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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 23: XBOX CEO Phil Spencer arrives at federal court on June 23, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Top executives from Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard will be testifying during a five day hearing against the FTC to determine the fate of a $68.7B merger of the two companies. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

As Microsoft attempts to convince regulators to approve its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company is revealing some of the other ways it’s looked to expand in the video game industry.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer testified in San Francisco on Friday that the company previously opened up talks with mobile game developer Zynga but ended up not consummating a deal.

The hearing, which began on Thursday and will continue next week, came after the Federal Trade Commission gained a temporary restraining order to keep Microsoft from closing the Activision purchase. The court agreed to maintain the status quo as it reviewed the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction for the deal.

“A lot of respect for people at Zynga and what they built,” Spencer said at the hearing. “In the end, for our opportunity, we thought we needed to have something that was even bigger than what Zynga was, given our very small starting space in the mobile gaming business.”

Take Two Interactive, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto titles and other games, ended up acquiring Zynga, in May of last year for $12.7 billion. Zynga was originally for the Facebook hit social game FarmVille, before eventually expanding into mobile games, largely through acquisitions.

Prior to the Microsoft offer, Activision met with a financial firm to work on topping Take-Two‘s purchase of Zynga, CNBC reported at the time.

Spencer didn’t say when Microsoft was in talks with Zynga, and the company wouldn’t provide further comment. However, Zynga said in a filing last year that executives met in September 2021 with representatives from an unnamed “strategic acquirer,” which “expressed non-specific interest in an acquisition of Zynga.”

It wasn’t the the first time Microsoft showed such interest. The company reportedly tried to buy Zynga in 2010.

In trying to the get Activision deal over the finish line, Microsoft says that even if the two companies combine, the joint entity would be smaller than Sony, whose PlayStation console competes with Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as China’s Tencent.

Spencer said on Friday that mobile games represent a faster opportunity for growth than PC games and consoles, where Microsoft gets the bulk of its gaming revenue. Microsoft has tried to boost cloud-based game streaming on mobile devices, but that effort has challenges. They include the smaller typefaces on phone screens and the fact that smartphones don’t come with controllers, Spencer said.

Additionally, Apple has stood in the way of bringing Microsoft’s Game Pass library of video games to its App Store, he said.

Spencer said that after the company went to Zynga, he worked with Microsoft finance chief Amy Hood to look for mobile opportunities. Activision was the biggest publisher of mobile content, and it was already a longtime Microsoft partner, he said.

Activision grew its portfolio of mobile games with the 2016 acquisition of King, publisher of Candy Crush Saga. About 35% of the company’s $8 billion in 2022 revenue came from its King segment.

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

Hinge Health’s Enso product.

Courtesy: Hinge Health

Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.

Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.

The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.

“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”

The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”

Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.

Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.

The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.

Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.

Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.

Hinge Health declined to comment.

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.

As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.

Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.

JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.

“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.

The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.

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Oracle misses on earnings but touts data center growth from AI

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Oracle misses on earnings but touts data center growth from AI

Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.

Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
  • Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected

Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.

The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.

“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”

In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.

Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.

Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.

As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.

Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.

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