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| Hello Insiders! Today's business newsletter covers: - 🔋 Redwood Materials, founded by Tesla's former CTO, raises $1B to recycle EV batteries.
- 🧸 Lego reports profit decline.
- 📈 Nvidia's stock surges.
If you find this newsletter useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Thank you. Arbër
p/Arber | |
| 1 | | Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup founded by Tesla's former CTO, has raised $1B. The company is now valued at $5B. More: - Redwood breaks down spent electric vehicle batteries and gets metals such as nickel, copper, cobalt, and lithium from them to produce new EV battery components.
- One of the company's major goals is to produce battery components in the U.S. in order to reduce its reliance on China.
- China controls 41% of the world's cobalt and 28% of the global lithium production, two minerals that are essential for EV battery production.
- The round was co-led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Capricorn's Technology Impact Fund, OMERS, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and Deepwater Asset Management.
- Since its inception, the company has raised $2B.
Question: Can startups help reduce the U.S. dependence on China regarding EV battery production? Let us know here. |     | |
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What happened: Lego has reported $807M in profit for the first half of 2023, a 17.7% YoY decline. The company also reported $4B in revenue, meaning it could struggle to surpass its revenue from the previous two years. More details: Lego's sales grew during the pandemic, managing to outsell its competitors and grow its market share. The company stated that the fall in profits could be attributed to higher raw material costs and more money being spent on factories. While its net profit dropped, consumer sales grew 3% during the first half of the year. Lego's competitors, such as Mattel, Hasbro, Funko, and Jakks Pacific, have all reported double-digit revenue and sales declines in 2023. Why it matters: Despite the profit fall, Lego remains the world's largest toymaker by market share and aims to grow internationally through its newly opened 54 stores in China. Overall, the company opened 89 stores worldwide. | | | |
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| 3 | | Nvidia's share price is close to reaching its all-time high, as news of a possible Google partnership boosted the stock by 4% on Tuesday. The company's stock is up 234% in 2023. More: - Google Cloud announced the general availability of its new A3 instances, powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
- The news sent Nvidia's stock surging 4%. Nvidia's stock is, so far, the best performer in the S&P 500 this year, leading Meta, which is up 148%.
- The record close comes days after the company reported record quarterly revenue and forecast a possible 170% sales increase on an annual basis.
- The day after the better-than-expected earnings report, the stock climbed to an intraday record of $502.66.
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| 4 | | The U.S. job market in August added 177,000 jobs, missing estimates by 23,000 jobs. The figure is a significant decline from the 371,000 jobs added in July. More: - After two years of exceptional gains tied to the recovery, we're moving toward more sustainable growth in pay and employment as the economic effects of the pandemic recede.
- Pay growth slowed for workers who changed jobs and those who stayed in their current positions.
- The report comes at a time when economists have expressed concern about the inflation rate in the U.S. and whether the Fed can lower inflation without leading to a recession.
Zoom Out: - The Federal Reserve recently hiked rates to the highest level in the last 22 years and has stated that further hikes are possible.
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| 5 | | Walmart has asked 16,000 pharmacists in the U.S. to voluntarily cut their pay and hours in an effort to reduce costs. The cuts will mostly affect pharmacists in higher wage brackets. More: - At a meeting in May, senior Walmart field leadership reportedly asked 20 market leaders to start asking pharmacists to voluntarily reduce their base salary hours, according to a source cited from Reuters.
- With these changes, a pharmacist could see their 80-hour, two-week pay period cut to 64 or 72 hours.
- Industry analysts claim that these cuts are a sign that weight-loss drugs are having a negative impact on Walmart's profit, even though they are sold at a premium price.
Zoom Out: - Walmart also recently agreed to pay $3.1B as its share of an opioid-related legal settlement, adding to its financial strain.
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| 6 | | Google is set to charge businesses $30 per user per month to add AI to Gmail and other productivity apps. The technology, called Duet AI, will cost just as much as Microsoft's 365 Copilot enhancements. More: - Google and Microsoft have been racing to add generative AI into more of their core products following the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot late last year.
- The company began taking preorders for Duet AI for Google Workspace at the $30 per user price in May but didn't disclose it publicly.
- Google has been gaining ground. The company said Workspace now has 10 million paying customers, up from 9 million in March and 6 million in 2020.
- Workspace revenue falls under Alphabet's Google Cloud category alongside Google's cloud infrastructure.
- Together, those units produced $8B in revenue in the second quarter.
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- X has confirmed that it will allow political ads on the social media platform, ending a ban on political ads Twitter made in 2019.
- The NFL could make over $126B in 2023 revenue from television deals.
- Regional banks could be obliged to issue debt and bolster living wills by regulators in order to better protect U.S. consumers.
- Ohio-based altafiber, a provider of integrated communications solutions, raised $600M in a round led by Macquarie Asset Management, Ares Management.
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INSIDE BUSINESS LEADERBOARD (30 DAYS) |
 | Writer | | Arbër is an Inside writer who also has experience in entrepreneurship. He has experience covering Consumer Tech, Venture Capital, NFTs, Crypto, etc. Arbër holds a Bachelor's degree in Business from XAMK University in Finland. When he is not reading(and writing) business news, he chooses to watch sports or anime...and then read news about sports or anime. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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