2024-07-10 18:35

NEW YORK, July 10 (Reuters) - While American children may wish summer vacation would never end, retailers want back-to-school season to start earlier than ever -- preferably now -- and are timing promotions ahead of Amazon's (AMZN.O) New Tab, opens new tab Prime Day. With deals on sneakers, computers, kids' clothing and backpacks, Walmart (WMT.N) New Tab, opens new tab, Target (TGT.N) New Tab, opens new tab and Shein hope to entice parents to start back-to-school shopping and capture dollars that might otherwise go to Amazon, which holds Prime Day on July 16 and 17. Although in many communities school does not resume until late August or September, the campaigns are launching this week and next, on average two days earlier than in prior years. "Retailers are looking to grow market share," said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. "It's not good enough to have bigger discounts. You need them earlier than your rivals." Target launched a week-long event on Sunday, two days earlier than last year, offering 30% off on school uniforms and backpacks, including from its in-house brand Cat & Jack. Walmart is holding its “largest deals event ever” from Tuesday to Thursday, also two days earlier than last year. Shein is holding a seven-week back-to-school sale starting July 15, two days ahead of its sale last year and a day ahead of Amazon Prime Day. Bytedance's TikTok Shop is running a deals event from Tuesday to July 17. Brian McCarthy, a retail strategy consultant at Deloitte Consulting, said the firm last year saw more families plan to spend the majority of their back-to-school budgets by the end of the July. Jewelia Stanley, 32 of Tampa, Florida, expects to spend $1,200, at least $300 more than last year, on back-to-school items for her three kids, including clothes from Shein and Temu, uniforms from Walmart and supplies from Amazon. She may have to wait longer to receive her purchases from Singapore-based Shein and PDD Group's Temu, as both retailers ship merchandise from China. Stanley's priciest purchase will be shoes from brands like Nike (NKE.N) New Tab, opens new tab or New Balance, which can cost $99 to $250 a pair. Back-to-school spending last year was an estimated $41.5 billion, a record, for children in kindergarten to 12th grade. The number grew to $135.5 billion when college students were included, according to the National Retail Federation. Prime Day, Amazon's summer extravaganza, spans two days. Continuing to keep competitors on their toes, the company pushed the event back five days from last year. But Amazon also released early Prime Day deals on Tuesday for Sony speakers, T-shirts, phone cases and other merchandise. When it launched a decade ago, Prime Day reshaped a traditionally slow time of year for retailers. Sales boomed and competitors had little choice but to follow suit. Last year, Amazon had its biggest single day of sales in company history on the first day of Prime Day. U.S. online sales across retailers during the event hit $12.7 billion. Prime Day draws shoppers hunting for all kinds of deals, not just on notebooks and lunch boxes. The event is estimated to generate 1% to 2% of Amazon's full year net sales, which were in $574.8 billion in 2023. The earlier and earlier start to back-to-school promotions has precedent in a similar strategy by Walmart and Amazon ahead of holidays. They launched year-end promotions in October last year, well ahead of Black Friday and Christmas. Shoppers last year bought 375 million individual items during Amazon's Prime Day. "Our members are looking for savings," said Jamil Ghani, worldwide vice president of Amazon Prime. "The economic situation of the last five years has been tough, and everybody is looking to stretch their dollars further." Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/summer-sizzles-us-retailers-try-move-back-to-school-shopping-july-2024-07-10/

2024-07-10 17:33

July 10 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) New Tab, opens new tab said on Wednesday it will acquire Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI for about $665 million in cash as the company tries to enhance its AI chip capabilities to compete against industry leader Nvidia. Building and training large language models is challenging, even for big tech companies. Acquiring Silo AI will help AMD improve the development and deployment of AMD-powered AI models and help potential customers build complex AI models with the company's chips, AMD said. Silo AI will also strengthen AMD's software development capabilities. While the deal will not impact AMD's financial performance, it "unlocks a significant amount of business moving forward," AMD Senior Vice President of AI, Vamsi Boppana said in an interview. AMD declined to discuss how much business the acquisition would generate over time. Helsinki, Finland-based Silo AI specializes in end-to-end AI-driven solutions that help customers integrate the tech into their products and services. With operations in Europe and North America, the startup counts companies, including Philips (PHG.AS) New Tab, opens new tab, Rolls-Royce (RR.L) New Tab, opens new tab and Unilever (ULVR.L) New Tab, opens new tab among its customers. Silo AI's CEO and co-founder Peter Sarlin will continue to lead the unit as part of the AMD Artificial Intelligence Group, AMD said. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2024. The acquisition marks the latest step from AMD in a series of moves aimed at expanding its footprint in the AI landscape. Last year, the company acquired AI software firms Mipsology and Nod.ai and has invested more than $125 million across a dozen AI companies over the last 12 months. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amd-acquire-finnish-startup-silo-ai-665-mln-step-up-ai-race-2024-07-10/

2024-07-10 17:28

July 10 (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said the central bank would make decisions on interest rates "when and as they need to be made" with no consideration to the coming presidential election. In response to a Republican lawmaker's question about the possibility of the Fed cutting interest rates at its meeting in mid-September, less than two months before Election Day, Powell said: "Our undertaking is to make decisions when and as they need to be made, based on the data, the incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance of risks, and not in consideration of other factors, and that would include political factors." "We'll make those decisions," Powell continued. "We have a long history of doing that, including during election years, and that is the undertaking we will make. Anything we do will be very well grounded. It's just not appropriate for us to get into the business of thinking about election cycles at all, one way or the other." Over Powell's two days of testimony in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Republican lawmakers asked him several whether the Fed intended to cut rates ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/feds-powell-will-act-when-as-needed-regardless-election-2024-07-10/

2024-07-10 16:34

July 10 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) New Tab, opens new tab announced a series of largely incremental refinements on Wednesday to several of its artificial intelligence products as it seeks to keep rivals at bay amid a continued investor frenzy over the technology. The retailer has sought to counter a perception that competitors Google (GOOGL.O) New Tab, opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O) New Tab, opens new tab and OpenAI have taken a lead in developing generative AI, which can respond almost instantaneously with full sentences or pictures to complicated prompts or queries. The improvements Amazon announced at its conference in New York include adding additional memory to so-called agents that automate work for businesses, so that each new request can build on prior ones, said Vasi Philomin, Amazon's vice president of generative AI. "This allows agents to provide more personalized and more seamless experiences, especially for complicated tasks," said Philomin in an interview Tuesday. He said, for instance, that the updated AI agents could remember for each subsequent request that a user prefers aisle or window seats on a flight, which was not previously possible. As well Amazon said it updated the Q chatbot it announced last November to make improved suggestions for writing software code, addressing one of the more popular uses for generative AI. Amazon also said it made improvements to help customers of its Bedrock service, which lets businesses create applications with a range of AI models, to detect and filter out so-called hallucinations -- when AI creates answers to questions or requests that may be wrong or misleading. Hallucinations have been a nagging problem in AI systems because they breed mistrust among users. Google, for instance, was criticized earlier this year for an AI-powered search feature that, among other things, recommended users add glue to pizza sauce to ensure cheese sticks to it. The new controls will help reduce the occurrence of hallucinations by about 75% for certain uses, Matt Wood, vice president of AI products at Amazon Web Services, said in an interview. AWS, which oversees much of Amazon's AI development, is on a pace to reach $100 billion in annual revenue, the company said in April. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/amazon-announces-incremental-ai-refinements-fend-off-rivals-2024-07-10/

2024-07-10 16:06

BERLIN, July 10 (Reuters) - Tesla (TSLA.O) New Tab, opens new tab has raised prices of its Model 3 cars in European countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Spain by about 1,500 euros ($1,622) after the EU imposed tariffs on EVs made in China, the U.S automaker said on Wednesday. Tesla, which makes the Model 3 in Shanghai and is the top exporter of EVs from China, had warned in June it might lift prices due to the tariffs imposed on July 4 by the European Commission to counter what it described as a potential flood of unfairly subsidised EVs. Beijing rejects this characterisation. The tariffs, which are provisional and will be applied until the Commission decides whether to apply final duties by November, are up to 37.6% depending on the carmaker. Tesla was classed as cooperating with the European Union's investigation into the matter and so was given a 20.8% tariff but requested a recalculation of its rate, according to the Commission. BMW (BMWG.DE) New Tab, opens new tab has also asked Brussels to cut the tariff for its China-made electric Mini, currently subject to the highest duty, to 20.8%. ($1 = 0.9243 euros) Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-raises-model-3-prices-germany-due-european-tariffs-china-made-evs-2024-07-10/

2024-07-10 15:32

July 10 (Reuters) - Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM.N) New Tab, opens new tab named manufacturing giant 3M's (MMM.N) New Tab, opens new tab Monish Patolawala as its CFO on Wednesday, as the grain trader tries to steer its way through multiple U.S. government investigations related to accounting irregularities. Patolawala's appointment at ADM will be effective Aug. 1, the company said. He will succeed interim CFO Ismael Roig, who has been serving in his role since January 2024. In March, ADM had corrected six years of financial data after an internal investigation found some sales between business units within the company were not recorded properly. ADM had put its then CFO Vikram Luthar on administrative leave in January before announcing his departure from the company in April. "I think the move signals the board wanted to hire an outside CFO candidate as a way to start fresh following the accounting issues," Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein said. ADM said Patolawala would have an initial annual base salary of $1.425 million. 3M shares were down while ADM was up marginally in morning trade. Some Wall Street analysts said Patolawala's departure from 3M was expected as he was likely passed over for the role of CEO for industry veteran Bill Brown. "We thought highly of Monish, and consider his four-year tenure at 3M to have been a success with clear and consistent messaging and the smoothly orchestrated Health Care spin," RBC Capital Markets analyst Deane Dray wrote in a note. 3M rolled out a major restructuring last year that includes cutting thousands of jobs and the spinoff of its healthcare business into a listed company, to mitigate the slowdown in demand. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/3m-cfo-patolawala-leave-company-by-end-july-2024-07-10/