactSet consensus, which is based on estimates from three analysts.
The company logged a net loss of $41.4 million, or $1.31 a share, compared with a loss of $56.2 million, or $1.86 a share, in the year-earlier period.
“We are turning our focus to delivering projects across product, engineering, sales, marketing and revenue management that we expect will reinvigorate our marketplace and position our business to return to growth,” interim CEO Dusan Senkypl said in a release.
Added Senkypl: “While we did not make as much progress on key projects as I expected and our business continues to be challenged, I am pleased to see sequential improvement in our financial performance, Local Billings return to growth, and our plan to strengthen our liquidity position.”
In addition, co-founder Eric Lefkofsky plans to leave Groupon’s board of directors, according to Thursday’s release. “With a new management team and the announcement of today’s financing strategy, I am confident that Groupon is on the right track to become the ultimate destination for experiences and services,” Lefkofsky said.
Groupon’s stock is up 58% so far this year but off 97% from its 2011 all-time high.
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Commercial space-flight operator Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it would cut staff in an effort to focus on developing its new class of Delta spacecraft that are expected to cost less and bring more profit.
Management, in an email to employees, did not offer specific figures on the cuts, while citing a shaky investing environment as part of the reason for them. The message said the company would offer more details during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
Virgin Galactic
SPCE,
when reached on Tuesday, declined to offer additional information. Executives over the summer said they expected commercial service for Delta ships to begin in 2026, after testing in 2025.
Shares were little changed after hours on Tuesday. The stock has fallen 50.4% so far this year.
The cuts follow a handful of space flights this year from Virgin Galactic, which was founded by billionaire Richard Branson. But Chief Executive Michael Colglazier, in the email, said that following successes from the spaceship Unity and its carrier mothership, Eve, the company needed to “reduce our reliance on unpredictable capital markets.”
“To profitably scale our business, we must first invest upfront capital to create a fleet of ships based on a standardized production model — the Delta Class ships,” Colglazier said in the email.
He added that “uncertainty has grown in the capital markets,” with higher interest rates pressuring borrowing and “geopolitical unrest” making for a more cautious environment. He said the Delta spacecraft played a key role in expanding flight service and profitability, and that it was crucial to focus on bringing them into service.
“Interest rates remain high, which adds pressure to companies who are investing today for profits that will come in the future,” he said. “Geopolitical unrest continues to expand, and the combination of these factors makes near-term access to capital much less favorable.”
“The Delta ships are powerful economic engines,” he continued. “To bring them into service, we need to extend our strong financial position and reduce our reliance on unpredictable capital markets. We will accomplish this, but it requires us to redirect our resources toward the Delta ships while streamlining and reducing our work outside of the Delta program.”
He said employees would be notified of their job status between Tuesday and Thursday. Employees will be working from home for the rest of the week, Colglazier said, adding that on-site work locations would be unavailable through that time.
“Delta ships have been designed to have a relatively low unit-production cost and have a material improvement flight cadence relative to our initial ship, VSS Unity,” Colglazier said on Virgin Galactic’s earnings call in August.
“The Delta development process has yielded some excellent enhancements to the ship’s architecture, particularly with regard to manufacturability and maintainability,” he said. “And we are tracking well against our primary ship-performance criteria.”
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“There is no way around the fact that they have stolen our business in Russia, and we are not going to help them make that look legitimate.”
That’s new Carlsberg CEO Jacob Aarup-Anderson, according to a Reuters account of a journalist call on Tuesday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin this summer ordered the seizure of Carlsberg’s stake in its Baltika subsidiary. Earlier this month, Carlsberg ended license agreements that allow for its beers to be produced in the country.
According to the presidential decree, Carlsberg retains title to the shares in Baltika Breweries but no longer has any control or influence over the company.
From the archive (March 2022): Carlsberg and Heineken both say they will exit the Russian market
Carlsberg reported a 3% decline in organic volume growth, as a 6.3% slide in Central and Eastern Europe and a 5.2% decline in Western Europe was partly offset by a 1.5% rise in Asia.
The brewer said two-thirds of the volume decline was due to bad weather and another one-third to consumer sentiment.
Organic revenue, however, rose by 5.8%, on price hikes. It kept its operating-profit guidance for the year unchanged at 4% to 7% growth, and launched a new stock-buyback program valued at 1 billion Danish crowns.
Carlsberg said comparisons in the fourth quarter will be positive in China, in light of the year-ago lockdown, but the weak macro environment in Southeast Asia will continue to impact markets.
Carlsberg shares
CARL.B,
were steady on Tuesday but have dropped 8% this year.
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Morgan Stanley said late Wednesday that Co-President Edward “Ted” Pick will become its chief executive, effective Jan. 1.
Outgoing Chief Executive James Gorman will become executive chairman, Morgan Stanley said. Pick will also join the firm’s board of directors.
“The board has unanimously determined that Ted Pick is the right person to lead Morgan Stanley and build on the success the firm has achieved under James Gorman’s exceptional leadership,” the company said in a statement.
“Ted is a strategic leader with a strong track record of building and growing our client franchise, developing and retaining talent, allocating capital with sound risk management, and carrying forward our culture and values,” it said.
Gorman had announced his intention to step down in May, setting off a “Sucession”-like run for the top job at the investment bank.
Pick’s name had been among those in the running. The executive joined Morgan Stanley in 1990, and was promoted to managing director in 2002, according to his bio on the company’s website.
Gorman became CEO in January 2010, having joined the firm in 2006.
The lack of a clear successor at Morgan Stanley has weighed on its stock lately.
The shares are down 24% in the last three months, three times the losses for the S&P 500 index
SPX
in the same period. So far this year, Morgan Stanley shares are down 16%, contrasting with an advance of about 9% for the S&P.
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“ ‘You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard, because it’s way harder than you think. If I go taking all of my knowledge now and I go back, and I said, I’m going to endure that whole journey again, I think it’s too much. It is just too much.’ ”
That was one of the world’s most visionary tech-sector leaders, Nvidia
NVDA,
CEO Jensen Huang, who explained that building Nvidia was “a million times harder than I expected it to be” as he theorized that “nobody in their right mind would do it” if they were aware of the true personal toll.
The Taiwan-born 60-year-old, whose family relocated to Thailand and then the U.S. in his youth and is said to have co-founded Nvidia in 1993 following a meeting at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, Calif., after stints at AMD
AMD,
and LSI Logic, wouldn’t start his own company today, he said, if he were 30 years old.
The tech titan, however, posited in a recent interview with the podcast Acquired that a “superpower” among entrepreneurs is the ability to trick themselves into believing “it’s not that hard.”
Huang said that his biggest fear remains, as it has been since Nvidia’s early days, is failing to facilitate success among workers. “I’m afraid of the same things today that I was in the very beginning of this company, which is letting the employees down.”
Huang, who according to FactSet owns a 3.5% stake in Nvidia (market cap: $1.04 trillion), explained in the podcast interview that workers joining a company end up believing in its vision and taking on its aspirations as their own.
“You have a lot of people who joined your company because they believe in your hopes and dreams, and they’ve adopted it as their hopes and dreams,” Huang said. “You want to be right for them. You want to be successful for them. You want them to be able to build a great life. … The greatest fear is that you let them down.”
In explaining how he persevered, despite doubts and challenges, in building Nvidia into the company it is today, Huang credited a “support network” of people who never gave up on him during the three-decade journey.
He explained that the experience of leading Nvidia during those periods when its share price has been in seeming free fall was almost “too much to endure,” after the company was first listed on public markets in 1999. “It’s embarrassing no matter how you think about it.”
His comments come as Nvidia’s share price has, again, been in retreat, losing ground following a major 245% surge over the previous 12 months.
More recently, the Santa Clara–based company’s stock was hit by the Biden administration’s decision to introduce tougher controls on the export of semiconductors to China.
Read: One semiconductor company is expected to grow sales nearly as quickly as Nvidia through 2025
Looking ahead, Huang said developments in artificial intelligence now pose an “enormous” opportunity for companies like Nvidia. “The market opportunity has grown by probably a thousand times,” he said.
He said AI will “create more jobs” in the near term, but he also warned that the creation of those jobs doesn’t mean certain other jobs will not be lost to automation. “If you become more productive and the company becomes more profitable, usually they hire more people to expand into new areas,” Huang said.
“Now, obviously, net generation of jobs doesn’t guarantee that any one human doesn’t get fired. That’s obviously true. It’s more likely that someone will lose a job to someone else, some other human that uses an AI,” he added.
He advised people to “learn how to use AI” as he argued that “jobs will change.”
As to Nvidia itself, Huang explained, the company — in a reflection of the products it sells — is structured like a “computing stack.”
He said “Nvidia’s not built like a military” with a top-down command and control system. Instead, Huang said, the company is organized like a “neural network” with a decentralized structure, reflecting a belief that “your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product.”
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