After Hours Summary: NAVI +6%, IBM / COF +3%, NFLX +2.3% are higher, while AMTD -1.5% is lower following earnings/guidance, CIT +5.8% on S&P MidCap 400 addition newsAfter Hours Gainers:
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: NAVI +6%, IBM +3.4%, COF +2.7%, NFLX +2.3%, ADPT +1.5% (also files for 8 mln share common stock offering by selling shareholders)
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: MNLO +7.4% (Point72 discloses 5.8% passive stake), CIT +5.8% (to join S&P MidCap 400), ACMR +3.6% (initiated with Overweight at Morgan Stanley), HZNP +3.3% (extending late move higher after announcing the FDA approved TEPEZZATM for the treatment of thyroid eye disease), SKT +3% (to join S&P SmallCap 600), FBK +2% / FSB +1.6% (FB Financial [FBK] announces merger agreement with Franklin Financial Network [FSB]), SCPL +1.9% (light volume; initiated with Buy at DA Davidson), INTC +0.3% (Andy Bryant stepped down as Chairman; independent director Omar Ishrak to succeed Bryant as an independent Chairman, effective immediately)
After Hours Losers:
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: FULT -2.3%, ZION -1.7%, IBKR -1.6% (light volume), AMTD -1.5%, UAL -0.6%
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: NVAX -15% (files prospectus supplement relates to the issuance and sale of up to $100 mln common stock), ADAP -5.8% (announces intended public offering of ADSs), APLT -4.4% (announces public offering of 1.75 mln shares of common stock), SIBN -4.2% (light volume; commences public offering of 4.3 mln shares of common stock by SI-BONE and selling stockholders ), KSU -3.3% (downgraded to Hold at Deutsche Bank), BPMC -2.8% (commences public offering of $325.0 mln in shares of its common stock), EFC -2.6% (announces public offering of 4.6 mln shares; expects to use proceeds to acquire targeted assets), ELAN -2.3% (files mixed securities shelf offering), ZYME -1.5% (files preliminary prospectus supplements for offering of common shares and pre-funded warrants), ZLAB -1.3% (commences public offering of 5.5 mln ADSs; shareholder QM11 Limited intends to make secondary offering of 500,000 shares), RIO -0.5% (downgraded to Market Perform at BMO Capital Markets)
Balenciaga to Return to Couture in July
Demna Gvasalia is to revive the brand's high-fashion activity 52 years after the founder closed his house.
“A synthesis between the street and the salon.”
That’s how Cédric Charbit, president and chief executive officer of Balenciaga, described what couture by Demna Gvasalia might look like.
On Monday, the Paris fashion house said it would resume making high fashion, some 52 years after the Spanish founder Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his legendary couture house. Gvasalia is to unveil his first couture collection in July on the official Paris calendar.
“We owe this to Cristóbal and the legacy of the house,” Charbit said in an interview a few hours after the surprise announcement on the opening day of the summer 2020 couture shows in Paris.
By that time, Balenciaga sales reps and executives had received telephone calls and about a dozen email inquiries from devoted clients, a signal of healthy curiosity.
“Demna is going to be the first one of his generation doing couture in this week,” Charbit said. “Maybe there’s a new customer out there.”
The development will bring a new name to couture week, and an unexpected one, given Gvasalia’s penchant for creating lust-worthy sneakers, hoodies and bomber jackets both at Balenciaga and at Vetements, the brand he founded with his brother Guram in 2014.
He stepped down from the creative helm of Vetements last September and a statement provided exclusively to WWD hinted at a new project, saying the designer, 38, was stepping down from his position “to pursue new ventures.”
On Monday, Charbit suggested Gvasalia already had couture in mind when he joined Balenciaga in 2015, knowing the founder’s stature as the “couturier’s couturier.”
Christian Dior once famously referred to him as “the master of us all” by Christian Dior while Gabrielle Chanel dubbed him “the only couturier in the truest sense of the word.”
Among the most famous designs of the late Spanish-French couturier, prized for his spare and sculptural designs, are the cocoon coat, bubble skirt, pillbox hat and semi-fit jacket.
“He worked on volumes first and foremost, and not decoration,” Gvasalia told WWD in an exclusive interview last year.
Indeed, in an early collection for Balenciaga, Gvasalia transposed the flaring back of the semi-fit jacket into a black sweatshirt. “What I found at Balenciaga was kind of a gift for me. I found Cristóbal Balenciaga’s approach to volume was so perfectly suitable for me with my personal taste for volume.”
Indeed, while stereotyped by some as a maker of expensive and trendy casual wear, Gvasalia prides himself in being a tailor — and he said last year he intended to flex these muscles more in the future.
“I actually can make a jacket for myself in one day with my own hands,” he said at the time, crediting his Antwerp education for his technical skills and characterizing his four years at Maison Martin Margiela as his master’s degree. “I learned how to work three-dimensionally with garments. That’s what happened there, but tailoring, and the know-how and technical part of dressmaking were always my primary interest actually,” he said. “So far from being a T-shirt and hoodie designer — even though I love those things and I wear them and that’s part of my wardrobe — I know how to make a jacket.”
In a statement on Monday, Gvasalia said “it is my creative and visionary duty to bring couture back.”
Furthermore, he called couture “an unexplored mode of creative freedom and a platform for innovation. It not only offers another spectrum of possibilities in dressmaking, it also brings the modern vision of Balenciaga back to its sources of origin. Couture is above trends. It’s an expression of beauty on the highest aesthetic and qualitative levels.”
Balenciaga will be the first fashion house owned by Kering to reenter the couture fray. Kering also controls Saint Laurent, whose founder staged his last high-fashion show in 2002 upon his retirement.
Hedi Simane, who dabbled in couture-level garments during his tenure at Saint Laurent from 2012 to 2016, has stated ambitions to do couture at Celine, which he joined in 2018 as its new artistic, creative and image director.
Charbit noted the move into couture was possible “due to the success of the creative vision of Demna Gvasalia as well as the exceptional results of Balenciaga these past few years.”
Reporting third-quarter results last October, parent Kering said couture and leather goods recorded a 19.3 percent rise, led by an “excellent” performance from Balenciaga, which the group expects to reach revenues of one billion euros.
On Monday, Charbit noted the house would establish a dedicated team and atelier replicating the original salons at Balenciaga’s historical address at 10 Avenue George V. He declined to say how much Balenciaga is investing to launch couture, but acknowledged couture is a costly, exacting enterprise and often loss-making.
“We will try to break even with it,” he said, stressing the house would approach couture in a “pragmatic” way. According to French fashion’s governing body, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, “only those houses and companies that are approved each year by a dedicated commission run by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture and held under the aegis of the Ministry for Industry may become eligible for it.”
Couture houses also must fulfill certain requirements, including employing certain numbers of seamstresses and tailors to realize the painstakingly handmade garments that comprise haute couture, the precursor to ready-to-wear, which arrived in earnest around the time Cristóbal Balenciaga hung up his scissors.
The designer, who died in 1972, continues to fascinate historians, curators, collectors, fashion students and prominent designers. On Sunday, an exhibition opened at the Association Azzedine Alaïa juxtaposing that late couturier’s work with that of Cristóbal Balenciaga. It runs until June 28.
The Athletic hits $500m valuation after latest fundraising
US sports site plans to hire more overseas reporters after push into English Premier League coverage
The Athletic has raised an additional $50m to hire more overseas reporters following its successful move into coverage of the English Premier League last year, giving the US sports journalism site a valuation of roughly $500m.
The four-year-old start-up, which offers subscribers highly specialised, team-specific coverage, has attracted in total nearly $140m from investors such as Comcast Ventures, the media conglomerate’s investing arm.
Hollywood venture firm Plus Capital, backed by entertainment stars such as Matthew McConaughey, was among the participants in the most recent round, according to Axios, which first reported the news.
“The Athletic’s launch in the UK was our biggest ever, and we have been blown away by the reception we have received from subscribers around the world,” said co-founder and chief executive Alex Mather.
The Athletic has cast itself as a testing ground for a new type of in-depth, add-free sports coverage and has made waves for aggressively hoovering up senior football reporters, offering salaries it has called “extremely competitive”.
The company has also hired popular beat reporters, many with large numbers of devoted fans on social media, to write detailed news and analysis about every English Premier League club.
Last year, the company reached a half-million subscribers in the US and Canada, and it plans to have 100,000 paying readers in the UK by the end of the year. Mr Mather said the UK had become The Athletic’s fastest-growing market, with many North Americans subscribers reading its football coverage out of the UK.
With the most recent cash injection, the company plans to boost spending on current and new reporters as well as invest in its app and podcasts.
“Fans have really taken to the model — the ad-free reading experience and quality storytelling,” Adam Hansmann, The Athletic’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told the FT last year.
Investors had poured billions into digital media brands such as BuzzFeed and Vice Media, hoping that their high reader numbers would translate into big rewards from the booming online advertising market. But over the past few years, the same companies have had to slash their valuations and fire hundreds of reporters after failing to compete with Google and Facebook, which grab an ever-growing chunk of digital advertising spend.
The Athletic has put its news and analysis behind a paywall and promising a “no ads, no clickbait” service for £4.99 a month, or £59.99 a year.
“A subscription model is arguably much harder to build, but you accumulate relationships with customers rather than advertisers which is more permanent,” Mr Hansmann said.
Douglas McCabe from Enders Analysis said The Athletic differs from older digital media companies in that it comes from “a completely different era of the development of the internet”.
“It is not about advertising or sponsorship and it is entirely about the quality rather than quantity of content, and building a niche audience rather than thinking about scale,” he said.
Estimating the start-up’s success has been difficult as it does not reveal revenues or costs. Mr McCabe said success will depend on sports fans making The Athletic core to their daily football news habit.
“I don’t think yet that the UK launch has been a proven success, because it takes time,” he said. “But they are getting quite significant support.”
Real estate fundraising hits lowest level since 2013
Largest fund managers like Blackstone and Brookfield stand to gain from tougher environment
As high-yielding real estate deals become harder to come by, institutional investors are starting to become more selective — making it harder for private equity real estate funds to raise capital.
Real estate funds closed in the fourth quarter of 2019 totaled $18 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from Preqin. That’s down from the $47 billion raised in the third quarter and was the slowest quarter since 2013.
“I notice in our conversations with investors that there’s even more of an air of caution than we’ve seen in the last few years,” Todd Ladda, a managing director at SoftBank-owned Fortress Investment Group, told the journal.
Fortress, whose big bet on rental apartments in Japan has now made it that country’s largest private landlord, provides an example of the more offbeat strategies funds have had to pursue as rising property values become less of a sure thing.
Due to the irregular pace of real estate fund closings, analysts caution against reading too much into a single quarter’s fundraising totals.
The third quarter of 2019 saw Blackstone Group close on a record $20.5 billion fund. In the first quarter, Brookfield closed a $15 billion fund which has invested in the Kushner Companies’ former crown jewel 666 Fifth Avenue, as well as the Leela Palace hotel in Bengaluru, India.
The largest fund managers like Blackstone and Brookfield stand to gain the most from a more selective fundraising environment. Many large institutions have been cutting down their fund manager portfolios since the financial crisis.
“The market is not providing as many clear opportunities to hit those high return objectives like it once did,” PJT Park Hill Real Estate Group’s Michael Stark said, noting that funds typically target returns in the mid-teens or as high as 20 percent. [WSJ]
Apple announces release date for Steven Spielberg’s ‘Amazing Stories’ and Apple TV+’s first British series
An image from the Amazing Stories episode entitled ‘The Rift’
Following the news of Home Before Dark, Apple has also announced the release date for its first TV+ project with Steven Spielberg, the remake of Amazing Stories. Five episodes will be released on March 6.
Amazing Stories includes the final performance of Robert Forster, who passed away in October. Apple also today announced that its first British TV production, called ‘Trying’, will debut May 1 on its streaming service.
Spielberg is the producer of Amazing Stories. The anthology series is a reboot of a 1980’s franchise of the same name, also originally produced by Spielberg.
Apple opened the TV section of its March 2019 event with a talk from Spielberg about the show, which will debut almost exactly a year later. It’s not currently clear if there are more than the initial five episodes in the season.
There was some reporting last year that Amazing Stories was intended to be a launch show for Apple TV+ but missed the fall deadline due to some production delays.
An image from the Amazing Stories episode entitled ‘The Rift’
‘Trying’ represents the first of Apple’s British productions. The half-hour comedy show revolves around themes of love, relationships and growing up. It stars Imelda Staunton, Rafe Spall and Esther Smith.
The company also announced a release date for the previously announced Home docuseries; it will debut on April 17.
Treasury Sec Mnuchin: regulation moved way too far after the 2008 financial crisis; where the US is in terms of debt is 'fine' - Davos comments
- US will have to slow down rate of growth of govt spending in coming years
- Think we will see very low inflation in the near term
- Pres Trump wants to do more on infrastructure
- It's a very big deal that US is now energy independent
- 737 MAX issues could weigh on US economy this year
- 2020 growth will be boosted by Phase 1 China-US and USMCA deals
- Believe labor participation rate can go higher