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The Morning Ledger: Nvidia CFO Reviewing Cash Holdings After Collapsed Deal for Arm
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Nvidia CFO Colette Kress PHOTO: NVIDIA CORP.
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Good morning. Chip manufacturer Nvidia Corp. is weighing its options for the cash on its balance sheet after its deal to buy SoftBank Group Corp.’s Arm Ltd. fell through.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, had agreed to acquire the U.K.-based chip designer for a combination of cash and shares but last week agreed to abandon the acquisition amid regulatory scrutiny of the transaction. Nvidia held $21.20 billion in cash at the end of January, up from $11.56 billion a year before.
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“We did plan on using some of that for Arm,” Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said, adding that the company is reviewing its capitalization. “Right now, we are also looking at our investments,” Ms. Kress said.
The company is also considering options for its upcoming bond maturities, its finance chief said. There are several bonds that will come due in 2023, 2024 and beyond. “We have a couple of maturities that are callable,” Ms. Kress said.
Nvidia on Wednesday said it generated $7.64 billion in revenue during its most recent quarter, up 53% from the prior-year period. It reported $3 billion in net income, more than double the figure in 2020.
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Bloomin' Brands Inc. Deere & Co. and Draftkings Inc. are among the companies scheduled to release earnings today.
U.S. home sales surged to a 15-year high in 2021. Economists forecast that the January sales figure will show a slight drop from December.
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Applied Materials Uses Automation to Shift How Finance Workers Spend Their Time
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Applied Materials Inc. is working to automate its finance processes to boost efficiency and free up employees for more analytical tasks. That includes using tools like robotic process automation and the cloud to reduce the time employees spend collecting data and increase the time they spend gleaning insights from it.
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Black Friday shoppers leave a Walmart store in California. In the latest quarter, Walmart saw higher sales in stores than earlier in the pandemic. PHOTO: RINGO H.W. CHIU/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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For Walmart Inc., being the country’s largest retailer by revenue has helped it navigate higher supply-chain and wage costs, labor shortages and rising prices.
On Thursday Walmart reported stronger sales over the winter holiday shopping season and said it is largely absorbing higher costs. At the same time it continues to try to create new sources of profit beyond its core retail business to help fend off Amazon.com Inc.
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Google Creates $100 Million Fund to Train People Without College Degrees
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Thursday launched a $100 million fund aimed at training workers without college degrees for jobs in technology.
The fund aims to help people earn Google Careers Certificates in areas including data analytics, project management, information technology support, and user experience and design, the company said. About 70,000 people have earned a certificate since Google created the program in 2017. Google doesn’t charge students for the certificates but delivers the courses through Coursera, an online educational platform that charges $39 per month.
Under the initiative announced Thursday, Google will provide $50 million in grants and $50 million in interest-free loans to Social Finance, a nonprofit advisory firm, which will administer the fund. Social Finance in turn will provide funding to nonprofits Year Up and Merit America, which will help students complete their certificates by providing financial assistance, including for childcare or rent, or services such as professional coaching. Students who graduate and get jobs that pay at least $40,000 a year will be obligated to repay the nonprofits for the assistance they received.
Through the fund, Google aims to reach 20,000 people, more than it could have reached by just providing grant funding, according to Alphabet Treasurer Juan Rajlin. “We're trying to create a model that can be self-sustaining, so that others can follow this model,” Mr. Rajlin said.
—Kristin Broughton
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4,583
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The number of North American corporate requests for security identifiers—an early indicator of capital-markets activity—in January was down 19.4% from the prior month, according to CUSIP Global Services, a service owned by S&P Global Inc. that assigns these identification numbers to securities.
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Blizzard Entertainment’s campus in Irvine, Calif. Activision is working to complete a planned $75 billion sale to Microsoft Corp. PHOTO: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS
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Federal and state regulators have widened their investigations into how Activision Blizzard Inc.’s leadership handled workplace misconduct claims, according to documents and people familiar with the probes, as the videogame giant works to complete a planned $75 billion sale to Microsoft Corp.
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Allianz SE set aside more than $4 billion for legal expenses stemming from losses its investment funds racked up during the March 2020 market panic when their options trades went bad.
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Tesla Inc. says regulators are harassing Chief Executive Elon Musk over his compliance with a 2018 regulatory settlement that sought to restrict his use of social media.
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Federal prosecutors charged James Velissaris, the former chief investment officer of Infinity Q Capital Management, on Thursday with securities fraud and obstruction of justice following the collapse of the investment firm.
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Federal regulators are closing in on rules requiring all public companies to disclose their greenhouse-gas output. But they are struggling to figure out how much detail to demand about emissions produced by businesses’ suppliers and customers.
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Justice Department Names Crypto Enforcement Leader
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 600 points Thursday, its steepest one-day loss of 2022, as geopolitical tensions and the prospect of tighter monetary policy ahead roiled markets.
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Circle Internet Financial Ltd., the crypto-focused firm that manages USD Coin, the second-largest stablecoin, pushed back the timetable for an initial public offering following its planned merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
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Cecilia Rouse told the Senate Banking Committee that factors causing high inflation are expected to ease as Covid-19 cases gradually decrease. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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President Biden’s top economic adviser on Thursday sought to ease lawmakers’ concerns about elevated inflation, saying that several factors in the coming months should help slow a steep rise in consumer prices over the last year.
“We expect inflation to moderate over the coming year, because we believe that the factors that have been causing high inflation will begin to ease as Covid cases gradually decrease,” Cecilia Rouse, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
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Jobless claims rose last week but remained historically low, indicating the labor market is on strong footing as Covid-19 cases of the Omicron variant decline.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased to a seasonally adjusted 248,000 last week from 225,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week moving average, which smooths volatility, fell slightly to 243,250.
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CME Group Inc., a Chicago-based derivatives marketplace, said its CFO, John Pietrowicz, plans to retire in 2023. The company promoted its treasurer, Lynne Fitzpatrick, to the role of deputy CFO, and said she will succeed Mr. Pietrowicz as CFO after he retires next year.
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Vulcan Materials Co., a Birmingham, Ala.-based construction-materials company, named Mary Andrews Carlisle as CFO, effective Sept. 1. Ms. Andrews Carlisle is currently vice president of finance. She succeeds Suzanne Wood, who is retiring.
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EMed, a healthcare-technology company, named Michael Cole as CFO. Mr. Cole previously worked at SevenSaoi Capital, a private-equity firm he founded in 2016.
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Sword Health, a musculoskeletal-health company, named Valentina Longo as CFO. Ms. Longo previously worked in the financial-institutions group at the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management LP.
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The Morning Ledger won’t publish on Monday in observance of Presidents Day. We will return on Tuesday.
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Every weekend we select a handful of articles we think are worth a bit of your time, either because they peel back the layers on a compelling business story or somehow make us look at business in a different light.
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The Financial Times takes a close look at the missteps that led to the resignation of Peloton Interactive Inc. Chief Executive John Foley.
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The Atlantic considers the downsides of saying the workplace is “like a family.”
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Small businesses owe about $28 billion in debt under the Paycheck Protection Program, created early on during the pandemic to help firms stay afloat, Bloomberg reports.
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