6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:37PM EDT · Published May 2, 6:10AM EDT

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Wikimedia Commons

The head of Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX) left after a bungled merger. According to MarketWatch:

Xerox Corp.’s Chief Executive Jeff Jacobson is resigning in a settlement with two of the company’s biggest investors, Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, a pact that shakes up the majority of the board and puts its transaction with Fujifilm Holdings Corp. at risk.

The new board is expected to consider alternatives to the deal with Fujifilm, a complex transaction that sells the majority of Xerox to the Japanese company by combining with a joint venture the two operate in Asia.

Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) earnings blew through estimates, and its shares rose — mostly because of a share buyback. According to MarketWatch:

Revenue rose 16%, to $61.1 billion, and came in just ahead of of the FactSet consensus of $60.9 billion. The company announced $100 billion in additional share buybacks and a 16% increase in its quarterly dividend

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Weinstein Company is about to be sold. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Dallas-based private-equity firm Lantern Capital Partners topped the bidding for the film and television studio co-founded by Harvey Weinstein and is close to acquiring the business, according to people familiar with the matter.

Weinstein Co. named Lantern the lead bidder with a $310 million offer when the entertainment company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March. No other potential buyers topped Lantern’s existing offer, one of these people said. The deadline for bids was the close of business Monday.

Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) posted horrible results that hurt its share price. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Snap Inc. on Tuesday said revenue rose 54% in the first quarter from a year ago, but that missed analyst estimates and fell nearly 20% short of the previous quarter as efforts to wrest a larger share of advertisers’ budgets were impeded by Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

The Venice, Calif.-based company’s shares were down 16% in after-hours trading.

The International Monetary Fund is worried about the economy in the Middle East. According to CNBC:

Tightening liquidity, trade tensions and ongoing structural issues mean that Middle Eastern nations are facing a multitude of challenges, according to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) regional director.

“The matrix of risks has local or regional components as well as international components,” Jihad Azour, director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told CNBC.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to upgrade the benefits of Prime membership. According to CNBC:

Amazon is planning new Whole Foods benefits for its Prime members, sources told CNBC.

The new perks will bring the might of Amazon’s membership program to the grocery industry, folding Whole Foods into a network other grocers will struggle to compete with. It will give Amazon vendors, many of which are niche and small, special access to Amazon’s vast shopper base.

Roughly 75 percent of Whole Foods shoppers are Amazon Prime members, but less than 20 percent of Amazon Prime members are Whole Foods shoppers, a source told CNBC.

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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.