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DONALD TRUMP likes oil—and oilmen. He gushes about “liquid gold” with as much ferocity as Spindletop, an oil well that spat out perhaps 1m barrels over nine days in 1901 and turned nearby Houston into a boomtown. In his first administration he named Rex Tillerson, former chief executive of ExxonMobil, America’s mightiest hydrocarbon firm, as secretary of state. On February 3rd the Senate blessed Chris Wright, who founded an oil-services firm called Liberty Energy, as head of the Department of Energy. Mr Trump promises that on his watch big oil can “drill, baby, drill” to its heart’s content. More

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For American consumers, online shopping has just got dearer. On February 1st Donald Trump did away with a decades-old provision, known as the de minimis waiver, that exempted goods under a certain value (lately $800) from customs duties. With the same stroke he raised tariffs on Chinese goods by 10%. Then on February 5th the United States Postal Service announced that it had temporarily suspended inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong, before abruptly reversing, causing all manner of confusion. More

Eli Lilly reported mixed results for the fourth quarter as sales of its blockbuster weight loss and diabetes drugs soared but saw lower realized prices.
Demand in the U.S. has far outpaced supply for Eli Lilly’s incretin drugs, such as Zepbound and Mounjaro, over the last year.

Eli Lilly on Thursday reported mixed results for the fourth quarter, even as sales of its blockbuster weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes treatment Mounjaro soared.
The company’s quarterly earnings topped Wall Street estimates, but sales fell just short as Mounjaro saw lower realized prices. Zepbound and Mounjaro have now underperformed expectations for two straight quarters, with the company previously pointing to issues around inventory decreases among wholesalers.

The pharmaceutical giant also issued fiscal 2025 profit guidance of $22.05 to $23.55 per share, which is in line with what analysts were expecting. Eli Lilly reiterated its fiscal 2025 sales guidance of $58 billion to $61 billion. 
The figures were consistent with the preliminary results Eli Lilly shared in January, which disappointed investors. Eli Lilly had slashed its 2024 revenue guidance, as it said demand for its weight loss and diabetes drugs would not meet its lofty expectations.
Notably, Eli Lilly said it plans to report late-stage data on its next-generation obesity drug retatrutide later this year, a few months earlier than expected. Retatrutide works differently from any of the treatments on the market, mimicking three different hunger-regulating hormones: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon.
Here’s what Eli Lilly reported for the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG: 

Earnings per share: $5.32 adjusted vs. $4.95 expected
Revenue: $13.53 billion vs. $13.57 billion expected

The company posted fourth-quarter revenue of $13.53 billion, up 45% from the same period a year ago. 

The pharmaceutical giant booked net income of $4.41 billion, or $4.88 per share, for the fourth quarter. That compares with a profit of $2.19 billion, or $2.42 a share, a year earlier. 
Excluding one-time items associated with the value of intangible assets and other adjustments, Eli Lilly posted earnings of $5.32 per share for the fourth quarter of 2024.

Zepbound, Mounjaro performance

Mounjaro posted $3.53 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, up 60% from the year-earlier period. Analysts had expected the drug to book $3.62 billion in sales for the quarter, according to StreetAccount.  
Eli Lilly said the increase reflects strong demand and increased supply of Mounjaro, but was partially offset by lower realized prices due to “favorable changes” in the fourth quarter of 2023 to estimates for rebates and discounts. 
Meanwhile, the results cap Zepbound’s first full year on the U.S. market. The weekly injection raked in $1.91 billion in sales for the fourth quarter, which is below the $1.98 billion that analysts expected, according to StreetAccount. 
But demand in the U.S. has still far outpaced supply for Eli Lilly’s incretin drugs, such as Zepbound and Mounjaro, over the last year. Both treatments mimic certain gut hormones to tamp down a person’s appetite and regulate their blood sugar.
The popularity of those injectable drugs has forced both Eli Lilly and its rival Novo Nordisk to invest billions to ramp up manufacturing capacity for their treatments. The efforts appear to be paying off: The Food and Drug Administration in December reaffirmed its decision to declare the U.S. shortage of tirzepatide — the active ingredient in Zepbound and Mounjaro — over.
Eli Lilly on Thursday estimated that it will produce at least 1.6 times the amount of incretin doses in the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024.
The results also kick off a critical year for Eli Lilly, which is slated to release closely watched clinical trial data on its experimental obesity pill, orforglipron. Those results are expected by the middle of the year.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates. More

The owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger has been placed on China’s “unreliable entities” list, which could force it to shut down stores, cease manufacturing and send its employees home.
China placed PVH on the list soon after President Donald Trump slapped a new 10% tariff on Chinese imports, and came along with other retaliatory actions, such as new duties on U.S. energy imports.
PVH has a significant manufacturing footprint in China and has about 18% of its suppliers and factories in the region.

People shop for clothes at a Calvin Klein store at a mall in Beijing on Feb. 5, 2025.
Adek Berry | AFP | Getty Images

China has blacklisted the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which could force the company to shut down stores and manufacturing in an early repercussion of President Donald Trump’s trade war. 
China added PVH Corp. to its “unreliable entities” list on Tuesday, which allows the Chinese government to fine the retailer, prohibit import and export activities, revoke work permits, and deny employees the ability to enter the country, among other deliberately vague powers. 

While China’s Ministry of Commerce began investigating PVH in September for allegedly refusing to source cotton from the Xinjiang region, which has become notorious for its Uyghur detention camps, Beijing officially placed the company on its blacklist on Tuesday. The announcement came just days after Trump slapped a 10% tariff on imports from China, and came along with a slew of other retaliatory measures against the U.S., including new duties on energy imports and farm gear. 
“There’s this tit-for-tat trade war going on, and [China] wants to show the United States that it’s going to take action to hurt either big U.S. companies or companies with significant interests in the U.S.,” said Michael Kaye, a partner at Squire Patton Boggs, who has been practicing international trade law for more than 30 years. “They’re being made an example. … My guess is, [China] wanted to pick somebody and they wanted it to be somebody that was high visibility.”
Now that PVH is on the unreliable entities list, China could force the company to shut down the dozens of stores that it operates in the region and forbid it from selling its wares to Chinese consumers online, said Kaye. Its staff — including those who’ve built lives in China — could be effectively deported and sent home, Kaye added.
It is unclear if China would try to enforce actions against PVH in the autonomous region of Hong Kong, where the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters are. In 2020, China passed a law that gave it more power to enforce national laws in Hong Kong, and that is “particularly the case with laws applicable to national security,” which could include the unreliable entities list, said Kaye.
As of Thursday morning Eastern time, the company appeared to be operating its business as usual in China.

China could even prohibit PVH from manufacturing in the region altogether, which could force it to move production to other countries and struggle to meet customer orders. 
It’s unclear which steps exactly China will take, or if the Trump administration will try to convince China not to punish the company.
In a statement, PVH said that it was “surprised and deeply disappointed to learn of the decision from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.”
“In our 20 years of operating in China and proudly serving our consumers, as a matter of policy, PVH maintains strict compliance with all relevant laws and regulations and operates in line with established industry standards and practices. We will continue our engagement with relevant authorities and look forward to a positive resolution,” the company said.
China represented 6% of PVH’s sales and 16% of its earnings before interest and taxes in 2023, but it relies more heavily on the country for manufacturing, which is the bigger risk to its business. PVH has more factories and suppliers in China than in any other region, representing about 18% of production, according to a disclosure it issued in December. 

“This has the potential to be very, very disruptive for PVH,” said GlobalData managing director and retail analyst Neil Saunders. “They would certainly have to scramble to find new capacity. They’d be able to do that in time, of course, but the two things that are at issue are that, because a lot of supply chains are just in time, they would probably find that they did get short on inventory whilst they made the transition. The other issue, of course, is quality.” 
PVH has operated in China for more than 20 years, and while it works with suppliers and factories in more than 30 other countries, the higher-end goods that it makes can be difficult to manufacture elsewhere because of the skill level needed, said Saunders. 
“While you can shift manufacturing capacity reasonably easily, it’s not so easy to guarantee the quality, guarantee the production processes. Those things take time to upskill,” said Saunders. “China has that capacity and has those skills, because PVH has been operating there for ages. Another country, another manufacturing facility, may not have those skills immediately.” 
Plus, PVH has viewed China as a growth market and it will now have to look for new strategies to increase sales and profitability as demand falls for its high-end dresses, intimate apparel and sweaters. 
China’s unreliable entities list is a relatively new law in the country, and experts say it’s deliberately opaque. The government has wide latitude to take action against PVH, but it remains unclear what exactly it will do. Typically, guidance comes within a few days of a company’s placement on the blacklist, said Kaye. 
China could add PVH to the list and do nothing to the company, but Kaye said the chances of that are “very slim” because the government will want to avoid the perception that it’s backing down. China will more likely use PVH as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table with Trump, and use it as an example to show the power it has to inflict pain on other U.S. businesses with major operations and customer bases in China, such as Nike, Apple, General Motors, Starbucks and others. 
“There’s a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over [PVH’s] head, and that is exactly what this is, because this isn’t really about PVH at all. This is about PVH being caught in the spat between China and the U.S.,” said Saunders. “China is using PVH as an example to say, look, if tariffs go ahead, if other restrictions are put in place on China, we can make life difficult for U.S. companies in the country. That’s really what this is about.”

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Peloton delivered mixed results for its holiday quarter, but managed to blow away adjusted EBITDA expectations despite a wider loss per share than expected.
The Bike and Tread maker’s guidance indicated it’s sacrificing sales growth for profitability in the near term, but could see revenue stabilize by the end of the year.
The connected fitness company has a new CEO at the helm, former Ford executive Peter Stern, who will make his public debut on the company’s earnings call.

A Peloton stationary bicycle inside a store in Palo Alto, California, US, on Monday, Aug. 5, 2024. 
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Peloton told investors Thursday it still has a “steep hill to climb” to achieve profitable growth under its new CEO, but the connected fitness company beat holiday sales expectations, thanks in part to its partnership with Costco. 
The bike maker posted mixed fiscal second quarter results, as it topped Wall Street’s sales estimates but lost more than expected as it continued its efforts to make its costly hardware business more profitable.

The bike maker also cut costs in three key areas that it has faced criticism for spending too much on – marketing, administrative costs and research and development – leading it to blow away analyst expectations for adjusted EBITDA. 
Peloton shares climbed more than 13% in premarket trading Thursday.
Peloton forecast worse than expected sales in the current quarter, but it projected better than expected cash flow and perhaps a recovery in revenue by the end of the year. 
During the current quarter, Peloton expects sales to be between $605 million and $625 million, worse than the $652 million analysts had expected, according to LSEG. However, it anticipates adjusted EBITDA will be between $70 million and $85 million, far better than the $50.4 million Wall Street expected, according to StreetAccount.
Peloton expects fiscal 2025 revenue to be roughly in line with expectations. It’s forecasting sales to be between $2.43 billion and $2.48 billion, compared to estimates of $2.47 billion, according to LSEG. 

Here’s how Peloton performed in its fiscal 2025 second quarter compared with what Wall Street was anticipating, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Loss per share: 24 cents vs. 18 cents expected
Revenue: $674 million vs. $654 million expected

The company’s reported net loss for the three-month period that ended Dec. 31 was $92 million, or 24 cents per share, compared with $195 million, or 54 cents per share, a year earlier. 
Sales dropped to $674 million, down more than 9% from $744 million a year earlier. Peloton’s holiday quarter is typically its strongest for hardware sales, but most of its revenue decline came from that side of the business, as sales fell about 21%. 
Still, it is making more than it used to from selling its pricey stationary bikes and treadmills, which have long been a money losing business. During the quarter, its connected fitness gross margin came in at 12.9%, the first time it’s reached double digits in more than three years, the company said. 
Peloton also saw big gains from its seasonal partnership with Costco, which drove more Bike+ sales during its holiday quarter than any other third-party retailer it works with, such as Amazon and Dick’s Sporting Goods. 
In October, Peloton announced that Peter Stern, a former Ford executive and the co-founder of Apple Fitness+, would be its next CEO and president after Barry McCarthy stepped down earlier in the year and two board members briefly took the helm. 
Stern was selected in part because of his experience running Ford’s subscription business, indicating Peloton was tripling down on its main value proposition: its high-margin, recurring subscription revenue. 
Stern started in the role on Jan. 1 and is slated to make his public debut to investors during the company’s earnings call scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET. 
He’s expected to continue Peloton’s efforts to cut costs and chart a path to profitability but also try to improve the member experience to reduce churn and bring on new customers. 
At the moment, Peloton is attracting a different class of investors that are more interested in seeing the company leverage its high-margin subscription revenue to boost profits over growing sales so their focus has turned to its ability to generate free cash flow and EBITDA. 
During the quarter, Peloton blew away adjusted EBITDA expectations. It posted $58.4 million in adjusted EBITDA, more than double the $26.7 million that analysts had expected, according to StreetAccount. It managed to eke out the number even with a higher-than-expected loss per share by reducing costs in areas that investors and analysts have said Peloton was overspending in. 
Sales and marketing costs were down 34%, general and administrative expenses fell 18% and research and development spending dropped 25%, leading total operating expenses to be down 25% compared to the year-ago period. More

Eli Lilly said it expects to release data from a late-stage trial on its next-generation weight loss drug retatrutide later this year, which is a few months earlier than expected. 
The company expects to read out results from a study in people with obesity and osteoarthritis of the knee in 2025.
Retatrutide is a key part of Eli Lilly’s drug pipeline that works differently from existing treatments and appears to be more effective.

The Eli Lilly & Co. logo at the company’s Digital Health Innovation Hub facility in Singapore, on Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. 
Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Eli Lilly on Thursday said it expects to release data from a late-stage trial on its next-generation weight loss drug retatrutide later this year, which is a few months earlier than anticipated. 
The company expects to read out results from a study in people with obesity and osteoarthritis of the knee in 2025, according to fourth-quarter earnings slides on its website. Eli Lilly previously said that phase three study was expected to finish in February of 2026. 

It is among at least nine closely watched clinical trials on retatrutide, which works differently from the obesity and diabetes treatments on the market and appears to be even more effective at weight loss. 
Retatrutide is a key part of Eli Lilly’s drug pipeline that could help the company maintain its dominance in the blockbuster weight loss and diabetes treatment space and gain an edge over key competitor Novo Nordisk. Dubbed the “triple G” drug, retatrutide works by mimicking three hunger-regulating hormones: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. That appears to have more potent effects on a person’s appetite and satisfaction with food.
Meanwhile, tirzepatide – the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s weight loss shot Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro –mimics two hunger-regulating hormones, GLP-1 and GIP. Novo Nordisk’s weight loss drug Wegovy only mimics GLP-1.
The treatment also appears to cause even greater weight loss than tirzepatide, which has skyrocketed in demand in the U.S.
Retatrutide helped patients lose 24.2% of their body weight, or 58 pounds, on average after 48 weeks in a mid-stage trial on adults who were obese or overweight. Those who took the placebo lost 2.1% of their body weight after that same time period.

Higher doses of tirzepatide helped patients with obesity lose up to 22.5% weight loss on average in late-stage studies.
— CNBC’s Angelica Peebles contributed to this report. More

Yum Brands on Thursday reported quarterly earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street estimates.
Results were fueled by strong sales for KFC’s international restaurants and Taco Bell.
Net sales climbed 16% to $2.36 billion, and the company’s same-store sales rose 1%.

A sign is posted in front of a Taco Bell restaurant in Richmond, California, on May 1, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Yum Brands on Thursday reported quarterly earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street estimates, fueled by strong sales for KFC’s international restaurants and Taco Bell.
Shares of the company rose more than 2% in premarket trading.

Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: $1.61 adjusted vs. $1.60 expected
Revenue: $2.36 billion vs. $2.35 billion expected

The restaurant company reported fourth-quarter net income of $423 million, or $1.49 per share, down from $463 million, or $1.62 per share, a year earlier. Excluding refranchising gains and other items, Yum earned $1.61 per share.
Net sales climbed 16% to $2.36 billion. More than half of Yum’s quarterly sales were digital, which includes online and delivery orders and those placed through in-store kiosks.
Yum’s same-store sales rose 1% in the quarter, thanks to Taco Bell.
Taco Bell reported same-store sales growth of 5%. Executives have previously credited the chain’s strong value perception for its success in recent quarters.

KFC’s same-store sales were flat for the quarter, but the fried chicken chain saw stronger demand outside of the U.S. For example, in China, its largest market, KFC’s system sales increased 5% in the quarter. Europe and Latin America reported double-digit system sales growth. The chain’s international same-store sales rose 1% overall in the quarter.
Meanwhile, in its home market, KFC’s U.S. same-store sales slid 5%. Popeyes has overtaken the chain to become the second-biggest chicken chain in the U.S., and other upstarts, like Raising Cane’s, have been growing quickly.
Pizza Hut, the laggard of Yum’s portfolio, reported same-store sales declines of 1% for the quarter. The pizza chain’s U.S. same-store sales fell 2%, while its international business reported flat same-store sales.
Yum opened 1,804 new restaurants during the quarter, growing its unit count by 5%.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates. More