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AMC Entertainment on Wednesday warned investors of declines in key metrics during the second quarter, sending shares down.
The company blamed last year’s actors and writers strike for a slowdown in theatrical releases which ultimately led to “weakness” in the quarter ended June 30.
AMC’s preliminary results revealed revenue down more than 23% during the period and a net loss, compared with a profit during the same period a year earlier.

The AMC 25 Theatres in Times Square in New York is seen on Tuesday, July 8, 2014.
Richard Levine | Corbis News | Getty Images

AMC Entertainment warned investors of declines in key metrics during the second quarter, sending its shares down nearly 8% during trading Wednesday.
The company blamed last year’s actors and writers strike for a slowdown in theatrical releases which ultimately led to “weakness” in the quarter ended June 30.

AMC’s preliminary results revealed revenue down more than 23% during the period to $1.03 billion. It also said it expects to post a net loss of $32.8 million compared with a profit of $8.6 million in the second quarter of 2023. Full results will be posted Aug. 2.
“As we accurately predicted and previously disclosed, the prolonged actors and writers strikes of 2023 severely reduced the number of movies being released theatrically in the early months of 2024,” Adam Aron, chairman and CEO of AMC Entertainment, said in a statement. “This explains the weakness in our preliminary Q2 2024 results, as contrasted with the same quarter of a year ago.”
The theatrical industry has gotten a boost in the last month after a pandemic-driven slump, as moviegoers have returned in droves for films like Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” Universal and Illumination’s “Despicable Me 4,” Universal’s “Twisters” and the surprise indie horror flick “Longlegs” from Neon.
“But if looking only at the full quarter, the lay observer might easily miss the incredibly good news that transpired within the second quarter,” Aron said. “Finally, moviegoing in theatres appears again to be on an upwards trajectory.”
Still to come is the much-anticipated release of Disney and Marvel’s “Deadpool and Wolverine,” which is expected to have the highest opening of 2024 and for any R-rated film ever.

And some heavy hitters are coming during the last stretch of the year. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” arrives in early September, “Joker: Folie a Deux” hits in October alongside “Venom: The Last Dance,” and November sees “Gladiator II,” “Moana 2” and “Wicked.” Additionally, December will have “Kraven the Hunter,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3″ and “Mufasa: The Lion King.”
“AMC continues to be confident that industry-wide movie revenues for the second half of 2024, and into 2025 and 2026 will continue to show increasing strength,” Aron said. “This in turn suggests that AMC should enjoy increasing adjusted EBITDA, if as and when overall industry revenues are climbing. Such improvements in revenues, earnings and adjusted EBITDA are our current expectations going forward, all of which shine brightly on AMC’s future.”
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.

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“We will drill, baby, drill!” So thundered Donald Trump in his speech on July 19th at the Republican National Convention, where he accepted his party’s nomination as its presidential candidate. Encouraged by rapturous applause, he warmed to the theme, vowing to boost domestic production of fossil fuels to “levels that nobody’s ever seen before”, making America so “energy dominant” that it “will supply the rest of the world”. More

If autonomous cars are supposed to make life easy, then Apollo Go, the robotaxi unit of Baidu, a Chinese tech giant, still has work to do. When your correspondent tested its service in the city of Wuhan he had to find his way to a designated pick-up location and end his journey at an approved drop-off spot—more like taking a bus than a cab. More

Disney and Pixar’s ‘Inside Out 2’ is now the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, surpassing Walt Disney Animation’s “Frozen II” for the box office crown.
The record-breaking box office for “Inside Out 2” comes after a series of theatrical hits and misses from the company, especially for its animated releases.
The film has yet to open in Japan, a region that contributed nearly $33 million to the $850.5 million global total of “Inside Out” in 2015.

Amy Poehler and Maya Hawke voice Joy and Anxiety, respectively, in Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2.”
Disney | Pixar

Disney is back on top at the box office.
On Tuesday, “Inside Out 2” surpassed $1.46 billion in global ticket sales, making it the highest-grossing animated feature of all time, usurping another Disney title, “Frozen II.” Its box office will continue to grow. The film has yet to open in Japan, a region that contributed nearly $33 million to the $850.5 million global total of “Inside Out” in 2015.

The record-breaking box office for “Inside Out 2” comes after a series of theatrical hits and misses from the company, especially from its animated releases.
In particular, Pixar has suffered at the box office in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Much of its difficulties have come, in part, because Disney opted to debut a handful of animated features directly on streaming service Disney+ during theatrical closures and even once cinemas had reopened.
As a result, before “Inside Out 2,” no Disney animated feature from Pixar or its Walt Disney Animation studio had generated more than $480 million at the global box office since 2019.
Of note, Disney does not consider its 2019 “The Lion King” to be an animated feature despite nearly the entire film being computer animated. It is considered a live-action remake, according to the company. Otherwise, it would be the highest-grossing animated feature, as it collected more than $1.6 billion during its theatrical run. Box office analysts adhere to Disney’s categorization of the film.

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Sales of previously owned homes dropped 5.4% in June compared with May.
Inventory jumped 23.4% from a year ago to 1.32 million units at the end of June, coming off record lows but still just a 4.1-month supply.
The median price of an existing home sold in June was $426,900, an increase of 4.1% year over year

A home is offered for sale on March 22, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. 
Scott Olson | Getty Images

Sales of previously owned homes dropped 5.4% in June compared with May, to 3.89 million units on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were also 5.4% lower than June of last year. This is the slowest sales pace since December.
These are closed sales, so based on contracts signed mostly in April and May, when the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage jumped above 7%. Rates have pulled back slightly since then, to the high 6% range.

“We’re seeing a slow shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors. “Homes are sitting on the market a bit longer, and sellers are receiving fewer offers. More buyers are insisting on home inspections and appraisals, and inventory is definitively rising on a national basis.”
Inventory jumped 23.4% from a year ago to 1.32 million units at the end of June, coming off record lows but still just a 4.1-month supply. A six-month supply is considered balanced between buyer and seller.
These inventory levels are the highest supply since May 2020, boosted by homes sitting on the market longer. The average time that a home sat on the market was 22 days, up from 18 days a year ago.
Even that new supply, however, is not helping ease prices. The median price of an existing home sold in June was $426,900, an increase of 4.1% year over year and an all-time high for the second straight month. Part of that is skewed because the higher end of the market is much stronger.
Sales of homes priced over $1 million was the only price category seeing gains over last year, while the biggest drop in sales was in the $250,000 and lower range.

Supply of homes for sale is weakest on the lower end, but is seeing a new surge now. While the sales price nationally is high, new listing prices are lower.
“The median listing price is being held down by an influx in smaller and lower-priced listings. In fact, the number of for-sale homes in the $200k to $350k price bucket surged by 50% compared to a year ago,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com.
Higher-end buyers tend to use more cash, and 28% of sales were all cash, up from 26% a year ago. Investors pulled back a bit, though, making up 16% of sales, down from 18% one year ago.
“Assuming more inventory continues to increase, two things would happen. Either home sales rise, or, if the prices do not rise, the prices would buckle down,” Yun added.

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GM is again slowing its plans for all-electric vehicles by further delaying a second U.S. electric truck plant and the Buick brand’s first EV.
The delay also means the company will not achieve a prior target of having North American production capacity of 1 million EVs by 2025.
GM did not update the timing on Buick’s first EV, which was expected in 2024.

GM’s 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV during a media launch event for the vehicle in Detroit, May 16, 2024.
Michael Wayland / CNBC

DETROIT – General Motors said Tuesday it is again slowing its plans for all-electric vehicles by further delaying a second U.S. electric truck plant and the Buick brand’s first EV.
The six-month delay in retooling the electric truck plant in Michigan, until mid-2026, also means GM will not achieve a prior target of having North American production capacity of 1 million EVs by 2025.

We are committed to growing responsibly and profitably,” GM CEO Mary Barra told investors Tuesday during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
Barra’s comments come a week after she raised concerns about GM hitting its North American EV production capacity target.
Barra did not provide updated timing on Buick’s first EV, which was expected in 2024. The entire Buick brand has targeted being fully electric by 2030, as part of GM’s plans to exclusively offer consumer EVs by 2035.
The changes add new questions about the Detroit automaker’s plans for future battery cell plants other than two current joint venture facilities with LG Energy Solution in North America. GM previously announced plans for four of the multibillion-dollar plants in the U.S. by 2026.
Barra on Tuesday said the company would grow cell production in a “meaningful cadence.”

GM CFO Paul Jacobson declined to discuss potential plans to delay or cancel the automaker’s future EV battery cell plants, aside from the two facilities making cells in Ohio and Tennessee.
“We’re going to continue to be guided by the customer. We’re rapidly scaling in cell plants one and two,” Jacobson said during a media briefing. “We have nothing to comment on right now.”
GM’s U.S. EV deliveries increased 40% during the second quarter compared with a year earlier to 21,930 units. Still, EVs made up only 3.2% of its total second-quarter U.S. sales.
Jacobson said the company is set to ramp up assembly to achieve production and vehicle wholesales of between 200,000 and 250,000 all-electric vehicles in North America this year. He said the company wholesaled about 75,000 of its new EVs during the first half of the year.
Jacobson reiterated GM expects its EVs to be profitable on a production, or contribution-margin basis, once it reaches output of 200,000 units by the fourth quarter.
“We’re still holding to that,” Jacobson said, adding additional EV sales are expected to lower the company’s earnings, as they will be less than variable profits of GM’s traditional gas models

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Bipartisan lawmakers introduced a new bill that aims to crack down on the business practices of drug supply chain middlemen who allegedly inflate prescription medication prices in the U.S.
The legislation aims to lower costs for patients enrolled in federal healthcare programs and ensure that community pharmacies are reimbursed fairly by so-called pharmacy benefit managers.
It comes amid a House committee hearing featuring testimony by the three largest PBMs, UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx, CVS Health’s Caremark and Cigna’s Express Scripts.

Feverpitched | Getty Images

Bipartisan lawmakers introduced a new bill on Tuesday that aims to crack down on the business practices of drug supply chain middlemen who are widely accused of inflating prescription medication prices and harming U.S. patients and pharmacies.
The legislation aims to ensure community pharmacies can provide care to patients enrolled in federal health-care programs while being reimbursed “fairly and transparently” by so-called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Under the “Pharmacists Fight Back Act,” seniors covered by Medicare and Medicaid, government employees and active duty service members, among other patients, would see lower health-care costs and have more freedom to choose which pharmacy to get their prescriptions from, according to a fact sheet on the bill.

Reps. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., and Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., unveiled the bill ahead of a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing about the drug middlemen’s tactics on Tuesday. Executives of three of the largest PBMs – UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx, CVS Health’s Caremark and Cigna’s Express Scripts – will testify on allegations that they play a role in rising healthcare costs, as federal scrutiny of their practices mounts. 
The new bill joins dozens of other bipartisan efforts on the federal and state level to reform PBMs, which negotiate rebates with drug manufacturers on behalf of insurers, large employers and federal health plans. Those middlemen also create lists of medications, also known as formularies, that are covered by insurance and reimburse pharmacies for prescriptions. 
But lawmakers and drugmakers alike argue that PBMs overcharge the plans they negotiate rebates for, underpay pharmacies and fail to pass on savings from those discounts to patients. Auchincloss said those practices have allowed PBMs to trap $300 billion in revenue in the middle of the drug supply chain between manufacturers and patients.
Meanwhile, PBMs contend that drugmakers are responsible for setting high list prices for drugs, and argue that their tactics shield patients from high healthcare costs.
Legislation targeting PBMs advanced through House and Senate committees with bipartisan support last year, and one proposal overwhelmingly passed the House in December. But that legislative momentum has stalled since Congress left PBM reform out of a massive government spending package earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has ramped up pressure on PBMs as Americans struggle to afford prescription drugs. The Federal Trade Commission is planning to sue Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRx, CNBC previously reported. 

Pedestrians walk by a CVS store on November in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

The new bill would do some of the same things as earlier legislation would, such as increasing transparency around certain PBM business practices and banning spread pricing, or charging plans more than what they pay pharmacies for a drug. 
But Auchincloss, who co-led another PBM bill that passed the House last year, said his new legislation is “bigger and tougher,” and focuses on pharmacies. A Tuesday release about the bill also described it as the “most comprehensive PBM reform ever introduced at the federal level.”
“It seeks to take the pharmacists’ view and say, ‘What is making it impossible for pharmacists to thrive as small business owners and provide clinical and pharmacological advice to the patients that they serve?'” Auchincloss told CNBC. “We’re systematically tackling the impediments to that mission …This bill is about those pharmacists fighting back against corporate greed.” 
Auchincloss pointed to a new pharmacy reimbursement model under the bill, which would largely center around a medication’s so-called national average drug acquisition cost, or NADAC.  That measures the average price pharmacies pay to purchase a drug from manufacturers or wholesalers based on a survey of invoices. 
“That is going to ensure that the actual cost of goods is what the price is predicated on,”, Auchincloss said. He added that the bill’s reimbursement model is most relevant to generic rather than branded prescription drugs. 
Pharmacies are typically paid using a complicated system not directly based on what they spend to purchase medications. That model, which involves a multitiered network of insurers, manufacturers, PBMs and pharmacies, leads to ambiguity around fees and markups added to the original cost of a drug. 
Among the bill’s other efforts, it requires PBMs to share 80% of rebates with patients and prohibits several other practices. It would bar requiring patients to obtain branded medications when a cheaper generic version is available, steering patients to PBM-affiliated pharmacies and excluding any in-network pharmacy from filling a prescription, among other tactics.
The bill would “put in place much-needed reforms to stop the gouging of independent pharmacies, make life-saving drugs more affordable for patients, and implement solutions that will yield savings to taxpayers,” Harshbarger said in a statement. More

General Motors is raising several key financial targets for 2024 after easily beating Wall Street’s earnings expectations for the second quarter.
Wall Street analysts expected adjusted earnings per share of $2.75 and revenue of $45.46 billion.
GM executives will host an earnings conference call at 8:30 a.m. ET.

DETROIT — General Motors is raising several key financial targets for 2024 after easily beating Wall Street’s earnings expectations for the second quarter, while it restructures money-losing operations such as autonomous vehicles and its China business.
The Detroit automaker now expects full-year adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of between $13 billion and $15 billion, or $9.50 and $10.50, up from previous guidance of $12.5 billion to $14.5 billion, or $9 and $10, previously. It also raised its adjusted automotive free cash flow forecast, while slightly lowering the range for its net income attributable to stockholders by less than 1%.

Here’s how the company performed in the second quarter, compared with average estimates compiled by LSEG:

Earnings per share: $3.06 adjusted vs. $2.75 expected
Revenue: $47.97 billion vs. $45.46 billion expected

Shares of GM were up about 4% during premarket trading. The stock has risen roughly 38% in 2024.
GM’s second-quarter results included net income attributable to stockholders, which excludes some dividend payouts, of $2.93 billion, up 14.3% from $2.57 billion a year earlier. On a per-share basis, GM reported earnings of $2.55, up from $1.83 a year earlier. Adjusted earnings before interest and taxes came in at $4.44 billion, up 37.2%, and adjusted earnings per share were $3.06.
Its unadjusted net income was $2.88 billion, up 14.8% from a year earlier. GM said its revenue for the second quarter was a fresh quarterly record for the automaker, up 7.2% compared with $44.75 billion a year earlier.

Stock chart icon

GM’s stock performance in 2024.

“It was truly a great first half and second quarter, and we’re positioned to have a very strong year,” GM CFO Paul Jacobson said during a media briefing. “We expect to see some seasonally higher commodity costs, as well as some pricing headwinds that we’ve assumed in the second half of the year.”

Alongside the strong earnings, GM on Tuesday said it is indefinitely pausing production of its Cruise Origin autonomous vehicle, triggering a $600 million special charge in the second quarter. It also said it’s attempting to restructure a joint venture in China with SAIC amid continuing losses, including a $104 million loss in equity income during the second quarter.

North America leads

As they have in recent years, GM’s North American operations, driven by truck sales, were largely responsible for the company’s second-quarter beat and guidance raise. Specifically, pricing on the vehicles has remained more resilient than GM anticipated at the beginning of the year, according to Jacobson.
GM said its average transaction price during the second quarter was roughly $50,000, with incentives lower than the U.S. industry average.
The North America division increased adjusted earnings during the quarter to $4.43 billion, up nearly 40% from a year earlier. The unit reported a profit margin of 10.9%, up 2.3 percentage points from a year earlier.
While GM outperformed in several areas, it did not achieve an anticipated return to profitability in China, where the automaker has experienced significant declines in earnings.

The automaker’s Chinese operations posted an equity loss of $104 million – its second consecutive quarterly loss after hitting a roughly 20-year low in 2023.
“In China, we’ve been taking steps to reduce our inventories, align production to demand, and reduce our fixed costs, but it’s clear that the steps that we’ve taken, while significant, have not been enough,” Jacobson said during a media briefing. “We’re working closely with our JV partner to restructure the business, to make it profitable and sustainable, while ensuring that it doesn’t require incremental capital.”
GM’s international operations, which include South Korea, Brazil and the Middle East, reported adjusted earnings of $50 million during the second quarter, down 78.8% from a year earlier. Its financing arm reported adjusted earnings of $822 million, up 7.3% from a year earlier.

EVs

GM continues to target production and vehicle wholesales of between 200,000 and 250,000 all-electric vehicles in North America, despite slower-than-expected adoption.
Its EV deliveries during the quarter increased 40% compared with a year earlier to 21,930 units. Still, EVs made up only 3.2% of its total second-quarter U.S. sales.
Jacobson reconfirmed that GM expects its EVs to be profitable on a production, or contribution-margin basis, once it reaches output of 200,000 units by the fourth quarter.

GM’s 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV during a media launch event for the vehicle in Detroit, May 16, 2024.
Michael Wayland / CNBC

“EVs are going to be an earning headwind as we scale, until we reach variable profits positive during the fourth quarter, then they should start to become a tail wind for EBIT,” he said.
Jacobson declined to discuss potential plans to delay or cancel the automaker’s future EV battery cell production in North America, aside from two joint venture plants currently producing cells with LG Energy Solution in Ohio and Tennessee.
“We’re going to continue to be guided by the customer. We’re rapidly scaling in cell plants one and two,” Jacobson said. “We have nothing to comment on right now.”
Last week, GM CEO Mary Barra said the automaker’s goal of reaching EV production capacity of 1 million vehicles in North America by the end of 2025 was heavily in doubt.

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