Game of thrones
Boardroom blitz at Nestlé
Happy Monday, candyland kings. This is your Stock Market Rundown for August 26th, 2024. Thanks for tuning in, once again. Let’s get into it:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: CEO SHUFFLE
How did you handle your last breakup? A tearful conversation over some spinach and artichoke dip? A long text ending with “I truly wish you all the best”?
There are so many ways to say goodbye. But in corporate life, it usually comes in the form of a simple two-word phrase: “You’re fired.”
Case in point: Nestlé’s CEO, Mark Schneider, was unexpectedly ousted last week. Sources within the company leaked to reporters that the reason for his unceremonious exit from the C-suite, was financial underperformance at the $234-billion-market-cap multinational.
As a packaged-food giant, Nestlé boasts a big list of billion-dollar brands, including Nescafe coffee, Perrier water, and Gerber baby food. The company has always been inventive: in 1875, Nestlé food scientists combined milk and cocoa to invent milk chocolate, reshaping the candy industry. In 1986, Nespresso pods changed how we make coffee at home. And who could forget baked potato-flavored KitKats?
During Schneider’s tenure, though, product innovation lagged. At the same time, Nestle’s bottom line was hammered by inflation. The business suffered earnings misses and sluggish sales. And the stock price slid to a multi-year low. Result: the board decided Schneider is “no longer a cultural fit” (ouch).
According to the company gossips, after eight years at the helm, Schneider was given only 24 hours’ notice of being canned. Brutal, but that’s the life of a megacorporation CEO—big career risk, but big paydays too. The now-former CEO took home $12 million in 2023… hope he saved some of it for a rainy day.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Meta (the owner of Facebook) just canceled plans to launch a virtual-reality headset that would have competed with the Apple Vision Pro. I guess they realized there wasn’t much point in competing with Apple’s headset, since it sold about as well as camouflage-print Crocs.
Move over, Tesla: BMW is now the #1 seller of electric vehicles in Europe. Beating Elon at his own game has gotta be as satisfying as a frosty Paulaner in a Bavarian Biergarten after a long drive on the Autobahn.
Was your jumpsuit made by a 14-year-old? Ecommerce retailer Shein disclosed it investigated two cases of child labour in its supply chain, and suspended orders from those suppliers. Teenagers should be playing video games and eating chicken nuggets, not toiling at a sewing machine.
After a software outage last month led to thousands of flights being canceled, Microsoft is hosting a security conference. The goal: figure out how to make the global internet infrastructure more stable than a Jenga tower at a toddler's birthday party.
That’s it for today, my dear friends. Let’s circle back for more later this week. Yours in capitalism, The Axe
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