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[ad_1] A customer pushes a shopping cart full of groceries outside a Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas, left, and a pedestrian passes a Target store in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Getty Images Target and Walmart are both catering to thriftier shoppers, but the two big-box retailers have seen very different outcomes when it comes to winning their dollars. Target missed Wall Street's sales expectations for the fiscal second-quarter. Walmart beat Wall Street's revenue estimates for the three-month period. Target slashed its forecast for the year, while Walmart raised its outlook. The companies' diverging performances illustrate some of the retailers' fundamental differences. Walmart, the nation's largest grocer, makes more than half of its annual revenue from selling groceries — a category that shoppers buy even when times are tight. Target draws only about 20% of its yearly revenue from grocery, making it rely more on sales of items such as cl

[ad_1] NYT Columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and C.E.O. of The Walt Disney Company Bob Iger speak during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on November 29, 2023 in New York City.  Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images It's the most wonderful time of the year! It's the third annual anonymous media and entertainment executive predictions list! In honor of the 12 days of Christmas, I asked 12 past and current executives at the world's biggest media and entertainment companies for one industry-shaking prediction for 2024. And then I asked one more because this is the holiday season, and I was feeling generous. A baker's dozen! Actually, I asked a few more, but some overlapped. Quite a few of last year's predictions were accurate . Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger did extend his contract . Christine McCarthy stepped down as Disney's chief financial officer. Paramount Global hasn't sold, but controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is now in talks to sell Natio

[ad_1] The extraordinary activist-investor interest in Salesforce (CRM) eased further in the second quarter, according to the latest regulatory filings from influential Wall Street pros. These big-name investors also made moves in nine other Club stocks during a strong three-month stretch that ended the best first half for the market in years. Starting with Salesforce, Dan Loeb's Third Point shed its stake in the second quarter. Jeff Smith's Starboard Value — the first known activist to target the enterprise software giant — cut its stake by 21% in the three months ended June 30. Those sales are among the Club-related trades revealed this week by the latest batch of securities filings known as 13Fs. Submitted to U.S. regulators on a quarterly basis, these disclosures offer a look — albeit with some limitations — into the investment decisions that closely followed Wall Street pros have made. CRM .SPX YTD mountain Salesforce's year-to-date stock performance, in compariso

[ad_1] GameStop on Tuesday posted a quarterly profit for the first time in two years, finishing out its fiscal year on a high note in the holiday quarter after grappling with sales declines, inventory woes and cash flow pressure. Shares of the company soared more than 45% during after-hours trading. For the quarter ended Jan. 28 , net sales dropped slightly to $2.23 billion from $2.25 billion in last year's fourth quarter. The video game retailer also posted a profit of $48.2 million, or 16 cents a share, compared to a loss of $147.5 million, or 49 cents, a year ago. GameStop did not provide financial guidance and has not done so since the early days of the pandemic. Its results can't be compared with Wall Street estimates because too few analysts cover the company. The retailer had been working to steer itself back to profitability, and got there in part by cutting costs. Selling, general and administrative expenses came in at $453.4 million for the quarter, or 20.4% o

[ad_1] Food-delivery company Wonder Group has gotten a cash infusion from Nestle , as the startup looks to sell high-tech kitchen equipment and prepared ingredients to businesses such as hotels, hospitals and sports arenas. The deal includes a $100 million investment from Nestle, along with a strategic partnership, according to sources familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because financial terms of the deal are not public. Nestle and Wonder confirmed the deal but declined to reveal transaction details. The funding could get Wonder a step closer to its ambitions of making it easier, faster and cheaper for busy families to have high-quality meals at home. The startup, which was valued at about $3.5 billion when it closed a $350 million funding round in June, was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneur and former Walmart e-commerce chief Marc Lore. Wonder recently struck a deal to acquire meal-kit company Blue Apron for $103 million. It has also developed kitchen equ

[ad_1] A rendering of Telesat's low earth orbit broadband constellation Telesat Shares of Canadian telecommunications satellite operator Telesat surged on Friday after the company announced it would swap suppliers for its planned Lightspeed global internet network. Canadian space company MDA will now build the Lightspeed satellites, taking the place of French-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space and resulting in "total capital cost savings" of about $2 billion, Telesat announced. The company expects to begin launching the first Lightspeed satellites in mid-2026, with global service beginning once the first 156 satellites are in orbit. The full network is planned to consist of 198 satellites. Telesat stock surged as much as much as 64% with heavy volume in early trading from its previous close at $8.45 a share, before slipping slightly to closer to 50%. "I'm incredibly proud of the Telesat team for their innovative work to further optimize ... resulting

[ad_1] A sign for hire is posted on the window of a Chipotle restaurant in New York, April 29, 2022. Shannon Stapleton | Reuters Job cuts are rising at some of the biggest U.S. companies , but others are still scrambling to hire workers, the result of wild swings in consumer priorities since the Covid pandemic began three years ago. Tech giants Meta , Amazon and Microsoft , along with companies ranging from Disney to Zoom , have announced job cuts over the past few weeks. In total, U.S.-based employers cut nearly 103,000 jobs in January, the most since September 2020, according to a report released earlier this month from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Meanwhile, employers added 517,000 jobs last month, nearly three times the number analysts expected. This points to a labor market that's still tight, particularly in service sectors that were hit hard earlier in the pandemic, such as restaurants and hotels. The dynamic is making it even harder to p

[ad_1] Exchange-traded funds can still compete in today's "stock picker's" market, according to a top investor. "A lot of money is moving into active ETFs, because it provides the benefits that you have from active management [or] from stock picking … but also all the tax benefits and cost benefits that you have in an ETF," Avantis Investors Chief Investment Officer Eduardo Repetto told CNBC's " ETF Edge " last week. He predicts actively managed ETFs will continue to gain traction through the second half of the year. "We used to only have index ETFs," Repetto noted. However, he emphasized this has changed over the past three years as the number of actively managed ETFs has grown. Repetto's firm is behind the Avantis U.S. Equity ETF , an actively managed portfolio of U.S. stocks. Its website shows the fund's top holdings are Apple, Microsoft , Amazon , Meta Platforms and Alphabet . As of Friday, the ETF is up 12% this ye

[ad_1] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy doesn't believe the retail and cloud computing giant should be counted out of the artificial intelligence race just yet. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Jassy challenged the notion that Amazon has fallen behind in AI as Microsoft and Google add chatbots to consumer products like their search engines, likening it to the "hype cycle" before the "substance cycle." "I think most people are focused on the applications, you know, things like ChatGPT brought everybody's awareness up, but I think of generative AI as having three macro layers," Jassy told Jon Fortt in an interview that aired on "Closing Bell Overtime" late Thursday. "I think they're all really big and important." Jassy has said Amazon intends to invest in AI across the company, and that AI programs have the potential to improve "virtually every customer experience." But he specifically pointed to Amazon Web Servi