6 Most Important Things in Business Today

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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6 Most Important Things in Business Today

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A major Chinese telecom is dropping in its initial public offering:

Shares of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp., which raised US$4.7 billion in one of Hong Kong’s largest tech initial public offerings in recent years, fell on their debut Monday as the broader market rose.

The lackluster start came after Xiaomi priced its IPO at the low end of an expected range, giving the company a valuation of $54 billion. If the shares perform poorly in the coming days and weeks, they could hurt the prospects of other tech companies who are preparing their own multibillion-dollar listings in the city.

Rising oil prices are expected to undercut airline profits. According to The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. airlines are aiming to convince investors that surging fuel costs won’t knock a record stretch of profitability off course.

Some investors say airlines won’t be able to raise prices fast enough to cover a roughly 55% increase in fuel costs from a year ago. The NYSE Arca Airline Index is down nearly 13% this year while the S&P 500 is up 3.2%.

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The box office has a new king. According to Box Office Mojo:

As we enter the second half of the year, and the 27th weekend of 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has now claimed the #1 spot at the weekend box office nine times. The latest is this weekend’s release of Ant-Man and the Wasp, the 20th installment in the MCU, which debuted with an estimated $76 million over the three-day weekend, out-performing 2015’s Ant-Man by nearly $20 million.

According to the Financial Times, Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) media business took a major step forward. The paper’s editors wrote:

Apple slices into Spotify’s US music market lead
Iphone maker expected to have more US subscribers by end of the year

The head of the World Bank is worried about worldwide debt. According to Bloomberg:

Global debt is becoming a bigger worry as the global policy tightening cycle takes hold, a top boss at the World Bank warned Monday.

“After a decade of low interest rates, the corporate and public debt in many places has ballooned to a staggering $164 trillion,” Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive officer of the World Bank, said in an interview in Singapore on Monday with Bloomberg Television’s David Ingles and Haidi Lun. “With interest rates going up, that attention on debt sustainability has to be stronger.”

A group of American farmers has warned about the effects of tariffs. According to CNNMoney:

Soybean farmers, apple growers and auto workers are among the US workers bracing for fallout from a trade war between the United States and China.

The US on Friday slapped tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports to combat what [it] says are the country’s unfair trade practices. Beijing called it the beginning of “the biggest trade war in economic history” and retaliated with tariffs on billions of dollars worth of US exports. Another $16 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese imports are set to hit in the next two weeks.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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