6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:43PM EDT · Published Mar 1, 5:00AM EST

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Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has raised the age at which people could buy guns in its stores to 21, according to 24/7 Wall St.

Spotify has outlined its plans to go public. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Music-streaming company Spotify Technology SA cemented plans for its unusual initial public offering while revealing the financial particulars of a fast-growing company that upended the music industry and revolutionized how consumers listen—but spent heavily to do so.

Stockholm-based Spotify filed to go public Wednesday by submitting an F-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission that contains years of data and details about how the 10-year-old company will launch its IPO.

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T-Mobile US Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) will start 5G service in several cities. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Top U.S. carriers are taking differing paths, both geographically and technically, as they plot out upgrades to their wireless networks in the country.

T-Mobile US Inc. said it plans to launch fifth-generation, or 5G, service across 30 cities in the fourth quarter, hitting parts of New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas first.

One of the world’s largest ad agencies has posted poor results as the industry braces for more changes. According to Bloomberg:

WPP Plc lowered its long-term profit outlook as Chief Executive Officer Martin Sorrell contends with tighter client ad budgets and mounting competitive threats, prompting the shares to slide to the lowest intraday since 2014.

The world’s largest advertising company reduced its target for earnings per share growth by about 40 percent to between 5 percent and 10 percent, from a previous 10 percent to 15 percent goal. London-based WPP reported a “slow start” to 2018 and a no-growth outlook for the year on the back of a tough 2017 where revenue and profit margins were also flat.

A drop in the Dow Jones industrial average broke a record that is nearly 60 years old. According to CNBC:

The Dow and S&P 500 snapped 10-month winning streaks, their longest since 1959. The Nasdaq posted a monthly loss for the first time in eight months. For the month, the Dow and S&P 500 closed lower by 4.3 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively. The Nasdaq closed February down 1.9 percent.

Best Buy Co Inc. (NYSE: BBY) will close some locations. According to CNBC:

Best Buy is planning to close all of its roughly 250 smaller-format mobile phone stores, CEO Hubert Joly said to employees Wednesday in an internal memo, which was reviewed by CNBC.

The stores, which are about 1,400 square feet in size compared with Best Buy’s bigger boxes of 40,000 square feet, are scheduled to close by the end of May, he said. The mobile stores are almost exclusively located within malls, with a few scattered throughout open-air strip centers.

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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.