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Deal will create 50-50 joint venture and make EPH one of French oil major’s biggest shareholders

TotalEnergies is making a big bet on gas-fired electricity generation by investing €5.1bn in a portfolio of projects controlled by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský.

The deal will create a 50-50 joint venture between Total and Křetínský’s EPH, giving the French company a stake in 14GW of gas-fired and biomass power plants and battery storage projects in France, Italy, the UK and the Netherlands, including a 5GW pipeline under development.

EPH will receive Total shares worth €5.1bn, making the Křetínský-led vehicle one of the oil and gas major’s largest shareholders with a 4 per cent stake.

The investment adds to Total’s strategy of continuing to invest in oil and gas production while developing a portfolio of electricity-generating assets.

Křetínský said the deal would help EPH diversify and reduce its geographic exposure that was concentrated in Europe. Last month, he exited a major German project by selling a minority stake in Thyssenkrupp’s steel operation, allowing the German conglomerate to pursue talks with Indian magnate Naveen Jindal.

Total’s Integrated Power division has 36GW of renewable electricity, which it combines with more flexible gas-powered plants and batteries. Gas-powered plants will account for 12.5GW of the portfolio of the EPH joint venture.

The investment, which reduces the focus of Total’s electricity division on renewables days after chief executive Patrick Pouyanné attended the COP30 climate conference in Brazil, would result in its Integrated Power division generating free cash flow in 2027 — a year earlier than forecast.

Pouyanné said the deal would strengthen TotalEnergies’ ability to provide “reliable, competitive and low-carbon energy to our customers”.

Křetínský started his business empire in the energy sector but has since added investments in Royal Mail, French retailer Casino and football clubs West Ham and Sparta Prague.

A decade ago, Cindy Eckert struggled to convince skeptics about a drug for premenopausal women. Lately, her business is booming.

Entering Cindy Eckert’s home quickly makes clear that the whole pink thing was never the gimmick her haters once made it out to be.

Gracing the entryway is an oversize pink statue of her French bulldog, Mortimer. In the interior courtyard, a glass-enclosed garage showcases a pink-wrapped 1940s Chevy truck. A pink metal staircase leads to a room filled with rack after rack of Ms. Eckert’s pink feathered-and-frilled wardrobe. Even the coop out back, occupied by a small flock of chickens and two overgrown pigs, is dedicated to Ms. Eckert’s signature hue. She calls it the Pink Poultry Club.

Then there is Ms. Eckert herself, who, on an October day in Raleigh, N.C., was dressed, as ever, in pink from the tip of her rose-lacquered toes to the top of her magenta-streaked head. “I was recently at a conference, and a woman that I love said, ‘Oh, we’re still doing pink,’” said Ms. Eckert, 52. “I said, ‘Just still doing me.’”

Ms. Eckert is the co-founder and chief executive of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the women’s libido drug Addyi, which treats the condition known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or H.S.D.D., in premenopausal women. Sometimes erroneously referred to as “female Viagra” — Addyi targets neurotransmitters, not blood flow — its proper name is flibanserin, and in 2015, Ms. Eckert won a knock-down, drag-out battle to get it approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Naturally, she has embraced the name “little pink pill.”

In Ms. Eckert’s fight with the government agency, critics accused Sprout of trying to medicalize the natural ebbs and flows of women’s sexual desire. They also saw Ms. Eckert’s colorful style as a sleight of hand to distract from the scientific debates about her product. When, one day after winning F.D.A. approval, Ms. Eckert sold Sprout for $1 billion to a company that soon hiked the price and effectively shelved Addyi, it was all the more proof for her detractors that she didn’t have patients’ best interest at heart.

But a decade later, after winning back her company in a 2018 legal battle, Ms. Eckert’s critics have quieted. Some have even been converted.

“My mind has been changed,” said Laurie Mintz, a psychologist and sex therapist, who once argued that likening low libido to a disease could drive women away from “less dangerous” remedies.

Thanks to the loosening of F.D.A. guidelines surrounding Addyi and a wider, ongoing reckoning with women’s health care, there are now more than 30,000 doctors prescribing Addyi and more than half a million prescriptions on the market. As women binge-read copies of Miranda July’s best seller about a perimenopausal mother’s sexual awakening, or devour stories about Gen X women having the best sex ever, women of all ages are prioritizing their own sex lives. And Ms. Eckert’s drug — and other treatments for women struggling with their libido — are reaping the benefits.

“We played the long game,” Ms. Eckert said. “Culture caught up.”

Breaking the taboo

For much of the last half-century, the fight for women’s sexual freedom has hinged largely on economic arguments. Giving women access to birth control, advocates’ reasoning went, would allow them to determine if and when they had children, empowering them to study, to work and to attain financial independence.

Whether women actually desired or enjoyed the sex they were now free to have was, for a long time, a far more taboo question — one that even their doctors weren’t trained to ask.

It was on Ms. Eckert’s mind, though, when she ran into the urologist Dr. Irwin Goldstein at a sexual medicine conference in 2010. She was attending on behalf of another company she co-founded with her then-husband, Bob Whitehead, which sold testosterone pellets. Dr. Goldstein had something he wanted Ms. Eckert to see.

It was a series of videos from women who had been part of a clinical trial for flibanserin. A German company was studying the drug for treatment of H.S.D.D., but the F.D.A. had rejected it, and now the company was giving up on the trials. The women in the videos were distraught that they would no longer have access to a treatment they said helped them.

Dr. Goldstein, who led clinical trials for Viagra, wanted Ms. Eckert to take up the cause. The timing was apt: At the same conference, a research cohort was presenting the results of a study that demonstrated the difference in brain activity between women with H.S.D.D. and women without it. Ms. Eckert was indignant that, for so long, women’s sexual desire had been dismissed purely as a matter of stress levels and marital woes.

One year after the conference, Ms. Eckert and Mr. Whitehead acquired the rights to flibanserin and founded Sprout, hoping to take another crack at approval.

That turned out not to be so easy. Clinical trials showed flibanserin slightly increased women’s sexual desire and activity and lowered their distress, compared with placebos, but it also made them drowsy and lowered their blood pressure, particularly when mixed with alcohol. The side effects gave F.D.A. officials pause, and the agency rejected Sprout’s application for approval for the drug, too.

To be turned down twice by the F.D.A. is typically a death sentence for new drugs. But for flibanserin, the decision had the opposite effect: It galvanized a movement of women who believed the rejection reeked of sexism.

Shortly after the F.D.A. denial, the feminist activist Susan Scanlan started a new and noisy advocacy group focused on flibanserin’s approval called Even the Score. The group, which received partial funding from Sprout, included dozens of women’s groups, consumer organizations and medical societies. Ms. Eckert, though, became perhaps its most visible champion, her wardrobe growing pinker by the day.

Sally Greenberg, chief executive of the National Consumers League, said she joined the group after attending a meeting with Dr. Goldstein, the urologist, and his patients. She believed there was a double standard in how regulators treated the well-known risks associated with drugs for men’s sexual dysfunction.

“Because sex is so important for men to have, we’re willing to take a chance — but women can’t be trusted,” she said. (The F.D.A., which did not comment for this article, denied the claims of sexism at the time.)

But as support for the drug swelled, so did the backlash. Some accused Even the Score’s leadership of being bought off by Sprout. Other feminist and medical organizations charged the group with crying sexism where none existed and argued that Even the Score was another example of the creeping influence of pharmaceutical money at the F.D.A.

Ms. Eckert is still sensitive about Sprout’s financial ties to Even the Score. According to the company, Sprout spent $25,000 helping produce one ad campaign and a few thousand more flying in three women to speak at an F.D.A. advisory meeting, financing all of the women publicly disclosed. Still, Ms. Eckert bristles at the insinuation that the outrage was manufactured.

“When they were treated like, ‘Oh, you’re just doing Cindy’s bidding for her,’ I’m thinking, ‘Man, you’ve never met these women,’” Ms. Eckert said.

The F.D.A. approved flibanserin in 2015, writing later in the New England Journal of Medicine that while “the average treatment effects were small” (about 10 percent higher than placebo) “efficacy had been established.”

But the wait for the drug was far from over. Regulators imposed strict guardrails, including a boxed warning on Addyi’s label. The F.D.A. also required doctors and pharmacists to get special certification to prescribe and dispense it, and women to sign a waiver promising to abstain from alcohol while taking it.

Then, within a year, Valeant, the company that acquired Sprout, effectively imploded, causing the entire Sprout team in Raleigh to be wiped out in a move so swift there was rotting food left in the refrigerator. Ms. Eckert had initially viewed the sale as an “entrepreneur’s dream.” In the hands of a bigger company, she believed Addyi would get out to the market faster than if Sprout had tried to commercialize it on its own. (The $1 billion price tag certainly didn’t hurt.)

When her plan fell apart, “it was really the feeling of just having let everybody down,” she said.

The pink pill’s second coming

That feeling, though, was also a powerful motivator. In 2016, Sprout’s former investors sued Valeant for failing to meet their contractual obligation to market Addyi. Two years later, Valeant made a deal, handing the keys to the company back to Ms. Eckert in exchange for 6 percent of the royalties, with an added bonus: a $25 million loan to help her bring Addyi back from the dead.

Today, Sprout 2.0, as Ms. Eckert calls it, operates out of an unremarkable office building and shopping complex about four miles from Ms. Eckert’s home. The team is small enough to fit around one big table for daily lunches and has a family feel, owing in part to the fact that some of them actually are Ms. Eckert’s family. Her older brother, Brian, is chief strategy officer. Justin Miller, Ms. Eckert’s fiancé, is Sprout’s chief operating officer. Even her ex-husband and co-founder, Mr. Whitehead, now chairs Sprout’s board.

The other employees inside this “unapologetically pink” office — as it says on the walls — are 20-or-so designers, marketers, supply chain specialists and one customer service agent with a particularly spicy inbox.

Their jobs are a bit different this time around. In the last few years, menopause and perimenopause have become, well, hot topics, and Silicon Valley investors and celebrities alike are contributing to a booming menopause economy.

At the same time, telehealth sites like Hims and Hers have wallpapered the world with ads about sexual enhancement treatments, chipping away at the stigma that has dogged the field for decades.

All of it has recently given Ms. Eckert’s company a boost. This year, Sprout is on track to double its revenue, and it is finding celebrity supporters along the way. In an ad for her podcast, the actress Jennie Garth shared that she was personally on the drug, and raved about how it had helped her. Gwyneth Paltrow, whose brand Goop sells its own libido supplement for women, wrote about Addyi earlier this year.

This weekend, Ms. Eckert is also the subject of a new documentary about the F.D.A. fight called “The Pink Pill,” premiering at the DOC NYC film festival. “This is a conversation that people have been desperate to have for such a long time,” said Aisling Chin-Yee, the film’s director.

This cultural shift has mirrored a regulatory one. Since Ms. Eckert won back Sprout, the F.D.A. has walked back many of its constraints on Addyi, removing the certification requirements on doctors and pharmacists and lifting the total restriction on alcohol intake for women.

Now, Addyi’s label recommends that women — who are supposed to take the pill daily at bedtime — wait two hours after drinking or skip it entirely if they’ve had three or more drinks. This summer, the F.D.A. also fast-tracked Addyi’s application to expand approval for postmenopausal women. A final decision could come as early as this year.

These changes have made Addyi far more accessible to patients, said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual medicine specialist, who used to lecture other clinicians on prescribing the drug and said she’s seen no major adverse events in her practice. “We’ve had years of experience with this medication,” Dr. Rubin said. “It’s just not scary.”

There are still plenty of women for whom it doesn’t work and who do require the therapeutic interventions that Dr. Mintz, the sex therapist who was once an Addyi critic, and others have long practiced. But for some women, Dr. Mintz has since found, Addyi “really is helpful, and I don’t think it should be dismissed.”

Some of Addyi’s skeptics remain as unconvinced as ever. In 2016, Dr. Steven Woloshin, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine who specializes in medical communication, wrote in a medical journal that the F.D.A. “approved a marginally effective drug for a non-life-threatening condition in the face of substantial — and unnecessary — uncertainty about its dangers.”

He stands by that, pointing to Addyi’s limited benefits over placebos. “There’s lots of things that can affect sexual desire, and the way to help people isn’t necessarily to give this particular chemical,” Dr. Woloshin said.

Addyi and Ms. Eckert have also occasionally drawn the ire of regulators. Shortly after she reintroduced her business, the F.D.A. sent Ms. Eckert a warning letter over a radio ad that failed to disclose all of Addyi’s risk factors. In May, it sent Ms. Eckert another, accusing her of doing much the same thing when she shared a People magazine article about Addyi on Instagram.

As of this week, she still hadn’t taken the post down.

Ms. Eckert is now working on another public pressure campaign, this time to expose what she says is a lack of parity in the way insurers cover drugs targeting women’s health conditions versus men’s. The idea was born during a recent salon Ms. Eckert attended at Gloria Steinem’s home.

As Addyi’s profile has grown, of course, so has the interest from potential acquirers. “We get offers,” Ms. Eckert said, and she isn’t ruling them out. But she’s a lot more hesitant to walk away. “This would be a really hard time, when we finally hit our stride, to ever give it up,” she said.

Amazon’s budding satellite internet program is no longer called Project Kuiper. It is now known simply as “Leo.” The name change comes as the company appears to be shifting its focus from “unserved or underserved” communities to securing larger commercial contracts.

The satellite network has been in the works since 2019 and, as Amazon tells it, the name Project Kuiper was only ever supposed to be temporary. Leo is a nod to the network’s location in what’s known as low-Earth orbit, commonly referred to in the space industry as “LEO.”

As Amazon worked toward launching the first Kuiper satellites earlier this year, the company boasted that the project was an “initiative to increase global broadband access” with a noble-sounding “mission to bring fast, affordable broadband” to communities that aren’t well-served by traditional internet providers.

But, as TechCrunch previously noted, the company has changed the language it uses to describe the service in recent months as it inked deals with Airbus and JetBlue, putting the network more squarely in competition with SpaceX’s Starlink service.

Amazon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

An archived version of the main FAQ page for Kuiper — published in late 2024 — puts the aforementioned “mission” to serve those communities right at the top of the post. Affordability is mentioned three times throughout, with Amazon calling it a “key principle of Project Kuiper.”

“Amazon has a longstanding commitment to low prices, and lots of experience building popular, low-cost devices like Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick,” reads the answer to a question on the archived post about how much Kuiper service will cost. “We’re applying a similar approach with Project Kuiper.”

That question-and-answer about cost is now gone from the Leo FAQ, and there is no mention of “affordability” anywhere on the page.

The language at the top of the new FAQ is also different. It states that Leo is “Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite network, designed to provide fast, reliable internet to customers and communities beyond the reach of existing networks.”

While the Leo FAQ mentions that poor connectivity can “create an economic disadvantage for people, businesses, and other organizations operating in unserved and underserved parts of the world,” the company is less specific than it used to be about putting those communities front and center in the customer pipeline.

Amazon Leo’s new website is even more blatant about how it is prioritizing home and commercial internet service. It promotes the ability to make “seamless video calls, stream 4K videos,” and “handle your whole family’s internet needs,” as well as the fact that Leo is “[f]lexible, scalable, enterprise-ready.”

The idea of using Leo “even in rural and remote locations” is brought up as almost an afterthought on the main website, and there is no mention of cost or affordability.

Despite all this, on Thursday, Amazon posted a flashy video about the name change on X. Among other things, it shows a kid using her computer to do homework, professional drift racing, ambulance workers on a remote road, a farmer using a tablet, and a couple dancing in a laundromat. Along with the video, it wrote: “New name, same mission.”

According to a new report from the International Energy Agency, the world will spend $580 billion on data centers this year — $40 billion more than will be spent finding new oil supplies.

Those numbers help to illustrate some big shifts in the global economy, and comparing data centers and oil seems particularly apt given concerns about how generative AI might accelerate climate change.

Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed the report’s findings on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.

There’s no question that these new data centers are going to be hungry for power, and that they could place even more stress on already taxed electrical grids. But Kirsten pointed to a potential upside, with solar poised to power many of these new projects, which could also create new opportunities for startups pursuing innovative approaches to renewable energy.

We also discussed how these projects will be funded, with OpenAI saying it has committed $1.4 trillion to building data centers, Meta committing $600 billion, and Anthropic recently announcing a $50 billion data center plan.

You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Kirsten: Here’s what I think is the potential upside. So Tim De Chant, who’s our climate tech reporter, has done a ton of reporting about not just data centers, but actually how a lot of data centers are turning to renewables because in terms of regulatory [hurdles] and cost, they are the go-to. It’s a lot easier to get a permit to throw up a bunch of solar panels adjacent to a data center.

So to me, the one upside is that it could really mean a positive for any kind of company that is doing interesting things around renewables or data center design and some of the technology to reduce the global emissions component of it.

But of course, the sheer number to me is what really stood out. As a former energy reporter myself, I know how much is spent on trying to find new oil.

Rebecca: I mean, it’s a lot. And a lot of that’s coming from the U.S. I think that report found that half of the electricity demand will be coming from the U.S., and the rest is a mix of China and Europe.

And another thing that struck me about it was that most of the data centers are coming to cities, or near cities, like populations of a million people, roughly. So that means there’s a lot more challenge with the grid connection and with connection pathways. I think that, to your point, renewables will have to [be a focus] — it’s just good business, it’s not because of any environmentally friendly policies.

Kirsten: Redwood Materials’ new business unit, Redwood Energy, is going to be an interesting company to watch with this. A few months ago, I went to their big reveal, and they’re taking the old EV batteries that aren’t quite ready to be recycled, and then they’re creating these microgrids, and then specifically going after AI data centers. And that, to me, would alleviate the problem or the concern that you just mentioned.

The question is: Are other companies going to do this? Are there other Redwood Energies out there that are trying to do the same thing? And how much of an impact could they make? Because I do think that like the pressure on the electrical grid, especially during certain times of the year, like in the middle of the summer, for instance, places like Texas that have rolling brownouts and blackouts, that is going to be a real concern. And it could spur a whole new kind of investment into companies doing what Redwood is doing.

Anthony: It also underlines this question about what is that going to do to the spaces that we live in? Even if they’re not in cities themselves, I feel like the landscape is definitely going to be transformed by construction at this scale.

And then, of course, there’s also this question of how much of [the planned data centers are] actually going to get built because there’s definitely very ambitious plans that require huge amounts of spending.

To start with OpenAI, that’s a company that a lot of people have been talking about, how much money are they actually making versus the trillions of dollars of capital commitments they have for the next decade. And then there was this whole controversy over their CFO saying, “The government should backstop our loans to build these data centers.” And then she’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, I didn’t mean backstop, that was a poor choice of words,” but it does look like they have been asking for an expansion of tax credits from the CHIPS Act.

I think that this is going to be an effort that’s not just going to fall on the companies, but also on the government — or at least that’s going to be a question that the government is considering over the next few years.

Nike and Adidas for sure, but also New Balance, Puma, Reebok, Anta Sports and Li-Ning are possible suitors for Stephen Curry's brand.

There likely won’t be any shortage of potential suitors for Stephen Curry‘s brand now that it is parting ways from Under Armour Inc. in 2026.

The Under Armour and Steph Curry partnership has changed over the years, with the Curry brand coming into its own in 2020 and the apparel and shoe brand giving the athlete a lifetime deal in 2023. But after 12 years — the original deal was signed in 2013 — sales of the Curry brand have shifted too, and Under Armour is also in the midst of a major restructuring to turn around operations.

Where Steph Curry could take his brand, and how much might a deal be worth, isn’t clear. According to Telsey Advisory Group’s (TAG) Cristina Fernández, the Curry brand has several athletes signed under it, “most notably De’Aaron. Fox whose latest signature shoe the Curry Fox 2” having just launched. She pointed out that even though Under Armour has agreements with these athletes, the basketball star has right of first refusal. That means that Steph Curry could take the athletes with him.

“The separation of the Curry brand is not expected to have a significant impact on Under Armour’s profitability,” the analyst said. That’s an indication that sales for the Curry brand have decelerated, and perhaps a sign that the contract also was a big expense for Under Armour.

So who might be the next partner for Steph Curry?

“While Nike and Adidas could be interested in the Curry brand, we also see New Balance, Puma, Reebok, Anta Sports and Li-Ning as potential suitors,” the TAG analyst said.

Some on Wall Street, including Fernández, believe that the Under Armour and Steph Curry partnership never materialized to its full potential. And while ending the partnership will give Under Armour the benefit of some cost savings, Fernández said the move isn’t without some risks.

“Without the Curry shoe, it will make it harder for Under Armour to gain more shelf space in specialty footwear retailers like Foot Locker,” she noted. The analyst added that the loss of its “most recognizable and commercial athlete” means that there’s also risk that Under Armour might find it hard to sign other notable athletes in the future, particularly in basketball.

That said, she pointed out that the company is making progress in rationalizing its stock-keeping units, as well as reducing promotions and cutting costs.

When Under Armour posted second quarter earnings results a week ago, its founder, president and CEO Kevin Plank said the company has streamlined assortments and cut about 25 percent of its stock-keeping units. The company has also refocused its materials library by prioritizing fabrics Under Armour can be famous for along with working to bring innovation and style back to its core, ingredients Plank said that “made Under Armour globally famous to begin with.”

“In footwear, we’ve addressed our contraction by refining our strategy and sharpening our aesthetic. We are not accepting the current state of the business. Our plan is straightforward: build on the franchises that are already successful and return to growth in the upcoming seasons. We’re leveraging our momentum,” the CEO said.

And he said Spring/Summer ’26 will be where Under Armour gets stronger and will showcase more innovation. Upcoming are the $160 Velociti distance run shoe, the next generation Shadow and Magnetico football boots and the Dry Pro clone golf shoe featured on Jordan Spieth, among other upcoming launches.

Plank also said that the new products represent “athlete-driven innovation.” He described the changes in how the company innovates, designs and connects with the younger generation as a redefining of how athletes perceive the Under Armour brand.

Jefferies analyst Randal Konik described that restructuring initiatives as founder Kevin Plank move towards “getting back to basics [and] we like it.”

And Williams Trading analyst Sam Poser said his retail checks show that young consumers have begun to “gravitate to the Under Armour brand,” another indication that the company is moving in the right direction.

Under Armour last week posted a second quarter net loss of $18.8 million on revenue of $1.33 billion. It will continue to sell the Steph Curry brand throughout most of 2026.

While Under Armour may have parted ways with its most famous star athlete, it still counts other big-name stars — all experts in their own fields — as part of its roster. They include marathon runner Sharon Lokedi, NFL Tennessee Titans football quarterback Cam Ward, and WNBA star Nika Mühl, among others.

Weakness in the economy could bolster views that the Bank of Japan will wait until next year to make any policy moves

TOKYO—The Japanese economy contracted for the first time in six quarters, further complicating the timeline of the central bank’s next interest-rate hike.

Real gross domestic product shrank 0.4% on a quarter-over-quarter basis, preliminary government data showed Monday. That compared with the 0.6% growth recorded in the April-June period and marked the first contraction since the first quarter of 2024.

In annualized terms, the economy shrank 1.8%.

Weakness in the economy could bolster views that the Bank of Japan will wait until next year to make any policy moves. The central bank has kept interest rates on hold at 0.5% since January due to lingering uncertainties over the impact of U.S. tariffs on the economy.

“The fall in output last quarter should give the Bank of Japan further pause for thought and means that a rate hike in December remains unlikely,” said Marcel Thieliant, head of Asia-Pacific at Capital Economics.

Thieliant expects the central bank to resume monetary tightening in January if the tankan corporate survey due in mid-December, as well as industrial production figures for October and November, point to a rebound in economic activity in the fourth quarter.

Monday’s data showed that external demand, or exports minus imports, subtracted 0.2 percentage point from GDP during the July-September quarter, reflecting the effect of higher U.S. duties. Although the Japanese government has reached a trade agreement with the Trump administration, Japanese companies still face a 15% tariff on their U.S.-bound exports.

Housing investment was another big drag, falling 9.4% from the previous quarter. That said, economists think the decline is due to temporary factors related to regulatory changes and expect the market to recover.

However, as the housing sector is sensitive to interest rates, the government may be more opposed to a rate hike after seeing the weak results, some economists say. The BOJ’s next policy-setting meeting is scheduled for Dec. 18-19.

Other key segments of the Japanese economy showed mixed signals. Capital expenditure rose 1.0% from the previous quarter, suggesting that demand for labor-saving investment and digitalization remains strong despite the headwind from U.S. tariffs.

Meanwhile, private consumption increased 0.1%, slower than the 0.4% rise in the April-June period, as inflation continued to outpace wage growth and weighed on consumer appetite.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called for economic growth driven by higher incomes, and her cabinet is currently compiling an economic stimulus package that will include measures to ease the burden of rising living costs.

“Given the negative growth in the July-September quarter, it would not be logical for the BOJ to raise interest rates at its December meeting immediately after the government passes a supplementary budget for economic stimulus to boost domestic demand through the Diet,” said Crédit Agricole economist Takuji Aida.

The central bank is expected to thoroughly examine the effects of the government’s measures in its quarterly economic report due January before making its next move, he said.

Mike Doustdar says he has a ‘fantastic pipeline’ after losing battle for biotech Metsera

Just one month into his job, Novo Nordisk’s new chief executive went to bed one night in September thinking he had secured a $10bn takeover of obesity-focused biotech Metsera.

Mike Doustdar’s predecessor was ousted in May after the Danish drugmaker’s share price started to slide following a disappointing trial result for a next-generation drug.

Despite briefly regaining the crown of Europe’s most valuable company in June, the stock slide continued as the Ozempic and Wegovy maker lost share in the crucial US market. The move to buy Metsera looked like a new, bolder approach from a leader determined to fix Novo’s problems. 

But when Doustdar woke up the following day in September, he discovered that Pfizer had clinched a deal despite only bidding $7.3bn. Metsera had decided that the US company’s offer was the safer bet because it was more likely to pass regulatory scrutiny.

“It became evident that Pfizer won this at a lower bidding price than we placed forward. That’s when I got very upset. I felt not in America, where there is free-market advocacy, shareholder value creation, that there’s just something unfair,” Doustdar told the Financial Times.

That frustration launched a nine-day takeover battle after Novo went public with a bid in late October, which will have lasting consequences for the company even though it eventually lost out.

Doustdar’s bold approach has divided shareholders. Some see it as refreshing and necessary to boost the share price, while others fear it could signal that Novo is desperate for deals and make future targets fear the attention of competition regulators.

Other people close to Novo worry that dealmaking could be a distraction from Doustdar’s most urgent task: rejuvenating sales in the US, where it is losing share to Eli Lilly and makers of replica drugs.

The Novo chief fought back against Pfizer, constructing an offer based on an unusual share structure, where Metsera shareholders would be paid the majority of the deal value before it was even put in front of regulators.

This prompted an unusual and bitter bidding war, where Doustdar goaded Pfizer to raise its bid during a press conference in the Oval Office. In the end, Pfizer won by matching Novo’s $10bn offer, as the Federal Trade Commission intervened to raise concerns about the potential merger. 

The Novo chief said he had “no problem” with the outcome. “This time, when I lost, I didn’t feel like losing. I actually felt the Pfizer CEO and Pfizer board listened to my comments at the White House, and they put their hands in their pockets and raised the previous offer, and ultimately won fair and square,” Doustdar said. 

Unusually for a large pharma company, Novo has tended to rely on its internal scientific research rather than mergers and acquisitions to build its cabinet of potential medicines. This began to change in 2020, when the company bought Corvidia Therapeutics for up to $2.1bn, while a big push into dealmaking came when it rehired David Moore to lead corporate development in 2022. 

Novo is now looking for more targets, focusing on its core areas of obesity and diabetes. Doustdar is more willing to pick up the phone to the chief executives of potential targets and can make decisions more quickly than his predecessor, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen. The former chief executive was just one of three people who had to sign off on deals previously, according to one healthcare banker. 

Linden Thomson, a healthcare investor at asset manager Candriam, said Novo Nordisk needed to be more aggressive on deals. “For its share price, Novo needs a new pipeline asset, or multiple smaller ones, something to rally people around to say this is the opportunity for the future and that’s going to come from M&A.”

The market would reward Novo for being “bold”, said Paul Major, a healthcare-focused fund manager at Bellevue Asset Management, adding that now it should be looking at companies with earlier-stage obesity assets, such as Structure Therapeutics, which he owns. 

Shares in many obesity-focused companies soared as Metsera’s valuation was bid up. Structure is up 47 per cent since the announcement of Pfizer’s first deal in September, while Viking Therapeutics has increased by 55 per cent. Healthcare bankers say that private companies Kailera Therapeutics and Verdiva Bio could also be possible targets. 

Some investors would like Novo to look beyond these two narrow areas. Markus Manns, global portfolio manager and healthcare specialist at Frankfurt-based Union Investment, said the Metsera deal would have been the wrong way to invest shareholder money. “What I want them to do is diversify the company, not double down on injectable obesity [drugs],” he said. 

He added that Metsera’s portfolio of potential drugs — which includes a long-acting injectable and a weight-loss pill — had so much overlap with Novo’s own that it would have raised questions about Novo’s confidence in its pipeline. 

Doustdar said the Metsera deal was in some ways a “perfect fit” for his transformation plan for Novo Nordisk, and it was important not to be “arrogant”. “This ‘not invented here’ syndrome that companies get sometimes and Novo might have had in the past, doesn’t go down my alley very well,” he said. However, Doustdar insisted he was “not desperate — I have a fantastic pipeline”. 

Candriam’s Thomson said that while Novo did need another obesity drug that would replenish sales after Ozempic and Wegovy lose patent protection early next decade, it could also look to buy companies in other areas where there are plenty of late-stage assets.

In October, the drugmaker signed a deal to buy Akero Therapeutics, which is developing a drug for a liver disease that is a common complication of obesity, for up to $5.2bn. 

“Novo needs to diversify somewhat here. Akero was step one. Their data shows obesity is in the centre of so many conditions: sleep apnoea, liver problems, kidney problems, maybe Alzheimer's,” she said. 

Looking outside obesity could also help address concerns about scrutiny from regulators. Novo said it was confident its strategy was legal and the structure would be accepted by regulators — but not all investors are convinced.

Manns said it would have been a “deep misjudgement” to assume that the FTC would accept this deal. Major said it was good that Novo did not raise its bid for Metsera any further because there were always going to be antitrust issues. “In Venn diagram terms, if you line up [the circles of] Novo and Metsera [the overlap] looks like a solar eclipse.”

Spanish fiscal position aided by political paralysis

Spain will run a smaller budget deficit than Germany for the first time in almost two decades next year in a reversal of the two countries’ fiscal fortunes.

Europe’s fourth-largest economy, once a major casualty of the Eurozone crisis, has trimmed its deficit after years of robust growth and higher tax revenues.

Spain’s deficit is set to fall for the fifth year in a row to 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2025 and decrease to 2.3 per cent next year, according to the latest forecast from the Bank of Spain.

Germany’s deficit will rise from 2.3 per cent this year to 3.1 per cent in 2026, according to the German Council of Economic Experts, an independent group of advisers to the government. Analysts expect it will rise closer to 4 per cent in subsequent years.

Some 17 years since the end of the Eurozone debt crisis, the former crisis countries Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, once branded “PIIGS” by some analysts, are on a better fiscal trajectory than the countries that helped stabilise the bloc: Germany and France.

In France, governments have collapsed over unpopular attempts to lower its budget deficit by cutting government spending.

“The different fiscal trajectories show how much the pecking order between euro area countries has changed since the euro crisis,” Karsten Junius, chief economist at Swiss private bank J Safra Sarasin, told the Financial Times.

Spain’s improving economic prospects have fuelled a rally in its government debt, mirrored by Italy and Greece.

That has pushed down the additional interest rate on Spanish 10-year debt over benchmark German Bunds — a key measure of market anxiety — to about 0.5 percentage points, their lowest since before the Eurozone debt crisis, when they topped six percentage points.

Spain now pays lower borrowing costs than France, a country viewed for a long time as one of the safest Eurozone borrowers. Despite the expected widening in its deficit, Germany’s debt remains the Eurozone’s haven asset given its strengths as the bloc’s biggest economy, which has a lower burden than larger global peers, including the US.

From the launch of the single currency in 1999 to the debt crisis, Spain experienced a multiyear boom, allowing it to run lower budget deficits than Germany in the decade to 2007. But a combination of high growth and low interest rates culminated in a housing bubble and a subsequent banking crisis.

The country tapped European bailout funds for €41bn in emergency loans at a time when Germany was reluctant to save seemingly profligate southern European peers.

Spain has now become one of the fastest-growing large developed economies, with average quarterly GDP growth of 3.9 per cent since the start of 2022, compared to Germany’s 0.3 per cent. For 2026, the IMF forecasts 2 per cent growth, just below the 2.1 per cent it predicts for the US.

“The investment cycle in Germany has faltered while investment has boosted Spanish GDP,” said Melanie Debono, an analyst at London-based macro advisory firm Pantheon Macroeconomics.

Spain’s expansion is driven by a combination of immigration, tourism, low energy costs and public spending including EU funds.

The Spanish government predicts it will this year post its first primary surplus since 2007 — a measure that excludes interest payments on debt and costs related to floods in Valencia.

Ironically, its fiscal position is being aided by political paralysis. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s minority government has been unable to muster the parliamentary votes to pass a new budget, leaving the country operating on a rolled-over version of its 2023 spending plans.

That has prevented the government from introducing any major new spending plans, although it has been able to raise outlays on defence by taking advantage of some flexibility within the budget rules.

During the Eurozone crisis, Spain was running deficits of up to 11.5 per cent of GDP a year, causing its overall debt levels to balloon from about 35 per cent of GDP in 2007 to more than 100 per cent.

However, total government debt in Spain remains high, equal to 100.4 per cent of GDP according to the IMF, while Germany’s debt is 64.4 per cent of its economy’s size.

Miguel Sebastián, a former Spanish industry minister who is now an economics professor at Madrid’s Complutense University, said: “Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio is still too high and that will significantly reduce room for manoeuvre if and when there is a recession. That is a problem.”

The Bank of Spain warned in its latest financial stability report last week that high levels of overall debt created a “vulnerability for the Spanish economy”, limiting the room for manoeuvre in the next crisis and exposing the state to the risk of higher interest rates.

Germany ran budget surpluses of up to 1.9 per cent of GDP in the six years to 2019. While its level of public debt is close to the 60 per cent stipulated by EU fiscal rules, the country’s public infrastructure started to suffer from an investment backlog that has resulted in unreliable railways, crumbling motorway bridges and military forces with ammunition for just two days of war.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump’s second term as US president and the lingering infrastructure crisis led to a historic political U-turn in Berlin, with new chancellor Friedrich Merz loosening the tight constitutional debt brake which limited borrowing to 0.35 per cent of GDP a year.

The new rules opened the door to up to €1tn of debt-funded infrastructure and defence spending over the next decade.

But Merz faces criticism for using some of the borrowing to fund welfare and tax cuts. “The opportunities arising from [the debt-funded investment funds] must not be squandered,” warned Monika Schnitzer, chair of the GCEE last week.