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The Purchase, New York-based company, which makes Cheetos, Tostitos and other Frito-Lay products as well as beverages, said it will cut nearly 20% of its product offerings by early next year. PepsiCo said it will use the savings to invest in marketing and improved value for consumers. It didn’t disclose which products or how much it would cut prices.

PepsiCo said it also plans to accelerate the introduction of new offerings with simpler and more functional ingredients, including Doritos Protein and Simply NKD Cheetos and Doritos, which contain no artificial flavors or colors. The company also recently introduced a prebiotic version of its signature cola.

PepsiCo is making the changes after prodding from Elliott Investment Management, which took a $4 billion stake in the company in September. In a letter to PepsiCo’s board, Elliott said the company is being hurt by a lack of strategic clarity, decelerating growth and eroding profitability in its North American food and beverage businesses.

In a joint statement with PepsiCo Monday, Elliott Partner Marc Steinberg said the firm is confident that PepsiCo can create value for shareholders as it executes on its new plan.

“We appreciate our collaborative engagement with PepsiCo’s management team and the urgency they have demonstrated,” Steinberg said. “We believe the plan announced today to invest in affordability, accelerate innovation and aggressively reduce costs will drive greater revenue and profit growth.”

Elliott said it plans to continue working closely with the company.

PepsiCo shares were flat in after-hours trading Monday.

PepsiCo said it expects organic revenue to grow between 2% and 4% in 2026. The company’s organic revenue rose 1.5%. the first nine months of this year.

PepsiCo also said it plans to review its supply chain and continue to make changes to its board, with a focus on global leaders who can help it reach its growth and profitability goals.

“We feel encouraged about the actions and initiatives we are implementing with urgency to improve both marketplace and financial performance,” PepsiCo Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta said in a statement.

PepsiCo said in February that years of double-digit price increases and changing customer preferences have weakened demand for its drinks and snacks. In July, the company said it was trying to combat perceptions that its products are too expensive by expanding distribution of value brands like Chester’s and Santitas.

Tokyo, December 9, 2025 – NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today that its Network Operating System (NOS) has been awarded the Silver Badge for compliance with requirements outlined by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). The NOS meets the Mandatory Use Case Requirements for SDN for Transport (MUST) developed for TIP’s open and disaggregated 400G optical transponder solution, Phoenix. This recognition further demonstrates the advancement and commercial-level reliability of NEC’s optical transport solutions.

MUST is being implemented by the TIP Open Optical and Packet Trasport (OOPT) MUST SubGroup, led by telecom operators such as Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom and Telia, which defines the target architecture and technical requirements for SDN-based transport networks. It requires that the control and management APIs for open optical terminals (O-OTs) comply with OpenConfig data models.

The Phoenix solution is also part of TIP’s OOPT initiative, led by NTT, Telia, Telefonica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and MTN, which defines open technologies, architectures, and interfaces in the optical and IP networking domains. Phoenix is the result of close collaboration among operators, specifying technical requirements for evaluating solution compliance through TIP’s testing and validation process.

In the process of becoming compliant with Phoenix, NEC has transitioned from a traditional optical transmission architecture to an advanced SDN management approach, adopting the SDN concept of centralized network resource management to enable flexible control and operation. Practical feedback from leading telecommunications operators such as Telefónica and Orange was important in refining NEC’s NOS solution to meet the specified requirements of TIP. The solution already earned a Gold Badge from TIP’s Phoenix Program in January 2025, and its growing maturity has now been further demonstrated by receiving the MUST Silver Badge.

Truell said the company had already automated roughly 80% of its customer support tickets with the help of the technology. He said the company had also implemented an internal AI-powered communication system that allows employees to query information across the organization. “We’ve actually done a lot of work internally on customizing that setup,” he said.

Cursor also uses AI for internal communications, he said. “We have a system where folks can ask any question about the company and get it answered by an AI,” Truell said, as well as an project with “a few forward deployed engineers internally embedded throughout, building custom tooling right now for operations, for sales and experimenting,” he said. 

Across the enterprise software landscape, some larger organizations are increasingly coming up against adoption challenges when attempting to integrate AI into workflows. 

Data silos—where information is trapped in disconnected systems—prevent AI tools from accessing the full context they need to be useful, and technical sprawl—the accumulation of disparate tools and platforms over years of growth— can create integration issues. Many organizations are finding they need more dedicated technical expertise to help tailor AI models to specific business needs.

Engineers are seeing productivity gains

Cursor, which is valued at $29.3 billion, said last month it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and now has more than 300 employees. The company has seen rapid growth since it was founded by a team of four MIT graduates in 2022. The company’s AI coding tool, which first launched in 2023, has been popular with software who use it to help both generate and edit code. 

There has been some conflicting research about how helpful AI tools actually are for software engineering. A July 2025 study by the nonprofit research group METR found that experienced developers working on large, mature codebases actually took 19% longer to complete tasks when using AI tools such as Cursor and Claude, despite believing they had worked 20% faster. The researchers attributed the slowdown to time spent prompting AI, waiting for responses, and time reviewing generated code.

A recent study conducted by University of Chicago found that teams using Cursor’s AI coding assistant in large companies merged 39% more pull requests (PRs) compared to non-users. The research also showed that senior developers created more detailed plans before writing code and demonstrated greater skill working with AI agents.

“A lot of folks think that junior developers get the most out of AI,” Truell said. But “when these academics went in and looked at the data, it looked like senior engineers actually were more effective in using the tools and were accepting code at higher rates and were getting more value from that.”

Truell noted that this surprised him as well: “We want to dig into to understand exactly why that’s the case.”

Story Continues

For asset heavy resource companies, the price to book ratio is often a useful yardstick because it compares the market value of the equity to the net assets on the balance sheet, including mines, plants and reserves. In general, the higher the expected growth and the lower the perceived risk, the more investors are willing to pay above book value, so a higher price to book multiple can be justified.

Uranium Energy currently trades at about 6.70x book value, which is well above the broader Oil and Gas industry average of around 1.45x and also richer than its peer group at roughly 4.31x. Simply Wall St goes a step further with its Fair Ratio, a proprietary estimate of what a reasonable price to book multiple should be after factoring in the company s growth outlook, profitability profile, risk characteristics, industry and size. This tends to be more informative than simple peer or industry comparisons, which ignore whether a company is genuinely higher quality or just more expensive. On this framework, Uranium Energy screens as clearly more expensive than its Fair Ratio, pointing to a stock that is pricing in a lot of good news already.

Result: OVERVALUED

PB ratios tell one story, but what if the real opportunity lies elsewhere? Discover 1453 companies where insiders are betting big on explosive growth.

Earlier we mentioned that there is an even better way to understand valuation, so let us introduce you to Narratives, a simple way to attach your own story about a company to the numbers behind its future. A Narrative is your view of how a business will grow, how profitable it can become, and what risks it faces, translated into assumptions for future revenue, earnings and margins that lead to a fair value estimate. This connects three pieces together: the company’s story, a structured financial forecast, and a clear fair value that you can compare to today’s share price to decide whether to buy, hold or sell. Narratives are available on Simply Wall St’s Community page, where millions of investors share and refine these story driven valuations, and they update dynamically when fresh news, earnings or guidance changes the outlook. For Uranium Energy, for example, one investor might have a very optimistic Narrative with a high fair value while another is far more cautious and assigns a much lower fair value, and you can see both side by side to decide which story you believe.

Do you think there’s more to the story for Uranium Energy? Head over to our Community to see what others are saying!

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

Companies discussed in this article include UEC.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com

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The $1.1bn loan First Brands secured to stabilise its business at the start of its bankruptcy dropped in value on Monday, in a sign that the company’s attempt to quickly reorganise its finances is foundering.

The so-called debtor-in-possession loan, provided by a cadre of existing First Brands senior lenders in September, was quoted by trading desks between 69 and 72 cents on the dollar, down 20 cents from Friday, according to people familiar with the matter.

Its rapid collapse signals that lenders are looking to pare back their exposure to the auto parts maker or get out entirely, as conflict over who has rights to what remaining collateral drags out an expensive bankruptcy process.

“Once you start untangling the Gordian knot, it gets murkier and murkier,” said one person familiar with the trading. “You’re getting more clarity on how little clarity you have as time goes on.”

Court filings showed Marathon Asset Management, Beach Point Capital Management and Redwood Capital Management were among the largest holders of the loan. But trading has intensified in recent weeks and some have cut or changed their initial positions.

A spokesperson for Marathon said the firm had sold its entire exposure to the loan at prices above 105 cents on the dollar.

Another investor said “people were panicking” and were dumping their positions, worried that the company would either need to secure a new senior loan or face further financial stress. If First Brands did strike a new loan, it could be entitled to repayment before the current rescue loan — further eroding the existing loan’s value.

First Brands and Beach Point declined to comment. Redwood did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Debtor-in-possession loans, which have the highest claim on a bankrupt company’s assets, rarely trade below 100 cents on the dollar. Having traded well above 100 cents, the First Brands loan began to fall sharply late last week.

The group of First Brands lenders that made the September loan was expected to bid for the company’s assets using the value of the $1.1bn rescue loans as well as more than $3bn in loans they made to the company before it went bankrupt.

More than 80 asset managers and hedge funds own parts of the bankruptcy loan, which was hastily put together in the days leading up to First Brands’ bankruptcy in late September, according to court filings.

A committee of First Brands’ creditors, which is challenging the rescue loan terms, previously told the bankruptcy court that the loan would ultimately come with an annualised rate of return exceeding 70 per cent.

Last month, Scott Greenberg, a lawyer for the lenders, told the court his clients expected to be fairly compensated for contributing “into a black box without a bottom”.

Greenberg in October said his clients’ due diligence was roughly 10 to 20 per cent of what they would typically have done for a loan of “this size and complexity”.

The bankruptcy thus far has been marred by conflicts over claims on collateral between various stakeholders in the company’s roughly $12bn debt stack. The company’s advisers have told the court that several billion dollars of cash has gone missing.

The company’s new management has sued First Brands founder Patrick James for fraud, alleging he misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars from the company for personal use and engaged in “fraudulent conduct”.

Customers are now freezing payments to First Brands until the court clarifies who they owe money to.

According to multiple people involved in the case, the fear is that the dwindling remaining value of the business, along with the missing cash, raises the risk that unsecured creditors and off-balance-sheet lenders will not be able to recover billions of dollars that they are owed.