Aurelia Butler

The company’s earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter were $0.13, surpassing analyst expectations by $0.05. However, revenue fell short, coming in at $438.4 million against the consensus estimate of $465.77 million.In comparison to the same quarter last year, Hain Celestial’s net sales experienced a decline of 3.7%, with both organic net sales and overall net sales reflecting this decrease. Despite the drop in net sales, the company saw improvements in profitability metrics, with a 60-basis point increase in gross profit margin and a significant reduction in net loss from the previous year.The company’s CEO, Wendy Davidson, acknowledged the challenges faced, particularly in the North American segment, which saw a 6.5% decrease in net sales, primarily due to lower sales in personal care and baby and kids categories. In contrast, the International segment reported a modest 1.0% year-over-year growth in net sales.Looking ahead, Hain Celestial has revised its full-year guidance for fiscal 2024, citing slower-than-expected recovery in its infant formula business, underperformance in the Snacks category, and delays in stabilizing the Personal Care business. Organic net sales are anticipated to decline between 3 to 4%, with adjusted EBITDA expected to range from $150 million to $155 million. The company has reaffirmed its free cash flow guidance of $40 million to $45 million.The company’s CFO, Lee Boyce, expressed determination to address the issues, stating, “We are aggressively addressing Personal Care stabilization through portfolio and operating footprint consolidation, we are working closely with our formula supplier to ensure a full recovery beginning in the second half of 2024, and we have realigned the commercial business in North America with a series of leadership changes and a clear plan to accelerate our execution in the region.”This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C. More

However, the company’s revenue fell short of forecasts, coming in at $438.4 million against a consensus estimate of $465.77 million. This represents a 3.7% decline in net sales compared to the same quarter last year.The company’s President and CEO, Wendy Davidson, acknowledged the challenges faced, particularly in the North American segment, attributing the revenue shortfall to underperformance in the baby formula and personal care businesses, as well as execution issues in the snacks category. Despite these setbacks, Davidson expressed confidence in the company’s ongoing transformation strategy, “Hain Reimagined,” and its potential for future growth.Hain Celestial’s adjusted gross profit margin improved by 90 basis points from the prior year period to 22.3%, and its adjusted EBITDA saw a year-over-year increase of 17.5% to $43.8 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin also expanded by 180 basis points compared to the prior year period. The company’s net loss narrowed significantly to $48.2 million from a net loss of $115.7 million in the prior year period.Looking ahead, Hain Celestial has revised its fiscal 2024 guidance. Organic net sales are expected to decline by 3 to 4% year-over, with adjusted EBITDA projected to be between $150 million and $155 million. The midpoint of the adjusted EBITDA guidance range is $152.5 million, which is a detail to watch as it compares to analyst expectations. The company reaffirmed its free cash flow guidance, anticipating it to be between $40 million to $45 million.CFO Lee Boyce commented on the revised guidance, citing the slower than expected recovery in the infant formula business, subpar execution in the snacks category, and the prolonged stabilization of the personal care business as contributing factors. Boyce emphasized the company’s proactive measures to address these issues, including leadership changes and strategic plans to improve execution in North America.While the company’s stock movement was not provided, the financial results and future guidance are critical indicators of Hain Celestial’s performance and trajectory. The company’s efforts to simplify its portfolio and improve operational efficiency are key to navigating the current challenges and achieving long-term success.This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.China’s President Xi Jinping has praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government for pursuing an “independent” foreign policy and “defying” great power politics on a European trip analysts say is aimed at exploiting divisions in the EU and Nato. Xi, who is due to travel to Hungary from Serbia on Wednesday evening as part of his five-day European tour, called for Budapest to “lead” central and eastern European nations’ relations with China in a letter published by Hungarian media group Magyar Nemzet.“We have gone through hardships together and defied power politics together amid volatile international relations,” Xi said in an English version of the article. “We have found our respective path for sovereign states to independently conduct friendly exchanges with other countries.”The comments appeared to be a reference to how Orbán, Europe’s longest-serving prime minister, has defied pressure from Brussels, the US and Nato, maintaining friendly relations with Moscow and deepening business ties with China.Xi told French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday that the world needed to avoid a “new cold war”, part of a campaign by Beijing to convince European governments to distance themselves from US foreign policy which it sees as aimed at containing China’s rise.China regards Hungary as one of its closest partners in Europe and has lavished investment promises on the country. One potential project under discussion is an electric vehicle plant for China’s Great Wall Motor, Chinese officials have said, following investments by EV maker BYD and battery maker CATL.However, Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, said reports Xi might announce plans for the factory during his visit were premature, adding: “Talking about specific companies during negotiations, before any agreement is made, is contrary to Hungary’s national interests”.Szijjártó said he expected at least 16 deals to be signed with China while Xi was in Hungary, covering infrastructure and the construction, energy, and industrial sectors. The two countries would start a co-operation programme “encompassing the entire portfolio of nuclear energy”, he said.According to Chinese estimates, accumulated foreign direct investment by Chinese enterprises in Hungary could reach €30bn by the end of this year.“Our two countries need to lead regional co-operation,” Xi said in his letter, adding Hungary could help China deepen ties with central and eastern European countries to ensure “steady” relations between Beijing and the EU.Xi’s comments are unlikely to ease European worries about Beijing’s priorities.During his meetings with Macron, Xi gave no ground on European complaints that oversupply and weak demand in China could threaten EU industry through the dumping of cheap products on the bloc’s markets.The EU is also concerned about Xi’s close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s growing trade with Russia, which the bloc alleges has helped Moscow withstand western sanctions since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Xi’s visits to Hungary and Serbia — among Europe’s most Russia-friendly countries — would do little to dispel those concerns, analysts said.Orbán in October became the first EU leader to meet Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The meeting took place in Beijing on the sidelines of the Belt and Road forum, Xi’s signature infrastructure investment initiative, where Orbán was the only European leader in attendance. Xi, who arrived in Serbia on Tuesday, lashed out at Nato over the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which killed three people, saying that Chinese and Serbians should “never forget” the incident.Welcoming Xi to Belgrade on Wednesday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić told the crowd he was happy to extend “the warmest welcome anywhere in the world” to the Chinese leader.“When they ask us about China, we don’t have complicated answers,” Vučić told Xi. “As a small country, we have a lot of problems, and then we call our big friends, Mr President.”“This is a bilateral and sincere friendship,” Xi replied. “There is a strong a sense of friendship between our countries.”Vučić hailed a free trade agreement with China that takes effect in July and which he said would “bring security” to Serbian farmers. Construction and transport minister Goran Vesić told journalists Serbia would buy Chinese high-speed trains for Belgrade-Budapest railway, which would be nearly complete by the end of 2024 and that China would also participate in the construction of the first Belgrade underground. More

While the investment bank remains bullish on its call for three 25 basis point rate cuts this year, it is pushing out the start until September from the previous expectation of June.”A reversal in key components points to disinflation ahead, but given the lack of progress in recent months, it will take a bit longer for the FOMC to gain confidence to take the first step,” wrote analysts at the bank.Morgan Stanley noted that it was early to warn of a reacceleration in inflation in the first quarter, but the data came in hotter than even they were anticipating.Despite the data surprises, the firm’s recently updated forecasts support the view that reacceleration in the first quarter was temporary and disinflation lies ahead.”We see sequential rates broadly aligned with the Fed’s 2% inflation target by the end of the year, bringing core PCE inflation to 2.7% 4Q/4Q in 2024,” Morgan Stanley added.The lack of progress since the start of the year suggests that it will take longer for the FOMC to gain confidence that inflation is on a sustainable path toward 2%.Along with the three rate cuts this year, the bank expects four 25 basis point cuts through mid-2025. More

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LONDON (Reuters) – If worries about sterling were a factor preventing the Bank of England cutting interest rates too far ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve, then Japan’s dollar-selling intervention may, weirdly, help keep its options open.Britain’s central bank announces its latest policy decision on Thursday. While its unlikely to change UK base rates this week, there’s speculation about whether it may guide markets towards a cut as soon as next month – just two weeks after a widely flagged move from the European Central Bank on June 6.More dovish recent noises from senior BoE figures, not least Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden, suggest some rhetorical movement in the Bank’s Threadneedle Street home – even as Fed hawks hang tough on a ‘higher-for-longer’ tack across the Atlantic. As it stands, money markets see a 90% chance of an ECB move next month, but less than a 50% chance of a June BoE cut – with a quarter-point reduction for the latter not fully priced until its Aug. 1 meeting. With a first Fed easing now not fully discounted in the futures market until November, that middle ground may seem comfortable for UK policymakers.However, BoE hesitation in joining the ECB may stem in part from a reluctance to undermine the pound against a resurgent U.S. dollar – as that in turn may just aggravate dollar-priced import costs in energy, commodity and other goods and cut across the UK disinflation process.But if the dollar has come off the boil more generally, there could well be bolder view in London.To that effect, Japanese government intervention over the past week to sell dollars and put a floor under its plunging yen might finally turn down the heat on the greenback – just as the Fed cools simmering speculation of another hike there.Morgan Stanley strategists point out that when Japan last intervened to sell the U.S. currency in late 2022, the dollar’s broader DXY index – which is almost 60% weighted against the euro but up to 14% and 12% respectively against the yen and sterling too – recoiled 10% over the following three months.While they’re quick to point out that wasn’t all down to Japan selling, the snowballing was aided back then by a resumption of U.S. disinflation and a China rebound – not an unlikely combination this time around either, even if less forceful.With the dollar on a tighter leash at least, BoE willingness to signal some more independence from the standing Fed policy timeline may increase.And reckoning the door may well open up this week for a June BoE rate cut, the Morgan Stanley team said its estimate of a 4.5% “sensitivity” of the sterling/dollar exchange rate to every 100 basis point fall in two-year U.S.-UK yield gaps would make that tolerable.”While unhelpful for the near-term inflation dynamic, this is not a dramatic depreciation,” it wrote, adding it’s enough to allow the BoE to deviate somewhat from the Fed.’ALTERED GUIDANCE’Deutsche Bank strategist Shreyas Gopal and UK economist Sanjay Raja riffed off a similar theme and said “divergence between the BoE and Fed is coming closer into view now.”The Deutsche pair said the environment of low currency market volatility more generally has reduced the sensitivity of sterling to a diverging rate path. It sees an even smaller 3.5% fall in the pound on a 100 basis point drop in the two-year U.S.-UK rate gap versus what would have been an equivalent 8% hit to the pound in the decade before COVID-19.And that sort of contained currency hit would only see a modest 6 basis point increase in UK inflation over the following year, they said.Barclays too thinks the BoE will hold the line this week – but “with altered guidance to pave the way to a June cut.”Further encouraging the BoE to lean to June will be the way in which the euro took only a glancing blow over the past couple of months as ECB officials insisted a cut next month is in store. And so while Japanese intervention may be the furthest thing from BoE policymakers’ thinking on Thursday, Tokyo’s timely shot across the dollar’s bow may indirectly encourage them that the pound can hold up comfortably in the crossfire.The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters. More

The Commerce Department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and the data it is trained on are kept under wraps, three people familiar with the matter said. Any action would complement a series of measures put in place over the last two years to block the export of sophisticated AI chips to China in an effort to slow Beijing’s development of the cutting edge technology for military purposes. Even so, it will be hard for regulators to keep pace with the industry’s fast-moving developments. The Commerce Department declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Currently, nothing is stopping U.S. AI giants like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google DeepMind and rival Anthropic, which have developed some of the most powerful closed source AI models, from selling them to almost anyone in the world without government oversight. Government and private sector researchers worry U.S. adversaries could use the models, which mine vast amounts of text and images to summarize information and generate content, to wage aggressive cyber attacks or even create potent biological weapons. To develop an export control on AI models, the sources said the U.S. may turn to a threshold contained in an AI executive order issued last October that is based on the amount of computing power it takes to train a model. When that level is reached, a developer must report its AI model development plans and provide test results to the Commerce Department. That computing power threshold could become the basis for determining what AI models would be subject to export restrictions, according to two U.S. officials and another source briefed on the discussions. They declined to be named because details have not been made public. If used, it would likely only restrict the export of models that have yet to be released, since none are thought to have reached the threshold yet, though Google’s Gemini Ultra is seen as being close, according to EpochAI, a research institute tracking AI trends.The agency is far from finalizing a rule proposal, the sources stressed. But the fact that such a move is under consideration shows the U.S. government is seeking to close gaps in its effort to thwart Beijing’s AI ambitions, despite serious challenges to imposing a muscular regulatory regime on the fast-evolving technology.As the Biden administration looks at competition with China and the dangers of sophisticated AI, AI models “are obviously one of the tools, one of the potential choke points that you need to think about here,” said Peter Harrell, a former National Security Council official. “Whether you can, in fact, practically speaking, turn it into an export-controllable chokepoint remains to be seen,” he added. BIOWEAPONS AND CYBER ATTACKS? The American intelligence community, think tanks and academics are increasingly concerned about risks posed by foreign bad actors gaining access to advanced AI capabilities. Researchers at Gryphon Scientific and Rand Corporation noted that advanced AI models can provide information that could help create biological weapons. The Department of Homeland Security said cyber actors would likely use AI to “develop new tools” to “enable larger-scale, faster, efficient, and more evasive cyber attacks” in its 2024 homeland threat assessment.Any new export rules could also target other countries, one of the sources said. “The potential explosion for [AI’s] use and exploitation is radical and we’re having actually a very hard time kind of following that,” Brian Holmes, an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said an export control gathering in March, flagging China’s advancement as a particular concern. AI CRACKDOWN To address these concerns, the U.S. has taken measures to stem the flow of American AI chips and the tools to make them to China. It also proposed a rule to require U.S. cloud companies to tell the government when foreign customers use their services to train powerful AI models that could be used for cyber attacks. But so far it hasn’t addressed the AI models themselves. Alan Estevez, who oversees U.S. export policy at the Department of Commerce, said in December that the agency was looking at options for regulating open source large language model (LLM) exports before seeking industry feedback. Tim Fist, an AI policy expert at Washington DC based think tank CNAS, says the threshold “is a good temporary measure until we develop better methods of measuring the capabilities and risks of new models.”The threshold is not set in stone. One of the sources said Commerce might end up with a lower floor, coupled with other factors, like the type of data or potential uses for the AI model, such as the ability to design proteins that could be used to make a biological weapon. Regardless of the threshold, AI model exports will be hard to control. Many models are open source, meaning they would remain beyond the purview of export controls under consideration.Even imposing controls on the more advanced proprietary models will prove challenging, as regulators will likely struggle to define the right criteria to determine which models should be controlled at all, Fist said, noting that China is likely only around two years behind the United States in developing its own AI software. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Sweden’s central bank cut interest rates for the first time in eight years as European monetary policymakers diverge from the US to support their economies even if it comes at the expense of their currencies.The Riksbank reduced its main interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.75 per cent on Wednesday, the first time it has loosened policy ahead of the US Federal Reserve this century.“When inflation approaches the target while economic activity is weak, monetary policy can be eased,” the Riksbank said. “If the outlook for inflation still holds, the policy rate is expected to be cut two more times during the second half of the year.” The Swedish rate cut, following similar moves in the past few months by the Swiss, Czech and Hungarian central banks, shows Europe’s growing willingness to take a different path from the US on monetary policy, economists say. An expected cut by the European Central Bank at its next meeting would confirm that divergence. Due to the size of the US economy and the outsized influence of its financial markets and the dollar, the Federal Reserve usually leads the way on changing rates. After the Riksbank’s decision the krona slid 0.5 per cent against the dollar to SKr10.9 and 0.4 per cent against the euro to SKr11.7.Sweden’s currency is the third-worst performer in the G10 group of most traded currencies this year, down 7.5 per cent against the dollar and 5 per cent against the euro.Christina Nyman, chief economist at Handelsbanken and a former Riksbank official, said earlier that a rate cut would put the krona under further pressure, particularly if the Fed delays its own cuts.“It’s the currency that could be potentially be a problem. Sweden is a small open economy and we are dependent on what happens around us,” she added.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.With US inflation remaining higher than expected and its economy continuing to produce solid growth, the Fed last week signalled it was likely to keep rates higher for longer.However, inflation and growth in Europe have been weaker in recent months than in the US, opening the door for the region’s central banks to start lowering borrowing costs before the Fed. The ECB has signalled it is likely to start cutting rates at its next policy meeting on June 6 if price pressures keep fading as expected. The Riksbank has moved ahead of the ECB before: in 2019 it ditched negative interest rates more than two years before they ended in the Eurozone.An EU member-state, more than two-thirds of Sweden’s imports and half of its exports are traded with the bloc, making the Nordic economy sensitive to shifts in the euro and ECB monetary policy decisions.But there are worries that if rates in Europe fall faster than in the US, it would cause European currencies to depreciate against the dollar, raising import prices and fuelling higher inflation. Riksbank governor Erik Thedéen recently acknowledged that the krona could be affected if the Fed sustains higher rates.“The Riksbank is particularly interesting to watch in this episode as the structure of the Swedish economy is closely related to the wider European one and hence it acts more as a precursor [than Switzerland] for what may come from the ECB,” said Piet Haines Christiansen, a strategist at Danske Bank.Sweden’s economy contracted both last year and in the first quarter of this year after a series of rate rises led to a sharp drop in house prices and fall in consumption, while there are signs that inflation should reach the Riksbank’s 2 per cent target in 2024.The Riksbank on Wednesday stressed that the outlook for inflation was uncertain, and that further changes in interest rates “should therefore be characterised by caution” as it worries in particular about a strong US economy, the krona, and geopolitical tension.The Swedish rate cut stands in contrast with sentiment in neighbouring Norway, which is also suffering from a weak currency. Norges Bank last week indicated it would keep rates on hold for the foreseeable future, with some economists now expecting it not to cut until December or even next year. That would probably make it one of the last major central banks to start loosening.Additional reporting by Mary McDougall in London More