Raphael Stevens

Toy and gaming giant Hasbro took an optimistic tone Thursday on the potential effects of Chinese tariffs on its business.
Executives said the company is shifting manufacturing away from China.
Hasbro also announced a licensing collaboration with Mattel to create Play-Doh versions of Mattel’s Barbie dolls.

The Hasbro Inc. logo is seen on a toy for sale in a store in Manhattan, New York, on Nov. 16, 2021.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters

Toy and gaming giant Hasbro took an optimistic tone Thursday on the potential effect of Chinese tariffs on its business, as executives said the company is shifting manufacturing away from China.
Hasbro Chief Financial Officer Gina Goetter said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the toymaker’s 2025 guidance — which includes adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion to $1.15 billion, compared with $1.06 billion in 2024 — reflects the anticipated effect of U.S. tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada. It also reflects “mitigating actions we plan to take, including leveraging the strength of our supply chain and potential pricing,” the company said in a news release.

Rival toymaker Mattel previously said it could increase the prices of toys such as Hot Wheels and Barbie in response to tariffs. President Donald Trump imposed 10% tariffs on China in early February and is set to add 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada in March after pausing their initial implementation for 30 days.
Hasbro is on track to cut the volume of U.S. toys and games that originate from China from 50% to less than 40% over the next two years, Goetter said. Hasbro does not source from Canada and has “minimal” imports from Mexico, she said.
“Really, it’s a China story for us,” Goetter said.
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said on the call that even when accounting for tariffs, the toymaker expects “flattish” performance from the broader industry this year, with trading cards and building blocks leading the way. The company’s licensing business, he added, is one of its biggest margin drivers and will not be affected much by tariffs.
“It’s relatively [unexposed] to some of the tariff drama that’s going on right now,” Cocks said.

Hasbro also on Thursday announced a licensing collaboration with Mattel to create Play-Doh versions of Mattel’s Barbie dolls.
“Play-Doh Barbie allows children to unlock their inner fashion designer, creating Play-Doh fashions with amazing ruffles, bows and realistic fabric textures, all made with every kid’s favorite dough for a never-before-seen creativity experience,” Cocks said.
Shares of Hasbro gained roughly 10% in morning trading Thursday.
Here’s how Hasbro performed in the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: 46 cents adjusted vs. 34 cents expected
Revenue: $1.1 billion vs. $1.03 billion expected

Fourth-quarter revenue fell 15% from $1.29 billion during the same quarter in 2023. Full-year 2024 revenue came in at $4.14 billion, down 17% from $5 billion in 2023.
The company partially attributed the numbers to its divestiture from its eOne film and TV business, which it sold to Lionsgate in December 2023. When excluding the divestiture, the company said, full-year revenue declined 7%.
Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 35% to $132 million in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in 2023. For full-year 2024, Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 22% to $471.7 million. Mobile game Monopoly Go! contributed $112 million in 2024 revenue.
Hasbro reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of $26.5 million, or a loss of 25 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $1.06 billion, or a loss of $7.64 per share, during the fourth quarter of 2023.
Adjusting for costs associated with restructuring and the eOne divestiture, among other one-time items, Hasbro reported fourth-quarter earnings of 46 cents per share, topping Wall Street expectations.

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ESPN plans to add some user-generated content to its flagship streaming service.
ESPN executives are targeting a price of either $25 or $30 per month for the service.
ESPN will likely announce a name for the service, a price and a launch date in the coming months.

A general view of the ESPN Monday Night Countdown booth prior to the game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Cincinnati Bengals at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, on Dec. 4, 2023.
Mike Carlson | Getty Images

In an attempt to court younger audiences, Disney’s ESPN is planning to add some user-generated content to its yet-to-be-named flagship streaming service, which will debut later this year.
While the details are still unclear, ESPN will allow subscribers to post their own content at some point in the application’s evolution, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology likely won’t be available at launch, which the company hopes will occur before the National Football League season begins in September. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.

Disney executives have also considered adding user-generated content to Disney+ and discuss YouTube’s influence on streaming on a near daily basis, CNBC reported last year.
Alphabet’s YouTube, which leans heavily on creator-led content, is the most popular streaming service with an 11.1% share of total TV usage in the U.S., according to Nielsen.
ESPN executives are targeting a price of either $25 per month or $30 per month for the ESPN streaming service, which will include all of ESPN’s linear programming plus other digital add-ons, the people said.
The company plans to announce a name for the service, a price and a launch date in the coming months, the people said.
Media and professional sports league executives are focusing on how to capture the attention of younger viewers that are opting to watch YouTube or TikTok over live games. ESPN spends tens of billions of dollars each year on the media rights for live sports.
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Amazon is set to gain creative control over the lucrative James Bond film franchise.
The company reached a deal with the Broccoli family, the film’s longstanding producers, to form a new joint venture.
Amazon’s MGM Studios and the Broccoli family will remain co-owners of the venture.

Daniel Craig stars as James Bond in “No Time To Die.”
Source: MGM

Amazon is set to take creative control over the lucrative James Bond movie franchise from the Broccoli family, the company announced Thursday.
The James Bond films have long been produced by Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who inherited the control from their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. Wilson and Broccoli will now give creative control to MGM Studios, which Amazon acquired for $8.45 billion in 2021.

Amazon gained distribution rights to the Bond franchise after the MGM acquisition, but not creative control.
As part of the deal, Amazon’s MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli formed a new joint venture to house the Bond intellectual property rights, and they will remain co-owners of the franchise.
“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide,” said Mike Hopkins, Amazon’s head of Prime Video and MGM Studios, in a statement. “We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”
Wilson and Broccoli said in a release that they are both stepping back from producing the Bond films to focus on other projects.
“Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future,” Wilson said.

In a nod to the deal, Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos wrote in a post on X, “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”
The Bond film franchise, which spans more than 60 years, is one of the highest-grossing series in history.
The valuable IP stands to be a boon for Amazon’s sprawling media and entertainment business, which includes the Prime Video streaming service. Prime Video is one of the key perks of Amazon Prime, the company’s mainstay subscription service that costs $139 a year. As of 2021, the company said it had more than 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide.

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Eli Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Dan Skovronsky said newer obesity medicines need to deliver more than just weight loss to compete with Zepbound and Wegovy.
The development of pills and more potent drugs are two areas where Lilly is focusing.
Skovronsky said he is most excited about treating more health conditions with GLP-1s and other incretin medicines.

Dan Skovronsky knows what makes a good obesity drug.
As chief scientific officer at Eli Lilly, he’s already done it once with the company’s weekly shot, Zepbound. He’s trying to do it again with a more convenient daily pill, then repeat the feat with a shot that could be even more powerful than Zepbound. And that’s not counting the other nine obesity drugs Lilly’s testing in clinical trials.

Skovronsky said the race to create the next great drug is not just about weight loss anymore, something more investors and analysts are starting to say.
Take Amgen’s experimental drug MariTide: people lost up to 20% of their body weight in a phase two study and Amgen shares fell about 5% on the day the results were released in November. Why? Investors worried that it wouldn’t be enough to compete with Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, both of which will have a yearslong head start. 

An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injection pen arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, March 28, 2024.
Shelby Knowles | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Skovornsky sees improving ease of use and making more potent drugs as two paths to move the field forward. He envisions pills like Lilly’s orforglipron reaching people around the world. He sees drugs that can deliver more weight loss – possibly including Lilly’s own retatrutide – as another area with potential. 

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But he’s most excited to see how many other health conditions that incretin – or gut hormone – medicines can treat. Lilly’s Zepbound recently was approved to treat sleep apnea. The company’s also exploring whether it can treat addiction, heart disease, inflammation and gastrointestinal conditions. 
You can watch to the full interview for more from Skovronsky on Lilly’s work in obesity and where he sees the market going.

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Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound are transforming the company.
Lilly now has an obligation to take on other challenging diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS and chronic pain, said the the company’s Chief Scientific Officer Dan Skovronsky.
Lilly is already testing its drug Kisunla for Alzheimer’s prevention.

Heart disease. Hearing loss. Addiction. Chronic pain. Alzheimer’s. ALS. These are some of the areas where Eli Lilly, flush with cash from its GLP-1 drugs, wants to make big bets. 
These are the ideas that are “hiding in plain sight,” said Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Dan Skovronsky. They’re places where other pharmaceutical companies might not want to go because they’re hard problems to solve. 

“As right now really the biggest health-care company in the world, probably the biggest health-care company in the world ever, we have an obligation,” Skovronsky said. “Investors have given us that vote of confidence. We see that as an obligation to invest in some of these big problems that are hiding in plain sight, to try and make a difference for the health of your community.” 
Lilly’s tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, has transformed the company. The company’s sales have grown almost 60% since Mounjaro was approved in 2022. Lilly’s stock price has rocketed 268% higher in the last three years, giving the company a market cap of $823 billion – the highest of any health-care company. 
Now the company wants that success to translate to other disease areas.
Lilly’s already testing whether its drug Kisunla can prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Kisunla is a monoclonal antibody that removes amyloid plaques from the brain, which are associated with the memory-robbing disease. It’s currently approved to treat people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. 
The company’s recruiting seniors at churches, Walmart parking lots and other venues to give them a blood test and see if they’re at risk of the disease. Some of the people in the trial will receive Kisunla and others will receive a placebo. Once enough of the participants are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Lilly will look and see if there’s a difference between people who received its drug and people who received a placebo. 

“If we can prevent it, even in half of the patients, that will be a revolution in how we think about diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s,” Skovronsky said. “It’d probably mark a major inflection point in how these kinds of medicines are used.” 

A vial of Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug sold under the brand name Kisunla.
Source: Eli Lilly

Lilly’s also investing heavily in gene therapy at a time when the field is facing significant uncertainty. Last summer, the company opened the $700 million Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine in Boston, away from Lilly’s headquarters in Indianapolis and in one of the U.S. epicenters for this work. 
Biopharma companies large and small are struggling to turn the potential of scientific breakthroughs like gene-editing technology Crispr-Cas9 into blockbuster drugs. One of the holdups has been figuring out how to get the treatments to their destinations inside the body, or delivery, as it’s known in the industry. 
“The reality is that local delivery is going to be sort of a small application to human health, but once we crack that, and I think Lily is the company that can crack it, because when we think about delivering to other tissues, it’s not just the genetic medicine, it’s how do you package it? How do you target it with antibodies or small molecules? Those are things we’re really good at,” Skovronsky said. 
Lilly is uniquely positioned to take the big swings. Whether it can hit them remains to be seen.  More

Walmart topped earnings and revenue estimates for its fiscal fourth quarter, but said its profit growth will slow in the current fiscal year.
Still, the retailer’s CFO, John David Rainey, said the company wouldn’t be “immune” from looming tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
Walmart saw strong gains in its e-commerce business and membership programs.

Walmart shares fell 8% in premarket trading Thursday, as the big-box retailer said profit growth will slow this fiscal year even as sales continue to climb.
Walmart said holiday-quarter revenue rose about 4% and e-commerce sales shot up 20% in the U.S., as growth in store pickup and home deliveries and gains with upper-income shoppers boosted results. But its outlook disappointed Wall Street.

In the fiscal year ahead, the discounter said it expects net sales to grow 3% to 4% and adjusted operating income to increase between 3.5% to 5.5% on a constant currency basis. The company said that includes a 150 basis point, or 1.5 percentage point, headwind from acquiring smart TV company Vizio and following a leap year in 2024. For the just completed fiscal year, Walmart posted adjusted operating income growth of 9.6% on a constant currency basis.
The company also said it expects full-year adjusted earnings of $2.50 to $2.60 per share, which includes a 5 cent per share headwind from currency. That fell short of the $2.76 per share Wall Street had expected.
In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey described consumer spending patterns as “steady” and said “there’s not any sharp changes that we’ve seen.”
Yet he acknowledged “there’s far from certainty in the geopolitical landscape.”
About two-thirds of what Walmart sells is made, grown or assembled in the U.S. Yet if tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada take effect, he said Walmart is “not going to be completely immune.”

“We’ve lived in a tariff environment for the last seven or eight years, and we’ll do what we know how to do,” he said. “We’ll work with suppliers. We’ll lean into our private brand. We’ll shift supply where necessary to try to take advantage of lower costs that we can then pass on to consumers.”
Since Walmart is not sure if the tariffs will take effect next month, the company did not factor them into its guidance, Rainey said.
Here is what the big-box retailer reported for the fiscal fourth quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: 66 cents adjusted vs 64 cents expected
Revenue: $180.55 billion vs. $180.01 billion expected

In the three-month period that ended Jan. 31, Walmart’s net income fell to $5.25 billion, or 65 cents per share, compared with $5.49 billion or 68 cents per share in the year-ago period. Revenue rose from $173.39 billion in the year-ago quarter. The company’s adjusted earnings per share figure excluded one-time items, including opioid-related legal costs and gains and losses on equity and other investments.
Comparable sales, an industry metric also known as same-store sales, increased 4.6% for Walmart’s U.S. business and 6.8% for Sam’s Club, excluding fuel.
Walmart’s e-commerce sales in the U.S. soared 20% compared with the year-ago period. That marked the 11th straight quarter of double-digit gains. Global e-commerce sales rose 16%.
In the Walmart U.S. segment, customers’ store visits and purchases climbed, as transactions rose 2.8% and average ticket increased 1.8% year over year. 
As Walmart is the top grocer in the U.S., investors often view it as a barometer of consumer health. Investors have tried to parse whether softer U.S. retail sales in January were a blip or warning sign. Wall Street also is trying to understand the potential impact of policy decisions, such as tariffs, on consumer spending. 
Restaurant chains, including Restaurant Brands’ Burger King and Popeyes, said sales improved in the fourth quarter, but they had weak trends in January. 
Yet those restaurants and some retail experts have blamed short-term factors for the drop, including winter storms, consumers taking a break after splurging over holidays and contending with damage and disruption from Los Angeles wildfires.
Rainey echoed those sentiments, saying cold weather and the wildfires hurt Walmart’s sales. He said that’s a temporary factor, however, and doesn’t indicate a change in consumer spending patterns.
Walmart’s e-commerce growth and newer initiatives worked in its favor in the fourth quarter. Its advertising business and third-party marketplace are small compared to Amazon’s, but have posted gains and driven higher margins than Walmart’s retail business.
Rainey pointed to double-digit gains in the fourth quarter in global advertising, membership income and Walmart’s fulfillment services segment, which packs and ships orders to third-party sellers.
“These are all higher margin, faster growing parts of our business where the math is just suggesting that our margins are going up over time,” he said. “And frankly, I don’t see any end to this.”
Walmart also hiked its dividend by 13% to 94 cents per share, the largest increase in over a decade.
As of Wednesday’s close, shares of Walmart are up about 83% over the past year. Shares closed on Wednesday at $104.00, up about 15% so far this year and outpacing the approximately 4% gains of the S&P 500 during the same period.

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