Business

Plant-based meat maker Beyond Meat urged investors to look past its mixed first quarter results Wednesday, saying a new, healthier burger hitting U.S. shelves now will help reignite weak sales.

“We really do believe we are at the early stages of a pivotal and terrific year for Beyond Meat,” President and CEO Ethan Brown said during a conference call with investors. “We’re doing the things you need to do to get through a period that’s challenging and return to growth.”

The comments came after a bumpy first quarter that saw lower demand for Beyond Meat’s burgers, steak and chicken in the U.S. and abroad.

The El Segundo, California-based company said its revenue fell 18% to $75.6 million in the January-March period. That was slightly higher than the $75.2 million Wall Street expected, according to analysts polled by FactSet.

It was the company’s eighth straight quarter of year-over-year revenue declines.

Beyond Meat said U.S. retail demand was soft despite discounts on its products. The company said sales also fell compared to last year because it discontinued its Beyond Meat Jerky. U.S. retail and food service sales were both down 16%.

International retail sales fell 12%, reflecting lower demand for plant-based chicken, Beyond Meat said. International food service sales fell 29%. Beyond Meat said it was a tough comparison to the first quarter of 2023, when Beyond Meat filled a big order for McDonald’s as its plant-based McNuggets went on sale in Europe.

Brown said inflationary concerns seemed to dampen demand for its products in some markets, including the United Kingdom and Canada. But he said Beyond Meat remains bullish about Europe, and noted that McDonald’s recently expanded sales of its McPlant burger — co-developed with Beyond Meat — to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Brown said the fourth iteration of the Beyond Burger, which is rolling out to U.S. stores now, addresses consumers’ concerns about the health of the company’s products. It has 60% less saturated fat and more protein than its predecessor, for example. Beyond Meat plans a marketing campaign to spread the word about the new burger.

“We wanted to tackle that directly and try to make our products as unassailable on the health side as they are on the climate and environment and animal welfare side of things,” Brown said.

The burger will also be priced higher than the outgoing burger, reflecting its premium positioning, he said.

Beyond Meat signaled its confidence by reiterating its outlook. Beyond Meat expects net revenue in the range of $315 million to $345 million for the full year. The company reported full-year revenue of $343 million in 2023.

But investors appeared skeptical. Beyond Meat’s shares plunged 15% in after-hours trading.

Beyond Meat’s first quarter net loss narrowed to $54.4 million from $59 million in the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted for one-time items, the company lost 72 cents per share. That was higher than the 67-cent loss analysts were expecting, according to FactSet.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is racing into yet another battleground state Wednesday, continuing to push a contrast with Donald Trump on economic policy as his own reelection campaign readies a new $14 million advertising blitz aimed in part at Black, Latino and Asian American voters.

Biden is traveling to Racine, Wisconsin, where he’ll highlight a decision by Microsoft to build a $3.3 billion data center that is expected to create roughly 2,000 jobs. It’s also the spot where Trump, to much fanfare, lauded a plan by Taiwan-based electronics giant Foxconn plan to build a $10 billion manufacturing facility that was supposed to eventually employ 10,000 people. Except it was never completed.

Conscious of that history, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith said in an interview with The Associated Press that Microsoft had a “steadfast commitment to under-promising and over-delivering” and praised the Biden administration and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for economic policies that set the stage for the developments announced Wednesday.

Trump’s campaign didn’t address Foxconn, but the Republican former president often says the economy was in a much better position when he was in office and will be again should he win in 2024.

Meanwhile, Biden’s reelection team is sharpening its outreach to minority voters on the airwaves, with the fresh, seven-figure digital and television ad campaign launching Wednesday that follows the $30 million effort that began after his State of the Union address in early March. One of the ads that is a part of the fresh campaign will also be released Wednesday and focuses on Trump’s failed yet determined push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

After his speech, Biden is making a campaign stop to speak with Black voters about the stakes of the November election.

The Biden campaign wants to capitalize on the fundraising advantage it’s enjoyed over Trump, amassing significant resources on the ground in key battleground states to force Republicans to play catch-up much later in the year.

“Equally important as our own historic investments is the complete lack of investment on the other side,” Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, told reporters. “Trump’s paid media strategy can only be described as anemic and inefficient.”

A significant portion of the $14 million campaign starting Wednesday will go into Black and Hispanic media, as well as Asian American print and radio, according to the campaign. Campaign officials also said Biden will continue to do targeted interviews with media that serve primarily minority audiences, while the campaign plans to launch in May more coalition groups that focus on specific blocs of voters. So far, the Biden campaign has started groups to engage women, Latinos and educators.

By the end of May, Biden’s reelection effort will have more than 200 offices and roughly 500 staff members in place, according to Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground director. Those figures include offices in areas that traditionally haven’t seen investments by Democrats in pockets of Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina.

“We’re showing up in the community every day and attempting to earn every vote,” said Quentin Fulks, the Biden campaign’s principal deputy campaign manager. “Donald Trump and his team are doing none of that.”

Though Biden’s remarks in Racine are part of a formal White House event, Fulks said the stop will “highlight the stark contrast between the progress he’s made for Wisconsin’s families and Donald Trump’s failures.”

Microsoft’s Smith said the first phase of the new data center complex will bring an influx of 2,300 mostly construction jobs by the end of the year.

While Microsoft has been ramping up artificial intelligence-driven data center construction around the world, “this one is more important than many because there is more land and ultimately access to power available,” said Smith, who as a child lived in the area where the center is being built.

Once in operation, however, even the most powerful data centers typically employ a relatively small group of full-time employees to oversee them. Microsoft will have about 500, pulling from highly skilled workers in the corridor between Milwaukee and Chicago, Smith said.

However, he argued that the bigger impact for the region would be in the technology itself and broader investments in preparing the Upper Midwest for its impacts.

“This is about the competitiveness of manufacturing in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Ohio,” Smith said.

Racine County is a critical location. All but five of the past 33 winning presidential candidates carried it. Trump is one of the five. He won Racine County but lost the election. Biden was the first Democrat since 1976 to win Wisconsin without carrying Racine County.

Polls, including one from the Marquette University Law School last month, show the race to be about even in Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Biden won by just under 21,000 votes in 2020.

Republicans point to both state and national polls showing that their voters are more enthused than Democrats. In Wisconsin’s presidential primary a month ago, 18,000 more Republicans than Democrats voted.

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Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Wisconsin and Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.

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(Reuters) – New York Times beat estimates for quarterly revenue on Wednesday, helped by a pick up in advertising spending and subscriber growth.

The company reported revenue of $594 million, compared with analysts’ estimates of $591.9 million, according to LSEG data.

(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)

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(Reuters) – AerCap Holdings NV has placed an order for 150 new CFM LEAP engines valued at about $3 billion, the world’s largest aircraft lessor said on Wednesday.

The CFM engines are made by a joint venture between General Electric Co and France’s Safran SA.

The engines will be managed by SES, a 50-50 joint-venture company between Safran and AerCap.

AerCap’s announcement comes ahead of its investor day presentation later on Wednesday.

The company’s board has also authorized a new $500 million share repurchase program through Dec. 31.

(Reporting by Nathan Gomes in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)

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ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Disney has received a key approval to expand its Southern California theme parks in its first push to make major changes to its iconic Disneyland in decades.

The Anaheim City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the plan to transform Disney’s 490-acre (488-hectare) campus in densely-populated Southern California by moving parking to a multi-story structure and redeveloping a massive lot with new entertainment and rides. It was a second, required vote for the plan after the council gave initial approval last month. The approved zoning changes and ordinances require another 30 days for changes to take effect.

The proposal doesn’t expand the parks’ physical footprint but will help Disney create new, immersive experiences for visitors by building a land such as the snow-covered hamlet of Arendelle from “Frozen” or the critter-filled metropolis of “Zootopia.” It requires Disney to invest at least $1.9 billion in the project over the next decade and spend tens of millions of dollars on street improvements, affordable housing and other infrastructure in the city of 345,000 people.

It’s the first time Disney has sought a major change to its California theme parks since the 1990s, when the company obtained approvals to turn Disneyland, its original theme park dubbed “the happiest place on Earth” and built in 1955, into a resort hub. It later built the Disney California Adventure theme park and the Downtown Disney shopping and entertainment area in the city 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.

Disneyland was the second-most visited theme park in the world in 2022 with 16.8 million people coming through the gates, according to a report by the Themed Entertainment Association and AECOM.

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(Reuters) -Refiner HF Sinclair beat Wall Street estimates for first-quarter profit on Wednesday, helped by tight fuel supplies due to refinery shutdowns in Russia and heavy maintenance in the U.S.

Fuel supplies have tightened this year following outages at Russian refineries after Ukrainian drone attacks shut a significant section of Russia’s refining capacity during the quarter.

HF Sinclair’s refinery gross margin was $12.70 per produced barrel, a 45% decline compared to the first quarter of 2023, the company said, as fuel prices scaled back.

The company also announced a new share buyback program of $1 billion.

The Dallas, Texas-based refiner posted adjusted net income of 71 cents per share for the three months ended March 31, compared with average analysts’ estimate of 65 cents per share, according to LSEG data.

(Reporting by Sourasis Bose in Bengaluru; Editing by Ravi Prakash Kumar)

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SEOUL (Reuters) – Korean Air will sell five of its planes to U.S. aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corporation, the airline said in an exchange filing on Wednesday.

Sierra Nevada recently won a $13 billion U.S. Air Force contract to develop a successor to the E-4B Nightwatch, known as the Doomsday plane due to its ability to survive a nuclear war and act as a command and control centre during emergencies.

Sierra Nevada did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Korean Air planes being sold are four-engined Boeing 747-8s, a source familiar with the matter said.

The four current E-4 planes, which have been in service since the 1970s, are modified Boeing 747-200s.

The sale, valued at 918 billion Korean won ($674 million), is in line with Korean Air’s medium to long-term plan to dispose of older aircraft and replace them with newer generation ones, the Korean Air filing said.

Korean Air will sell the planes in September 2025, the filing said.

($1 = 1,363.0100 won)

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington)

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A look at the day ahead in U.S. and global markets from Mike Dolan

Wall Street looks to have brushed off the latest hawkish Federal Reserve noises and Disney’s outsize swoon, with European bourses stalking new records as Sweden becomes the latest G10 central bank to cut interest rates and oil prices plunged.

Stocks futures and Treasury yields held pretty steady overnight even after Minneapolis Fed chief and known hawk Neel Kashkari said all policy options were on the table in getting inflation back in the bottle.

“If we need to hold rates where they are for an extended period of time to tap the brakes on the economy, or if we even needed to raise, we would do what we needed to do to get inflation back down,” Kashkari said.

Perhaps seen as a outlier and not even a voting member of the Fed’s policymaking committee this year, markets appeared to bat the comments away.

Helped by brisk demand for the hefty $58 billion sale of three-year notes on Tuesday and another sharp fall in crude oil prices, Treasury yields were relatively calm going into a $42 billion 10-year auction later on Wednesday.

Crude oil prices fell to their lowest since March 11 as industry data showed a pile-up of U.S. inventories – a sign of weakening demand – and cautious supply expectations emerged ahead of an OPEC+ policy meeting next month.

U.S. crude stocks rose by 509,000 barrels in the week ended May 3, sources said, citing American Petroleum Institute figures, and gasoline and distillate inventories also rose. Official U.S. government data is due later in the day.

And European bourses looked set for record highs as Sweden cut interest rates on Wednesday and underlined the divergence between European central banks policymaking and the Fed’s.

Sweden’s central bank cut its key interest rate to 3.75% from 4.00% as expected and said it was likely to cut the rate two more times in the second half of the year if the outlook for inflation still holds.

After eight rate hikes in Sweden, inflation is now close to the Riksbank’s 2% target after peaking at over 10%.

The Riksbank is the second of the major G10 central banks to ease, with the Swiss National Bank jumping the gun in March.

And crucially, the crown weakened only marginally.

With the European Central Bank now widely expected to cut rates next month, attention turns to Thursday’s Bank of England meeting. Although no UK move is expected this week, there’s considerable speculation the BoE may open the door for a rate cut in June too.

Britain’s benchmark FTSE 100 hit a new record high on Tuesday, 10-year gilt yields fell to their lowest in almost four weeks and the pound slipped.

The overall picture kept the dollar buoyed generally – especially against the ailing Japanese yen. Dollar/yen climbed back above 155 despite fresh warnings from Japanese authorities of repeat intervention to sells dollars.

Asian stocks bucked the U.S. and European trend and wobbled across the board earlier, with Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong all ending in the red.

Back on Wall Street, Tuesday’s gains and steady overnight futures survived another retreat in Tesla and Walt Disney’s 10% slump. Disney fell as a surprise profit in its streaming entertainment division was eclipsed by a drop in its traditional TV business and weaker box office.

Shares in electric-pickup maker Rivian fell about 5% in out-of-hours trade overnight as it stuck to a 2024 production forecast well below Wall Street targets and reported a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss as it ended a weeks-long manufacturing halt.

Key diary items that may provide direction to U.S. markets later on Wednesday:

* Federal Reserve Vice Chair Philip Jefferson, Fed Board Governor Lisa Cook and Boston Fed President Susan Collins speak

* US corporate earnings: Uber, News Corp, Airbnb, Emerson Electric, Corpay, Celanese, Atmos Energy, NiSource, STERIS, Broadridge Financial Solutions

* Chinese President Xi Jinping in Serbia and Hungary as part of week-long visit to Europe

* US Treasury auctions $42 billion of 10-year notes

(By Mike Dolan, editing by Nick Macfie mike.dolan@thomsonreuters.com)

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(Reuters) -Reddit predicted that it could post an adjusted core profit in the second quarter on the back of strong user growth and an uptick in the advertising market, sending its shares up more than 16% in extended trading on Tuesday.

The forecast contrasted with Wall Street expectations of a loss. Reporting its first results since going public in March, the company also forecast revenue for the second quarter that was widely above market estimates.

Reddit is also trying to diversify revenue by licensing its user-generated content for the training of data-hungry AI models. It signed a deal with Google earlier this year that is worth about $60 million per year.

The results follow strong earnings from rivals including Snap and fan optimism that marketers are ramping up spending this year, after an ad market slump in 2023 caused by sticky inflation and an uncertain economic outlook.

Reddit said it expects adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization to be between break-even and $15 million in the second quarter, compared with analysts’ estimate for a loss of $18.2 million, according to LSEG data.

The company also forecast second-quarter revenue to be between $240 million and $255 million, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $223.8 million.

(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)

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TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance are suing the U.S. over a law that would ban the popular video-sharing app unless it’s sold to another company, arguing that it vaguely paints it as a threat to national security to get around the First Amendment.

The widely expected lawsuit filed on Tuesday may be setting up what will likely be a protracted legal fight over TikTok’s future in the United States — and could end up before the Supreme Court. If TikTok loses, it says it will be forced to shut down next year.

The popular social video company says that the law, which President Joe Biden signed as part of a larger $95 billion foreign aid package, is so “obviously unconstitutional” that the sponsors of the measure are trying to portray it not as a ban, but as a regulation of TikTok’s ownership. It’s the first time the U.S. government has singled out a social media company with a potential ban, which free speech advocates note is more common in repressive regimes such as Iran or China.

“Congress has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok: a vibrant online forum for protected speech and expression used by 170 million Americans to create, share, and view videos over the Internet,” ByteDance said in its suit, filed in a federal appeals court in Washington D.C. “For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”

The law requires TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to sell the platform within nine months. If a sale is already in progress, the company will get another three months to complete the deal. ByteDance has said it “doesn’t have any plan to sell TikTok.” But even if it wanted to divest, the company would have to get a blessing from Beijing. According to the lawsuit, the Chinese government has “made clear” that it would not permit ByteDance to divest the recommendation engine that is “key to the success of TikTok in the United States.”

TikTok and ByteDance argued in the lawsuit that it isn’t being given a choice.

“The ‘qualified divestiture’ demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally,” they said.

“There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit argues that it would be impossible for ByteDance to divest its U.S. TikTok platform as a separate entity from the rest of TikTok, which has 1 billion users worldwide — most of them outside of the United States. A U.S.-only TikTok, the suit says, would operate as an island that’s detached from the rest of the world.

TikTok also paints divestment as a technological impossibility, since the law requires all of TikTok’s millions of lines of software code to be wrested from ByteDance so that there is no “operational relationship” between the Chinese company and the new U.S. app.

“Specifically, to comply with the law’s divestiture requirement, that code base would have to be moved to a large, alternative team of engineers — a team that does not exist and would have no understanding of the complex code necessary to run the platform,” the lawsuit says.

The parties argued that they should be protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression. They are seeking a declaratory judgment that the Act violates the U.S. Constitution; an order enjoining Attorney General Merrick Garland from enforcing the Act and any further relief that the court may deem appropriate.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit Tuesday. And White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to engage on questions about why the president continues to use TikTok for his political activities, deferring to the campaign.

ByteDance will first likely ask a court to temporarily block the federal law from going into effect, said Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School. And the decision whether to grant such a preliminary injunction could decide the case, he said. In its absence, he said, “ByteDance is going to need to sell TikTok before this case is ever decided.”

Whether a court will grant such an injunction remains unclear to Hurwitz, largely because it requires balancing important freedom-of-speech issues against the Biden administration’s claims of harm to national security. “I think the courts will be very deferential to Congress on these issues,” he said.

The fight over TikTok takes place as U.S.-China relations have shifted to that of intense strategic rivalry, especially in areas such as advanced technologies and data security, seen as essential to each country’s economic prowess and national security.

U.S. lawmakers from both parties, as well as administration and law enforcement officials, have expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or sway public opinion by manipulating the algorithm that populates users’ feeds. Some have also pointed to a Rutgers University study that maintains TikTok content was being amplified or underrepresented based on how it aligns with the interests of the Chinese government, which the company disputes.

Opponents of the law argue that Chinese authorities — or any nefarious parties — could easily get information on Americans in other ways, including through commercial data brokers that rent or sell personal information. They note the U.S. government hasn’t provided public evidence that shows TikTok sharing U.S. user information with Chinese authorities, or tinkering with its algorithm for China’s benefit.

“Data collection by apps has real consequences for all of our privacy,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “But banning one social media platform used by millions of people around the world is not the solution. Instead, we need Congress to pass laws that protect our privacy in the first place.”

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, expects TikTok’s challenge to the ban to succeed.

“The First Amendment means the government can’t restrict Americans’ access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here,” Jaffer said in a printed statement.

While TikTok has prevailed in its earlier First Amendment challenges, it is not clear whether the current lawsuit will be as simple.

“The bipartisan nature of this federal law may make judges more likely to defer to a Congressional determination that the company poses a national security risk,” said Gautam Hans, a law professor and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell University. “Without public discussion of what exactly the risks are, however, it’s difficult to determine why the courts should validate such an unprecedented law.”

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Associated Press writers David Hamilton and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

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