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Samsung is facing headwinds from a global slump in deamand and prices for its memory chips, sales of which make up a large part of the South Korean technology giant’s business.

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Samsung said Friday its operating profit likely plunged 32% in the third quarter of the year as weaker memory pricing and demand hit the technology giant.

The South Korean firm said it expects operating profit to be between 10.7 trillion ($7.57 billion) and 10.9 trillion South Korean won. It is the first decline in operating profit since 2019.

Samsung reported a revenue rise of between 75 trillion and 77 trillion Korean won, a 1.3% to 4% year-on-year rise.

Samsung’s chip business, which includes selling chips for laptops, servers and storage, as well as manufacturing semiconductors, accounts for 70% of its profits.

The company sells NAND and DRAM chips which are used in devices such as laptops and smartphones, through to data centers. It also has a semiconductor manufacturing business. Samsung did not release any commentary alongside its third-quarter forecast but analysts said a weakening of memory chip prices and demand was likely behind the profit fall.

Daiwa Capital Markets said in a note on Friday that DRAM and NAND shipments declined by 15% and 10% quarter-on-quarter, while prices fell 19% and 20% respectively quarter-on-quarter, “which led to a sharp decline in earnings.”

The predicted profit fall adds further concerns about the chip sector which is facing softer demand amid a weaker global macroeconomic environment.

Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday reported preliminary revenue estimates for the third quarter that were well below its initial guidance. The U.S. firm cited “weaker than expected PC market and significant inventory correction actions across the PC supply chain.”

Micron, a rival to Samsung, warned last month that “consumer demand and inventory-related headwinds” were impacting memory makers.

Samsung’s profit fall forecast sent shockwaves through other chip stocks. In Europe, companies such as Dutch equipment maker ASML and Apple supplier STMicro were lower in morning trade.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, was down in Taiwan trade. However, after the market close in Taiwan, the company reported a 42.6% year-on-year rise in revenue, bucking some of the bearishness among semiconductor firms. TSMC is perhaps the world’s most important chipmaker, manufacturing components for the world’s largest electronics makers including Apple.

Many companies, including Micron, are cutting their capital expenditure and reducing inventory, which could help companies like Samsung recover and signal the bottom of the current semiconductor downturn.

“That is kind of the signal of bottoming,” SK Kim, analyst at Daiwa Securities Capital Markets, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Friday.

Kim said he expects memory prices will rebound in the first half of the next year, adding that Samsung’s share price “is also bottoming out soon.”

Samsung shares are down more than 28% year-to-date.

Despite the recent slump, Samsung has laid out a roadmap for its semiconductor business, in which it aims to start manufacturing the most advanced chips in five years time.

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

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Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.

EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.

The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.

The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.

EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.

Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.

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At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.

The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.

Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”

“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.

EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”

Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.

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Additional reporting by CNBC’s Annie Palmer.

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 2, 2024.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

Amazon warehouse workers at a site in North Carolina will vote next month on whether to join a union, setting the stage for the company’s latest labor battle.

Workers at the Garner, North Carolina, facility will cast their ballots from Feb. 10 to Feb. 15, according to a Tuesday post on X by Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, the group seeking to organize staffers. Representatives from Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Known as CAUSE, the grassroots group led by current and former employees has been working to organize Amazon employees at the warehouse, which is located in a suburb about 10 miles south of Raleigh, for the past three years.

If the election is successful, the warehouse, known as RDU1, would be only the second Amazon site in the U.S. to unionize. Workers at Amazon’s largest warehouse in New York City voted to join the Amazon Labor Union in 2022, but the group struggled to negotiate a contract with Amazon, and last June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.

A handful of union elections were held at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. in recent years but employees have either rejected unionization or the results continue to be disputed in lengthy court battles. Last November, a federal labor judge ordered a third rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after ruling the company improperly interfered in the vote.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

CAUSE filed for a union election last month, saying in a press release that 30% of workers at the North Carolina site signed union authorization cards, which is the necessary threshold to trigger an NLRB vote. Organizers are seeking to boost wages and improve working conditions.

The union filing comes after Amazon delivery and warehouse workers went on strike at nine facilities last month to push the company to come to the bargaining table, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the employees. The action was intended to snarl Amazon’s operations during the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, referred to as peak season. An Amazon representative told Reuters the company expected to see a limited impact on deliveries from the strike.

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Apple’s inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

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Apple's inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

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An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, stoking concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple that summarizes users’ notifications using AI, pushed out inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications on the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship.

The incident happened a day before the actual tournament’s final, which Littler did go on to win.

Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that Tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself — which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it’s working on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently, generated news notifications show up as coming directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it’s encouraging users to report a concern if they view an “unexpected notification summary.”

The BBC isn’t the only news organization that has been affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the feature sent an AI-summarized notification wrongly claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

The mistake was flagged on the social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.

CNBC has reached out to the BBC and New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation issue.

AI’s misinformation problem

Apple touts its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite previews of news app notifications into a single alert on a users’ lock screen.

It’s a feature Apple says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and cut down on the overwhelming barrage of updates many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this has resulted in what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” — responses generated by AI that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple will not be alone in having challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently telling mistruths, so-called ‘hallucinations’,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at tech-focused market research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.

In Apple’s case, because the AI is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it’s mashed the words together in a way that’s inaccurately characterized the events — but confidently presenting them as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up delivering erroneous messages,” Wood added. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how it responds.”

Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt inserted by a user, relying on vast quantities of data which its underlying large language models are trained on.

Sometimes the AI might not know the answer. But because it’s been programmed to always present a response to user prompts, this can result in cases where the AI effectively lies.

It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summarization feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said to expect one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”

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