TheChek News Flow

The luxury e-tailer could be the latest e-commerce firm to go private amid its worst year as a public company. But Farfetch’s much scrutinised lack of focus could persist outside the public market.

Farfetch’s long, tumultuous quest for profitability is far from over, but whatever comes next will likely happen away from investors’ prying eyes.

On Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that Farfetch’s CEO Jose Neves, who founded the company in 2007 and holds the majority of its voting shares, was in discussion with top shareholders and JP Morgan to delist the luxury e-tailer. Farfetch then cancelled its quarterly earnings release, scheduled for Wednesday, an unusual move that strongly implied seismic changes were imminent.

The potential delisting caught the market by surprise, with Farfetch shares jumping more than 20 percent on Tuesday. While analysts and fashion insiders have been speculating about the marketplace’s trajectory for years, few had a Neves-led buyout on their list.

In retrospect, of course, this outcome feels almost inevitable. Since its IPO in 2018, Farfetch’s stock has lost more than 90 percent of its value, and its market capitalisation has plummeted from a high of $26 billion in February 2021 to just over $600 million today. The company has never turned an operating profit, prioritising marketing spend as it sought to dominate the online luxury e-commerce space. Worryingly, its momentum has also stalled, with sales declining in recent quarters. New businesses meant to drive sales and profits, including beauty and brand operator New Guards Group, have struggled.

As a private company, Farfetch would face less scrutiny as it looks to improve its bottom line. A take-private deal could also be an opportunity for Farfetch to go back to basics — selling high-end goods online from the curated inventories of local luxury boutiques — after years of chasing dominance beyond luxury e-commerce with a series of acquisitions: British department store Browns in 2015, sneaker reseller Stadium Goods in 2018, brand incubator New Guards Group in 2019 and niche beauty retailer Violet Grey in 2022.

Less clear is what such a deal would mean for Farfetch’s relationship with Richemont. The two companies have been working for over a year on a complex transaction that would see Farfetch acquire a 47.5 percent stake in YNAP, mostly for shares, with the intention it would buy the rest in a few years once its onetime rival becomes profitable. European Union regulators approved the deal in October, theoretically clearing the way for all parties to proceed.

Richemont is likely to be having second thoughts, analysts say. The Swiss luxury giant released a statement on Wednesday saying that it “does not envisage lending or investing into Farfetch.” The e-tailer’s stock more than reversed the gains made on Tuesday, plunging over 50 percent on the news, its steepest one-day drop this year.

The steep sell off reflects how the YNAP deal is widely seen as a potential lifeline. It could add over $3 billion in gross merchandise volume — a measure of sales on its core marketplace. Under the terms of the deal, Richemont would also replatform its brands using Farfetch’s technology, giving a boost to Farfetch’s white label software service.

Any other potential partner in taking Farfetch private (Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which teamed up with Richemont in 2020 to invest over $1 billion in Farfetch through a joint venture could be a candidate) could be on the hook to foot the bill for the rest of its YNAP deal in the next few years, as Farfetch currently has $1 billion in debt.

Focussing on the core business may not be enough, with or without YNAP. Luxury spending generally is down as aspirational consumers see their spending power dwindle in a challenging macroeconomic environment, with even traditional luxury players like LVMH and Kering seeing softening demand.

Those challenges are even more pronounced in the luxury e-commerce sector, due in part to consumers returning to in-person shopping. YNAP has long struggled to turn a profit (the reason behind the sell-off plan in the first place), despite having the backing of a major luxury group. Canadian e-tailer Ssense reduced its workforce by 7 percent in January, citing stagnant sales growth, while Munich-based online destination Mytheresa reported a sales slowdown in September.

And then there’s the question of whether Farfetch actually would simplify its business if it was taken private. Neves has always taken big swings, whether in beauty, brand building or the “store of the future.” With a majority of voting shares he had the freedom to pursue his vision, even as CEO of a public company. Still, going private would free Farfetch from the need to issue public disclosures, and from the real-time feedback of its stock price.

“It could be José [Neves] saying, ‘well, if I’m not a publicly held entity, I can do all the initiatives that I want to do,” said Tom Nikic, an equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities. “He can’t be [backed] into a corner as far as voting rights are concerned.”

That’s certainly how things have played out at X, formerly known as Twitter, where Elon Musk has scared off users and advertisers since taking the company private last year.

Neves fortunately doesn’t share Musk’s penchant for courting controversy. But whether he has the discipline to stay laser-focused on making his marketplace profitable - and whether he’ll have the capital to implement his strategy - remains to be seen.

Rivals are discussing merger that could be announced as soon as Sunday

Alaska Air is nearing a deal to buy Hawaiian Airlines, a combination of rivals that could be announced as soon as Sunday, according to people familiar with the matter.

Could there be an earlier version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting? Some experts are alleging that a piece depicting a younger version of the sitter could be the original.

The Mona Lisa (1503–19) is a Renaissance painting of the Florentine woman Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, by Leonardo da Vinci.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa, as it has been dubbed (because it was previously owned by an art dealer in the London suburb), shows Lisa in the same position as the original. There are, however, a few key differences. Namely, the Isleworth iteration depicts a younger version of the sitter with a thinner face.

Experts appear unconvinced that the painting is an authentic da Vinci work. As Jonathan Jones, an art critic for The Guardian, pointed out on Wednesday, da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa layer by layer for years perfecting his masterpiece. It is unclear how or why there would be a prequel to the Mona Lisa or why the artist would have abandoned the canvas. Jones went so far as to call it a “bad copy” or a “deliberate fake.” Meanwhile, Martin Kemp, a professor of art history at the University of Oxford and a da Vinci expert, told Artnet News that he believed the work to be a copy.

Still, the Mona Lisa Foundation, a Zurich nonprofit founded in 2011 to establish the Isleworth Mona Lisa as an authentic da Vinci work, is championing the privately owned piece as the first of two iterations of Leonardo’s masterpiece. For those interested in seeing it for themselves, the painting in question is currently on view in an exhibition at Promotrice delle Belle Arti gallery in Turin, Italy.

Though the work is privately owned and not currently for sale, it raises a lot of market–related questions. The controversial Salvator Mundi painting, for instance, which was marketed as a rediscovered masterpiece by da Vinci, fetched $450.3 million six years ago at auction. Despite looming questions surrounding its authenticity, it still holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Should the Isleworth Mona Lisa ever hit the market, it could surpass that record.

ARTnews : Vincent Honoré, French Curator Beloved by Artists of All Kinds, Dies at 48

Vincent Honoré, a French curator whose exhibitions gained him the respect of many young artists across Europe, has died at 48.

The French publication Le Quotidien de l’Art reported that Honoré had died on Wednesday and that the cause of his death was still being investigated by the police. The report cited several relatives who said that Honoré had died by suicide.

MO.CO Montepellier, the French museum where Honoré served as head of exhibitions, confirmed Honoré’s death on Friday morning. In a statement posted to social media, the museum wrote, “Today we lose an extraordinary and inspiring colleague who will leave a huge void in our community. His legacy will live on through all the exhibitions he designed, like the current one by Huma Bhabha, and the young artists he mentored and supported. During this difficult time, our thoughts are with his family, loved ones and everyone else who had the privilege of working alongside him.”

Across the past two and a half decades, Honoré amassed a reputation for staging exhibitions of cutting-edge art, much of it by women and queer artists. “I consider exhibitions as open systems and I think that is something that can definitely be read in my work,” he said in an interview with This Is Tomorrow. “Overall, I like proposing introductions, rather than conclusions. I like things that are unresolved.”

He started his curatorial career in 2000 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and would go on to hold positions at London institutions, like Tate Modern, the David Roberts Arts Foundation, and the Hayward Gallery, before joining MO.CO Montpellier in southern France.

Among the celebrated exhibitions that he mounted was “DRAG: Self-Portrait and Body Politics,” which he curated in 2018 for the Hayward Gallery, where he was senior curator at the time. Featuring works by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sin Wai Kin, and others, the show sought to show how artists—both queer and not—had incorporated drag into their work. “This timely exhibition examines how the way we look, at ourselves and at others, has been conditioned by a series of gendered, racial, class and colonial structures,” Apollo wrote in its review.

“Kiss My Genders,” a show Honoré staged the year after at the Hayward Gallery, sought to explore gender fluidity through works by Juliana Huxtable, Kent Monkman, Catherine Opie, and more, and also received positive reviews. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones awarded the exhibition five stars, writing that it “touches, in profound ways, on what it is to be human, and why we need this great river of the unfixed.”

He also organized solo shows for artists such as Neïl Beloufa, Hans Haacke, Ana Mendieta, Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Wall, Fiona Banner, and many more, as well as the 13th edition of the Baltic Triennial in 2018.

In addition to curating, Honoré wrote criticism, contributing to Mousse regularly, and started his own journal, Drawing Room Confessions, which enlisted artists such as Miriam Cahn and David Lamelas for drawing-oriented projects.

“I really believe an art museum should be a stage on which events are happening,” he said in an interview for the website Art Map London. “It should not be a temple and it should not be an amusement park. Displaying an artwork is an event, a talk is an event, and they create memories. Therefore, a museum is made of memories and when we leave it we should be filled with these memories.”

Houthi-led Yemeni forces say attacks were response to Israeli war in Gaza

A U.S. destroyer and several commercial ships operating in the Red Sea came under drone and ballistic missile attacks, a U.S. defense official said Sunday, marking the most significant escalation of a weekslong military attack on ships operating in those waters.

The USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, struck a drone that was “in the direction of the ship” and launched from a Houthi-controlled part of Yemen, the official said.

At roughly the same time, the MV Unity Explorer, a Bahamas-flagged bulk cargo ship, came under a ballistic missile attack that landed near the ship, the official said. The commercial ship sent a distress call and the Carney moved toward the ship in response, the official said.

As the Carney was assessing the damage on the commercial ship, it spotted a second drone operating nearby and shot it down, the official said. The official didn’t say what the destroyer used to bring down the drones.

The official stressed that the U.S. has so far only done an initial assessment and is still determining the details of what happened. Other commercial ships also came under attack and the Carney also shot down additional drones, the official said, but didn’t have further details.

In a statement, the Yemeni armed forces confirmed the attack, saying it launched a missile toward the Unity Explorer and a drone at another commercial cargo ship “in response to the demands of our great Yemeni people and the calls of the free people of our Arab and Islamic nation to stand fully with the choices of the Palestinian people and their proud resistance.”

“The Yemeni Armed Forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement and previous statements issued by the Yemeni Armed Forces,” the statement said.

The Carney has come under a number of attacks since it began operating in the Red Sea, shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, as have some U.S. Naval vessels. Last week, the Carney, operating in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, shot down an Iranian-made drone launched from Yemen. And an Iranian-made drone flew near a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, as it operated in the Arabian Gulf.

Indebted Chinese property developer faces winding-up demand in Hong Kong court on Monday

Evergrande’s international creditors are pressing for a last-minute agreement to avert a court order to liquidate the highly indebted Chinese property developer.

Investors in Evergrande’s debt have been talking to the company about various restructuring options in recent days, two people close to the talks said, aware that a formal liquidation — which could be ordered within hours — would be likely to mean lower recovery prospects for their investments.

The talks have taken on a renewed urgency since Hong Kong’s High Court is due on Monday to hear a petition from an Evergrande creditor, Top Shine Global, asking for the winding-up of the company that defaulted in 2021 with $300bn of liabilities.

Two people close to the last-ditch talks said creditors had been placing growing pressure on Top Shine to drop the lawsuit, a move that could enable restructuring talks involving debt to equity swaps to continue. Top Shine’s lawyer did not immediately comment on Sunday, and the company itself could not be reached for comment.

Evergrande has been at the heart of China’s property crisis and the indebted developer has encapsulated concern over the scale of problems in the sector, which once accounted for a quarter of the country’s economic growth.

Representatives for some of its creditors have previously said that liquidation could have a “catastrophic effect” on other developers in China, and on Chinese companies’ ability to raise money in international capital markets.

Since Evergrande’s default other developers have also run into problems as Chinese authorities have tried to rein in excessive leverage in the sector.

Hong Kong-listed Evergrande has been struggling to finalise a restructuring. Its plans were derailed in September when it failed to proceed with an offshore debt refinancing due to an unspecified regulatory investigation. 

The liquidation hearing in Hong Kong has been adjourned several times but in October Judge Linda Chan gave Evergrande “one last opportunity” to formulate a new restructuring proposal, warning that otherwise it was “very likely” to be subject to a winding-up order.

The last-minute efforts to try to negotiate show the limited options that international creditors have to recover some of their investments, people familiar with the talks said.

The winding-up petition was probably “a negotiating tool” to try to force a better restructuring deal, one of the people familiar with the negotiation said.

Days ago Evergrande proposed a debt-to-equity swap that offered creditors minority stakes in the company and two of its Hong Kong listed units, two people with knowledge of the matter said. No such deal has yet been agreed, however, and some creditors have said they want majority stakes, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

One problem in any attempt to strike a deal over Evergrande is the role of Hui Ka Yan, its chair and founder, in any deal.

Hui was placed under “mandatory measures” by Chinese authorities on suspicion of involvement in “illegal crimes” in late September, the company said in a stock exchange filing at the time. He had a controlling 60 per cent stake in the group at the end of 2022, according to corporate filings.

Further restructuring efforts “have little meaning now”, one of the people familiar with the negotiation said. “You can’t get any investors on board with a less favourable deal and, most importantly, you can’t find the person in charge of the company to sign it off.”

L’Oréal may not stay the world’s No. 1 cosmetics group forever. LVMH could eventually gobble up all or parts of the Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) even though the French luxury giant has denied any interest – for now, as Miss Tweed reported last week. Competition from rival groups Coty, Shiseido, Interparfums and Puig is set to intensify and new challengers are emerging such as Cartier owner Richemont and French luxury group Kering.

In September, Richemont announced the creation of a beauty division called Laboratoire de Haute Parfumerie et Beauté but it has yet to explain how it plans to build it up. After having lost more than €4 billion in the Yoox-Net-A-Porter (YNAP) and Farfetch debacle, the Swiss group may want to pause and think hard about investing more money into a high-stakes project such as beauty, industry insiders say.

“It’s not the best time to invest in beauty when part of your business is on fire,” one senior beauty industry insider said about Farfetch and YNAP. Richemont appears to have put on hold plans to sell Farfetch a minority stake in YNAP and use its e-commerce technology for its brands (see today’s Weekly highlights Nov. 27-Dec.1 for more details).

The Swiss group has hired Boet Brinkgreve from the fragrance and nutrition group DSM-Firmenich to lead its push into beauty. Brinkgreve is studying various options and preparing proposals he is due to submit to the board early next year, industry sources say.

“Boet is currently gathering intelligence and evaluating different proposals he will make to the board,” one senior industry source said. Richemont is expected to make a decision after Christmas, in the first quarter of next year, he said. “They want to become a bigger player in beauty and fragrance,” the source said. “This sector naturally complements their jewelry, watch and fashion brands.”

CARTIER

Cartier is a hugely successful jeweler, the biggest in the world in terms of sales, but its perfumes – like its handbags – were never a huge commercial hit. It’s not been able to stretch the brand much beyond watches and jewelry. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, Cartier was making a lot of money with Les Must de Cartier items such as perfumes, accessories, lighters and watches. It was another era then.

Cartier has developed its perfumes internally for decades. It has legitimacy in the field. Its in-house nose Mathilde Laurent, previously at Guerlain, has been creating the brand’s fragrances since 2005.

Cartier’s “Panthère” and “Pasha” perfumes sell well, but the brand’s fragrance business is small relative to that of other big brands. Industry experts estimate Cartier generates around €70 million from its perfumes. It could easily bring that to €300 million if it invested in its distribution and in the brand’s marketing. But as of now, the activity is too small to serve as a basis to help launch other brands, beauty experts say.

It sells its perfumes mainly in its Cartier jewelry boutiques and through a few selected distributors such as Sephora in France and in duty-free shops in airports. Richemont does not publish separate figures for each of the brand’s category, but industry experts estimate that the wholesale business does not represent more than 30 percent of total turnover from Cartier fragrances.

BUYING BACK LICENSES

If Richemont is serious about making a push into perfume and cosmetics, it will have to make acquisitions and buy back some of its biggest licenses, industry analysts say. Richemont’ s two most important fragrance licenses are for French fashion brand Chloé and for luxury pen and watchmaker Montblanc. The Chloé license is being exploited by Coty and according to industry sources, its contract with the U.S. beauty company lasts at least another nine years. Industry insiders predict it will not be easy for Richemont to buy back the license from Coty. Chloé generates more than €300 million in fragrance sales. It would cost at least that amount to buy back the license, experts estimate, and Coty would have to agree – which is not a given.

Same for Montblanc, a top moneymaker for French fragrance maker Interparfums. In 2022, it generated revenue of €184 million for the Paris-based company, up 30 percent against the previous year. Buying back the Montblanc license could cost Richemont more than €700 million, or at least four times the annual sales the Montblanc license generates for Interparfums, sources close to Interparfums say. The amount of €700 million is exactly the loss Richemont reported for YNAP in the six months to Sept. 30.

The Montblanc license expires in seven years. Whatever deal is agreed, it is likely that Richemont will want to continue using Interparfums’ distribution network and work with the French company.

The business Interparfums makes with Richemont’s other brand, Van Cleef & Arpels, is much smaller at around €22 million. It is unlikely Richemont will be interested in taking that one in-house. Its ambition has never been to build this perfume activity into a big business. The French jeweler makes good volumes with “First”, a fragrance created in 1976 by Jean-Claude Ellena, Hermès’ former in-house nose, and which sells for around €75 a bottle. It also developed with Interparfums a high-end, more confidential collection of perfumes with names such as “California Rêverie” or “Santal Blanc” that sell for €175 a bottle. “I think Richemont and VCA CEO Nicolas Bos do not want to change anything regarding that particular license with Interparfums,” a senior source close to Interparfums told Miss Tweed.

Richemont should be able to strike a deal with Interparfums. “Relations are good between Interparfums and Richemont, so they will be able to come to an agreement if Richemont wants to buy back licenses,” that source said.

The one fragrance license Richemont has available is for Alaïa. The French fashion brand has been enjoying a steady renaissance under designer Pieter Mulier. It’s on its way to generating annual sales close to €100 million. To leverage the brand’s popularity, Richemont may consider launching an Alaïa perfume collection – if it has the right teams and distribution in place. For that, it may also need Interparfums’ help. That’s one of the many options Richemont will be reviewing next year.

Investors may not be as enthusiastic about this new beauty venture as Richemont Chairman Johann Rupert. The Geneva-based group knows how to run jewelry and watch brands. It does not have a strong track record in fashion and its venture into e-commerce proved a disaster. Chloé, its biggest fashion brand, has been through two designers that were not cut out for the brand. As a result, Chloé lost six years in terms of reaching its full growth potential. Fashion critics hope Chemena Kamali, the brand’s new designer, will be better suited. Kamali will present her first collection at Paris Fashion Week next spring.

“I am not sure Richemont understands how complex the perfume business is,” a senior manager at one of the world’s biggest perfume companies told Miss Tweed on condition of anonymity. “It’s not just about putting a juice in a bottle, there are many sanitary norms you need to worry about and managing the supply chain is not easy either.”

Taking back licenses and producing in-house is a costly gambit. Burberry spent €181 million buying back its license from Interparfums in 2012 only to throw in the towel a few years later and sell the business to Coty. Two years ago, Dolce & Gabbana internalized its cosmetics and fragrance operations, but the company is such a black box from a financial point of view, it’s not clear yet how successful that move has been.

KERING

Richemont is not alone in wanting to bet big on beauty. Kering has similar plans. The owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent this year spent €3.5 billion on high-end fragrance maker Creed, its first acquisition in the sector. The price was very high, but industry sources say Creed is the biggest of so-called “niche brands” and its distribution network will be used to help other fragrance brands Kering plans to bring to the market.

The Creed acquisition is part of Kering’s ambition to build a beauty unit from scratch and produce in-house the fragrances of its own stable of brands including Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga and Bottega Veneta. The ultimate goal is to be big enough and ready in terms of distribution and brand portfolio to take back the Gucci license from Coty, which runs until the end of 2028. It is estimated to generate around €500 million in annual sales, as Miss Tweed reported in February. Kering will want to wait for its own beauty business to grow and to have the right people in place before it starts discussing the possibility of buying back the Gucci license, industry sources predict.

Kering aims to build a sizable fragrance and cosmetics business that generates at least €1 billion in annual sales, industry sources say. To achieve that, it will need to make more acquisitions. However, there are not that many brands with revenue of at least €100 million. In the past few years, major players such as Puig, L’Oréal, LVMH and The Estée Lauder Companies have already bought most of the strong and promising brands available. Puig has recently announced plans to do an IPO next year that could value the company at €8 billion. The flotation is designed to help Puig pay down its debt, taken on to finance its acquisition of Charlotte Tilbury for nearly €1 billion in 2020 and Byredo for roughly the same amount in 2022.

SCENT BEAUTY

Scent Beauty is a new player that harbors big ambitions in beauty. Founded in 2019 by former Coty CEO Bernd Beetz and Steve Mormoris, who was chief marketing officer at the U.S. beauty company, it aims to rival big groups.

Scent Beauty specializes in the celebrity fragrance market, a segment on which most big groups have turned up their noses. It’s too mass-market and cheap for them. They prefer to focus on best-selling designer brands and expensive niche fragrances. “This has created opportunities for smaller players to recuperate brands the big groups no longer want and give them the love and care they need to grow,” one adviser to beauty executives told Miss Tweed.

Scent Beauty is growing fast by developing fragrances named after celebrities such as singers Dolly Parton, Kylie Minogue, Whitney Houston and Sabrina Carpenter and brands such as Stetson, the hat maker. The latter name is one of its strongest-selling labels. It makes good money selling gift boxes during the holiday and festive seasons. “I believe in celebrity perfume. It has a strong connection with customers. It allows them to be part of that celebrity’s story,” explains Beetz.

Scent Beauty took several brands from Coty including Kylie Minogue and Stetson. Mormoris said about the famous hat maker: “We built it as a transgender brand. The story is that ‘my father used it, my grandfather used it’ and we moved it from cowboy to hipster.” Sabrina Carpenter’s Caramel Dream, launched in the spring, has been a top best-seller at Walmart, he said.

“We are brand builders,” Mormoris told Miss Tweed. “I feel that we are like the Warner Brothers in the 1950s.” Mormoris said that the company did not have a distribution bias and was raking in big sales at stores such as Walmart. Scent Beauty is looking to take on more licenses and, like Coty and the Estée Lauder group, it plans on opening an office in Paris to be closer to perfume and marketing creatives and production and distribution partners. After having secured growth with mass-market brands, Scent Beauty is looking to expand into high-end niche fragrance brands - the sweet spot of the market. Only it’s not alone. Puig, LVMH and L’Oréal are also keeping their eyes peeled for the next target. “Everybody’s on the prowl for acquisitions,” Mormoris said.

HIGH-END PERFUME

Every major player wants higher exposure to the fast-growing market of high-end perfume brands. Coty and Interparfums have plans to create their own exclusive fragrance brands. “There is a premiumization of the market with high valuations attributed to niche brands such as Creed and Parfums de Marly and the company is not yet very present in that segment,” a senior source close to Interparfums said. Interparfums is going unveil its new brand in 2025.

Coty, on the other hand, is ready to launch its new brand next year. Called Infiniment Coty Paris, it will feature a collection of 14 fragrances. The initiative unveiled at an event in Grasse, France’s perfume Mecca near Cannes, was described by Coty CEO Sue Nabi as “its most ambitious and most premium fragrance project to date.”

The company twinned the announcement of its new fragrance line with the launch of a new serum product by Orveda, a high-end skincare line founded in 2014 by Nabi and her partner Nicolas Vu, a hip-hop music producer and boxing and judo champion.

Coty and Nabi declined to comment on the fact that there could an ethical issue around Coty’s relationship with Orveda. Nabi is the CEO of Coty, which is exploiting the license for Orveda, and she is spending a lot of Coty’s money on advertising the brand. Coty declined to reveal how much Nabi’s partner still owns in Orveda, saying only that the Coty CEO no longer has a stake in the company.

Orveda is Nabi’s pet project. Even though Coty says she is no longer involved in the company, she is the one in charge of the license.

When Coty hired Nabi, it agreed to invest in Orveda. The move was a smart one since Coty is under-exposed to skincare, one of the best performing segments of the beauty industry. Orveda uses natural prebiotics from fermented potatoes, which feed the good bacteria on skin, as well as bio-fermented marine enzymes and bio-fermented Kombucha black tea. In skincare, Coty only has Lancaster, a brand strong in sunscreens, and Philosophy, which also sells perfume.

The maps of the beauty industry are being redrawn. The battle for world domination by the biggest luxury groups has only started. L’Oréal cannot rest on its laurels.

Google has quietly delayed the public debut of Gemini, a conversational artificial intelligence that aims to compete with OpenAI, to January, two people with knowledge of the decision said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently decided to scrap a series of Gemini events, originally scheduled for next week in California, New York and Washington, after the company found the AI didn’t reliably handle some non-English queries, one of these people said. The planned events, which hadn’t been publicized, would have marked Google’s most important product launch of the year, after it strained its computing resources and merged large teams in an urgent pursuit of OpenAI.

• Gemini postponement underscores the challenge of catching OpenAI

• Gemini’s performance is comparable to that of GPT-4 in some ways

• But the model underperformed on some non-English language tasks

The delay underscores how difficult it’s been for Google—which has 200,000 employees and was long considered an AI leader—to catch up to an 800-person startup that has developed one of the fastest-growing software businesses in history. OpenAI also has buoyed Microsoft, a Google Cloud rival that has gotten traction selling OpenAI technology to cloud customers. The Information reported last month that Google told some cloud customers and business partners not to expect to receive access to the primary Gemini model until next year, but the scrapped events also imply that other products such as search (which now has generative AI results), Bard, Google Assistant and Google Docs may not get a boost from the new technology until 2024.

It’s rare for Google to launch a major product between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, but Google intended to make an exception for Gemini because it’s arguably the company’s most important initiative in a decade. The Gemini event in Washington was intended to showcase the technology to policymakers and politicians, which have increasingly discussed potential regulations involving AI, one of the people said. Pichai and other executives have been concerned that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a household name and that Microsoft’s Copilot features for productivity software, including for software developers, are turning into a significant business too, people with knowledge of the situation have said.

Companies use the technology, known as large language models, for tasks like automating software coding, summarizing long reports, generating marketing campaigns and building specialized apps that make use of its predictive capabilities.

Last month, Pichai, who in May confirmed The Information’s earlier reports about Gemini, said at a public event that the company is “focused on getting Gemini 1.0 out as soon as possible, make sure it’s competitive, state of the art, and we’ll build from there on.” A Google spokesperson did not immediately have comment for this article.

Google has had all year to develop Gemini, its answer to OpenAI’s most advanced LLM, GPT-4, which debuted in March and is the backbone of the paid version of ChatGPT. Google’s ChatGPT rival, Bard, which uses a more primitive LLM than Gemini, has failed to take off with consumers. That’s bad news for Google because ChatGPT’s millions of customers generate valuable data that helps OpenAI track and improve the quality of its products, and Google is missing out on that opportunity.

Gemini also aims to power new tools for YouTube creators and for advertisers that want to generate text and imagery. Gemini is “mulitmodal,” meaning it can work with images and text alike, producing code for a website just by seeing a sketch of what a user wants the site to look like, for instance, or spitting out a text analysis of visual charts. See the Gemini team here.

Google has developed several versions of Gemini to handle different tasks, depending on their complexity. Outside developers have already tested smaller versions of the model, measured in terms of the number of parameters, or calculations, they do. But the company is still finalizing the primary, biggest version of Gemini, said people who have been involved in the effort. (A big LLM typically is made up of smaller models that work together.)

A key challenge for the Gemini team is making sure the primary model is as good as or better than GPT-4. It has met that standard in some respects, said one of the people familiar with it, but the company is still making improvements because it wants the technology to work well globally, in numerous languages. Model developers frequently test the capabilities of their models while they work on them, but it’s not uncommon for them to miss some of the tech’s limitations during those checks.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has had its own challenges in improving GPT-4 meaningfully, and it quietly canceled a major new model it was developing earlier this year, called Arrakis. But recently OpenAI made a breakthrough, known as Q*, giving the company hope that it can develop a significantly better LLM, The Information reported. The company is still recovering from a near- implosion following the firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman.

A little activism from Elliott Management nudged Phillips 66 stock to a record close, and if the firm gets its way, there may be more upside ahead.

Elliott unveiled a roughly $1 billion stake in Phillips 66 earlier this week, arguing that the integrated oil and gas company’s decision to de-emphasize refining meant that it missed the refining supercycle of the last two years, leading it to underperform peers such as Marathon Petroleum and Valero Energy .

But while Elliott criticized Phillips 66’s underperformance and missteps in a letter to the company’s board, it appeared to be supportive of plans laid out by Chief Executive Mark Lashier, which include selling some $3 billion of noncore assets and planning to return more capital to shareholders. Still, Elliott believes Phillips 66 could use more prodding and is seeking two seats on the board.

With changes in place, Elliott believes Phillips 66 shares could advance 75%. Wall Street is similarly bullish.

“An activist shareholder, Elliott, can be a positive catalyst for shareholders,” wrote Wells Fargo Securities analyst Roger Reed, adding that Elliott’s letter might push Phillips “to take actions they otherwise might not.” Reed has an overweight rating on the shares and a $143 price target.

Representatives from Phillips 66 acknowledged receiving Elliott’s letter and recent conversations with the activist hedge fund. “The Phillips 66 board and management team welcome the perspectives of our shareholders and value their input,” the company said.

Fisker, the California-based EV startup, cut its annual production guidance in an effort to free up $300 million in working capital, the company said in a business update Friday.

Fisker said it expects to produce about 10,000 vehicles this year. The decision comes less than a month since Fisker cut its production target to between 13,000 and 17,000 vehicles for 2023. The production guidance is just a quarter of Fisker’s bullish forecast from a year ago. In November 2022, Fisker said it planned to produce 42,400 Ocean SUVs by the end of 2023 due to strong demand in the U.S. and Europe. That rosy projection was slashed in May to 32,000-36,000 vehicles and then cut again in August to 20,000-23,000 vehicles. This latest update makes four reductions since the spring.

The production cut will allow the company to access $300 million in working capital, giving the company “flexibility,” according to the business update.

“Our teams have worked hard to overcome some early delivery challenges and are now setting an impressive pace as we prepare to close out 2023,” Chairman and CEO Henrik Fisker said in a statement. “We may not have hit our original forecast but taking current market conditions and negative sentiments around EV sales into account, I would say we are doing quite well, as we continue to accelerate sales and deliveries. This is yielding considerable revenue as we ramp up our business. I expect by the end of this year we will have delivered more customer cars than any Western EV startup did in their first year of deliveries. The company continues to sharpen its focus on growing its current markets and enhancing our sales and service offerings for the Fisker Ocean.”

Fisker said in its business update that it has also launched a new strategy to improve deliveries in the U.S. and Europe, which helped it overcome early logistics hurdles. While Fisker didn’t elaborate on exactly what those challenges were, it appears the strategy involves adding more transportation logistics companies to speed up deliveries, increased outreach to reservation holders and opening more facilities dedicated to retail, deliveries and service.

The company said it’s also launching a leasing program in the U.S., Canada and Europe, but didn’t include details on when that might occur.

Fisker also provided an update around hiring, importantly Dan Quirk as its new executive vice president of finance and accounting. The hiring comes after Fisker lost two chief accounting officers in short succession and delayed the filing of its quarterly earnings report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Other hires include Axel Buhr as vice president of finance and controller operations, Ram Iyer as senior VP of EE integration and validation and Wolfgang Hoffmann as country manager in Canada, where Fisker is about to begin deliveries.