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How Kodak is trying to turn around after teetering on bankruptcy

admin — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:23:44 +0000

On Jim Continenza’s first day on the job as Eastman Kodak executive chairman in 2019, he got a call from a star Hollywood filmmaker telling him the company was making a big mistake.

The photography technology company was in the process of shutting down its acetate factory, which makes one of the key ingredients used in film. Christopher Nolan, the director behind major movies like “Inception” and “Oppenheimer,” urged Continenza to stop the process.

“He goes, ‘Do not turn this off. Please take a look.’ And I did,” Continenza, now CEO, told CNBC. “He was right. I started looking at it because I shoot 35 millimeter [film], and I’m like, ‘Why would one of the greatest directors of all time even have this conversation?'”

Continenza, a self-proclaimed “turnaround specialist,” said he quickly realized how central film was to Kodak’s roots, and how it could be one of its biggest strengths as he fought to bring the company back from teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Fast forward roughly seven years, and multiple 2026 Oscar-winning movies, including “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” were shot on Kodak film. It’s part of a bigger trend as the category sees a resurgence fueled by both a nostalgia for film in Hollywood and by younger consumers.

That road wasn’t smooth, though. The company declared bankruptcy in 2012 and reemerged a year later. Then it cautioned last year that its financial conditions “raise substantial doubt about Kodak’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

In the second-quarter earnings where it made that going concern statement, Kodak posted a 12% decrease in gross profit, with millions in debt obligations.

But Continenza said it was one step in a longer process toward rebuilding the company to its former success.

CEO of Kodak Jim Continenza speaks onstage during Kodak’s Film Awards at ASC Clubhouse on March 2, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.

Rodin Eckenroth | Getty Images

Last month, the company’s earnings report looked different. Its fourth-quarter gross profit reached $67 million, a 31% increase from the year prior. Kodak also said it had reduced its annual interest expense by roughly $40 million.

Continenza said at the time that the results were signs of the long-term plan he began executing in 2019. He told CNBC that he chose Kodak as his final company to revive before closing his chapter as a C-suite executive, having previously served in leadership roles at communication companies including AT&T and Lucent.

“Here’s what our goal is: We’re going to create jobs for the next generation. Make no mistake, we’re going to fix this company and put it on a stable foundation and put building blocks to grow all the systems,” Continenza said. “We didn’t put in what we need, we put in what we want, and that’s a difference.”

Troubled waters

In a digitally evolving society, Kodak has been fighting to keep its place and relevancy.

The company’s 2012 bankruptcy protection came after it failed to improve its finances as digital photography took off and revolutionized the industry. When it reemerged the following year as a smaller company, it shifted its primary focus to commercial printing.

Though it’s not a company that is largely covered by investors anymore, Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note last year that the onset of digital technology posed a significant setback for Kodak.

“At the time, Kodak management told us that film would co-exist with digital cameras and more photos would be taken — and more would need to be printed by Kodak,” he wrote.

Still, Kodak faced its struggles. Its stock sank more than 35% in 2014, continuing to gradually fall over the next few years and hitting an all-time low of $1.55 per share during the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.

Last August, the more than 100-year-old photography company said it had roughly $155 million in cash and nearly $600 million in loans.

A Kodak spokesperson said at the time that the going concern language had to be included because Kodak did not have enough available liquidity to pay off its debt, due within 12 months. Still, the company said it was confident it would pay off a significant portion of that loan before it became due by terminating its pension plan and said the disclosure was just a required technical report.

Wall Street investors didn’t like what they heard. The stock plunged from a price of roughly $7 per share a few days prior to just over $5 per share on the day of earnings.

“We could have done a better job on it, because to us, it wasn’t as dire straits, it was more of a GAAP accounting coincidence by dates,” Continenza said, adding that it was a “timing issue” for the loans.

Rolls of Kodak Gold film hang on a shelf at the Precision Camera & Video store on Aug. 12, 2025 in Austin, Texas.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Continenza said Kodak’s main challenges were in its “huge tranches” of debt and a lack of communication with its shareholders and customers.

The CEO said he’s never sold a share of Kodak and instead bought stock after the company issued its going concern disclosure.

“You’ve got to put the work in and the long-term investments, and you’ve got to be methodical, but you’ve got to fix your operations, and I’ve spent seven years of doing it,” he said. “[It’s] a 130-plus year old company, right? You can imagine what’s in the attic.”

Defining success

Continenza said he’s been intentional about instituting long-term changes since he took over the company. He’s changed about 90% of the company’s leadership, paid off more than $400 million in debt and reorganized the company’s priorities to focus on print and advanced materials and chemicals.

He said it was also important to be “transparent” with his team and acknowledged that turning around the company would mean layoffs and staffing changes.

“First thing I always do is go out and get people who want to hold the company and buy them out, and that’s what we did,” he said. “I got a board and investors who love what we’re doing — we keep them informed, and they help guide us.”

As he examined what worked for the company, Continenza said he saw an opportunity with Generation Z and the resurgence of the film aesthetic. The look of photos and videos shot on film captures something that “penetrates your heart and soul,” he said.

Kodak leaned into the analog and authenticity trend, investing its resources in its film capacities and creating products that consumers, directors and filmmakers alike were interested in.

Continenza said he also refinanced the company three times and rightsized its balance sheet.

It seems to have hit the right note on Wall Street. Over the past year, Kodak’s stock has shot up nearly 100%.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

Kodak 1-year chart

“We’re doing our job. The stock’s not supposed to spike, it’s supposed to crawl, because that’s how we grow,” he said. “I don’t look at our stock price. I don’t care. I couldn’t tell you what it is today. I’m a long-term investor.”

Continenza said success to him will mean continuing to improve finances and ensuring Kodak has a solid succession plan in place to continue its growth.

Though the company is well over 100 years old, he said he likes to treat Kodak as a startup, where all of the debt is paid off, the brand is well-loved and only Kodak itself could, at this point, “screw it up.”

“We don’t need to be a $5 billion or $20 billion or $80 billion company,” Continenza said. “We’re a billion-dollar global company, but one thing we have going for us is our brand recognition. And make no mistake, around the globe, it is endeared and loved, and it’ll continue to be.”

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Infiniti hopes new SUV can turn around fortunes in the U.S.

admin — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:19:47 +0000

The 2027 Infiniti QX65.

Courtesy: Infiniti

Japanese brand Infiniti on Thursday unveiled a new midsize luxury SUV, called the QX65, as it tries to mount a comeback in the U.S.

The vehicle will have a 268-horsepower VC-Turbo engine with 286 foot-pounds of torque, as well as dual 12.3-inch displays.

The QX65 “accelerates INFINITI into its next era,” Eric Ledieu, vice president of Infiniti Americas, said in a press release.

Infiniti, Nissan’s premium brand, sold a record 153,000 vehicles in 2017 in the U.S., one of the world’s most important auto markets. Last year, it sold just a third of that, according to the company.

The 2027 Infiniti QX65.

Courtesy: Infiniti

After its record 2017, sales have declined nearly every year, according to a report from Haig Partners, a firm that facilitates dealer transactions. Infiniti sales fell 9% in 2025 over the previous year.

“Now down 65.6% from its peak, and with only two nameplates on dealer lots, INFINITI sits in a tough position,” the report said.

Contrast that with Lexus, the luxury brand from Nissan’s Japanese competitor, Toyota, which saw sales climb 7.1% in 2025, after an already record year in 2024, according to Haig Partners. Sales of Acura also rose slightly in the same period, at just under 1%.

Infiniti has been in a “product lull” for a while, said Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst at S&P Global Mobility.

“They’ve changed, of course, a couple of times over the last few years,” she said. “And Nissan, the parent company, has had a lot on its plate. While the intent to support Infiniti is there, it has faltered a little bit.”

Right now, Infiniti has two 2026 models in the U.S. The QX65 will make a third, and it will be a midsize SUV — hitting one of biggest single segments in the U.S. With a starting price of $53,990, it’s less expensive than the average luxury midsize vehicle’s manufacturer’s suggested retail price of about $77,000, according to Cox Automotive.

The brand touted its American ambitions with the vehicle’s launch, choosing New York City’s Grand Central Terminal as the site to unveil the QX65 and, as it has in the past, enlisting NFL stars Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman as hosts for the event.

Brinley also said the QX65 draws on Infiniti’s old FX line of sport utility vehicles, which debuted in the U.S. in the early 2000s.

“[Those vehicles] were terrific,” she said. “They were super stylish, they were performance oriented, and still just really cool and really vibrant.”

Infiniti said it plans to release one vehicle annually over the next five years, as opposed to a more aggressive cadence.

“Hopefully they can … turn this into a turnaround,” Brinley said. “But it’s going to take some time.”

The QX65 is set to be manufactured in Smyrna, Tennessee, with vehicles arriving at retailers in early summer.

Correction: The headline on this story has been updated to reflect that Infiniti is releasing a new SUV in the U.S. A previous headline misspelled the brand’s name.

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Japanese investors turn to Europe in lieu of own ecosystem

admin — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:38:28 +0000

Huge swathes of cash are flowing from Japan to European tech startups as risk-averse investors favor a more mature entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping to scale the continent’s booming deep tech cluster.

While the European startup and venture capital ecosystem has long operated in the shadow of Silicon Valley, it has become fertile ground for Japanese corporates, whose domestic market is younger.

Japanese investors or venture capital funds who themselves have Japanese investors, known as limited partners, participated in European financing rounds worth more than 33 billion euros ($38 billion) since 2019 when a trade deal between the European Union and Japan came into force, according to research from venture capital fund NordicNinja and data platform Dealroom.

For the five years leading up to the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, investment totaled 5.3 billion euros.

In Europe at that time, “there was no Japanese capital other than Softbank,” Tomosaku Sohara, co-founder and managing partner of Japan-Europe VC NordicNinja, told CNBC. NordicNinja, which has 250 million euros of assets under management, is a collaboration between the firm’s managing partners and Japan’s JBIC IG Partners.

“Softbank was pretty active already at that moment, because they had acquired Finnish gaming company Supercell,” Sohara said, noting that the acquisition injected life into Finland’s startup ecosystem.

Now, Mitsubishi, Sanden, Yamato Holdings, and Marunouchi Innovation Partners are among those directly backing European tech, per the report, while Japan-linked venture capital firms such as NordicNinja, Byfounders, and Toyota‘s Woven Capital cut checks to startups on the continent.

There are over two times more VC-backed startups in Europe than in Japan, per capita, and 4.3 times more unicorns, per the report.

The shadow of Silicon Valley

Japan’s appetite for investing was always there, Sohara said. Its multinationals — like many — headed stateside to set up corporate venture capital arms in early 2000, in search of a slice of the action at the time when some of today’s largest companies were just being thought up in dorm rooms.

“Nobody wanted to look at Europe at that moment, but I think that after a couple of years they realized, ‘Hey, maybe the U.S. culture is totally different from the Japanese culture,’ and they began thinking, ‘Hey, maybe we need to look at another region like Europe,'” Sohara said, adding that the profile of entrepreneurs in Europe, many of whom came from large corporates at the time, was more aligned with Japan. That’s in contrast to the young founders coming from Stanford or university research and development departments, he said.

“They have experience at the corporates and also they have a mindset of entrepreneurship. Japan, unfortunately, is lacking the entrepreneurship mindset,” Sohara added, referring to Europe’s founders, many of whom came from Nokia and Skype.

The pull for founders

Japanese-linked investors have a penchant for one sector in particular: deep tech, which refers to companies building on top of scientific or engineering innovation. Deep tech and artificial intelligence accounted for 70% of deals made by such investors in Europe in 2024, echoing trends in the broader startup ecosystem as the AI, energy, and defense industries boom.

The top-funded companies with Japanese participation include the U.K.’s autonomous vehicle startup Wayve, which raised $1.05 billion in an investment round in May 2024, British quantum computing firm Quantinuum, which secured 273 million euros in January 2024, and Spanish quantum firm Multiverse Computing, which saw investors cut it a check of 189 million euros in June 2025. The rounds were backed by Softbank, Mitsui and Toshiba, respectively.

Such companies, however, typically need a lot of growth capital and industrial experience to scale successfully — two elements that Europe famously lacks.

“Investment appetite is way stronger than [in] any strategics I’ve seen here in Germany or in Europe,”

Sarah Fleischer

co-founder and CEO, Tozero

“Japanese firms — and they’re old, most of them that we’re talking about, right — they’re just sitting on a pile of money. They’ve been saving money throughout the last century, and now they’re starting to spend it, to try to grow as a large corporate and increase their footprint outside of Japan,” said Sarah Fleischer, co-founder and CEO of Germany-based battery materials recycling startup Tozero.

“You see that investment appetite is way stronger than [in] any strategics I’ve seen here in Germany or in Europe,” she added. Tozero has raised 14.5 million euros to date and counts NordicNinja, Honda and JGC among its investors.

It’s not just about the check. Japanese corporates and industrials have robust manufacturing and automotive know-how, Fleischer and Sohara noted respectively, meaning they are well positioned to plug Europe’s knowledge gaps when it comes to scaling large manufacturing projects.

Fleischer added that Japanese firms have long shored up their critical minerals supply chain and long-established trading firms, meaning they know how to secure essential components needed for the energy transition. For Tozero, this is an added plus, Fleischer said, given it’s in the business of recovering such materials from spent batteries.

In the age of political uncertainty amid choppy U.S.-China relations, Japan also acts as a good bridge to the Asian markets, Fleischer said.

A slower pace and lower risk appetite

Back in Japan, the number of entrepreneurs is “still very limited,” Sohara said, as the older generation and “great talents” wanted to work for “a Toyota and Honda or Sony,” he added, but the younger generation’s mindset is beginning to change.

Europe has also become the home to ambitious would-be founders searching for a tech ecosystem to build their companies in, Sohara said.

However, as collaboration between Europe and Japan scales, language remains a barrier as fluency in English is not widespread in Japan, he added.

For Fleischer, this also poses challenges. “There’s so much miscommunication and local translation that could ruin a partnership instantly. And there’s also some sort of cultural aspect as well, one needs to probably be aware of,” she said, adding that she recently spent weeks in Japan getting to know her investors face-to-face, “because that’s still the sentiment” there.

Decision-making can therefore be slower, the founder said, due to thorough research and preparation. “They just do their homework,” Fleischer said, noting that Japanese partners were hands-on in helping the company understand “how to build our next future commercial plant, potentially starting from Japan and then going worldwide.”

Indeed, “without the support from NN [NordicNinja] it would have been much more difficult to build the right relationships,” said Aaike van Vugt, co-founder and CEO of Dutch nanotechnology engineering firm VSParticle.

That’s in contrast to perhaps the most well-known Japanese player: Softbank. Softbank is “totally different” from traditional Japanese investor cultures, given it is driven by founder Masayoshi Son’s decisions rather than operating on a consensus basis, like most Japanese business, Sohara added.

The venture firm, known for its lofty bets on WeWork and, more recently, chip company Arm, poured huge sums of cash into tech startups amid the 2021 venture capital tech boom, which saw at least one Japanese-linked investor involved in deals worth 11.2 billion euros, per the report. Softbank stood out during this period; it was involved in 22% of deals with Japanese-linked participation in 2021.

Interest ticking up

Looking forward, Sohara and Fleischer expect greater collaboration between Europe and Japan. However, Japanese investors are expected to participate in rounds worth 3 billion euros in 2025, per the Dealroom and NordicNinja report, representing a dip from last year.

As many eyes turn to the Middle East for investment, Fleischer said that interest in Japan appears to be ticking up. Anecdotally, “people reach out to me for intros, which is fun, to meet Japanese corporate LPs,” she said, noting that this is a new development for her but that it may simply be because she has such investors now.

“I think it’s also politically driven as well in Japan, by the government, to position themselves more geopolitically smartly and make sure that the corporates or the industries grow in certain ecosystems, strengthening their positioning as a country,” she said.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that NordicNinja is a collaboration between its managing partners and Japan’s JBIC IG Partners, and to update Tozero’s investors.

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Lisa Cook standing up for the Federal Reserve is a ploy to turn a blind eye from her mortgage scandal

admin — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 09:44:42 +0000

Fed Governor Lisa Cook is standing up to Donald Trump, suing to keep her job because she says the president is trumping up a scandal and she’s fighting for Fed independence.

Trump has called for Cook’s head for allegedly committing mortgage fraud by signing documents that she had two primary residences.

We should let the courts decide that one.

But Cook’s notion that she’s standing up for the sanctity of the Fed should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Fed has long been distracted by side hustles to its “dual mandate” of price stability within the context of maximum employment. It’s far from an apolitical agency.

Even more, Cook’s own appointment by Joe Biden in 2022 is an example of how politics, particularly of the left-wing variety, has been infused into the Fed’s plumbing.

More From Charles Gasparino

In getting rid of Cook, you can make the case that Trump — in his own messy way — is righting the ship.

The markets may be signaling this — despite media talking heads and those of some Fed watchers exploding over Trump’s latest alleged apostasy.

The establishment commentariat is arguing that not being able to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell or even Cook except for some on-the-job crime, aka cause — is why people keep buying our debt.

The nation’s central bank created by Congress to manage the money supply doesn’t report to the president.

It’s not subject to his political whims to juice economic growth at the expense of “King Dollar.”

OK, all good points.

But stocks and bond yields have barely budged.

The stated reasons in a recent Wall Street Journal piece: Traders believe Trump will appoint seasoned pros to fill the jobs of both Cook and his main Fed nemesis, Powell.

Big investors unfazed

Yes, but my sources provide a more prescient analysis of the market’s insouciance: Trump is merely putting his MAGA stamp on the independence charade.

Many big investors are unfazed by Trump’s power grab because for years the Fed has been straying from its mandate — constantly intervening in the economy by playing with the money supply when it isn’t needed and most recently becoming woke.

Lisa Cook’s nomination in 2022, subsequent confirmation by the then Democrat-controlled and woke-obsessed Senate is part of the proof.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s what Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary, former Harvard president and one of the most important economic minds on monetary policy said in 2021 about the Fed’s mission-creep:

“We have a generation of central bankers who are defining themselves by their ‘wokeness.’ They’re defining themselves by how socially concerned they are. They’re defining themselves how concerned they are about the environment . . . business ethics.”

In 2022, the Fed developed a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan” to reflect the Federal Reserve Board’s “strategic initiative on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a shared responsibility of all Board employees.”

Now tell me exactly how DEI, which the Supreme Court says is discriminatory and common sense tells you erodes the nation’s meritocracy, helps the Fed figure out if it’s stoking inflation as it did just a few years ago during Joe Biden’s reign of error?

Or maybe I should be directing that question to Lisa Cook.

Her lawyer argued Friday before a federal judge that her firing by Trump is “unprecedented and illegal” in that it exceeds the president’s authority over an independent, nonpolitical agency.

Go back a few years to her messy confirmation battle and you will see how Cook is anything but apolitical.

Yes, she has a Ph.D. in econ, from Berkeley no less, and was a longtime academic.

She is the first African-American woman to serve as a Fed governor, which should be celebrated.

Charlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet

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But during the hearings we discovered that her areas of interest in economics, based on her publishing record, are dominated by stuff like how lynchings hindered the economic growth of black Americans.

There is a place for such research at the university — though you gotta ask yourself why we need an economist to explain something so fundamentally obvious.

Look into Cook’s résumé and you see this is an economist who seems more obsessed with being a social-justice warrior than weighing the vicissitudes of M2 and how it impacts price stability.

Presumed innocent

Again, I’m giving Cook the presumption of innocence on the mortgage inquiry.

For the record, I hate the lack of due process she received.

Instead of a simple referral to the DOJ to determine probable cause — cause is what Trump needs to boot her from the post — Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has been announcing criminal referrals on the mortgage charges via social media.

Music to the ears of his social-media-obsessed boss, who announced Cook’s firing on Truth Social.

To date, Cool hasn’t denied the central charges that she purposely stated two primary residences to get a lower mortgage rate.

(Her lawyer has suggested she possibly erred.)

I also wonder if she would accord the same due process to someone who encroached on her woke-obsessed boundaries.

Good evidence says probably not.

Consider what she did in 2020, during the insane Summer of Love when Black Lives Matter riots spread across the country, demanding that the police be defunded.

A fellow academic at the University of Chicago, Harald Uhlig, also the editor at the influential Journal of Political Economy, criticized BLM and defunding.

She joined the online assault to get him fired.

(He was placed on leave by the publication and reinstated.)

Her rationale: “Free speech should have its limits,” adding that it shouldn’t be used to “spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people.”

Now do you really want someone like that helping run the nation’s central bank?

Maybe that’s why the markets don’t care about Trump’s power play.

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Family offices turn to private markets, allocations up 500% since 2016

admin — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 06:16:21 +0000

Westend61 | Westend61 | Getty Images

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

As the world’s rich have gotten richer, their investment firms have doubled down on private assets such as direct lending and data centers.

The number of family offices with allocations to private markets has surged by 524% since 2016, rising from 651 to 4,067, per Preqin data. This increase surpasses that of wealth management firms (410%) and endowments and foundations (81%) with allocations to private markets, according to the alternative investment data platform owned by BlackRock.

This growth has been marked in recent years, surging nearly 21% in 2023 and about 26% in 2024. In the first half of 2025, the number of family offices with private markets exposure increased by 8%.

Armando Senra, who leads BlackRock’s institutional business in the Americas, said family office activity reflects broader interest in private credit and infrastructure from investors. A BlackRock survey conducted this past spring reported that nearly a third of single-family offices planned to invest more in private credit and infrastructure from 2025 through 2026.

PwC’s Jonathan Flack told CNBC via email that much of this activity can be attributed to family offices having far more wealth to manage. By Deloitte’s estimate, family offices managed a combined $3.1 trillion in 2024, up 63% from 2019.

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Family offices have less need for quick cash, so they can afford to make illiquid private investments, Flack said. With family offices known to invest for decades or even generations, private markets appeal to their long-term mindset, according to Flack, the leader of the consulting giant’s U.S. and global family office practice.

“Private markets allow the families to invest longer term in a more stable growth environment as compared to the public markets which have proven to be more volatile over the same period,” he said.

But family offices have become increasingly selective about private offerings. A May survey by UBS found that family offices planned to increase their private debt holdings but trim their private equity bets in favor of developed market equities in 2025. For U.S. family offices, the expected drawdown was especially steep.

That said, when asked about their five-year plans, more family offices intended to increase rather than decrease their allocations to private equity and other private assets.

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

admin — Sat, 24 May 2025 12:07:43 +0000

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

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Facing the Looming Threat of A.I., Publishers Turn to Decentralized Platforms

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:09:25 +0000

A tech industry veteran, Mike McCue sees an opening for a different kind of internet where algorithms don’t call the shots. Mr. McCue, the chief executive of the internet company Flipboard, is challenging social media’s automated grip on our attention, betting that humans, not machines, should curate online experiences.

Three decades ago, as vice president of technology at the groundbreaking tech company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize information access through the World Wide Web. Now, he’s positioning his company’s new Surf browser as part of a growing community of so-called decentralized social media options, alongside emerging platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.

The timing could be fortuitous, as online publishers struggle with an old problem and a new threat. For years, they have worried that the internet’s middlemen — huge platforms like Facebook and TikTok — have weakened their ties with the people who read or view their material. Now publishers face another issue: New A.I. systems that could completely eliminate those fraying links with their audiences.

Surf offers a window into a quiet technology movement echoing the early days of the World Wide Web. With the aid of several internet technical standards that are intended to encourage the growth of a new kind of social media, Mr. McCue has created a potential path where media companies can build direct relationships with readers.

In contrast to the current social web, which is dominated by a few large technology companies, the new software protocols may seem a bit wonky for now. But they make it possible for internet users to communicate and share information without relying on a single centralized service.

One of the new technical standards is known as ActivityPub. Social media platforms using the protocol can talk to one another, allowing users on different networks to interact seamlessly — similar to how email works across different providers.

ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technology standards-making organization. The standard initially drew scant interest. But Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, in 2022 has created an exodus of users and publishers looking for alternatives.

Surf allows phone, tablet and personal computer users to curate feeds from a variety of sources into a single dashboard-like view. It will also allow them to publish personally curated collections of information.

Surf is still being privately tested by Mr. McCue’s small company, which plans to offer the program freely later this year. Yet while the open social movement is still small, it has gained attention every time there is a disruptive event such as Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

Decentralized social media gained significant momentum in 2023 when Meta adopted the ActivityPub standard for its X competitor, Threads, and later announced plans to connect with other ActivityPub-based services. What Mr. McCue calls the “open social web” already has more than 300 million participants, he estimated, and the bulk of them are now Meta’s Threads users.

The shared goal of leading users out of silos accelerated with the recent success of Bluesky, which the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched in 2023. Although it is built on a rival standard known as the AT Protocol, a bridge has already been built between the two protocols to make it possible for users of the social media services to connect.

“Everyone has just been copying each other’s features in walled gardens, but now innovation will become decentralized around human connection,” Mr. McCue said in an interview.

Mr. McCue, 56, co-founded Flipboard as a digital news aggregator in 2010. He has made a career of being early to exploit changes in internet technologies. He started Paper Software to make it possible to visually display 3-D information in web browsers and then sold the company to Netscape for $20 million in 1996.

In 1999 he co-founded Tellme Networks, a pioneering effort to create what had been described as a “voice browser” and make it possible to receive internet information via the phone. That company was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.

One of the most significant potentials of the open social web is that it will permit companies to step away from invasive advertising, Mr. McCue said. He describes the alternative as “contextual” advertising to particular interests rather than individuals. For example, ads can be posted to web feeds focused on topics such as backpacking or fashion.

“The notion of creating an audience rather than chasing traffic is something we have been exploring,” said Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a popular news and media website. “ActivityPub might facilitate that by allowing for more direct and meaningful engagement with our readers.”

In addition to Meta’s decision to base Threads on ActivityPub, news organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the technology, as have blogging platforms such as Medium, WordPress and Ghost.

ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of over 14,000 host computers, as well as start-ups like Pixelfed and PeerTube, distributed services that offer features similar to Instagram and YouTube.

For several decades, Google’s dominance of internet search has been the driving force behind content creation and distribution. But as Google has invested in generative-A.I. summarization for responses to users’ queries, a window of opportunity for all kinds of discovery tools in addition to chatbots has made the need for alternatives more urgent.

That is a far cry from the very early roots of the World Wide Web in the work of Theodor H. Nelson, who, while a Harvard graduate student in 1961, noticed that text on the first computer monitors could move and that writing no longer needed to be linear. He invented the concept of hypertext, which was later adopted as the underlying structure of the World Wide Web. The designers of the new open social web services believe that their alternative is a step back toward the internet’s original ideals.

“It goes back to the original principles where the internet started out as decentralized,” said Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social networking platform that allows users to join independently operated servers while staying connected through a global network.

The transition from centralized to decentralized models will require a cultural shift among both publishers and audiences.

“There are significant product questions to solve, such as how to handle moderation and content discovery in a decentralized environment,” said Mike Godwin, a lawyer known for his work on internet rights and digital culture. “But these are the kinds of new problems we should be facing, ones that come with genuine innovation.”

Despite these challenges, the enthusiasm among the early adopters reminds some internet pioneers of the first few years of the World Wide Web.

“The energy around ActivityPub reminds me of the early days of the Web,” Mr. Nelson said in a recent interview, “where anything seemed possible, and innovation was around every corner.”

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How Macy’s can turn around its business amid struggles

admin — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 06:36:07 +0000

Macy’s needs to reignite its creativity by featuring more exciting products in stores and hosting engaging events to attract younger generations back, according to activist investor Barington Capital.

Those are just two of several changes the activist investor says are necessary to turn around Macy’s, which once established itself as a premier department store but has struggled to keep up with rapid industry changes and competition.

Jim Mitarotonda, the CEO of Barington Capital Group, made it clear that he is confident in Macy’s executive leadership, saying “there isn’t any reason” why the company shouldn’t be able to improve the execution of its business. While Macy’s CEO Tony Spring and CFO Adrian Mitchell “have a good understanding of the retail sector,” Mitarotonda told FOX Business that “the thinking has to change.”

Barington Capital, Thor Equities LLC and their respective affiliates, who are Macy’s shareholders, recommended that the retailer make changes to its capital allocation strategy and consider other structural actions to improve shareholder value.

Barington Capital argues that Macy’s needs to start hosting engaging events to bring younger generations back. Getty Images

Mitarotonda said the company needs to bring on “superb merchants.” Spring wasn’t on the merchandising side when he was heading Bloomingdales, so it’s important that he brings on a very creative team with people with strong merchandising and fashion skills, according to Mitarotonda.

“If the product is not exciting, they’re [customers] not going to go to the store or even go on a Macy’s website. It’s just not going to happen. So it really is about the product and about creating exciting events to drive people into the store,” Mitarotonda said.

The company also has to boost its digital marketing strategy, including leveraging influencers. Appealing to younger consumers is critical in helping the company penetrate the vast retail options available to the U.S. consumer today, according to Mitarotonda.

Mitarotonda thinks that Macy’s needs to take on “superb merchants”. Bloomberg via Getty Images

“Young people are going to TikTok. They’re going to Instagram, they’re going to Threads, they’re going to all of these other things that older people are not just gravitating towards,” he said. “They [Macy’s] need to think about that. They need to recreate the excitement again that existed a long, long time ago.”

Barington Capital’s chief praised Dillard’s, another major department store, for its strong performance, highlighting its success in both merchandising and improving business execution, which led to a significant increase in margins.

Over the past year, Macy’s shares have fallen more than 16%. During that same time, Dillard’s stock has increased over 11%.

Macy’s shares have dropped more than 16% over the past year. Getty Images

Mitarotonda also suggested that Macy’s should separate its operating company from its real estate business, meaning Macy’s should create a separate real estate company that owns the property, with the operating business paying rent to the real estate company.

This won’t “damage the retail business at all,” Mitarotonda said. On the contrary, he said it would “make them even better.”

Mitarotonda said this would create more transparency, allowing shareholders and the financial community to clearly see the revenue and expenses for each part of the company. Additionally, by having a real estate expert manage the property side, rather than a retailer, the firm believes it would help maximize the value of the real estate.

Mitarotonda thinks that Macy’s should also separate its operating company and its real estate business. Bloomberg via Getty Images

The firm also suggested spinning off the company’s luxury brands, Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, which continue to generate positive store sales.

Mitarotonda said if Bloomingdales and Bluemercury traded independently of Macy’s, they would trade at a higher multiple than their corporate parent.

“It’s imperative for the board of directors and the management team to look at how to maximize value for the owners of the company to shareholders of whom they are as well,” he said.

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