TheChek News Flow

The deal is now expected to close on Sept. 8.

A new athletic retail powerhouse is one step closer to becoming reality.

On Tuesday, Dick’s Sporting Goods noted that all required regulatory approvals – including observing the required waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 – to complete the $2.4 billion merger have been met.

With the retailer’s path forward made clearer by regulators, the deal is now expected to close on Sept. 8, subject to the satisfaction of remaining customary closing conditions, Dick’s said.

This announcement comes just days after shareholders for Foot Locker voted to approve the acquisition in a special meeting held on Friday.

In May, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced its intention to acquire Foot Locker for $2.4 billion, which would combine the U.S.’s largest sporting goods retailer with one of the largest athletic shoe retailers in the country. The new giant would allow Dick’s to control more than 15 percent of the U.S. sporting goods market and could create a duopoly with the current largest athletic footwear retailer, JD Sports.

And with the closure of the sale looming just weeks away, some analysts are weary about the new company’s future. Williams Trading analyst Sam Poser is one of those voices, stating in a note last week he fears Dick’s takeover of Foot Locker will distract the sporting goods retailer from the progress it has made in recent quarters.

“Dick’s has undergone significant improvements in store layout, store design, omnichannel execution, exclusive brand execution, brand and product assortments, and to a lesser degree, in-store consumer engagement,” Poser wrote. “Overall, we believe that Dick’s Sporting Goods has become the default sporting goods store, but generally not the ‘must go to’ sporting goods store.”

But Poser added that he foresees challenges ahead for Dick’s when taking on an athletic specialty retailer like Foot Locker, which focuses on fashion lifestyle consumers and operates smaller store footprints, many of which are in malls or in urban street locations. “The expertise to run an athletic specialty retailer are not within the core competencies of Dick’s Sporting Goods,” he wrote.

The analyst also suggested that the leadership needed to run both businesses successfully does not currently exist inside the companies. “Many of Foot Locker’s most experienced, talented, and tenured leaders departed the company over the past few years, and are now holding senior merchant positions at Journey’s, Famous Footwear and Snipes,” Poser wrote. “While there are some talented merchants remaining at Foot Locker, new leadership will be needed, in our view, which will not be easy to come by, even for an ‘incredible retail expert.’”

On the bright side, however, Poser said there will be approximately $100 million to $125 million of cost synergies once the deal is closed, which will be realized in the medium term. Some of the cost savings he foresees are duplicate costs like technology and human resources, distribution center efficiencies and better terms from vendors.

“Dick’s and Foot Locker combined will be able to use its heft to pressure its vendors for more of what it wants,” Poser said. “Generally, such strength should be good. However, it’s essential that brands, especially the strongest ones, stick to their principles, and do not believe that orders from the Dick’s Sporting Goods’ and Foot Locker merchants always reflect the demand of the end consumer.”

The fashion company plans to continue to build off of the success of its viral Bad Bunny campaign.

The parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger nudged up its full-year revenue forecast as it plans to break the internet again with more blockbuster campaigns after the success of its Bad Bunny ad.

PVH Corp. now expects fiscal 2025 revenue to increase slightly by low single digits compared to flat to increase slightly previously, while adjusted profits per share for this year are still expected to come in at $10.75 to $11, the fashion company said Tuesday.

Its stock price rose more than 4 percent in after-hours trading following the release of second-quarter earnings, having closed up 1.09 percent at $82.49. The stock is down 22 percent in the year to date.

“In terms of the outlook, it’s continuing this momentum that we created in Calvin and Tommy around the innovation of iconic products, the cut-through campaigns and cut-through talent and then stronger and stronger marketplace executions,” said Stefan Larsson, chief executive officer, in an interview with WWD, teasing what was in the works.

“Coming into the fall, both Calvin and Tommy are geared up to keep the momentum from Q2,” he continued. “We are about to launch what I believe is the strongest fall campaign from Calvin so far. In women’s underwear, we are doing the equivalent of what we did with Bad Bunny.”

That means building on the product innovation around men’s underwear and bringing that to women’s underwear, with a campaign led by “one of the biggest music stars in the world” to be released shortly.

For the second quarter, revenue came in at $2.17 billion, compared with Wall Street estimates of $2.12 billion.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.52, compared to $3.01 in the prior-year period, but topping Wall Street estimates of $2.01.

Calvin Klein was up 5 percent, driven by sales of denim and underwear. On the back of the aforementioned Bad Bunny campaign, sales of Cotton Stretch styles grew 14 percent globally, on top of 25 percent growth in the first quarter.

Over at Tommy Hilfiger, revenue increased 4 percent compared to the prior-year period, boosted in part by the brand’s partnership with the “F1” movie, starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris.

At the same time, Tommy Hilfiger and Cadillac Formula 1 Team forged a multiyear partnership setting the fashion brand up as the team’s official apparel partner. On Tuesday, Cadillac named Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as its drivers in the sport next season.

“We’re well underway to drive both brands back to growth for 2025 full year,” said Larsson.

Europe, Middle East and Africa revenue increased 3 percent, Americas rose 11 percent and Asia-Pacific decreased 1 percent, with PVH stating that the consumer environment in China was challenging.

Licensing revenue decreased 3 percent compared to the prior-year period due to the transition of certain previously licensed women’s product categories in-house.

As previously reported, G-III hit PVH with a $250 million breach of contract lawsuit in June after it was denied three-year extensions on its women’s suit licenses for the Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein brands. In July, PVH filed a countersuit, alleging that G-III “refused to align” with PVH’s new strategic plan.

In terms of tariffs, PVH reaffirmed its full year outlook for operating margins at 8.5 percent, down from 10 percent last year.

Anthropic is launching a research preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI models, the company announced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a group of 1,000 subscribers on Anthropic’s Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month. The company is also opening a waitlist for other interested users.

By adding an extension to Chrome, select users can now chat with Claude in a sidecar window that maintains context of everything happening in their browser. Users can also give the Claude agent permission to take actions in their browser and complete some tasks on their behalf.

The browser is quickly becoming the next battleground for AI labs, which aim to use browser integrations to offer more seamless connections between AI systems and their users. Perplexity recently launched its own browser, Comet, which features an AI agent that can offload tasks for users. OpenAI is reportedly close to launching its own AI-powered browser, which is rumored to have similar features to Comet. Meanwhile, Google has launched Gemini integrations with Chrome in recent months.

The race to develop AI-powered browsers is especially pressing given Google’s looming antitrust case, in which a final decision is expected any day now. The federal judge in the case has suggested he may force Google to sell its Chrome browser. Perplexity submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for Chrome, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested his company would be willing to buy it as well.

In the Tuesday blog post, Anthropic warned that the rise of AI agents with browser access poses new safety risks. Last week, Brave’s security team said it found that Comet’s browser agent could be vulnerable to indirect prompt-injection attacks, where hidden code on a website could trick the agent into executing malicious instructions when it processed the page.

(Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, told TechCrunch in an email that the vulnerability Brave raised has been fixed.)

Anthropic says it hopes to use this research preview as a chance to catch and address novel safety risks; however, the company has already introduced several defenses against prompt injection attacks. The company says its interventions reduced the success rate of prompt injection attacks from 23.6% to 11.2%.

For example, Anthropic says users can limit Claude’s browser agent from accessing certain sites in the app’s settings, and the company has, by default, blocked Claude from accessing websites that offer financial services, adult content, and pirated content. The company also says that Claude’s browser agent will ask for user permission before “taking high-risk actions like publishing, purchasing, or sharing personal data.”

This isn’t Anthropic’s first foray into AI models that can control your computer screen. In October 2024, the company launched an AI agent that could control your PC — however, testing at the time revealed that the model was quite slow and unreliable.

The capabilities of agentic AI models have improved quite a bit since then. TechCrunch has found that modern browser-using AI agents, such as Comet and ChatGPT Agent, are fairly reliable at offloading simple tasks for users. However, many of these agentic systems still struggle with more complex problems.

Beijing is encouraging companies to move away from Nvidia

Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon posted a record profit in the first half of the year, as it benefits from a surge in demand from companies including ByteDance for domestically made semiconductors to replace Nvidia’s chips. 

The Beijing-based company on Tuesday reported a Rmb1bn ($140mn) profit in the first six months, compared with a loss of Rmb533mn the previous year. It recorded revenues of Rmb2.9bn, a 44-fold rise from 2024.

Cambricon’s share price has doubled in the past month, pushing its market capitalisation to Rmb580bn, after Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveiled an updated model compatible with domestically made chips. 

Its stock rose by 5 per cent on Wednesday to Rmb1,391, as investors bet that Cambricon would benefit from Beijing’s push to support the local AI chip ecosystem. Beijing has instructed major AI firms, including the large internet companies ByteDance and Tencent, to reduce their dependence on Nvidia’s technology.

The majority of Chinese AI labs rely on the US tech giant for training large language models, but are increasingly using rival local chips for inference — the process of using the models for tasks such as generating responses to chatbot inquiries.

Cambricon is a small player in comparison to Huawei, its main rival in developing AI chips for China. It holds an estimated 3 per cent of the Chinese AI chip market, according to analysis by Bernstein, in part due to its limited fabrication capacity.

Cambricon stated in its results that it has improved its inference software platform, enabling customers to run AI models more easily on its chips. The company is now seeking to raise up to Rmb4bn in a follow-on stock offering to fund investment in its AI chips and software for LLM training.

Lin Qingyuan, a semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, wrote in a note to clients that Cambricon was the “best alternative to Huawei”.

“We continue to see Cambricon’s commercial momentum significantly improve, as the addressable market for China AI fabless continues to ramp up post-DeepSeek and the ban on Nvidia chips,” he wrote.

The Chinese gadget maker taking on Tesla and Apple

Formerly dismissed as a ‘Lego’ assembler, Xiaomi is building its reputation as a high-tech manufacturer

An electric vehicle factory built by China’s largest smartphone maker has become a tourist attraction in Beijing, with visits to the company’s plant needing to be booked a month in advance and entry sometimes decided by lottery at peak times.

Xiaomi’s loyal fans, styled “mi fen”, pack its smart car factory every day to watch the production line churn out a car every 76 seconds. Tour guides proudly compare the manufacturing processes to those of Tesla, as the Chinese company seeks to emulate its American rival’s automated production line and build key EV components in-house.

Although only two models have been launched, the cars rolling off the end of the line are expected to outnumber those sold by Tesla in China next year, according to Citic Securities’ estimates. Its new SUV attracted hundreds of thousands of pre-orders within minutes of its launch in June, while its original sports sedan ranked second in premium car sales in China in the first half, only behind Tesla’s Model Y. The excitement around its cars has helped drive Xiaomi shares almost 200 per cent higher over the past year.

Once an assembler that built its success on suppliers’ components, Xiaomi is aiming to reinvent itself as a manufacturing powerhouse.

Xiaomi had humbler ambitions when it was formed just 15 years ago. Its name is Chinese for millet, with founder Lei Jun saying the company was created in 2010 in the spirit of “millet plus rifles”, a reference to Mao Zedong’s description of the Communist party’s modest military resources during the civil war. 

But in the space of its first three years, it leapfrogged incumbents to become the world’s third largest handset vendor and expanded its product line-up to include everything from rice cookers to robot vacuums.

Despite its early success, critics have consistently drawn attention to its lack of core technologies and over-reliance on suppliers.

“The reason why it has so many products in the ecosystem is that these are not Xiaomi products in their own right historically. It has a large network of partners,” said Richard Windsor, founder of research service Radio Free Mobile. 

“We used to say that Xiaomi sourced everything externally and assembled them into a brick, a device . . . much like playing with Lego,” said Ivan Lam, a smartphone analyst at Counterpoint Research. “In fact, Xiaomi has continued to invest in R&D over the past few years.”

Acknowledging the criticism himself multiple times, Lei has been determined to shed the company’s “assembly workshop” image by building up manufacturing facilities to craft premium products.

Its first step towards in-house manufacturing came in 2020, with the opening of a Rmb600mn ($83.5mn) factory on the outskirts of Beijing to produce small batches of the brand’s first foldable phone.

With Lei wanting to “benchmark” his company against Apple, it shifted manufacturing of its most expensive phone models to its own factories in early 2024. In the first quarter of this year, Xiaomi recorded an 81 per cent year-on-year jump in premium handset shipments, far outpacing the 3 per cent growth in its overall phone shipments, data from the Canalys research firm showed. 

“Tech brands command a premium when they are known to use advanced technology, and advanced factories are one of the tangible representations,” Xiaomi told the Financial Times.

The company has been applying the same strategy to cars. After following Apple on smartphones, it took only three years from Xiaomi announcing its intent to build a car to the debut in March last year of its first model — the Speed Ultra 7 sports sedan — produced at its new factory. By contrast, Apple had ditched its decade-long project to build an Apple Car a month earlier.

Besides autonomous driving features and an operating system that links up with phones and home appliances, the company also trumpeted its investment in self-developing auto components and manufacturing equipment, ranging from a unique aluminium alloy and ultra-strength steel to the mould for car body casting. 

Consumers are buying into the vision. After the SU7 became one of the best-selling cars in China’s cut-throat auto market, the recently unveiled YU7 sport utility vehicle, which was designed to rival Tesla’s Model Y, received 200,000 pre-orders in just three minutes at launch, a “miracle”, according to Lei. 

“Call me factory director Lei,” the billionaire founder wrote in a social media post, extolling the virtues of the EV and smartphone factories.

Lei’s current obsession with manufacturing has not stopped there. The company is currently building the second phase of its EV factory, which is expected to double production capacity to achieve its annual shipment target of 350,000 units. An air conditioner plant is also under construction in the central city of Wuhan. 

The pivot from an asset-light consumer electronics business to a manufacturing high-flyer aligns with Beijing’s call to domestic companies to develop “new, quality productive forces”. 

An approving commentary published in the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist party, made a comparison between Chinese engineers’ efforts to pick through imported steel in the hope of finding auto parts in the 1950s and the use of more than 700 robots at Xiaomi’s EV factory. 

Xiaomi’s strategy is being extended to another key area of competition with US tech companies, following Apple again in developing its own silicon. Earlier this year, it launched its Xring O1 — a system-on-a-chip built on a leading edge 3-nanometre manufacturing process. The processor powers its latest smartphones and tablets, placing the company among elite players — including Apple, Samsung and Huawei — that have achieved a high level of vertical integration. 

“A self-designed chip can help Xiaomi build a more integrated ecosystem, as it enables seamless communication between different devices,” said Lam from Counterpoint, while cautioning about its vulnerability to potential US sanctions. Taiwanese contract chipmaker TSMC makes the chipset, the FT reported in June. 

Xiaomi has said it will invest at least Rmb50bn ($7bn) over the next decade to continue developing advanced chips, with another Rmb200bn allocated to developing “hardcore” tech, including operating systems and artificial intelligence products, over the next five years.

Lu Weibing, Xiaomi’s president, predicted on an earnings call last week that the ability to create chips in-house would be a key differentiator for tech companies.

“In the future, there’ll only be two types of businesses: those that develop their own chips and those that don’t,” he said.

“There will emerge a generational gap in core competitiveness between them.”

Pharma group has installed new leadership in the country and pledged $2.5bn for a Beijing R&D centre

Less than a year after a scandal embroiled its then China boss, pharma group AstraZeneca appears to have bounced back, maintaining sales and avoiding major fallout in the country.

Since Leon Wang’s arrest last October during a probe of alleged illegal drug sales, the UK-listed company has installed new local leadership, launched an employee incentive scheme and pledged $2.5bn for a Beijing research and development centre — the centrepiece of a strategy aimed at stabilising its China business. 

AstraZeneca’s latest results suggest progress in the country which accounts for 13 per cent of its revenues. After a 1 per cent fall in the last three months of 2024, sales in China were up 4 per cent in the first half of this year to $3.5bn, driven by the inclusion of two cancer drugs in a national reimbursement scheme and by solid demand for long-standing drugs in poorer regions.

Its shares, which fell more than 10 per cent in the days after the news of Wang’s arrest, have recovered.

Since the scandal broke, chief executive Pascal Soriot has been in China a couple of times, including for a conference in March where he was also selected to be part of a group of foreign executives that met Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“This was a big relief for the company. The list of attendees is heavily scrutinised,” said a person who was involved in the planning.

“The storm seems to be blowing over. The company is back in growth mode,” said Bruce Liu, head of the China life-sciences practice at consultancy Simon-Kucher.

Last year, police arrested Wang, as well as AstraZeneca’s former head of oncology in China, over the alleged illegal importation and sale of the cancer drug Imjudo through Hong Kong.

Separately, between 2020 and 2021 around 100 AstraZeneca salespeople were sentenced for insurance fraud for doctoring test results of patients who otherwise would not have qualified for state insurance for one of the group’s drugs. 

Soriot has tried to distance the company from the scandals, saying after Wang’s arrest that it was hard for the head office to police its 18,000 staff in China. A close associate said Soriot had never denied that some people may have broken the law but had acted quickly to contain the fallout.

AstraZeneca announced the new R&D centre in Beijing just before the group of foreign executives met Xi. It already has a centre in Shanghai, a city with a bigger concentration of biotech companies. The close associate of Soriot said the company had offered to make the investment in the capital. The centre has been welcomed by Beijing, which is seeking to attract foreign investment as it contends with a sluggish economy.

AstraZeneca’s experience contrasts with that of GlaxoSmithKline, which suffered several years of declining sales after some of its senior staff in its China subsidiary were accused of bribery in 2014.

“GSK was iced out for several years. But today, China is in a very different position. It has got better at handling these situations and doesn’t want to overreact and freak out other multinationals,” said a consultant who advises foreign companies.

AstraZeneca appointed a new head of China last year, but people with knowledge of the situation say that changes made by Wang laid the foundations for its current strong performance in the country. Granted broad autonomy, Wang expanded into smaller cities, making partnerships with local hospitals to build specialised cardiovascular and respiratory clinics, entrenching the company’s drugs.

This strategy has helped the company manage the fallout from drug pricing reforms, beginning in 2018, that put hospitals under pressure to find cheaper domestically made alternatives to branded generic drugs manufactured by multinationals.

Liu said AstraZeneca has “successfully grown demand” for its generic drugs in smaller Chinese cities, where there tends to be less scrutiny on budget control.

Recent wins include the addition of the breast cancer drug Enhertu to the national reimbursement list, allowing it to be prescribed to patients in the public health system. This helped push sales in AstraZeneca’s “emerging markets” region, which includes China, up 63 per cent to $365mn in the first half. The rare disease treatment Koselugo has also performed well in China, analysts say. The company did not provide a geographic breakdown of its sales.

Shirley Chen, a Barclays analyst, said that “AstraZeneca’s efforts to maintain its market presence in China have been largely successful . . . investors who closely follow the company no longer seem to be focusing on the investigation in China”.

But for employees, Wang’s absence is still felt. He remains in detention, with no update on the investigation, according to several people close to the company. AstraZeneca declined to comment.

Wang, known for his charisma, ran AstraZeneca’s China business for a decade and was celebrated, including by state media, as one of the most influential Chinese executives at a multinational corporation. He was replaced by company veteran Iskra Reic.

One long-term employee noted that, despite the company's strong financial performance, morale had not yet recovered following the scandal.

“AstraZeneca’s revenues are doing well. We have a good product pipeline, and doctors and patients recognise the product. But at the company, we’re going through a much more challenging time than under Leon,” said one employee. “It is physically demanding and mentally taxing.” 

New York’s office revival doesn’t quite reach the top floor

Owners of four skyscrapers have issued $3bn in commercial mortgage-backed securities

Nobody on Wall Street works their way up to the executive suite by playing it safe. Money managers are rushing back in to the market for refinancing office mortgages in New York City, suggesting credit investors have regained their taste for a sector once seen to be gravely challenged by work-from-home trends. Owners of four skyscrapers have issued $3bn in commercial mortgage-backed securities, the Financial Times has reported.

Is this a sign of a turnaround? Equity markets suggest not. Shares of large commercial office landlords such as Vornado, SL Green, and Empire State Realty Trust are down between 10 and 27 per cent this year. While debt investors are focused on whether landlords can make their interest and principal payments, equity investors demand growth in leasing rates, and high returns.

Those still look uncertain. New York’s current vacancy rate of 12.7 per cent has fallen slightly this year from its post-pandemic peak but remains elevated relative to the 8.2 per cent vacancy rate in 2019, according to Moody’s. The credit research agency expects the rate of open space to inch up in the coming year as new buildings are completed and come online.

Empire State Realty Trust offers a helpful window into the state of the Big Apple. More than half of its operating income comes from New York City office buildings, and another quarter from the Empire State Building. Its annual net operating income, a figure watched closely by investors in property companies, has hovered around $400mn since 2019.

True, Empire State doesn’t have the highest quality portfolio relative to some peers, and its financial performance reflects tourist traffic to its eponymous landmark, not just trends in workplace rents. But the stock is a pretty good barometer for New York City. And it is down more than a quarter in 2025, trading at half 2019’s level.

That doesn’t mean that a revival of CMBS activity isn’t reassuring. Refinancings of that kind can help set building valuations. The recycling of funds can prompt more investment in the property sector. New York’s office occupancy trends are ahead of those in other cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example.

In the US more broadly, commercial real estate is still something that inspires caution. The country is oversupplied, even if its biggest city is enjoying the advantages of unique geography and a huge financial services sector. Credit sector investors are putting a toe back into the office elevator; their equity counterparts are still watching from the lobby.

GLP-1 medications could be the group’s death knell — or grant it a new lease on life

When WeightWatchers filed for US bankruptcy protection this spring, as part of a deal to hand control to its secured lenders, investors could be forgiven for wondering whether this was the fat-loss company’s final Kodak moment.

Just as the film company struggled to adapt to the rise of digital cameras and video rental group Blockbuster passed up an early chance to buy Netflix, the diet group is under pressure to prove that it has not fallen behind the times.

With an enviable global brand and a workshop-based model that inspires passionate devotion, WeightWatchers was worth $6.7bn seven years ago. But a rebrand as WW Inc confused consumers just as competition from online apps dented its appeal, and the Covid pandemic decimated its meetings business. Now the rise of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy have redefined weight loss. Its subscriber base has dropped by 30 per cent from its 2018 peak.

The bankruptcy filing allowed WeightWatchers to cut its debt by $1bn without entirely wiping out existing shareholders: they retain about 9 per cent of the equity. That could be a decidedly mixed blessing: it keeps the brand in the public eye but also means the company’s attempts to pivot will face scrutiny every quarter.

And pivoting is exactly what chief executive Tara Comonte, who took over last year and steered the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, intends to do. She argues that the 62-year-old company still has broad resonance but needs to be adapted for the 2020s.

Comonte has recruited a new leadership team and doubled down on WeightWatchers’s 2023 purchase of a telehealth group that allowed it to get into the diet drug game. Clinical subscriptions, which include GLP-1 prescriptions and bring in nearly five times as much revenue as an ordinary membership, are a bright spot, rising 56 per cent year on year to 127,000.

“We help members manage side effects, adjust their nutrition and talk about what it means to show up in a new body or how to get through the holidays without drinking or eating so much,” says Kim Boyde, the group’s chief medical officer. “That community component is enormously important, especially in this day and age when we are more disconnected and lonely.”

WeightWatchers also plans to introduce a menopause care option in the autumn that will similarly combine medical care and behavioural support. While not as directly tied to the primary mission as diet drugs, the offering is well timed. Not only is there growing public awareness of the challenges women face during middle age, but many current WeightWatchers customers are in the target age range and weight gain is a common symptom.

The US healthcare system is also ill-equipped to deal with multi-faceted issues such as weight-loss and menopause, even when drugs are available. Doctors who are forced to rush from patient to patient in 15-minute increments often do not have time to talk through the physical, mental and behavioural changes that patients are experiencing. That leaves a hole that WeightWatchers hopes to fill.

“These medications were never designed to be taken by themselves. They’re most effective when prescribed with nutrition and exercise plans, and with support. No one else can deliver that at scale,” says Julie Rice, the group’s new chief experience officer, who co-founded cult exercise chain Soul Cycle.

Novo Nordisk’s recent decision to cut the list price of its GLP-1 drugs in half to $500 per month may further boost demand by making treatment more accessible to consumers without health insurance. Eli Lilly’s breakthrough diet pill could further open up the market to customers who are squeamish about injections.

Besides, WeightWatchers is not the only business having to retool because of weight-loss drugs. Gyms and health clubs are now emphasising strength training and social activities that complement GLP-1 use. The strategy is working: the Health & Fitness Association reports that membership climbed 6 per cent year-on-year in 2024, hitting historic highs and the number of fitness facilities expanded nearly 4 per cent.

Not all pivots work. Kodak eventually launched a user-friendly digital photo website, but sold it to Shutterfly, and Blockbuster eventually tried streaming. But if my run-ins with the time-pressed US healthcare system are anything to go by, WeightWatchers’ crisis is one that should not go to waste.