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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Blue Apron, which makes and delivers premium meal kits, will go public. The price range of the IPO has dropped. Many blame Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) move further into the grocery business for the pessimism.

All 34 major U.S. financial companies put through stress tests by the Federal Reserve passed. The tests are meant to see what would happen in a new recession or deep financial crisis. One by-product of the success is that banks can start to offer higher dividends.

Office supply company Staples Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLS) has been sold to Sycamore Partners for $6.9 billion. The firm has struggled through a series of M&A deals and unsuccessful attempts and threats from e-commerce leaders.

Consulting firm PwC issued a report that said artificial intelligence will add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. A Bloomberg story about the study explained:

Gains would be split between $6.6 trillion from increased productivity as businesses automate processes and augment their labor forces with new AI technology, and $9.1 trillion from consumption side-effects as shoppers snap up personalized and higher-quality goods, according to the report.

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July 11 will be this year’s Amazon Prime Day. According to the company, the sale period will run 30 hours, which will begin at 9 p.m. on the 10th. Amazon announced:

The third annual Prime Day will be Tuesday, July 11, with hundreds of thousands of deals exclusively for Prime members around the world. New this year, members can enjoy 30 hours of deal shopping starting at 6pm PT/9pm ET on Monday, July 10 – and new deals as often as every five minutes. Prime Day has expanded to 13 countries this year, and Amazon is bringing new and existing members in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, Japan, Italy, India, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium and Austria the best deals of the year. Members will find millions of items in stock, including deals from thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs.

People will need to sign up for Amazon Prime to participate. The program is the company’s wildly successful membership club, which provides free shipping, special deals on merchandise and Amazon’s streaming video service. Prime costs members $99 a year.

A ransomware computer virus continues to hit companies around the world. According to Reuters:

A computer virus wreaked havoc on firms around the globe on Wednesday as it spread to more than 60 countries, disrupting ports from Mumbai to Los Angeles and halting work at a chocolate factory in Australia.

Risk-modeling firm Cyence said economic losses from this week’s attack and one last month from a virus dubbed WannaCry would likely total $8 billion. That estimate highlights the steep tolls businesses around the globe face from growth in cyber attacks that knock critical computer networks offline.

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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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