Raphael Stevens

Fanatics is in discussions to buy the BetParx sportsbook, sources said.
Fanatics, which has a valuation of $31 billion, has been exploring acquisitions of sportsbooks as it moves further into the sports betting business.
Fanatics has signed a letter of intent for the sportsbook, but a deal is not certain and the talks may not result in a sale, the sources said.

New York, NY. – December 7th. Portrait for a profile on Fanatics founder & CEO Michael Rubin at his office in downtown NYC.
The Washington Post | Getty Images

Fanatics is in discussions to acquire the BetParx sportsbook, as the sports merchandising company looks to take a bigger position in sports betting, according to people familiar with the matter.
A deal hasn’t been reached, although Fanatics signed a letter of intent to buy the sportsbook, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. A deal price couldn’t yet be learned, and the discussions may not result in an agreement, the people added.

Representatives for Fanatics and BetParx declined to comment.
The BetParx app was launched last year by Greenwood Gaming & Entertainment, the parent company of Parx Casino in Pennsylvania, and Playtech, an online gambling software supplier. BetParx is also available in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan and Ohio.
Fanatics has considered an initial public offering, but has been looking to complete an acquisition in the gambling space, among other possible deals, ahead of going public, the people said.
The company would be entering a crowded marketplace. Dozens of sports-betting operators have emerged in recent years, including Flutter-owned FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars and BetMGM, which is co-owned by MGM Resorts and Entain. As the space has grown more competitive, smaller players have struggled, with some, like MaximBet, ceasing operations recently.
Fanatics has been seeking a deal in the sports betting space for some time. Last year, it had been in discussions with small gambling operator Tipico, CNBC previously reported.

The company is opening Fanatics Sportsbook at FedExField, the stadium of the NFL’s Washington Commanders. Fanatics also said it received a temporary license to operate in Massachusetts, and plans to partner with Plainridge Park Casino, which is owned by Penn National.
In October, Fanatics said it hired Andrea Ellis as chief financial officer of its betting and gaming division.
Last year, Fanatics’ billionaire executive chairman Michael Rubin sold his 10% stake in Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment, the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils, allowing Fanatics to enter the gambling space. NBA rules prohibit team owners from operating a gambling platform.
Fanatics raised $700 million in capital late last year, which the company planned to use toward potential mergers and acquisitions across the collectibles, betting and gaming businesses, CNBC previously reported.
The fresh round of capital brought Fanatics’ valuation to $31 billion.
Rubin’s company has been rapidly growing recently, pushing past solely being an online sports merchandise business. The company estimates its revenue for Fanatics, including its Lids segment, will be approximately $8 billion in 2023.
The company has been growing through acquisitions. Last year, it expanded its footprint in the collectibles business with a $500 million acquisition of Topps. It also bought clothing brand Mitchell & Ness in partnership with LeBron James and Kevin Durant.
–CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this article.

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Homes sales ended the year at a seasonally adjusted, annualized pace of 4.02 million units, which was 34% lower than December 2021.
It is the slowest pace since November 2010, when the nation was struggling through a housing crisis.
Home sales have now fallen for 11 straight months, due to much higher mortgage rates.

Homes in Rocklin, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022. A record number of homes are being delisted as sellers face a sharp drop in demand, according to real estate brokerage Redfin.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Sales of previously owned homes dropped 1.5% in December from the previous month, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Sales ended the year at a seasonally adjusted, annualized pace of 4.02 million units, which was 34% lower than December 2021. It is the slowest pace since November 2010, when the nation was struggling through a housing crisis brought on by faulty subprime mortgages.

Total sales for the year were down 17.8% from 2021.
Home sales have now fallen for 11 straight months, due to much higher mortgage rates, which began rising last spring and had more than doubled by fall. Sky-high prices, driven by high demand during the first years of the pandemic, weakened affordability even further and caused supply to fall sharply.
“December was another difficult month for buyers, who continue to face limited inventory and high mortgage rates,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors. “However, expect sales to pick up again soon since mortgage rates have markedly declined after peaking late last year.”
Mortgage rates have fallen a full percentage point since their high last October, but they are still roughly double what they were one year ago.
At the end of December, total housing inventory fell 13.4% from November to 970,000 units. It was, however, up 10.2% from the previous December. Unsold inventory is at a 2.9-month supply at the current sales pace, down from 3.3 months in November but up from 1.7 months in December 2021.

Low supply continues to support prices to some extent, but the gains are shrinking compared with a year ago. The median price of an existing home sold in December was $366,900, up 2.3% from the year before. It is still the highest price recorded for December, but annual price gains had been in the double digits last summer.
“Markets in roughly half of the country are likely to offer potential buyers discounted prices compared to last year,” added Yun.
The trouble, however, is that sellers are not entering the market, given falling prices and weaker demand. The total inventory is higher than a year ago because homes are sitting on the market longer. New listings in January are down year over year.
“Evaporating demand has ended the strong sellers market of the past several years, and still-falling home sales tell us that many buyers are still not able to afford a purchase or not yet convinced that the market is tilted sufficiently in their favor to move forward. The housing market is entering “nobody’s market” territory as buyers and sellers remain largely in a stalemate,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com.
First-time buyers continue to struggle in today’s market, making up just 31% of December sales. While this is up from 30% in December of last year, it is far off the historical norm of 40%.
The market continues to slow, with homes sitting on the market an average 26 days, up from 24 days in November and 19 days in December 2021.
All-cash sales rose to 28% of transactions from 23% the year before and investors made up 16% of sales, slightly down from 17% the year before.
While sales are down in all price categories, they are falling most sharply on the higher end. Sales of homes priced above $1 million were down 45% year over year, compared with sales of homes priced between $250,000 and $500,000, which were down 34%. Yun suggested that weakness on the higher end may be due to volatility in the stock market.

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Struggling to find workers and eager to relieve staff from boring, repetitive tasks, fast-food restaurant chains are adding robots to their kitchens.
Using artificial intelligence, computer vision technology and a mechanical arm, Miso Robotics’ Flippy 2 has been deployed to Chipotle, White Castle and Wing Zone. White Castle said it plans to add 100 Flippy robots to work the fry station at its restaurants nationwide. 

“The tide has turned, this is no longer a question of are robotics coming to the industry,” said Jake Brewer, chief strategy officer at Miso Robotics. “It’s a foregone conclusion. The question is at what pace and in what form.”
Up to 82% of restaurant positions could, to some extent, be replaced by robots, according to a forecast by restaurant consultancy Aaron Allen & Associates. Automation could save U.S. fast-food restaurants more than $12 billion in annual wages, the group said.
Other companies in the space include Picnic, whose pizza station can make up to 130 oven-ready pizzas per hour, and Autec, with a line of sushi robots.
So what impact will robots have on the fast-food industry and the livelihood of its workers? CNBC got a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant robot maker Miso Robotics to find out.
Watch the video to learn more.

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Indian education technology start-up Byju’s will not renew its jersey sponsorship deal with India’s cricket team, the company’s co-founder Divya Gokulnath, told CNBC.
Gokulnath said Byju’s is targeting profitability by March 2024.
The company is also aiming for an initial public offering (IPO) when market conditions improve, Gokulnath said.

Indian education technology start-up Byju’s will not renew its jersey sponsorship deal with India’s cricket team, the company’s co-founder Divya Gokulnath, told CNBC.
In a wide-ranging interview, Gokulnath spoke about the path to profitability and the potential for an initial public offering for Byju’s, one of India’s most valuable private technology firms.

The Bangalore-based Byju’s delivers online classes to students in various subjects. It has 150 million students across the world, of whom 25% outside of India.

Star Indian batsman Virat Kohli in picture. Indian education start-up Byju’s has its logo prominently displayed on the Indian cricket team’s jerseys.
Munir Uz Zaman | AFP | Getty Images

The company’s losses boomed in its financial year that ended in March 2021, its latest public figures showed. Gokulnath attributes this to a change in revenue recognition. Instead of revenue being accounted for when a person paid for a course, it is instead calculated when the specific course begins.
Gokulnath said that the company is seeing improvements over the last 12 months.
“We are doing really well … the last 12 months have been really good for us in terms of the number of products that we’ve added, in terms of the different formats that we’ve launched and in terms of the geography and the subjects that we’ve scaled into,” Gokulnath said.
The co-founder added that the company will “hopefully” become profitable by the end of its financial year, which concludes in March 2024.

This will involve cutting down on branding and marketing expenses. Byju’s was an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar last year. The company also has a sponsorship deal with the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the governing body for the sport in the country. Cricket is the biggest sport in India, a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion people.
Byju’s logo currently appears on the Indian cricket team’s jersey. But Gokulnath told CNBC Byju’s will not renew the deal after its March expiry.

IPO ahead

Byju’s reportedly has a valuation of $22 billion. Gokulnath says that the company was looking to go public last year, but that market conditions deteriorated.
Tech stocks globally got hammered, as the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks rapidly raised interest rates to fight rampant inflation.
An IPO is still on the cards when the market improves, Gokulnath said.
“Even early last year, we did think of multiple options to go public. But the thing is, we do have the luxury to decide when and where and how we want to do this,” Gokulnath said.
“We want to do this at a time when we don’t have to give up on the potential the company has. Because a lot of internal processes are in our control but not the external environment, and we want both to be doing really well before we go the IPO way.” More

“Ministers are deliberately misleading the public about the life and limb cover and who is to blame for excessive deaths,” Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham said.
Unite National Lead Officer Onay Kasab said that a resolution was “in the government’s hands,” and the dispute would only end when the U.K. leadership enters “proper negotiations” over pay.

COVENTRY, U.K. – Dec. 21, 2022: Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham (centre), joins ambulance workers on the picket line outside ambulance headquarters in Coventry. On Friday, Jan. 20, Unite announced a further 10 days of strikes as a dispute between the government and ambulance escalated.
Jacob King/PA Images via Getty Images

LONDON — One of the U.K.’s largest unions on Friday announced 10 further days of strike action over the coming weeks, as a standoff between the government and ambulance workers intensifies.
More than 2,600 ambulance workers in Wales and the West Midlands, North West, North East and East Midlands of England are already set to walk out on Monday as part of an ongoing dispute over pay and staffing.

The newly announced strikes will affect the North West (Feb. 6, 22 and March 20), North East (Feb. 6, 20 and March 6, 20), East Midlands (Feb. 6, 20 and March 6, 20), West Midlands (Feb. 6, 17 and March 6, 20), Wales (Feb. 6, 20 and March 6, 20) and Northern Ireland (Jan. 26 and Feb. 16, 17, 23 and 24).
Further ballots are currently held at four other ambulance trusts that could potentially join the dispute later next month, the union said.

“Rather than act to protect the NHS and negotiate an end to the dispute, the government has disgracefully chosen to demonise ambulance workers. Ministers are deliberately misleading the public about the life and limb cover and who is to blame for excessive deaths,” Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham said.
“Our members faithfully provide life and limb cover on strike days and it’s not the unions who are not providing minimum service levels: it’s this government’s disastrous handling of the NHS that has brought it to breaking point.”
The union said that its representatives would be working at a regional level to ensure that emergency life and limb cover will be available during the strikes, while patients in need of life-saving treatment will still be transported to appointments.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has introduced contentious anti-strike legislation to “enforce minimum service levels” across key public services, in a move that unions have lambasted as an attack on worker rights.

The legislation would force some employees to work during a strike. Government ministers have publicly accused ambulance workers of endangering lives by taking industrial action, prompting a widespread backlash from unions and political opponents.
Unite National Lead Officer Onay Kasab said that a resolution was “in the government’s hands,” and the dispute would only end when the U.K. leadership enters “proper negotiations” over pay.
“The government’s constant attempts to kick the can down the road and its talk about one off payments, or slightly increased pay awards in the future, is simply not sufficient to resolve this dispute,” Kasab said.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing and ambulance workers, who are part of the GMB union, are also striking on Feb. 6. The GMB has scheduled further action for Feb. 20, March 6 and March 20.

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