Media

6 Most Important Things in Business Today

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: July 12, 2017 5:06 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 10:14 am

Reuters reports Saudi Arabia will chop its oil exports in August to the lowest level of the year. Oil prices have sold off sharply in the past month, and the move might stabilize the market.

Twitter Inc. (NASDAQ: TWTR) added a new chief financial officer. Ned Segal comes from tax software company Intuit, where he was the head financial officer of the small business group. Twitter has lost key executives on an ongoing basis for the past two years as it has struggled to make money on its 300 million users. The stock has been battered because of its lack of progress.

Time Inc. (NYSE: TIME) may rebrand itself, according to The Wall Street Journal. Time has been the company’s flagship brand since 1923. However, Time’s print products are a marker of its past, and not what management believes is its future, and it may want a corporate name more reflective of this.

Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) shares dropped below their initial public offering price as one of its IPO underwriters, Morgan Stanley, cuts its rating on the stock. Snap is under siege from other products, particularly Facebook Inc.’s (NASDAQ: FB) Instagram. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote:

SNAP’s ad product is not evolving/improving as quickly as we expected and Instagram competition is increasing.

Bloomberg reported that most self-driving car companies will fail according to one expert:

The race to field the first autonomous car will be a Darwinian exercise, with more than 50 major competitors reduced to a handful of winners over the next decade, according to a new study by consultant AlixPartners LLP.

“You’ve got 50 major players trying to develop autonomous software and you’ll probably get three or four of them who will win,” John Hoffecker, global vice chairman of the Southfield, Michigan-based firm, said in a speech Tuesday to the Automotive Press Association in Detroit. “There will be billions and billions of dollars lost in bets that were put in the wrong place.”

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) said Prime Day, a major sales event for the company, will be a smash success. According to CNBC:

Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday its Prime Day sale was on track to be the biggest shopping event in its history by sales.

The world’s largest online retailer said customers ordered more than three times as many Echo-family speakers than during Prime Day 2016, which at the time broke records for Amazon devices.