Raphael Stevens

MSG Networks – which features Knicks, Rangers, and Devils games – is launching a streaming service.
MSG+ will launch this summer and will cost $29.99 a month, or $309.99 annually.
MSG is the latest regional sports network to launch a streaming service as customers continue to flee the traditional cable-TV bundle.

Artemi Panarin #10 of the New York Rangers celebrates with teammates after scoring a goal in the third period against the Los Angeles Kings at Madison Square Garden on February 26, 2023 in New York City.
Jared Silber | National Hockey League | Getty Images

MSG Networks, James Dolan’s cable-TV channels that feature local New York and New Jersey professional sports games, is launching its own streaming service.
MSG+ will launch this summer with games for the NBA’s New York Knicks, as well as the NHL’s New York Rangers, Buffalo Sabres and New Jersey Devils. The streaming service will cost $29.99 a month, or $309.99 annually, according to a company release on Wednesday.

MSG Networks also said it recently launched a free, ad-supported streaming TV, or FAST, channel called MSG SportsZone, which is available nationally on Vizio televisions and the Plex streaming platform. Additional platforms are coming soon. The FAST channel features MSG Networks’ programming centered around sports betting and classic games.
MSG+ will only be available in the region that already carries its MSG Networks on cable-TV. Traditional TV subscribers will also get access to MSG+ for free.
The launch comes as regional sports networks in particular have felt the pain of consumers leaving the cable-TV bundle, opting for streaming services instead. However, watching local sports teams is often difficult for cord-cutters as few online bundles carry regional sports networks and the networks have been slow to offer their own direct-to-consumer options.
These networks also must be careful when pricing their streaming options so not to further disrupt the pay-TV model, and breach contracts with distributors. The pay-TV contracts for regional sports networks help support the billions of dollars in fees that the networks pay professional sports teams to air their games.
Launching direct-to-consumer streaming services is a bid to keep or bring back customers that have cut the cord. Last year, New England Sports Network, the local TV home of the MLB’s Boston Red Sox and NHL’s Bruins, launched a streaming option similarly priced at $29.99 a month, or $329.99 annually.

Meanwhile, Diamond Sports Group launched Bally Sports+ last fall, priced at $19.99 a month, or $189.99 per year.
MSG Networks’ new streaming service will also allow fans to purchase single game streaming feeds for $9.99 per game. This offering has yet to be made available by other regional sports networks that have created a streaming platform.
However, the cable-TV providers have seen the rate of customers fleeing the bundle accelerate in the last year, which has exacerbated their issues.
Diamond’s Bally Sports is on the brink of bankruptcy due to a hefty debt load. Warner Bros. Discovery is reportedly looking to get out of the regional sports networks business.

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Delta’s pilots are voting on a new four-year contract that will provide 34% raises.
United, American and Southwest are still negotiating new contracts with pilot unions.
Negotiations have been fraught as pilots seek higher pay and better working conditions.

A pilot walks past the windows at the newly renovated Delta terminal D at LaGuardia Airport in New York March 6, 2021.
Timothy A. Clary | AFP | Getty Images

Delta Air Lines pilots on Wednesday will wrap up voting on a new contract that includes 34% raises over four years and other improvements as the industry faces a protracted shortage of aviators and strong travel demand.
Delta and the pilots’ union had reached a preliminary agreement in December. The Delta pilots are expected to approve the deal Wednesday. That would make the Atlanta-based airline the first of the largest U.S. carriers to finalize a labor deal with its pilots. United, American and Southwest pilots’ unions are still in negotiations.

The start of the Covid pandemic three years ago had delayed negotiations at major airlines. Travel demand has since rebounded, and airline executives have said pilot shortages have limited capacity growth, a factor that has kept airfare high.
“The pilots as a whole are striking when the iron is hot,” said Savanthi Syth, airline analyst at Raymond James. “They probably realize this is the best moment in time to get a deal done.”
In January, Delta forecast a drop in non-fuel costs this year of as much as 4%, including “all expected labor cost increases.”
Contract talks between airlines and labor unions have been fraught at times, as aviators seek higher pay and better schedules. Delta’s pilots last year voted in favor of allowing the union to authorize a strike when contract talks hadn’t yielded an agreement, and the airline’s pilots picketed several times.
Alaska Airlines pilots won raises in their latest labor deal last year. JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines, which are awaiting a government response to their planned merger, have each struck deals with their pilots recently.
Regional airlines, where the pilot shortage has been most severe, have also hiked pay recently to attract and retain pilots.

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Mortgage demand fell for the third straight week as interest rates increased.
Mortgage applications to buy a home dropped 6% last week from the previous week.
Mortgage rates have moved half a percentage point higher in the past month.

A potential buyer with her realtor view a home listed for sale during an open house in Parkland, Florida.
Carline Jean | Tribune News Service | Getty Images

Mortgage rates moved higher again last week, pushing buyers back to the sidelines just as the spring housing market is supposed to be heating up.
Mortgage applications to purchase a home dropped 6% last week compared with the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Volume was 44% lower than the same week one year ago, and is now sitting at a 28-year low.

This as the average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($726,200 or less) increased to 6.71% from 6.62%, with points rising to 0.77 from 0.75 (including the origination fee) for loans with a 20% down payment. That is the highest rate since November of last year.
Mortgage rates have moved 50 basis points higher in just the past month. Last February, rates were in the 4% range.
“Data on inflation, employment, and economic activity have signaled that inflation may not be cooling as quickly as anticipated, which continues to put upward pressure on rates,” said Joel Kan, an MBA economist.
Applications to refinance a home loan fell 6% for the week and were 74% lower year over year.
“Refinance applications account for less than a third of all applications and remained more than 70% behind last year’s pace, as a majority of homeowners are already locked into lower rates,” added Kan.
Mortgage rates haven’t done much to start this week, but the trajectory now appears to be higher, after a brief respite in January. Lower rates to start the year caused a brief surge in homebuying, but mortgage demand from homebuyers would seem to indicate a very slow spring is ahead.

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Kohl’s sales for the holiday quarter came in well below Wall Street’s estimates.
The retailer has been under intense pressure from activist investors.

People shop at Kohl’s department store amid the coronavirus outbreak on September 5, 2020 in San Francisco, California.
Liu Guanguan | China News Service | Getty Images

Kohl’s shares sunk on Wednesday after the retailer posted a big loss and a sales decline of about 7% in the holiday quarter.
Here’s how the retailer did for the quarter that ended Jan. 28 compared with what Wall Street was anticipating, based on a survey of analysts by Refinitiv:

Loss per share: $2.49 vs. expected earnings of 98 cents a share
Revenue: $5.78 billion vs. $5.99 billion

Kohl’s also shared a weak outlook for the year ahead. It said it anticipates net sales to range between a decline of 2% and a decline of 4%, including the impact of the 53rd week of the year that is worth about 1% year over year. It said it expects diluted earnings per share to range from $2.10 to $2.70, excluding non-recurring charges.
Tom Kingsbury, the company’s newly named CEO, attributed the retailer’s disappointing results to “the ongoing persistent inflationary environment.”
Yet he said the company is taking steps to “better position the business for 2023.”
“I am confident that our efforts will drive improved, and more consistent, sales and earnings performance over the long-term,” he said in a news release.
Kohl’s has dealt with activist pressure, leadership changes and a more challenging economic backdrop.

Then-CEO Michelle Gass announced in November that she was leaving to become president and CEO-in-training at Levi Strauss & Co. Her departure came after Ancora Holdings and Macellum Advisors questioned Kohl’s turnaround strategy, pushed for improvement to its sales trends and called for new leadership.
Pressure from those investors gained momentum after Kohl’s ended talks this summer to sell to the Franchise Group, owner of The Vitamin Shoppe.
Kohl’s announced last month that Kingsbury, who served as interim CEO, would step into the position permanently. He is the former CEO of Burlington Stores. It said at the time that it had reached a cooperative agreement with Macellum Advisors, as it named Kingsbury to the role.
Kohl’s had declined to provide a holiday-quarter outlook and pulled its full-year guidance in November, saying inflation had hurt consumer spending and made future sales patterns hard to predict.
As of Tuesday’s close, Kohl’s stock is up about 11% this year, outperforming the approximately 3% gain of the S&P 500. Shares closed at $28.04, bringing the company’s market value to nearly $3.1 billion.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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Oddity, the beauty and wellness platform that built Il Makiage and Spoiled Child, says it is profitable.
The company, which is best known for its Il Makiage foundation, looks like it could be preparing for an IPO, experts said.
Oddity is seeking to disrupt the legacy beauty and wellness market by replacing the in-store experience with product recommendations driven by artificial intelligence and data. 

Oddity Il Makiage
Coutesy: Oddity

Oddity — the direct-to-consumer beauty and wellness platform known for its ubiquitous Il Makiage social media ads — is making money and growing in an environment that’s increasingly risky for purely digital retailers. 
The Tel Aviv-founded company looks like it could even be preparing for an initial public offering, despite rising uncertainty in markets and the economy, experts told CNBC. 

Oddity, which is home to the Il Makiage makeup line, the Spoiled Child skin and hair care brand, and a third brand that’s in the works, declined to say whether it’s planning to go public but did reveal some of its financial metrics with CNBC. 
Since its U.S. launch in 2018, Oddity has achieved profitability, the company said, making $380 million in gross sales in 2022. On average, its gross sales have doubled each year since 2018, the company added.
In Spoiled Child’s first year on the market, the new brand brought in $48 million in gross sales. Oddity declined to share its return rate; its gross sales total does not include returns. 
Despite the high cost of customer acquisition for most DTC retailers, Oddity says it is making money the first time a customer buys a product, not just in repeat sales, and it boasts more than 40 million users.
The business, which is as much of a tech company as it is a beauty and wellness company, is seeking to disrupt a market long dominated by legacy retailers by replacing the in-store experience with product recommendations driven by artificial intelligence and data. 

“How is it possible that this beauty customer is spending all of her time online, on Insta, on YouTube, getting education, inspiration, but then ultimately transacting in stores?” said Lindsay Drucker Mann, Oddity’s global chief financial officer. “It’s not that she wants to go to the store, it’s that she needs help. She needs help choosing, she needs recommendations.” 
And that’s where Oddity comes in.

How Oddity does it

Launched in 2018 by brother and sister duo Oran Holtzman and Shiran Holtzman-Erel, the heart of Oddity’s business model is its proprietary technology — including tech developed by a former Israeli defense official — and the billions of data points it has collected from its millions of users. 
A digitally native, purely DTC company, the retailer underscores that 40% of its workers are technologists and no one on staff come from the beauty and wellness industry. 
Instead of creating products that customers would need to try in a store, Oddity uses data and AI to make tailored product recommendations for clients. What’s more, it plans to use these same tools to build numerous new brands in the future.

Courtesy: Oddity

Oddity’s first brand, Il Makiage, works to select the “perfect” foundation match for any skin type with its “powermatch quiz,” which is an AI-powered product recommendation algorithm, the company says. The quiz takes customers through a series of questions about their skin type and tone and then scans a picture of their face to figure out the right shade. 
The company insists the algorithm works — and says it gets the shade right more than 90% of the time.
“If it did not work, we would have tons of returns, no repeats, and the economic model would fall upside down,” said Drucker Mann.
Oddity builds out new products and brands by using its tech to figure out what customers are looking for. Then it goes to its suppliers, which also serve the legacy beauty community. 
“We go to our suppliers with like, super specific product briefs on ‘we want you to create x’… based on all the data that we’ve looked at,” Drucker Mann explained. “We’re actually going a layer deeper into specific product attributes that will matter to the customer.” 
The company said it doesn’t share its data with its suppliers.
In 2021, the company acquired Voyage81, a deep tech AI-based computational imaging startup founded in 2019 by Niv Price, the former head of research and development for one of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite technological units, Dr. Boaz Arad, Dr. Rafi Gidron and Omer Shwartz.
The tech is capable of mapping and analyzing skin and hair features, detecting facial blood flows, and creating melanin and hemoglobin maps using a regular smartphone camera. 
Oddity is in the process of integrating the tech into its Il Makiage powermatch quiz to improve accuracy. They claim one day it “could replace a dermatologist’s eyes.”

Reading the tea leaves 

Over the last year and a half, Oddity has made a series of moves that indicate it could be preparing for an IPO. 
In 2021, it tapped Drucker Mann, a former Goldman Sachs executive, to be its global chief financial officer. She spent more than 16 years with the Wall Street giant, most recently as its head of consumer and consumer-technology equity capital markets in the U.S. 
In the role, she took many businesses public and helped others that were trying to go public. She also led public and private equity financing for consumer and technology companies, including IPOs, follow-on offerings and private placements. 

Oddity SpoiledChild
Courtesy: Oddity

Later, in January 2022, Oddity brought in $130 million from investors such as Franklin Templeton and Fidelity Management, at a $1.5 billion valuation. Prior to that, the only outside investor Oddity brought in was private equity powerhouse L Catterton, which helped fund the company’s U.S. launch. 
Later that year, it announced the offering of a so-called security token, which would convert into a share of stock in an eventual IPO at a 20% discount to the opening price. 
“The CFO hire that was, I think, definitely a positive sign for an IPO, it’s something we look for in IPO candidates,” said Matthew Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist for Renaissance Capital. “If the growth was good in 2022, then I’d say they’re firing on all cylinders and seems like they could be well poised to go public.”
He pointed to Oddity’s token offering as further evidence the company could soon have a public stock ticker. 
“An IPO has clearly been on their mind,” he said. “Companies that are not considering an IPO don’t issue a press release saying that tokens will convert at the time of an IPO.”
Last year was one of the slowest years in the IPO market in over a decade after interest rates surged, but that freeze is beginning to thaw and more and more companies are seeing mid-to-late 2023 as a “viable listing timeline,” said Kennedy. 
In his work at Renaissance Capital, Kennedy tracks every initial filing for the firm’s clients. Usually he looks for companies that have over $100 million in sales and the ability to be profitable within a few years of going public.
“Oddity is not one we had been tracking,” he said. “But I think we’ll keep an eye on it now.” 

‘We do see fads come and go’

In some ways, Oddity’s brands are reminiscent of the buzzy hair care line Olaplex, a technology-driven beauty company that had rapid growth at the time of its IPO only to see its stock plummet after it failed to reverse plunging sales.
If Oddity decides to go public, it will need to show investors it can sustain its rapid growth over time and not fade away as a fad. 
“I think the biggest risk is that they are growing off of this initial hype and consumer preferences can change rapidly and we do see fads come and go,” said Kennedy. 
Nikki Baird, a longtime retail analyst and current vice president of strategy at retail technology company Aptos, said DTC brands need to strike the right product mix in order to stay relevant, sustain growth and attract investors. 
“The DTC challenge and where lots of brands struggle is, you have this founder that has this one great idea for this product or they found some nut on some unique tree in Brazil that they’re bringing to market through their skin care product,” said Baird. “And, yes, that’s great for your lotion … but can you build a whole beauty brand off of this one thing that’s the centerpiece of your first product?” 
Oddity says it’s ready for the challenge – and thinking even bigger. 
“I believe what emerges from this moment will be the platforms of the future, right? I think right now we’re cementing those winners,” Drucker Mann said. “And, in my view, for Oddity, we are really creating the next generation, one of the most important consumer companies truly of our lifetime.” 

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Lowe’s sales in its fiscal fourth-quarter fell short of Wall Street’s expectations.
The home improvement retailer issued a conservative outlook as the sector comes under pressure from a shift in consumer spending.
The company beat Wall Street’s expectations for earnings per share for the quarter.

A Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse worker collects carts in a parking lot on August 17, 2022 in Houston, Texas. 
Brandon Bell | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Lowe’s on Wednesday reported fiscal fourth-quarter sales that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations, while also issuing a conservative outlook for the current year.
Here’s how the retailer did compared with what Wall Street was anticipating, based on a survey of analysts by Refinitiv:

Earnings per share: $2.28 adjusted, vs. $2.21 expected
Revenue: $22.45 billion vs. $22.69 billion expected

The company’s reported net income for the three-month period that ended Feb. 3 was $957 million, compared with $1.21 billion, or $1.78 per share, a year earlier. 
Sales rose to $22.45 billion from $21.34 billion a year earlier. However, Lowe’s fiscal fourth quarter included an extra week that saw $1.4 billion in sales. Without that additional week, sales would have declined slightly from the year-ago period.
Overall same-store sales fell 1.5%, with a 0.7% decline in the U.S.
For fiscal 2023, Lowe’s said it expects total sales to be between $88 billion and $90 billion, compared with Wall Street expectations of $90.48 billion. The company also expects same-store sales to be flat or down 2% compared to the prior fiscal year.
The company expects its earnings per share for the year to be $13.60 to $14.00, versus $13.79 projected by analysts.

Lowe’s, which has been working to grow its Pro market, saw a 10% growth in sales in the category in the U.S. and a 5% jump in online sales.
This time last year, Lowe’s was benefiting from a red-hot housing market that led many to fix up and renovate their homes. As the market gradually cooled towards the second half of 2022, Wall Street’s expectations fell compared to prior quarters.
Amid the Covid pandemic, the home improvement market grew as stuck-at-home consumers undertook pricey renovations and spruced up their living spaces. The market is under more pressure these days. Shoppers feeling pinched from high inflation have been using their discretionary dollars on travel and entertainment as opposed to goods like patio furniture and paint.
Last week, rival Home Depot missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations for the first time since November 2019 and issued a muted outlook. The company anticipates flat consumer spending and more pressure on the sector in the quarters ahead as the pandemic-fueled boon subsides.
However, a persistent shortage in the country’s housing supply and an aging housing stock, which the home improvement sector has long benefited from, could benefit the retailers. With interest rates soaring in a stagnant housing market, many people with low interest rates may choose to stay in their homes and undergo renovations rather than move somewhere new.
Read the full earnings release here.

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