TheChek News Flow

The Sandro and Maje parent company taps the Cos executive to drive growth following its exit from Saks.

PARIS — French fashion group SMCP has appointed Linda Li president and chief executive officer for North America, as it looks to accelerate growth in one of its fastest-expanding regions despite recent distribution setbacks.

Li succeeds Ida Simonsen, who took on the role in late 2024 and is stepping down to pursue other opportunities. She will also join the group’s executive committee, reporting to CEO Isabelle Guichot.

The appointment comes at a pivotal moment for SMCP, which owns contemporary brands Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot and Fursac, and is navigating both operational shifts and ongoing shareholder uncertainty.

Li joins from H&M Group’s Cos, where she served as managing director and president of North America. During her tenure she led the brand’s omnichannel expansion and commercial performance in the region. She previously held senior roles at the Swedish company, including head of marketing and communications and head of e-commerce, and began her career at Boston Consulting Group.

“We are delighted to welcome Linda Li to SMCP as president and CEO for North America. Her strong track record at the intersection of retail and fashion, combined with her deep knowledge of the North American market, will be key assets in continuing to drive the development of our brands in the region. Her leadership and operational discipline will enable us to accelerate our growth momentum and further strengthen our presence in this strategic market,” said Guichot in a statement shared first with WWD.

SMCP has identified North America as a strategic priority, with plans to continue controlled store expansion, maintain its full-price positioning and accelerate omnichannel capabilities to strengthen brand desirability.

In the first quarter of 2026, SMCP closed all of its concessions within Saks department stores following bankruptcy proceedings at the U.S. retailer. The closures contributed to a reduction in the group’s global store network to 1,587 points of sale.

Even so, the Americas region remained SMCP’s fastest-growing region, with sales rising 11.7 percent to 44 million euros, driven by strong performances at Sandro and Maje, in first-quarter financial results released April 28. Growth was further supported by expansion in South America, including new stores in Argentina and Chile and a flagship opening in Mexico.

Li’s appointment is part of a broader effort by SMCP to strengthen its leadership bench across key regions. Last summer the company named Kleine Tan, a former Loewe executive, CEO for Asia, as part of its continued focus on international rebalancing.

The changes come as SMCP remains floated for a potential sale. Key shareholders are seeking to divest up to 51.2 percent of the company’s share capital, in a transaction led by Lazard. The process follows years of shareholder disputes linked to the collapse of former majority owner Shandong Ruyi and could trigger a takeover offer if a buyer acquires a controlling stake.

Running shoes were the standout in the first quarter, delivering double-digit dollar and unit growth.

Rising prices led to modest footwear sales growth in the first quarter of 2026.

According to new data from Circana’s Retail Tracking Service, total U.S. footwear sales increased 1 percent versus the same period last year in the first quarter of 2026. And while overall units sold declined, higher average selling prices continued to support topline revenue.

Circana’s data shows that styles rooted in activity, comfort, and daily wear emerged as the strongest performers, reflecting a persistent preference for shoes that can move seamlessly across multiple occasions.

As such, the performance category outperformed the broader market in Q1, with dollar sales up 5 percent, supported by both unit demand growth and average selling prices increases.

Within performance, running shoes were the standout, delivering double-digit dollar and unit growth – highlighting sustained consumer investment in footwear that support regular movement and wellness routines.

Cross-training styles, along with sport-oriented shoes for golf and tennis, also delivered solid gains as participation-based activities and hybrid fitness habits continue to influence purchasing behavior. In the lifestyle space, running-inspired silhouettes continued to gain share while other sport-inspired segments slowed.

The research firm added that some of this softness was absorbed by casual fashion categories that reflected the emphasis on wearability and comfort.

Overall, the fashion segment delivered 2 percent dollar growth in Q1, supported by higher prices despite declining units. Sandals posted growth in both dollars and units, led by slides and flip–flops.

Shoe silhouettes such as mules, clogs, and ballerinas also contributed positively, reinforcing demand for silhouettes that can transition easily from casual to more polished settings. In contrast, fashion boots continued to decline despite growth in the high-shaft segment, as soft unit demand across ankle and mid-shaft styles outweighed meaningful average selling price increases.

Beth Goldstein, footwear and accessories industry advisor at Circana, said in a statement that price increases remain a challenge for the footwear industry in 2026, but certain segments are bucking the trend.

“Categories tied to daily use, activity, and casual comfort proved best positioned to capture consumer spending in Q1,” Goldstein noted. “As the year progresses and consumers remain selective in their spending, brands and retailers must connect their merchandising and messaging to their customers’ key lifestyle priorities – those that do this well will be the share winners in this slow growth environment.”

This data comes as footwear prices continued to rise in March after a sharp increase at the start of the year persists, according to the latest data from the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA).

While overall inflation jumped last month due to rising energy costs sparked by the conflict in the Middle East, retail footwear prices rose 2.4 percent year-over-year in March, higher eight of the last nine months and the fastest in 40 months, the FDRA noted.

When Cursor agreed to a $60 billion conditional takeover offer from SpaceX last month—the purchase isn’t definite—some of Cursor’s rivals expected the coding startup to work with SpaceX’s xAI unit to develop new models, specifically for coding.

That’s not happening anytime soon, apparently. Cursor doesn’t currently plan to codevelop coding models with xAI and is focused on improving its own model, Composer, which is powered in part by Chinese model Kimi, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s strategy.

Less surprisingly, Cursor also doesn’t plan to steer customers to xAI’s Grok model when they pick the AI they want to power their coding, the person said.

The top models powering Cursor’s products today are Composer, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex, the person said. That doesn’t say much for Grok’s coding capabilities.

The situation puts the spotlight on what the two companies are getting from their tentative arrangement. As reported, SpaceX has an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion. If SpaceX doesn’t proceed, it has to pay $10 billion to Cursor.

The immediate beneficiary of the arrangement may be Cursor. It is getting access to xAI’s computational resources, although that may be the result of a separate commercial deal between the companies. Computing costs had been weighing down Cursor’s gross margins, so perhaps the server rental agreement will help.

The arrangement is probably helping xAI make use of its numerous idle chips so it will burn much less cash than it has been. That’s good news for SpaceX shareholders awaiting that company’s initial public offering as soon as next month.

The real advantage for xAI may not come until the company actually acquires Cursor—assuming it does. At that point, xAI could try to use Cursor’s customer data to improve Grok’s’s coding capabilities, and, perhaps, direct Cursor customers toward Grok.

In the meantime, Cursor will want to retain its top research talent. Some of Cursor’s researchers may have mixed feelings about joining Elon Musk’s rocket company, even if the value of their Cursor equity has ballooned like few other companies before it (though they’d end up owning SpaceX stock at what will probably be a very high market capitalization). In the meantime, we’ll be curious to see if any of those researchers get retention bonuses or other incentives to stay.

The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them both in the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new lineup of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are capable of capturing color imagery and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, doing the work of two sensors in one.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product lineup in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”

“For all of human history, it’s been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of the combination with some higher level reasoning, and waste an enormous amount of time doing this,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies only get really halfway there in terms of calibrating and fusing the data streams.”

Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change this equation.

“The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. There has been a years-long wave of consolidation happening, with Ouster buying Velodyne, and Luminar’s assets recently getting acquired in bankruptcy.

At the same time, the market for sensors is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotaxis and are scaling quickly. Robotics companies — humanoid and industrial — are hoovering up investment dollars and need sensors to perceive the world. There’s so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are popping up and testing the waters with entirely new modalities. (In Teradar’s case, it’s using terahertz imaging.)

A color lidar that combines pinpoint depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to the robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to build a great camera.”

In fact, Pacala claims Ouster’s color lidar is “improving in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.

Ouster uses so-called “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar info directly on its custom chip using what’s known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.

The company is using this same SPAD technology to capture the color image data in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said this novel technique allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.

“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like mega pixel resolution. These are top line numbers that make it pound for pound good camera. But it just so happens it’s coming as a pre-fused data stream as a 3D colorized point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream as well, but it’s that’s one of the powers of this system, is you can use just the lidar data stream, you can use just the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-fused data stream, depending on how kind of forward-thinking your perception team is.”

Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and that it’s now taking orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considers to be “the industry’s best long range lidar.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long range lidar “by a big margin.”

“We’ve had a long range LiDAR, but it hasn’t been just like clearly a cut above everything else,” he said. “That’s a big leap for Ouster. I think it means that we’ll start to see it much more on high-speed robo-trucking, robotaxi applications, I think a lot of drone stuff will transition to the OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.

Ouster isn’t the only company that has started talking about color lidar. Last month, Chinese company Hesai announced its own color lidar platform that it says will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, like Innoviz, have previously pitched their own takes on “color lidar.”

Pacala says most other players trying to “fuse” cameras and lidar sensors are basically packaging them together in a box, though. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is putting the lidar and imaging tech on the same chip.

This dramatically cuts down on the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to make sense of the competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also sets those customers up to eventually eschew cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.

“This is kind of fundamentally changing the value proposition of what we’re selling to a customer from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.

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The technology giant met with administration officials last week to address a growing concern in Washington: insufficient computing power for artificial intelligence.

The Trump administration’s compute fears

The C.E.O. of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, was at the White House on Thursday for a series of high-stakes meetings with senior Trump administration officials.

The official agenda was cybersecurity threats. But DealBook has learned that the subtext was more specific: worries about artificial intelligence “capacity” — and the government’s struggle to secure enough A.I. processing power to maintain its own defenses.

It’s the latest fallout from Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview model, access to which is restricted to several dozen corporate and government users. Anthropic has described the limited release as a safety-first measure, but it has also spooked the Beltway.

Recent tests suggest that Mythos can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in critical software infrastructure at a speed traditional cybersecurity teams can’t match.

But the administration is worried that Anthropic doesn’t have enough “compute,” industry lingo for computing power, and that the company might have to throttle the use of Mythos even for high-priority users. In a crisis, some officials fear, the government could be locked out of the tools it needs to patch its software systems.

That’s where Google (and OpenAI and others) come in. Even as the administration appears to be easing tensions with Anthropic, it’s hoping to use Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT models and other bleeding-edge tools to decrease its reliance on Claude.

Separately, the Pentagon last week said that it had reached deals to use several more models beyond Claude on classified work.

Google does face a big challenge, DealBook understands: Some of its A.I. processing chips, known as TPUs, can’t be used in some classified contexts. Anthropic became an easy option for the government because its models largely run on Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing platform, which has spent billions to achieve so-called Impact Level 6 security certifications.

The government is seeking ways to help accelerate similar clearance for Google TPUs.