MORNING NEWS

PepsiCo Chief Executive Ramon Laguarta said the Iran war had a meaningful impact on business during the latest quarter, resulting in a slowdown in the conversion of traffic to purchases. "Will it change in the coming months? It all depends on the price of gas," he said on a call with analysts Thursday.

Cocoa products manufacturer and trader Barry Callebaut began to see a return to volume growth in the third quarter of its staggered 2025/26 fiscal year—for the first time in two years. However, this was not enough at this stage to reverse the downward trend observed over the first three quarters combined. Nevertheless, the 5.7% rebound observed between March and the end of May reduced the volume contraction—which had stood at 6.9% at the midpoint of the period—to 2.8%. In terms of revenue, the multinational reported sales of 9.56 billion francs for the first nine months of its staggered fiscal year, down 12.7% year-over-year, according to a statement released Thursday.

Samsung Electronics projected a 19-fold jump in second quarter operating profit, extending its record earnings streak on booming demand for artificial-intelligence chips, though the upbeat outlook did little to lift its shares. The South Korean technology company has extended its run of record quarterly revenue and operating profit since the final quarter of 2025. Its chip-making division is expected to fuel even stronger earnings growth this year, many analysts said, citing booming demand for AI chips. Samsung said in a preliminary earnings report Tuesday that its operating profit likely reached an all-time high of about 89.4 trillion won, equivalent to $58.47 billion, for the three months ended June.

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix has lowered the fundraising target for its planned U.S. stock market listing to about $28 billion following the recent decline in its stock price. The world’s second-largest manufacturer of memory chips announced in a regulatory filing with the South Korean stock exchange that it intends to raise 43.141 trillion South Korean won—equivalent to approximately $28 billion—by issuing American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the Nasdaq technology exchange.

French aerospace-and-defense group Thales said it expects to record a charge after Berlin scrapped a project to procure F126 frigates, the latest casualty from the country’s decision not to move forward with what could have been Germany’s biggest class of warship since the end of World War II. Dutch shipbuilder DSNS was the prime contractor for the project and Thales one of the sub-contractors. The German government had expected the first batch of frigates to be delivered in 2033, but DSNS couldn’t hit the targeted budget and timetable, prompting Berlin to start transferring the project to Rheinmetall.

Meta Platforms had its best day since January yesterday. This was prompted by a report from Bloomberg stating that Facebook’s parent company intends to sell access to AI computing power and models. These are similar to the offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

NKE recorded another sales decline in the latest quarter as it continued to hit hurdles with weakness in China. The sneakers and apparel company said the results were in line with its expectations, despite facing what it called an increasingly challenging operating environment in which sell-through remains under pressure. “While we continue to face top-line headwinds, we’re encouraged by progress in performance product and are focused on consistent execution, improved profitability and scaling our wins to realize our full potential,” Chief Executive Elliott Hill said.

Comcast’s planned breakup is sending Charter Communications’ stock soaring. The cable giant plans to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky operations, leaving Comcast to focus on broadband, wireless and cable. That has investors betting on the prospect of Comcast acquiring Charter after the split’s completion to bolster its broadband operations amid the prospect of growing competition. “The core regulatory questions [for a potential bid] become cleaner: broadband concentration, local market overlap, wireless bundling and the FCC public interest review,” research firm MKI Global Partners said in a note today.

Volkswagen is working on a radical overhaul that will likely result in thousands of additional job losses beyond the 50,000 already agreed with unions, in the automotive giant’s latest move to bolster its finances amid growing competition from China. The project is aimed at making “the entire company more efficient and leaner,” the German carmaker. The company’s management team is expected to present details of the plan to its supervisory board early next month. Volkswagen’s statement followed a report by local business monthly Manager Magazin that the company wanted to double its job-cut target to 100,000 positions.

Micron MU Technology, which has seen its value triple this year, said revenue quadrupled in the second quarter and forecast that rapid growth will continue due to near-insatiable demand for its memory chips. Shares surged by as much as 15% in after-hours trading after the company beat Wall Street expectations in virtually every financial metric watched closely by investors, including sales, earnings per share and adjusted gross margin.