More stories

  • in

    Former Citi CEO Sandy Weill launches new cancer research hub focused on immunotherapy

    Sandy Weill on Thursday announced a new $50 million donation to create a cancer research and treatment hub focused on immunotherapy.
    The hub is in partnership with four leading research institutions.
    The Weill Family Foundation said the hub will also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.

    Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill announced Thursday morning a $50 million gift through the Weill Family Foundation to establish the Weill Cancer Hub East, a partnership aimed at using research on nutrition and metabolism to develop cancer treatments.
    The partnership brings together four leading research institutions — with experts from Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research — to develop an immunotherapy strategy to fight cancer.

    “Good things happen when people believe in cooperation,” Weill said in an exclusive interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday morning.
    Weill’s latest donation marks the foundation gifting a total of more than $1 billion to nonprofits.
    “With the best minds in the field armed with the most advanced research techniques, the Weill Cancer Hub East will seek to elevate immunotherapy and improve patient care for people battling cancer,” Weill said in a statement.
    The new partnership will focus on investigating how nutrition and the microbes that metabolize food can influence immunotherapy and other cancer treatments. The Weill Family Foundation said the hub will also examine how GLP-1 agonists and other emerging therapeutics might affect cancer treatment.
    Immunotherapy, unlike other therapies that target removing or attacking cancer cells directly, uses the patient’s immune system to fight the illness from the inside. The hub’s projects will focus on “reprogramming” the tumor microenvironment, the foundation said in a release, and will also offer clinical trials.

    “How we can increase the effectiveness of immunotherapy across all cancer types and patients is one of the scientific questions that most needs answering,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, the dean of Weill Cornell Medicine.
    The research from the new hub is meant to complement research and development out of the National Institutes of Health, Weill said, and cannot replace the work the NIH does. However, Weill added that he thinks NIH’s work may be somewhat limited.
    “I think they’re not the big risk-takers that they used to be,” he said on “Squawk Box.” “I think that it’s the job of the private sector to be more of the risk-taker.”
    The Weill Family Foundation previously founded another hub in 2019, called the Weill Neurohub, that pulled together researchers from University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Washington; and the Allen Institute to work on developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

    Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO More

  • in

    KB Home unveils its first ‘fire-resilient’ community in Southern California

    California-based KB Home is unveiling what it calls its first “wildfire-resilient” community, meeting standards that protect the homes against the three major sources of ignition during a wildfire.
    As climate change causes more severe drought in more areas of the country, focus is shifting to fire-resistant homes and communities.
    The homes range from $1 million to the low millions, which tends to be a move-up price in the area of Escondido, just outside San Diego.

    KB Home’s new wildfire-resilient neighborhood in Escondido, California.

    Just months after raging wildfires destroyed thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area, California-based KB Home is unveiling what it calls its first “wildfire-resilient” community.
    The development, in Escondido, just outside San Diego, will have 64 single-family homes when completed that all meet the wildfire resilience standards developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a nonprofit, scientific research and communications organization supported by property insurers. These standards are designed to protect the homes against the three major sources of ignition during a wildfire: Flying embers, flames and radiant heat.

    A handful of homes in the development are now complete, with roughly 20 homes already sold. Three homeowners have moved in, according to KB Home.
    The homes are built with covered gutters, enclosed eaves, noncombustible siding — like stucco and fiber cement — tempered-glass windows, and non-combustible patios, doors and roofing. They have six-inch vertical clearance using the concrete foundation, stucco and stone. They also incorporate defensible space with low-combustible vegetation at least 5 feet from the homes. Metal fencing is used throughout the neighborhood.
    Steve Ruffner, regional general manager of KB Home’s coastal division, said he and his colleagues saw a fire-resistant home demonstration by IBHS at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference last summer and were impressed by the opportunity this type of community presented. Since KB Home had already broken ground on the development, they had to change gears quickly to incorporate the fire-resilient components.
    “We had to change the architecture on the fly to a more stucco-oriented architecture with fire-resistant shutters, or fire-free shutters and doors and tempered windows. We were able to do that really quickly with the city, because they wanted to work with us. They really understood that this was important for their city,” Ruffner said.
    He called it more of a research and development project to see what the costs might be and how to work with trade partners to lower that cost, although he wouldn’t say how much those costs increased.

    KB Home’s new Wildfire-Resilient Neighborhood in Escondido, CA.

    The homes range from $1 million to the low millions, which tends to be a move-up price in that area for single-family, detached homes.
    “We’re trying to get the cost to a reasonable place, because we really specialize in first-time buyers and first-time move-up buyers. So we want to make sure we can get this in a good place where it’s affordable to do it and it’s also got a good payback to the customer in a form of safety,” he added.
    As climate change causes more severe drought in more areas of the country, focus is shifting to fire-resistant homes and communities.
    During the the Palisades Fire in January, some homes that had been specifically built to fire-resistant standards remained unscathed while everything around them was destroyed. These types of homes, however, are largely one-offs by custom builders.
    There has been progress in California on a home-by-home basis, according to IBHS, but KB Home is the first big production builder in the country that has designed and is fully building out 64 homes all to meet the wildfire-prepared neighborhood standard.
    Among the specifications, homes are spaced 10 feet apart to help slow the progression of a fire.

    KB Home’s new wildfire-resilient neighborhood in Escondido, California.

    “This subdivision built by KB Home, it’s really the test bed to show this and demonstrate it,” said Roy Wright, CEO of IBHS. “I know that KB Home already has two other projects here in Escondido, looking at duplexes and other kinds of town homes, and I do imagine that other builders are going to quickly follow suit. They’re going to be building the homes that Californians want to buy.”
    Wright emphasized that part of the draw is not just to build a home that is survivable, but also one that is insurable. Insurance companies have been pulling out of California in droves, leaving homeowners with soaring costs and some without insurance entirely.
    Though the homes are billed as fire-resilient, that doesn’t mean they are entirely risk-free. Homeowners and cities are going to have to make changes when it comes to non-combustible landscaping, elevations and even design. The real test will come in the future, should the community be in the line of a wildfire.
    “Nothing is ever fireproof. We’re always just seeking to try to narrow those paths of destruction,” said Wright. More

  • in

    Even priests need the free market

    Henry Ward Beecher’s church was very rich. Every Sunday crowds would flock across New York’s East River on “Beecher’s boats” to see the charismatic preacher, who had arrived in Brooklyn from rural Indiana. In the 1850s and 60s Beecher sold sermons, bringing in so much cash that he could sponsor and arm with rifles a regiment in the American civil war (“Beecher’s regiment,” toting “Beecher’s bibles”). By 1875, when an adultery scandal brought him down, his Brooklyn congregation had swollen from 20 souls to thousands. Beecher was a celebrity; proof both that religion can lead to riches, and that riches can lead to religion. More

  • in

    Can foreign investors learn to love China again?

    FOR CHINESE stocks to outperform American ones is rare enough. But this year the MSCI China index has beaten its American equivalent by an impressive 20 percentage points, on the back of excitement about cutting-edge tech firms such as DeepSeek and Manus AI. American shares, meanwhile, have been weighed down by worries about a bellicose Trump administration and the danger of a slowing economy. More

  • in

    The surging gold price is boosting Central Asia’s economies

    Tian Shan—the name for the mountains that cross Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—roughly translates as “Mountains of Heaven”. It is fitting for a range that is dotted with gold mines, including Kumtor, one of Central Asia’s largest and a symbol of Kyrgyz national pride. Moreover, it is not just the mountains of Central Asia that hold big reserves. Hundreds of kilometres to the west, in Uzbekistan’s Kyzylkum Desert, sits Muruntau, the world’s largest open-pit gold mine. More

  • in

    Nubank has conquered Brazil. Now it is expanding overseas

    Brazil may not be an obvious place to look for the future of retail banking. Yet in just over a decade Nubank, based in São Paulo, has transformed its home market by offering cheap, branchless banking to millions of customers ignored by the big players. Its market value of $56bn leaves it vying with Itaú Unibanco for the title of Latin America’s biggest bank. In 2024 Nubank made $2bn in profit, double the previous year’s figure. Having conquered Brazil, and with the country’s economy now struggling, it has set its eyes on new markets. More

  • in

    Chinese consumer companies signal spending is picking up again

    E-commerce giants have reported stronger year-on-year revenue growth in the last three months of 2024, indicating recovery in consumption growth — but not back to pre-pandemic levels.
    However, the earnings released by certain companies reveal strong consumer spending in niche areas, with companies such as Laopu Gold and Pop Mart seeing a surge in revenues.
    Competition remains fierce in certain market segments, such as coffee and tea.

    Shoppers line up to shop at a Laopu Gold outlet in Deji Plaza in Nanjing, China, on Feb. 21, 2025.
    Fang Dongxu | Feature China | Future Publishing | Getty Images

    BEIJING — Chinese companies’ latest earnings reports point to an improvement in consumer spending, though it’s not necessarily back to pre-pandemic levels.
    E-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com both said in the last several weeks that their China retail business saw faster year-on-year revenue growth in the last three months of 2024 than in 2023.

    “We think consumption growth is in a period of healthy recovery, but not [yet reaching] the high previously,” Charlie Chen, managing director and head of Asia research at China Renaissance Securities, said Wednesday in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
    For consumer spending to return to pre-pandemic growth, Chinese companies’ revenue growth likely needs to recover by double digits and consumer confidence needs to improve, Chen said. He noted that the recent real estate slump has weighed on consumers’ sense of affluence.
    Chinese policymakers have emphasized that boosting consumption is their priority this year. So far, authorities have expanded a trade-in subsidy program to include smartphones, on top of home appliances and electric cars. In September, Beijing also signaled a shift in real estate policy by calling for a halt in the market decline.

    JD.com has benefitted directly from the trade-in program, and reported 15.8% year-on-year growth in sales for electronics and home appliances in the fourth quarter of 2024. However, full-year segment revenue of 4.9% was only the fastest growth since 2021, when sales surged by nearly 23%.
    The government has introduced consumption-stimulating policies since the second half of last year, and they have “driven a steady recovery in consumer confidence,” Sandy Xu, chief executive officer and executive director of JD.com, said in an earnings call this month, according to a FactSet transcript.

    “In short-term we believe there are still challenges on the macro side, but in the long term, we remain very optimistic about consumer sentiment,” she said.

    Niche markets stand out

    Tencent, which operates mobile payments and social media app WeChat, reported a 3% growth in fintech and businesses services to 56.1 billion yuan ($7.7 billion) in the fourth quarter of 2024, noting that “commercial payment services revenue was broadly stable year-on-year.” That compares with 39% segment growth in the fourth quarter of 2019, which Tencent had attributed to “greater revenue contributions from commercial payment.”
    Certain companies have found niche areas where Chinese consumers are spending, however.
    In late February, Beijing-based Laopu Gold, which makes and sells gold jewelry with Chinese designs, forecast that its net profit last year surged by at least 236% in 2024 to 1.4 billion yuan. The company is set to release full results for 2024 on Tuesday.
    Toy company Pop Mart also propelled ahead, reporting on Wednesday that revenue in mainland China more than doubled last year to 2.64 billion yuan.
    Niu Technologies reported that e-scooter sales in China surged by more than 80% year on year in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 646.2 million yuan. Full-year segment sales rose by 27.5%. The company attributed growth to its focus on premium models and store expansion.
    In contrast, Niu had said the relatively slow recovery in China’s economic growth in 2023 had resulted in a decline in sales that year.
    China’s official economic data for the start of the year showed modest improvement in growth.
    Retail sales growth of 4% year over year in January and February was the highest increase in the past 12 months on a seasonally adjusted basis, Chen said. Since that rise was on a high base of 5.5% growth in the first two months of 2024, he expects retail sales growth this year will be higher than 4%.
    Retail sales rose by a muted 3.5% in 2024. For 2015 to 2019, retail sales had grown by an average of 9.7% each year.
    Chen said he expects government policy to support more consumer discretionary or services spending since the potential for recovery is greater there than in daily necessities.
    Chinese travel booking site Trip.com said in late February its net revenue for 2024 rose by 20% to 53.3 billion yuan. That was faster than a 15% increase in 2019 to 35.7 billion yuan in net revenue.
    While the company did not detail its views on the domestic market, it emphasized that international travel had recovered to more than 120% of 2019 levels. CEO Jane Sun also highlighted in an earnings call that the “silver generation,” or travelers over the age of 50, is a target demographic as the market segment will likely exceed 1 trillion yuan in value in coming years.

    Intense competition

    China, the world’s second-largest consumer market, remains intensely competitive especially as consumer demand has been soft. Electric car companies have slashed prices, while retailers have struggled to compete with heavy online discounts.
    Home accessories retail chain Miniso reported its mainland China revenue grew by 10.9% last year to 1.28 billion yuan, although growth moderated slightly in the December quarter at 6.5%. The company does not plan to accelerate its pace of store openings, and said online sales in China are increasingly driving growth.
    Major beverage chains in China from milk tea to coffee also saw lower same-store sales in the latter part of 2024.
    Overall industry slowdown and competitors launching low-priced products contributed to a 0.7% drop in same-store sales in the first nine months of 2024, bubble tea chain Guming said in its Hong Kong initial public offering prospectus released Feb. 4.
    In the fourth quarter of 2024, average monthly sales per Chagee milk tea store in China fell by 20.6% from a year ago, after modest growth in the prior quarter, according to CNBC calculations of figures disclosed this week in a prospectus for a U.S. IPO. Overseas sales surged by 29.2% year on year in the fourth quarter.
    Chinese bubble tea chain Mixue said average sales per store fell to 1.08 million yuan in the first three months of 2024, down from 1.13 million yuan a year earlier, according to the latest figures available.
    Even upstart Chinese coffee chain Luckin saw a decline of 3.4% in same-store sales for self-operated stores in the quarter ended Dec. 31 from the year-ago period. Starbucks marked a 6% decline in comparable store sales during that time.
    — CNBC’s Ying Shan Lee contributed to this report. More

  • in

    Dollar Tree says it’s winning over higher-income shoppers and may offset tariffs with price hikes

    Dollar Tree said it is winning over more high-income shoppers during a sustained period of high inflation.
    The company said it could use negotiations with suppliers, manufacturing changes and price increases to mitigate the effect of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
    Dollar Tree reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday and said it would sell its struggling Family Dollar chain.

    Erin Scott | Reuters

    Dollar Tree said Wednesday that it’s gaining market share with higher-income consumers and could raise prices on some products to offset President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
    The discount retailer’s CEO, Michael Creedon, said the company is seeing “value-seeking behavior across all income groups.” While Dollar Tree has always relied on lower-income shoppers and gets about 50% of its business from middle-income consumers, sustained inflation has led to “stronger demand from higher-income customers,” Creedon said on an analyst call.

    Dollar Tree’s success with higher-income shoppers follows similar gains from Walmart, which has made inroads with the cohort following the prolonged period of high prices.
    Trump’s tariffs on certain goods from China, Mexico and Canada — and the potential for broad duties on trading partners around the world — have only added to concerns about stretched household budgets. While Dollar Tree will use tactics like negotiating with suppliers and moving manufacturing to mitigate the effect of the duties, it could also hike the prices of some items, Creedon said.
    Dollar Tree has rolled out prices higher than its standard $1.25 products at about 2,900 so-called multi-price stores. Certain products can cost anywhere from $1.50 to $7 at those locations.
    The retailer weighed in on higher-income customers and the potential effect of tariffs as it announced its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings. Dollar Tree also said it will sell its struggling Family Dollar chain for about $1 billion to a consortium of private equity investors.
    Dollar Tree said its net sales for continuing operations — its namesake brand — totaled $5 billion for the quarter, while same-stores sales climbed 2%. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.11 for the period.

    It is unclear how the figures compare with Wall Street estimates.
    For fiscal 2025, Dollar Tree expects net sales of $18.5 billion to $19.1 billion from continuing operations, with same-store sales growth of 3% to 5%. It anticipates it will post adjusted earnings of $5 to $5.50 per share for the year.
    Creedon said the expected hit from the first round of 10% tariffs Trump levied on China in February would have been $15 million to $20 million per month, but the company has mitigated about 90% of that effect.
    Additional 10% duties on China imposed this month, along with 25% levies on Mexico and Canada that have only partly taken effect, would hit Dollar Tree by another $20 million per month, Creedon said. The company is working to offset those duties, but did not include them in its financial guidance due to the confusion over which tariffs will take effect and when.

    Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO More