Business

If red tape could be said to have a spiritual home, it would be the corridors of the European Commission in Brussels. The beating heart of the “regulatory superpower” that is the EU, it is there that the rules which guide how business is done in the 27 member states are made. The EU produced nearly 14,000 legal acts between 2019 and 2024. Perhaps not coincidentally the bloc’s economy has stalled. Bosses gripe about spending more time filling forms than filing patents. A plan to lessen their burden is expected to be released on February 26th. Hopes for radical deregulation, however, will have to wait. More

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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Carvana topped Wall Street’s top- and bottom-line expectations for the fourth quarter, while guiding for another “strong” year in 2025.
Carvana gave a broad 2025 guidance that includes growth in both retail units sold and adjusted EBITDA.
For 2024, the Tempe, Arizona-based company reported adjusted EBITDA of $1.38 billion and net income of roughly $404 million.

A Carvana sign and signature vending machine in Tempe, Arizona.
Michael Wayland | CNBC

Carvana topped Wall Street’s top- and bottom-line expectations for the fourth quarter while guiding for another “strong” year in 2025.
Carvana, as it has in the past, gave a broad guidance outlook for this year that includes growth in both retail units sold and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, including sequential increases in both during the first quarter.

Shares of Carvana fell more than 10% during after-hours trading Wednesday. The stock closed at $281.82, down roughly 1%.
Here’s how the company performed in the fourth quarter, compared with average estimates compiled by LSEG:

Earnings per share: 56 cents vs. 29 cents expected
Revenue: $3.55 billion vs. $3.31 billion expected

Revenue of $3.55 billion was up 46% from $2.42 billion in the prior-year period. Full-year 2024 revenue came in at $13.67 billion, up almost 27% from $10.77 billion in 2023.
For 2024, the Tempe, Arizona-based company reported adjusted EBITDA of $1.38 billion and net income of roughly $404 million. That includes adjusted EBITDA of $359 million and net income of $159 million during the fourth quarter. Fourth-quarter net income marks major improvement from a loss of $200 million in the same period a year earlier.
On a per-share basis, the company reported earnings of 56 cents for the December period, compared with a loss of $1 per share during the same quarter in 2023.

Both the yearly and quarterly results were records for Carvana.
Carvana said it sold 416,348 retail vehicles last year, up roughly 33% from the year before, for record total annual revenue of $13.67 billion in 2024. Its total gross profit per unit for the fourth quarter and full year was $6,671 and $6,908, respectively. Both metrics were up nearly $1,400 from 2023.
“With just ~1% market share today and many opportunities to improve and expand our offering from here, we know this is just the beginning of our journey to change the way people buy and sell cars,” Carvana CEO and co-founder Ernie Garcia said in a news release.
Shares of Carvana are up roughly 40% in 2025, adding to last year’s nearly 285% gain.

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UnitedHealthcare is offering certain employees in its benefits operations unit the option to accept buyouts if they quit by March 3, following a tumultuous year for the insurance giant, CNBC has learned.
If the company does not meet a resignation quota through buyouts, it will lay off employees, two people familiar with the matter said, citing an internal resource site. 
The buyout offers come after a tumultuous last year for UnitedHealth Group, which grappled with the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, a historically costly cyberattack, and rising medical costs.

A general view outside the United Healthcare corporate headquarters on December 4, 2024 in Minnetonka, Minnesota. 
Stephen Maturen | Getty Images

UnitedHealthcare is offering certain employees in its benefits operations unit the option to accept buyouts if they quit by March 3, following a tumultuous year for the insurance giant, CNBC has learned.
Those who don’t accept the offer will continue in either their current role or a comparable position, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC. If the company does not meet a resignation quota through buyouts, it will lay off employees, the people said, citing an internal resource site. 

The company declined to share how many employees received buyout offers under the so-called Voluntary Resignation Separation Program. The benefits operations unit oversees multiple subdivisions that help manage customer service, claims, enrollment, customers’ insurance benefits and more, one person said.  
UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, is the largest private health insurer in the U.S. UnitedHealth Group had more than 440,000 employees as of December 2023, but it does not disclose how many people work in its benefits segment or overall insurance business.
UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S. based on revenue and its roughly $460 billion market cap, but it has tried to cut costs as medical expenses increase for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries and it deals with the fallout from the costly cyberattack against its subsidiary Change Healthcare. It has also faced renewed anger over high health-care costs in the U.S., following the killing of its insurance unit CEO Brian Thompson in December.
Employees eligible for the buyouts include full-time or part-time U.S. workers assigned to four internal segments under benefits operations, including corporate, consumer operations, core services and provider services, according to an internal memo sent Monday and viewed by CNBC.”This voluntary option is part of our ongoing efforts to ensure our team is best positioned to meet the evolving needs of the people and customers we are honored to serve,” a UnitedHealth spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “We continue to grow our workforce with more than 3,200 positions currently available on UnitedHealth Group’s careers site.”
The company expects employees’ termination date to be no sooner than May 1, according to the memo. The memo said some employees who accept buyouts may need to work beyond that date, but the company does not expect to require them to work past Nov. 13. 

Their severance packages will depend on the number of years they have spent at the company and their salary grade, and will kick in on their termination date, the memo said. The benefits provided to employees included in any potential future layoffs may not be “as favorable” as those offered to workers under the buyout program, according to the memo. 
Workers who received the buyout offers are in shock, said the people familiar with the matter, especially after UnitedHealth Group reported its highest-ever annual revenue in 2024. The company said in its January earnings release that it generated $400.3 billion in revenue in 2024, up 8% year over year.
UnitedHealth executives said during the company’s fourth-quarter call in January that “digital adoption” helped the company lower costs. CEO Andrew Witty called it a “modernization agenda” which includes but isn’t limited to artificial intelligence.
He added that UnitedHealth is “just kind of scratching the surface of the opportunity.” 
Workers were informed about the buyouts Monday during a meeting that lasted around 10 minutes and were told they will have the opportunity to ask questions in information sessions in the coming days, the people said. 
The buyouts follow the shooting of Thompson, which unleashed a torrent of pent-up anger and resentment toward the insurance industry and renewed calls for reform. 
That came only months after Change Healthcare, which processes medical claims, was hit by a cyberattack in February 2024 that compromised the protected health information of around 190 million people. UnitedHealth Group has paid out more than $3 billion to providers affected by the cyberattack. 
UnitedHealth Group also laid off workers in its Optum health services division last year. 
Shares of the company closed up 2% on Wednesday.  More

U.S. government travel makes up about 2% of United’s business, its chief financial officer said.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have vowed to slash government costs.
Thousands of federal employees have been either laid off or offered buyouts.

A United Airlines plane takes off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, on November 23, 2021.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images

United Airlines says travel demand has been resilient lately — except from the U.S. government.
Government travel “has fallen off here post-inauguration,” United’s Chief Financial Officer Mike Leskinen said at a Barclays industry conference on Wednesday, referring to the start of President Donald Trump’s term last month.

Trump and his advisor, billionaire Elon Musk, have vowed to cut costs in the government, and thousands of government workers have either been laid off or offered buyouts. Jobless claims have surged in Washington, D.C.
The government travel segment is about 2% of United’s revenue, a United spokeswoman said. The airline brought in nearly $52 billion in passenger revenue last year. Leskinen said other demand is helping to make up for the shortfall.
Strong international leisure travel demand continues to outshine domestic demand, Leskinen added.

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It should be a management consultant’s dream. The organisation is immense. The bloat is obvious. And the new boss is eager to shake things up. President Donald Trump and his disrupter-in-chief, Elon Musk, have already begun hacking away at America’s federal bureaucracy. Mr Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has set itself the target of cutting government spending by a colossal $2trn. More

The San Francisco 49ers are considering a sale of up to 10% of the franchise to either a private equity firm or other investors, including wealthy individuals or families, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The 49ers are hoping to value the franchise near $9 billion, the person said.
The York family owns the 49ers, and Jed York is the 49ers’ CEO.

A San Francisco 49ers helmet on the field during pregame warmups before an NFL game against the Arizona Cardinals at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Dec. 17, 2023.
Ryan Kang | Getty Images

The San Francisco 49ers may be the next National Football League franchise to sell a minority stake to private equity.
The 49ers are considering a sale of up to 10% of the franchise to either a private equity firm or other investors, including wealthy individuals or families, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The New York Giants are also exploring a minority stake sale, the franchise announced last week.
NFL owners voted last year to allow private equity investment of up to 10% of a franchise. The Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills have already struck deals with investment firms, and the Philadelphia Eagles and Las Vegas Raiders have used the increased interest from private equity to generate higher prices from other individuals and families.
The 49ers are hoping to value the franchise near $9 billion, the person said. CNBC valued the organization at $7.4 billion in its most recent valuations list.
Bloomberg first reported the team’s interest in selling a minority stake.
The NFL’s 49ers are both recently and historically one of the most successful NFL franchises in terms of wins and losses. The parent company of the 49ers, 49ers Enterprises, also owns the English football club Leeds United. The York family owns the 49ers, and Jed York is the 49ers’ CEO.

Many teams are eager to sell minority stakes for increased liquidity for family members or for money that can be pumped back into the team for stadium repairs or future investments.
Sales to private equity firms come with no voting rights. Still, firms have been willing to pay premium prices for small stakes because they come with perks, such as owner’s box seating, which can be used for clients and employees. More