LVMH in Talks to Sell Fashion Label Marc Jacobs
The world's largest luxury goods company has been working with advisers since last year to explore options for Marc Jacobs after being approached by potential buyers.
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Why Star Bulk Carriers (SBLK) is Gaining Attention Among Dividend-Paying Shipping Stocks
Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:SBLK) is included among the 10 Best Shipping Stocks with Dividends. A hugh vessel carrying hundreds of containers passing by a small fishermen boat. Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:SBLK), a Greece-based shipping company listed in the US, operates a fleet of 148 dry bulk vessels that transport global commodities such as grains, fertilizers, minerals, and steel products. The company runs three categories of ships, with an average fleet age of under 10 years, positioning it among the most cost-efficient dry bulk operators worldwide. Despite facing seasonal market softness in the first quarter of 2025, Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:SBLK) remained profitable, reporting a net income of $0.5 million, EBITDA of $58.0 million, and a time charter equivalent (TCE) rate of $12,439 per vessel per day. With liquidity exceeding $500 million, net debt below the fleet's scrap value, and 13 vessels unencumbered, the company views itself as well-positioned to take advantage of opportunities within the dry bulk sector. Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:SBLK) also continues to follow a disciplined capital allocation strategy focused on enhancing shareholder value through a mix of dividends and share repurchases. The Board announced a $0.05 per share dividend, marking the 17th straight quarter of capital returns, which have reached approximately $1.35 billion to date. In addition, the company repurchased around 1.3 million shares using proceeds from vessel sales at net asset value, buying back stock at prices well below NAV to capitalize on market dislocations and further boost shareholder returns. With a dividend yield of 7.85%, as of July 30, SBLK is among the best dividend stocks in the shipping sector. While we acknowledge the potential of SBLK as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: and Disclosure: None.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Big tech has spent $155bn on AI this year. It's about to spend hundreds of billions more
The US's largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another, lavishing $155bn on the development of artificial intelligence, more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services in the 2025 fiscal year so far. Based on the most recent financial disclosures of Silicon Valley's biggest players, the race is about to accelerate to hundreds of billions in a single year. Over the past two weeks, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, Google's parent, have shared their quarterly public financial reports. Each disclosed that their year-to-date capital expenditure, a figure that refers to the money companies spend to acquire or upgrade tangible assets, already totals tens of billions. Capex, as the term is abbreviated, is a proxy for technology companies' spending on AI because the technology requires gargantuan investments in physical infrastructure, namely data centers, which require large amounts of power, water and expensive semiconductor chips. Google said during its most recent earnings call that its capital expenditure 'primarily reflects investments in servers and data centers to support AI'. Meta's year-to-date capital expenditure amounted to $30.7bn, doubling the $15.2bn figure from the same time last year, per its earnings report. For the most recent quarter alone, the company spent $17bn on capital expenditures, also double the same period in 2024, $8.5bn. Alphabet reported nearly $40bn in capex to date for the first two quarters of the current fiscal year, and Amazon reported $55.7bn. Microsoft said it would spend more than $30bn in the current quarter to build out the data centers powering its AI services. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the current quarter's capex would be at least 50% more than the outlay during the same period a year earlier and greater than the company's record capital expenditures of $24.2bn in the quarter to June. 'We will continue to invest against the expansive opportunity ahead,' Hood said. For the coming fiscal year, big tech's total capital expenditure is slated to balloon enormously, surpassing the already eye-popping sums of the previous year. Microsoft plans to unload about $100bn on AI in the next fiscal year, CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday. Meta plans to spend between $66bn and $72bn. Alphabet plans to spend $85bn, significantly higher than its previous estimation of $75bn. Amazon estimated that its 2025 expenditure would come to $100bn as it plows money into Amazon Web Services, which analysts now expect to amount to $118bn. In total, the four tech companies will spend more than $400bn on capex in the coming year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The multibillion-dollar figures represent mammoth investments, which the Journal points out is larger than the European Union's quarterly spending on defense. However, the tech giants can't seem to spend enough for their investors. Microsoft, Google and Meta informed Wall Street analysts last quarter that their total capex would be higher than previously estimated. In the case of all three companies, investors were thrilled, and shares in each company soared after their respective earnings calls. Microsoft's market capitalization hit $4tn the day after its report. Even Apple, the cagiest of the tech giants, signaled that it would boost its spending on AI in the coming year by a major amount, either via internal investments or acquisitions. The company's quarterly capex rose to $3.46bn, up from $2.15bn during the same period last year. The iPhone maker reported blockbuster earnings Thursday, with rebounding iPhone sales and better-than-expected business in China, but it is still seen as lagging farthest behind on development and deployment of AI products among the tech giants. Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said Thursday that the company was reallocating a 'fair number' of employees to focus on artificial intelligence and that the 'heart of our AI strategy' is to increase investments and 'embed' AI across all of its devices and platforms. Cook refrained from disclosing exactly how much Apple is spending, however. 'We are significantly growing our investment, I'm not putting specific numbers behind that,' he said. Smaller players are trying to keep up with the incumbents' massive spending and capitalize on the gold rush. OpenAI announced at the end of the week of earnings that it had raised $8.3bn in investment, part of a planned $40bn round of funding, valuing the startup, whose ChatGPT chatbot kicked in 2022, at $300bn. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Shooting ourselves in the foot': how Trump is fumbling geothermal energy
Geothermal is one of the most promising clean energy sources in the US, providing 24/7 renewable power that could meet rising energy demand from AI datacentres. But former Department of Energy officials are alarmed that Donald Trump is fumbling its potential. Compared with other clean energy sources such as solar and wind, geothermal enjoys rare bipartisan support. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has praised the technology, calling it 'an awesome resource that's under our feet'. And Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved tax credits for geothermal. But the administration's slashing of Department of Energy staff, delays in issuing low-interest loans, and tariffs are together creating uncertainty for the industry and investors. The US has an advantage on geothermal over China and must move urgently, said David Turk, who served as the deputy secretary of energy under former president Joe Biden. 'Anything that stops our ability to execute on a plan – staffing, other funding – I think, is shooting ourselves in the foot,' Turk said. The White House and Department of Energy did not respond to questions about how their policies are affecting enhanced geothermal. Related: US renewable energy has tripled in a decade – but almost $8bn in projects now face cuts The potential of geothermal Geothermal energy uses the heat from the Earth's crust to transform water into steam that turns turbines and generates electricity. It has been used for more than a century, but has been limited to places where hot water reached the Earth's surface, including hot springs. Now there's a new technique that can generate energy anywhere, known as enhanced geothermal. The same horizontal drilling approach used in fracking can reach hot rock deep below the surface. 'It opens up enhanced geothermal all over the country, all over the world,' Turk said. 'That's just tremendous.' So far, enhanced geothermal systems are located in the Western US. One of the most promising geothermal projects by Fervo Energy can be found in Utah. But the technology can also work in the east. The US is ahead of other countries on enhanced geothermal because of its shale gas boom over the past 15 years, said Eva Schill, a staff scientist who leads the Geothermal Systems Program at Berkeley Lab. 'The reason is that we have a lot of experience here from oil and gas fracking,' she said. The enhanced geothermal industry is nascent, generating only 1% of the US's electricity. And it's still too expensive to compete with coal and natural gas. But under the right conditions, it could evolve into a cheap source of power. A January article in the journal Nature Reviews found that it could be cost competitive with the national average cost of electricity generation by 2030. The US is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China, and although US emissions have trended downward for the past two decades, the country is still not on track to meet its climate targets. The rapid growth of AI datacentres is further threatening those targets by fueling rising energy demand; datacentres need to run 24/7, so they tend to rely on fossil fuels. We have the technology, we have the tools … and I think now what we really need to do is establish the confidence Jigar Shah, clean energy entrepreneur Geothermal can potentially solve that problem. It could create 80,000 megawatts of new power, according to a liftoff report published by the Department of Energy. 'To put that in perspective, that could meet 100% of all of the AI datacenter load growth for the next 10 years,' said Jigar Shah, a clean energy entrepreneur who served as the director of the loan programs office at the Department of Energy under Joe Biden. 'That's pretty impressive.' Already, Google and Meta have signed deals that would see geothermal companies power their datacentres. How the Trump administration is fumbling geothermal Enhanced geothermal accelerated under Biden-era policies. But several former energy department officials say the Trump administration is failing to provide the business certainty needed to get the fledgling industry off the ground. 'The whole ball game right now is bringing down those costs, proving it for investors,' Turk said. 'This is really about feelings,' Shah said. 'Do the investors feel like this administration really has their back when it comes to investing in these new technologies? They felt like we actually had their back when I was running the loan programs office, and when secretary [Jennifer] Granholm was running energy. They're unsure whether this administration has their back on these technologies.' Under the Biden administration, the loan programs office was working on closing a low-interest loan for geothermal. Similar loans previously boosted Tesla and utility-scale solar. However, the Trump administration has yet to close a low-interest loan for geothermal, Shah said. The gutting of energy department staff has lowered its capacity to support geothermal, several former energy department officials said. Thousands of scientists, analysts, engineers and procurement officers took deferred resignation offers or were fired. Politico reported that the administration was considering cutting loan programs office staff by half. The Department of Energy has lost 'absolutely indispensable' experts on geothermal and loans, Turk said. 'So I would worry about, have we lost some of that capacity to actually execute?' Trump's zeal for tariffs is adding to the industry's anxiety. Steel tariffs, now at 50%, are hurting companies that use steel in wells. Enhanced geothermal wells require installing miles of steel pipes. Behind the scenes, geothermal companies are 'freaking out' about the steel tariffs, Shah said. 'They don't want to say anything negative, lest the Eye of Sauron find them,' he added. The survival of the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for geothermal provides some certainty. Geothermal can still access the full tax credit, as long as they begin construction by 2033, when the value of the credit will begin phasing down. But geothermal projects now face strict restrictions on the involvement of 'foreign entities of concern,' such as Chinese companies and individuals, known as FEOC requirements. Geothermal projects use rare earth elements in their drill bits, and China dominates the rare earth minerals market, said a former energy department official who requested anonymity. What Trump officials can do to boost geothermal 'This is a good enough market opportunity that somewhere in the world is going to come true, and we are really well set up for it, if we're not stupid,' the official said, talking generally about the industry. 'But we've unfortunately been pretty stupid, and we're making it harder on ourselves to win in an area that should be pretty easy to win.' There are actions the Trump administration can take immediately to bring down costs and boost the industry. The government can speed things along by 'doing a lot of mapping of resources to make it cheaper and less risky for drilling in this area versus that area', Turk said. 'Close a loan,' Shah said, explaining that it would send a strong signal to investors. 'We have the technology, we have the tools – the loan programs office and other tools – and I think now what we really need to do is establish the confidence,' Shah said. Solve the daily Crossword
