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Five years in the making, L'Oréal Cell Bioprint marks a breakthrough in the beauty giant's efforts to proactively — versus reactively — improve skin longevity.

Has the Magic 8 Ball of skin care arrived?

With L’Oréal unveiling its latest Cell Bioprint device on Monday at the annual CES tech showcase in Las Vegas, the beauty giant is looking to assess consumers’ unique skin concerns of not just the present but more importantly, the future — and in just five minutes at the beauty counter.

“We want to give people an idea of how to correct the trajectory of their skin health, and not just reactively address what has already happened,” Guive Balooch, global managing director of augmented beauty and open innovation at L’Oréal, said in an interview.

The tool, slated to pilot with a L’Oréal brand in Asia later this year, has been five years in the making alongside Korean start-up NanoEnTek, which develops biochemical skin diagnostic systems.

It differs from existing skin analysis tools — including L’Oréal’s own L’Oréal Paris Skin Genius — in that it’s not an imaging tool, or one that functions via a 2D or 3D scan of one’s face that detects fine lines, blemishes, hyperpigmentation and other existing conditions.

“Those give you a snapshot of where your skin is today, but what people really want to know is their biology — and how understanding it can help them right now to improve their skin health in the future,” said Balooch.

Rather, L’Oréal Cell Bioprint works by measuring the presence — or lack thereof — of certain proteins in the skin, each of which has different implications for the conditions a consumer may be more prone to in the future. The tool also calculates one’s biological skin age, and indicates how well certain active ingredients, like retinol, will work on their skin.

“There are certain proteins, or what we call biomarkers, which if present in high levels, dispose you to a greater likelihood of having wrinkles, fine lines, or dark spots,” Balooch said. “For instance, we might give you a visual diagnosis and say, ‘OK — your skin isn’t dry at this moment, but based on your biomarker related to dry skin, you have either a low, medium or high chance of having dry skin in the future.’”

The device, which aims to take the guesswork out of skin care, can then help ascertain a personalized regimen to optimize skin health in the long term. To undergo the assessment, a strip of facial tape is placed on one’s cheek and inserted into a protein-isolating buffer solution, before being deposited into the Cell Bioprint cartridge for analysis.

“It’s a protein measurement tool at the point of sale that works in five minutes — nothing exists in the beauty market like this,” claimed Balooch, adding that so far, the Cell Bioprint can detect just under 20 kinds of proteins which correlate with consumers’ most common skin concerns.

“Those proteins took us years to uncover and to clinically study, but every time we find a new one in the lab, we will add it to the experience,” said Balooch, adding that the tool will most likely be paired with a luxury L’Oréal skin care brand during its initial rollout, “and then we will cascade — this plan has worked well for us in the past.”

At CES 2022, L’Oréal revealed its at-home hair coloring Colorsonic tool, hailed as a revolutionary development in the space thanks to its mess-free application. In 2023, it revealed a number of prototypes including Hapta, a computerized makeup applicator intended to support consumers with limited mobility, which launched at the 2024 Paris Paralympics.

Like those innovations, the Cell Bioprint “is a tech that aims to solve a real problem,” Balooch said.

“We’re finding that nine out of 10 women are frustrated with their skin care solutions, and part of that stems from the crowdedness and confusion of the market. We must make that number go down; we must make people less frustrated and more precise, and that will take biology and tech to do.”

In a post on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he believes OpenAI “know[s] how to build [artificial general intelligence]” as the company has traditionally understood it, and is beginning to turn its aim to “superintelligence.”

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future,” Altman wrote in the post. “Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

Altman previously said that superintelligence could be “a few thousand days” away, and that its arrival would be “more intense than people think.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a nebulous term, but OpenAI has its own definition: “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup’s close collaborator and investor, also have a definition of AGI: AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. When OpenAI achieves this, Microsoft will lose access to its technology, per an agreement between the two companies.

So which definition might Altman be referring to? He didn’t specify, but the former seems likeliest. Altman wrote that he thinks AI agents — AI systems that can perform certain tasks autonomously — may “join the workforce,” in a manner of speaking, and “materially change the output of companies” this year.

“We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes,” he wrote.

That’s possible, but it’s also true that today’s AI technology is significantly limited. It hallucinates, for one; it makes mistakes obvious to any human; and it can be very expensive.

US set for IPO comeback as private equity firms seek to offload holdings

Bankers hope strong 2024 gains for Wall Street equities and pro-business policies will drive listings rebound

Wall Street bankers are gearing up for a revival in initial public offerings as private equity groups seek to tap buoyant US equities markets to offload some of their flagship holdings.

Several private equity-backed groups have already filed paperwork with securities regulators for IPOs, including medical devices company Medline and software maker Genesys.

Bankers and analysts are expecting a flurry of listing announcements in the first half of 2025, after blockbuster gains by US stocks in 2024 and on hopes president-elect Donald Trump will cut regulations and taxes.

Investors and bankers have also been encouraged by strong share price gains following recent deals. Shares in nine of the 10 largest IPOs of 2024 ended the year above their listing price, with half of them — led by social media group Reddit — recording triple-digit gains.

“Successive improvement and more activity, that’s the headline,” said Eddie Molloy, global co-head of equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley. “With an [economic] backdrop that is a bit more certain, more of a pro-business bent to regulatory policy and the Fed [cutting interest rates], we should be busier for sure.”

The expected rush of US IPOs comes after a drought in the past three years as the Federal Reserve’s campaign of sharp rate rises, which began in 2022, curbed investor demand for new listings.

Higher rates reduce demand for assets that are considered high-risk, or which are valued on the promise of growth far in the future — both common features of newly-listed companies. Economists have scaled back their forecasts for how quickly the Fed will cut interest rates over the next 12 months, but nonetheless expect rates to fall further after the central bank announced three consecutive cuts in late 2024.

US listings raised $32bn in 2024, excluding special purpose acquisition companies, according to Dealogic, up almost 60 per cent on 2023.

Few observers are predicting a return to the dealmaking mania of the pandemic period, when huge government and central bank stimulus programmes boosted markets and led to a surge in IPOs that peaked at $150bn in 2021.

However, bankers are hopeful that equity capital markets activity will top the pre-2020 average of $38bn.

“Large [private-equity backed] IPOs will be the most important theme,” Molloy said.

The trend is partly driven by private equity firms under pressure to return cash to backers after the long dealmaking drought. It also reflects a shift in investor appetite after many were burnt by bad bets on lossmaking start-ups during the pandemic-era IPO rush.

“These are companies that generally speaking are larger and more profitable, and will therefore be more palatable for public market investors,” said Jeremy Abelson, founder and portfolio manager at Irving Investors, a growth-focused fund that invests in private and public companies. “The difference between now and 2021 is that in 2021 there was significant enthusiasm for mediocre businesses. We won’t see that again for a very long time.”

Fintech will also be a closely watched theme in the first half of 2025, with Swedish buy now, pay later group Klarna expected to be one of the first large venture-backed companies to brave the market.

San Francisco-based mobile banking group Chime has also renewed its plans to go public after initially aiming to list more than two years ago. Chime has previously discussed with investors a valuation of between $15bn and $20bn — a similar size to Klarna — according to two people familiar with the talks, though tech and financial stocks have made strong gains since last month’s US election, which could help lift its final valuation. Chime declined to comment.

Some observers have been surprised by the relative quiet in IPO markets considering the broader strength in US stocks over the past two years, with the S&P 500 rising almost 70 per cent from its 2022 lows. However, much of those gains have been driven by a small number of very large companies, rather than the smaller groups that typically float their shares.

Ryan Nolan, co-head of software investment banking at Goldman Sachs, said the broadening of stock market gains in the second half of 2024 had helped confidence. “There’s a lot more excitement and momentum,” he said.

Many private companies secured huge amounts of funding at inflated valuations in 2021, which reduced the urgency for further deals and made executives reluctant to accept new cash at a marked-down valuation. 

Samantha Lau, chief investment officer for small and mid-cap growth equities at AllianceBernstein, said private investors were now showing a “more realistic attitude” towards valuations. 

“Enough time has passed since 2021 that things will have to start to thaw,” she added.

There is fresh evidence the once-mighty innovator is losing market share in more areas

You may think you know how much Intel is struggling, but the reality is worse.

The once-mighty American innovation powerhouse is losing market share in multiple areas that are critical to its profitability. Its many competitors include not just the AI juggernaut Nvidia but smaller rivals and even previously stalwart allies like Microsoft.

One flashing warning sign: In the latest quarter reported by both companies, Intel’s perennial also-ran, AMD, actually eclipsed Intel’s revenue for chips that go into data centers. This is a stunning reversal: In 2022, Intel’s data-center revenue was three times that of AMD.

AMD and others are making huge inroads into Intel’s bread-and-butter business of making the world’s most cutting-edge and powerful general-purpose chips, known as CPUs, short for central processing units.

Even worse, more and more of the chips that go into data centers are GPUs, short for graphics processing units, and Intel has minuscule market share of these high-end chips. GPUs are used for training and delivering AI.

By focusing on the all-important metric of performance per unit of energy pumped into their chips, AMD went from almost no market share in servers to its current ascendant position, says AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster. As data centers become ever more rapacious for energy, this emphasis on efficiency has become a key advantage for AMD.

Notably, Intel still has about 75% of the market for CPUs that go into data centers. The disconnect between that figure and the company’s share of revenue from selling a wider array of chips for data centers only serves to illustrate the core problem driving its reversal of fortunes.

This situation looks likely to get worse, and quickly. Many of the companies spending the most on building out new data centers are switching to chips that have nothing to do with Intel’s proprietary architecture, known as x86, and are instead using a combination of a competing architecture from ARM and their own custom chip designs.

A spokeswoman for Intel says the company is focused on simplifying and strengthening its product portfolio, and advancing its manufacturing and foundry capabilities while optimizing costs. Intel interim Co-Chief Executive Michelle Johnston Holthaus recently said that 2025 will be a “year of stabilization” for the company. Intel is currently seeking a permanent leader after its CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out last month.

The decades that developers spent writing software for Intel’s chips mean that Intel remains a giant, even as its market share has shrunk, and that legacy will limit how quickly Intel’s revenues can decline in the future. Analysts estimate Intel’s 2024 revenue was about $55 billion, just behind Nvidia’s approximately $60 billion. Intel still has the lion’s share of the market for desktop and notebook CPUs—around 76%, overall, according to Mercury Research.

AMD recently formed an alliance with Intel to collaborate on support and development of the x86 ecosystem that both companies make chips for. Papermaster says that his own company continues to invest in this ecosystem even as AMD also develops ARM-based chips for some applications, such as networking and embedded devices.

For a concrete example of Intel’s challenges, look at Amazon, the world’s biggest provider of cloud computing. More than half of the CPUs Amazon has installed in its data centers over the past two years were its own custom chips based on ARM’s architecture, Dave Brown, Amazon vice president of compute and networking services, said recently.

This displacement of Intel is being repeated all across the big providers and users of cloud computing services. Microsoft and Google have also built their own custom, ARM-based CPUs for their respective clouds. In every case, companies are moving in this direction because of the kind of customization, speed and efficiency that custom silicon allows.

All those companies are also making their own custom, ARM-based chips for AI workloads, an area where Intel has missed the boat almost entirely. Then there’s the 800-pound gorilla in AI, Nvidia. Many of Nvidia’s current-generation AI systems have Intel CPUs in them, but ARM-based chips are increasingly taking center stage in the company’s bleeding-edge hardware.

Intel’s repeated flubs in entering markets for new kinds of computing and new applications for chips are a textbook example of a big, profitable incumbent becoming a victim of the innovator’s dilemma, says Doug O’Laughlin, an industry analyst at SemiAnalysis, which recently published a blistering report on Intel. The innovator’s dilemma holds that powerful companies that are unwilling to cannibalize their biggest sources of revenue can be overtaken by upstarts that build competing products that start out small, but which can ultimately take over the market which the incumbent dominates—like the mobile chips which ARM started off with.

In 1988, former Intel CEO Andy Grove published a book called Only the Paranoid Survive, which highlighted the ways that companies have to be vigilant about what’s coming next, and be willing to disrupt themselves and pursue new technologies. What he intended as a warning to all companies has since become a prophecy foretelling Intel’s current difficulties.

“The book is literally about the importance of not missing strategic inflections, and then Intel proceeds to miss every single strategic inflection since,” says O’Laughlin.

Then there are laptops. After decades of trying to make it happen, 2024 was finally the year of credible, ARM-based laptops running Windows, thanks to efforts by Microsoft to make Windows on ARM work. The company convinced other companies to port their own software, and created tools that allow most existing programs to run on the new laptops, in emulation. Chips in these devices are made by Qualcomm, and benchmarks show that they can finally compete with Apple’s M-class mobile processors, which are also based on a combination of ARM technology and a great deal of custom chip design by Apple’s formidable in-house team.

Another bastion of market share and profits for Intel, the PC gaming market, is also showing early signs of erosion. Portable gaming systems like Valve’s Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go, which can run even very demanding games, use processors from AMD. Future devices that will be part of the company’s plan to license its custom OS to other manufacturers may also use ARM-based ones.

Inherent in Intel’s woes is the way its vertically integrated structure, long an asset, now weighs on the company’s bottom line and ability to innovate. Unlike other companies that either design chips or manufacture them, Intel has stuck to a seemingly antiquated model of doing both.

Intel reported a $16 billion loss in its most recent quarter as it spent big to transform into a contract manufacturer—that is, a company that also manufactures chips for other companies, even competitors—and catch up to rival TSMC, which now produces the world’s most cutting-edge chips.

Analysts expect Intel to return to profitability in 2025, but it won’t be clear for years whether the company’s big manufacturing bets will ultimately pay off.

One of the big bets of Intel’s recently departed CEO Gelsinger, was Intel’s attempt to leapfrog TSMC in terms of chip technology. What it calls its “18A” tech could in theory allow its own chips, and those it makes for outsiders, to once again be the most cutting-edge, and the fastest, on the planet. The company has said it could regain that title by 2026. Intel recently announced it had signed a deal with Amazon to make custom chips for the company, using its 18A technology.

Even if Intel can once again lead the industry with its technology, the best case scenario for Intel’s own products is that it regains dominance in a market that continues to shrink—the x86 CPU one, says O’Laughlin. The removal of Gelsinger, who was betting on an all-in strategy for Intel to regain dominance both in the market for its own chips and in serving outside companies, suggests that Intel’s board agrees that the company can’t continue to count on being the best in the world at everything.

All of these challenges and conflicting priorities may push Intel to someday split in two, severing its product side from manufacturing. Intel INTC 1.68%increase; green up pointing triangle Co-CEO David Zinsner recently said that spinning off the company’s manufacturing side is an “open question.”

It’s also possible, in the worst case, that a fate even worse than being dismembered could be in store for Intel.

Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, recently observed that Intel has long been an innovation powerhouse, but that in chipmaking and design, there are countless companies that don’t innovate fast enough—and no longer exist.

US hedge fund manager called on shareholders of seven trusts to overhaul their boards and install his fund as investment manager

Two UK investment trusts have hit back at US activist investor Boaz Weinstein, who last month called on trusts’ shareholders to overhaul their boards and install his hedge fund as the investment manager.

The board of the Keystone Positive Change trust said on Monday that it was “appalled” by Saba Capital’s approach and warned that the US hedge fund was “acting opportunistically, seeking to seize control of the board without a controlling shareholding, to pursue its own agenda”.

Another trust, Baillie Gifford US Growth, also called on shareholders to vote against Saba’s proposals. The trusts have shareholder meetings scheduled for February.

Weinstein’s Saba Capital called for the meetings to replace directors, stating that they had “failed shareholders” because of the trusts’ weak performance. Saba Capital is targeting seven trusts in total, including CQS Natural Resources Growth & Income, Edinburgh Worldwide Investment, European Smaller Companies, Henderson Opportunities, and Herald Investment.

Saba is the largest shareholder in each of the trusts, with stakes ranging from 19 per cent to 29 per cent. The total value of its stakes amounts to £1.5bn.

The hedge fund is proposing two new directors on each fund, including Weinstein on one of the funds, and Paul Kazarian, who leads Saba’s investment trust strategy, on the other six trusts. If the resolutions are passed and if the new boards decide to replace the existing fund managers, then Weinstein will put forward Saba as the trusts’ new manager.

The board of Keystone, which is managed by Baillie Gifford, said: “We believe Saba’s plan lacks transparency, would flagrantly disregard good governance and may introduce substantially inflated fees. The proposed resolutions are not in the best interest of all shareholders and create significant uncertainty.

“Given Saba’s considerable voting position, every vote against its resolutions is vital. We strongly urge all shareholders to vote against all resolutions — a high turnout is critical.” The resolutions require more than 50 per cent of the votes to be in favour in order to pass.

Last week, the board of the Herald trust recommended that shareholders vote against Saba and said its investment strategy had “been highly successful over the long term”, delivering a net asset value total return of 865 per cent since its launch.

Andrew Joy, chair of Herald, said the board “believes Saba wishes to take control of the company for its own economic benefit and to change the company’s investment strategy, which . . . could result in significant value being lost”.

The investment trusts being targeted by Saba have suffered from their market capitalisations lagging behind the value of their assets. The discounts range from 12 per cent to 14.7 per cent over three years. The other trusts’ managers include Janus Henderson and Manulife.

The UK’s investment trust sector, which manages about £265bn of assets, has come under pressure more broadly from wide discounts.

Saba did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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