Connect with us

Published

on

The Ohio Cup Trophy on top of a Bally Sports logo prior to a game between the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Guardians at Progressive Field in Cleveland, May 17, 2022.

George Kubas | Diamond Images | Getty Images

The courtroom continues to heat up for Diamond Sports Group, the largest owner of regional sports networks.

On Thursday, Diamond will ask a bankruptcy judge for permission to appoint mediators as it is negotiates with creditors to reach a reorganization plan. The company said in court papers it needs to meet “substantial plan progress” ahead of the start of the upcoming NBA and NHL seasons in October.

Last week, Diamond won court approval to extend the period of time it has to come up with a reorganization plan.

Diamond sought bankruptcy protection earlier this year, burdened by more than $8 billion in debt and the significant headwinds hitting the regional sports networks business as more consumers cancel their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming.

The company and some of its creditors at earlier points in the case, including during a hearing last week, “have indicated that mediation could help [Diamond] sort through myriad issues they must confront on the path toward reorganization.”

Diamond has until Sept. 30 to file a reorganization plan, weeks ahead of the opening of the 2023-24 NBA and NHL seasons. It is vital for Diamond to continue carrying local games on its networks. Since its filing, it has already seen some teams leave its Bally Sports channels due to a breakdown in rights fees discussions.

The prospect of local game rights being up for grabs has attracted broadcast station owners – including Nexstar Media Group, Gray Television and E.W. Scripps Co. – looking to carry the games, CNBC previously reported. The Phoenix Suns recently exited a Bally Sports network for such a deal.

Besides shedding its hefty debt load, Diamond is looking to reset some of its rights deals with teams to reflect so-called market rates.

Last week, a lawyer on behalf of the NHL said the league was in constructive discussions with Diamond, but that “time is of the essence” ahead of the upcoming season.

Sinclair tension

During the bankruptcy process so far, Diamond has faced numerous conflicts – including an ongoing battle with MLB over teams’ streaming rights and rights fees that has led to Diamond dropping some teams from its Bally Sports channels and its recent lawsuit against parent company, Sinclair.

On Wednesday, Diamond unveiled the details behind the lawsuit.

In 2019, Sinclair acquired the portfolio of networks – previously known as Fox Sports – from Disney for $10.6 billion, a required divestiture that was part of Disney’s buyout of Fox Corp.’s 21st Century assets.

Diamond’s more than $8 billion debt load stems from the deal, which also imposed between $400 million to $650 million in debt payments, the company said in court papers.

In the few years since, Diamond’s business, pay-TV providers and other cable channels have experienced accelerating deterioration in their business.

Diamond is now alleging that the ownership of Sinclair only exacerbated its problems.

In court papers, the company said Sinclair has been “milking” Diamond for more than $100 million annually in management fees since the acquisition, despite knowing the dire state of the business. On top of this, Diamond alleges Sinclair, in a “nefarious strategy … wrongfully caused Diamond to transfer more than $1.5 billion in cash and other consideration for the benefit of Sinclair.”

This occurred as Diamond alleges Sinclair knew the RSN business was “careering toward bankruptcy, and it continued after Diamond was unquestionably insolvent.”

“Sinclair has been informed of a lawsuit filed by Diamond Sports Group in connection with their ongoing bankruptcy proceeding. We firmly believe the allegations in this lawsuit are without merit and intend to vigorously defend against them,” a Sinclair spokesperson said in a statement.

Diamond appointed a new board and leadership last year to run its RSN business as it faced an inevitable bankruptcy filing. Diamond is now an unconsolidated and independently run subsidiary of Sinclair.

Continue Reading

Technology

Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI as it considers strategic alternatives

Published

on

By

Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI as it considers strategic alternatives

Chegg seen at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 13, 2025. 

Danielle DeVries | CNBC

Chegg on Monday filed suit in federal district court against Google, claiming that artificial intelligence summaries of search results have hurt the online education company’s traffic and revenue.

The legal move come nearly two years after former CEO Dan Rosensweig said students engaging with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant were cutting into Chegg’s new customer growth.

Chegg is worth less than $200 million, and in after-hours trading Monday, the stock was trading just above $1 per share. Chegg has engaged Goldman Sachs and will look at strategic options, including getting acquired and going private, President and CEO Nathan Schultz told analysts on a Monday earnings call.

Chegg reported a $6.1 million net loss on $143.5 million in fourth-quarter revenue, a 24% decline year over year, according to a statement. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $142.1 million in revenue. Management called for first-quarter revenue between $114 million and $116 million, but analysts had been targeting $138.1 million. The stock was down 23% in extended trading.

Google forces companies like Chegg to “supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function,” said Schultz, adding that the search company uses its monopoly power, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”

Despite the suit, Chegg has its own AI strategy. It has drawn on Meta’s open-source Llama, as well as models from privately held Anthropic and Mistral, Schultz said. Chegg has also partnered with OpenAI, which the education company views as a competitor, alongside Google. The company reported that 3.6 million students had subscriptions in the fourth quarter, down 21%. Subscriptions include access to AI-powered learning assistance. Chegg also rents and sells textbooks.

AI Overviews, as Google’s artificial intelligence summaries are called, are available in the company’s search engine in over 100 countries, with more than 1 billion users, the company said in October. They show up above links to other pages in search results.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the company will defend itself against Chegg’s suit.

“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” the Google spokesperson said.

Chegg claimed that Google drew on Chegg’s collection of 135 million questions and answers on a variety of subjects in its model training data sets.

After training its models, Google can generate content that competes with information that publishers have on offer in search results, Chegg argued in its complaint. The online learning company included a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that borrows details from Chegg’s website but does not attribute the information. However, the relevant Chegg page does show up lower down in search results.

Chegg cited a federal judge’s ruling last August that Google holds a monopoly in the search market. The decision came after the Department of Justice in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance.

WATCH: Google unrolls AI Overviews in six more countries

Google unrolls AI Overviews in six more countries

Continue Reading

Technology

Hims & Hers shares tumble after company misses on margin, says may stop selling some weight loss drugs

Published

on

By

Hims & Hers shares tumble after company misses on margin, says may stop selling some weight loss drugs

Hims & Hers Health shares plunged 18% in extended trading on Monday after investors looked past better-than-expected revenue and earnings and focused instead on the disappointing gross margin.

Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:

  • Earnings per share: 11 cents vs. 10 cents expected
  • Revenue: $481 million vs. $470 million expected

Revenue at the telehealth company increased 95% in the fourth quarter from $246.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release.

However, the company’s gross margin, or the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, was 77%, while analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting 78.4%.

It is the second big stock drop for Hims & Hers in a matter of days. The shares tumbled 26% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The company was a breakout star within the digital health sector in 2024, in part because of the success of its popular new weight loss offering.

The company said its GLP-1 offering generated more than $225 million in revenue in 2024. The stock climbed about 200% for the year.

Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days.

Hims & Hers said on the earnings call that as a result, compounded semaglutide will likely not be offered on the platform after the first quarter.

“We will have to start notifying customers in the coming month or two that they will need to start looking for alternative options on the commercial dosing,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said on the call. “I would suspect, just being very direct, that a lot of those patients will try to go into the open market and try to secure a branded option in some form factor.”

Some patients might still be able to access compounded semaglutide if it is clinically necessary, the company added.

The company’s weight loss offerings will primarily be composed of its oral medications and the generic medication liraglutide, which it plans to introduce on its platform this year. Excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide, Hims & Hers said it expects it weight loss offering will generate at least $725 million in revenue in 2025.

Hims & Hers also offers treatments for skin care, mental health, sexual health and hair care.

Revenue for non-GLP-1 products increased 43% to $1.2 billion for the full year, “meeting our previous 2025 revenue target a year early,” Chief Financial Officer Yemi Okupe said in a release.

“The success we are experiencing is a direct reflection of our improving ability to democratize access to high quality, personalized care across each of our specialties,” Okupe said.

Net income climbed to $26.01 million, or 11 cents per share, from $1.25 million, or 1 cent per share, a year prior. The company reported adjusted earnings of $54.1 million, meeting analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount.

For the first quarter, Hims & Hers expects to report revenue of $520 million to $540 million, while analysts were expecting $497 million. Adjusted earnings will be between $55 million and $65 million for the period, the company said.  

Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5:00 p.m. ET.

— CNBC’s Brandon Gomez contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Technology

How AI is speeding the mining of valuable metals needed to power the clean economy

Published

on

By

How AI is speeding the mining of valuable metals needed to power the clean economy

As the clean energy economy expands, finding the minerals and metals that power it becomes increasingly critical. The answer might lie with artificial intelligence.

Electric cars, solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells all have one thing in common: the need for precious metals.

Historically, that’s required going through the arduous process of finding the metals and then getting them out of the ground. But new technologies from a slew of companies might be changing the game.

Kobold Metals, VerAI and a startup called Earth AI are in a race to get the metals to market as soon as possible. Earth AI combines AI-powered mineral discovery software with proprietary drilling technology. Its data goes back 50 years.

“We train our AI to learn from failures and successes of decades of hundreds of geologists that explored in the past to make much better predictions for where to look for metals in the future,” said Roman Teslyuk, CEO of Earth AI.

When the system finds what it thinks are metal deposits, Earth AI can drill down to verify it in just a tennis ball-sized hole. Teslyuk said that using this mining process takes half the cost and a fraction of the amount of time that was previously required. Individual annual mine revenues can range from $50 million to $3 billion, according to Mining Data Online.

“We drill down to 2,000 feet and grab a sample of rock that has never seen light, and the metals in that rock, they can build hundreds of millions of electric cars,” Teslyuk said. “They can turn our grid renewable. This rock can get us off hydrocarbons.”

Earth AI doesn’t explore around existing mines, but finds new areas and then sells that information to mining companies.

“The market for these minerals is massive,” said Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global, an investor in Earth AI. “The way that they have approached this really caught our attention because there’s a there is a significant moat in their business model and the way that they’ve trained their large language model.”

Other investors include Y Combinator, Cantos Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital and Overmatch. The company has raised a total of $38 million.

Earth AI explores on its own, as well as with partners to find deposits faster. The company recently discovered one of the largest verified deposits of palladium in Australia using AI as part of a joint venture with Legacy Minerals.

CNBC Producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

Continue Reading

Trending