6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 10:14AM EST · Published Jul 12, 5:06AM EDT

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Thinkstock

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.

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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.

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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.