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Andrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg during the New York Times DealBook Summit in the Appel Room at the Jazz At Lincoln Center in New York City, Nov. 30, 2022.

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany will no longer see a dedicated section for news articles starting in December.

Meta said Tuesday that it is plans to “deprecate” the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”

The company added that it plans to spend more time and money on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product. News represents less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said.

Meta said it would honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won’t enter into new deals and has no plans to offer new products for news publishers.

Meta debuted Facebook News in 2019, saying at the time that the product “was built to bring people closer to the stories that affect their lives.”

The decision to deprecate Facebook News is part of a broader move away from the news business. The company recently shut down access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada after its government passed the Online News Act, which requires tech firms to pay content fees to media outlets in the country.

Meta disagreed with the Canadian law, saying that “the legislation misrepresents the value news outlets receive when choosing to use our platforms” and that it is “based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms.”

Some news experts criticized Meta’s decision to block users from viewing or posting news links in Canada, saying it could lead to a rise of misinformation and negatively affect local news organizations.

Watch: Is WhatsApp, Facebook’s biggest acquisition, paying off a decade later?

How Meta's $19 billion bet on WhatsApp could finally start paying off

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Corporate travel and expense software firm Navan shares sink by double-digits in first trade after $6 billion Nasdaq IPO

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Corporate travel and expense software firm Navan shares sink by double-digits in first trade after  billion Nasdaq IPO

Corporate travel and expense management platform Navan fell by as much as 15% in its first trading day on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN” after its successful initial public offering.

The Navan IPO, which priced on Wednesday night, valued the business-to-business software vendor at $6.2 billion, raising $923 million and with shares settling at the midpoint of its deal range, $25 per share. The valuation was roughly $3 billion less than where private investors last valued Navan in 2022 in a $300 million round.

Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.

The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.

Customers include Geico, Zoom, Lyft, OpenAI, Unilever, Anthropic, Adobe, Christie’s, and Blue Origin.

“We really care about the traveler, the road warrior,” said CEO Ariel Cohen in a CNBC interview on IPO day.

Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and has made the list for two consecutive years.

Navan’s big day is also a huge win for venture investor Oren Zeev, who runs the rare one-person VC firm and at the IPO price was expected to have a stake in Navan worth over $1 billion, having first invested in the founders in 2013, two years before Navan came to life. “It’s a first for me,” Zeev told CNBC of having an early-stage investment result in a $1 billion payday. He has no office, no assistant, no one on payroll at all, but a portfolio of 50 companies (40 where he sits on the board, including Navan).

Cohen said Navan’s focus on business travel and expensing allows it to not only support the largest companies in the market but companies with as few as 10 employees. The idea, regardless of size, is that any companies with travelers can make sure “they are not wasting their time,” he said in his “Squawk Box” interview.

According to Cohen, it can take on average 45 minutes to book a complex business trip using traditional methods, but with Navan the process has been whittled down to seven minutes, and has led to 15% savings for customers.

It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.

“You are always one click away from Ava our chatbot to fix a flight, connect to a new hotel … whatever you need,” Cohen said.

Credit card swipes, corporate calendar items, and photos snapped on a phone of receipts can all go straight into AI analysis.

With Ava handling 50% of customer discussions, Cohen says the era of long hold times with travel agencies are a thing of the past, whether it is a natural disaster or the recent airport delays and closures that creates travel headaches.

“You don’t have to wait with us. She will take care of it,” he said.

Navan does have a lot of competitors, from niche players like Expensify to enterprise software heavyweights like Oracle and SAP.

Expensify stock has cratered since its 2021 IPO, down to under $2 per share after its $27 IPO price.

Cohen says when it comes to the competition, Navan believes it can separate itself from the pack with its focus on the traveler. No one likes to deal with expense reports or spend hours on the phone with travel agents, but “that’s what we do,” he said. “We know how to support you really fast and we know there is an interruption and we are trying to understand your journey as a traveler,” he added.

Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to its S-1 filing. For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year, but fell short of its previous timeline for profitability.

The IPO market has bounced back to life in 2025, fueled by a mix of hot AI and crypto names and more mature tech companies that grew in the past decade of Silicon Valley startup funding, such as Coreweave, Circle, Figma and Klarna (Navan was founded in 2015).

There have been 182 IPOs priced this year, an increase of 42.2% from last year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital, with total deal proceeds of $33.3 billion up just under 17% from last year.

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Apple reports fourth quarter earnings after the bell

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Apple reports fourth quarter earnings after the bell

FILE PHOTO: Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.

Mike Segar | Reuters

Apple reports fiscal fourth quarter earnings on Thursday after the bell.

The fourth quarter, which runs through the end of September, is the first quarter that includes a little more than a week of sales of the new iPhone 17 models.

Analysts have said that early signs are pointing to improved demand for the iPhone 17 models, especially the entry-level and Pro models. Investors will be looking for any color from CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh on the demand they’re seeing for the new devices.

Analysts polled by FactSet expect Apple’s fiscal 2025 to be the first year of iPhone sales growth since 2022.

Apple has also been negatively affected by Trump administration tariffs, although the company has gotten praise from President Donald Trump over its plan to spend $600 billion in the U.S. and boost American semiconductor manufacturing. Apple also announced last week that it was shipping artificial intelligence servers from a factory in Houston.

In July, Apple said it could incur $1.1 billion in tariff costs. Investors will be watching to see if its actual costs came in under its forecast, as well as what tariff costs it sees in the current quarter.

Some investors want to see Apple step up its level of capital expenditure and AI spending. Apple has largely sat out the data center and AI chip investment boom that other large tech companies are spending tens of billions on.

Last quarter, Cook said that it was “significantly” growing its investments in the technology. That will likely show up in the company’s capital expenditures, but commentary from Cook may provide insight into the company’s AI strategy.

Cook will also likely praise the company’s five-year deal with F1 to broadcast its races in the U.S. on Apple TV, the latest development in the company’s sports and media strategy.

Expectations remain high for Cook and Apple. In the June quarter, Apple reported 10% year-over-year revenue growth. For the September quarter, analysts polled by LSEG are expecting 7.7% sales growth.

Here’s what Wall Street is expecting, per LSEG estimates:

  • EPS: $1.77
  • Revenue: $102.24 billion

Analysts polled by LSEG expect Apple to guide to $132.31 billion in December quarter sales, and earnings of $2.53 per share.

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Amazon earnings: Cloud growth, holiday outlook and layoffs in focus

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Amazon earnings: Cloud growth, holiday outlook and layoffs in focus

What to expect from Amazon's earnings report as AWS faces pressure from rivals

Amazon is slated to post results for the third quarter after the closing bell Thursday.

Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are looking for:

  • Earnings per share: $1.57
  • Revenue: $177.8 billion

Wall Street is also looking at other key revenue numbers:

  • Amazon Web Services: $32.42 billion expected
  • Advertising: $17.34 billion expected

AWS growth will be a major focus for investors once again, as the company faces intensifying pressure from cloud competitors Google and Microsoft, which also reported quarterly results this week.

Revenue at AWS is projected to expand 18.1% year over year, which is about the same growth rate as the second quarter. Google’s cloud revenue accelerated 34% during the third quarter, while Microsoft Azure recorded growth of 40%.

AWS stumbled last week during an extended outage that lasted more than 15 hours, taking down numerous websites as a result. Microsoft experienced outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before its scheduled earnings release.

The Amazon unit is also battling the perception that it’s missing out on a flurry of highly lucrative artificial intelligence deals for cloud services.

Anthropic and Google deepened their cloud partnership last week in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, while Meta has inked hefty cloud deals with Google and Oracle in recent months.

Amazon on Wednesday opened its $11 billion AI data center called Project Rainier, which was first announced last December and is intended to train and run models from Claude chatbot creator Anthropic.

Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, said the startup will use 1 million of its custom Trainium2 chips by the end of 2025.

During last quarter’s earnings conference call, investors grilled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on AWS growth and AI competition.

Jassy reiterated AWS has a “pretty significant” leadership position in cloud market share, while noting that it’s still “early” days in the AI industry that remains “very top heavy” with a “small number of very large frontier models.”

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Amazon’s core retail business will also be top of mind for investors as the company gears up for the start of the holiday shopping period. Amazon said earlier this month it planned to hire 250,000 workers to staff up for peak season, the same number as the last two years.

Adobe Analytics recently projected that online holiday spending in the U.S. will jump 5.3% year over year to $253.4 billion, which is slower than last year, when online sales grew 8.7% over the same period.

During the third quarter, Amazon held its annual Prime Day deals event. Online spending reached $24.1 billion in the U.S. across the four-day stretch in July, according to Adobe, exceeding its estimates and representing growth of 30.3% year over year.

Jassy told investors last quarter that President Donald Trump‘s shifting tariff policies haven’t dented demand or driven up prices so far this year.

Amazon’s third-quarter sales are expected to increase 11.9% year over year, compared with growth of 13% in the second quarter.

For the fourth quarter, analysts surveyed by LSEG are projecting sales to reach $208.1 billion, representing growth of 10.8% from a year earlier.

Amazon on Tuesday initiated massive layoffs, cutting about 14,000 roles across nearly every area of the company. Executives hinted that more cuts may be on the way in the new year as the company looks to get leaner, reduce bureaucracy and invest further in AI.

Once the job reductions are complete, they’re expected to be the largest corporate cuts in Amazon’s history, CNBC previously reported. Amazon laid off more than 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023.

Shares of Amazon have increased 4.9% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up approximately 24% over the same stretch.

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