Category: 3. Business

(Reuters) -Workday reported third-quarter subscription revenue in line with Wall Street ​estimates on Tuesday, signaling softer demand and ‌sending its shares down nearly 7% in extended trading.

The human resources ‌software provider’s fourth-quarter subscription revenue forecast was also barely above estimates, hit by sluggish demand from certain higher education customers that depend heavily on federal ⁠funding.

Workday competes with Oracle,‌ SAP and payroll providers such as Automatic Data Processing. Its customers include ‍United Airlines, Visa and FedEx.

In an uncertain economy, some customers are tightening spend on platforms like Workday as they ​reassess budgets and timing.

The company expects fourth-quarter subscription ‌revenue of about $2.36 billion, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $2.35 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.

In the third quarter, the company’s revenue rose 12.6% to ⁠$2.43 billion, slightly ​beating estimates of $2.42 billion.​

Subscription revenue also rose 14.6% to $2.24 billion in the quarter ended ‍October 31,⁠ which came in line with estimates.

The company reported adjusted profit per share of $2.32 for ⁠the quarter, compared with an estimate of $2.18 per ‌share.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru;‌ Editing by Alan Barona)

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AI bubble fears are getting louder. Stocks tied to artificial intelligence continue to rise, yet every earnings cycle brings intensifying anxiety, especially around Nvidia and US tech giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta. Investors are scanning every signal for the earliest sign that the boom could be starting to unwind. 

But they are looking in the wrong place. If the AI cycle is going to crack, the first signs will come from Asia. 

Today’s AI mania certainly resembles past tech bubbles. There is intense hype, generous venture funding and a clear divide between investors who see an unsustainable surge in spending and those who insist that this is real transformation, big enough to justify aggressive investment.

What is different this time is the location of the bottlenecks. The most constrained and most profitable links in the AI supply chain are now in Asia. High-bandwidth memory chips, advanced chip packaging and cutting-edge chipmaking capacity, all essential for powering AI models, are overwhelmingly concentrated in Korea and Taiwan.

SK Hynix and Samsung together produce about 80 per cent of the world’s high-bandwidth memory, while TSMC controls nearly three-quarters of the global contract chipmaking market. Also, unlike previous tech cycles, which were largely defined by software, the global AI boom depends critically on the supply of these physical components.

Take SK Hynix, the world leader in high-bandwidth memory, the ultrafast memory chips used to train and run large AI models. Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips rely heavily on these chips and each new generation requires more quantities of them. Last month, SK disclosed that its entire production of these chips had already been sold out until the end of 2026 with supply expected to remain tight compared with demand into 2027.

It is the same story at TSMC. Its advanced packaging technology that integrates Nvidia’s AI chips with large stacks of high-bandwidth memory chips has become essential to AI chip production. TSMC’s capacity for this technology remains in high demand with Nvidia alone reported to have secured more than 70 per cent of that capacity for this year.

Taken together with record earnings at Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers, it appears on the surface to be clear evidence of booming AI demand.

Yet in chip supply chains, unusually strong demand often signals a cycle peak, not lasting growth. Chip order backlogs typically form during periods of scarcity, as they did last year, when customers place far more orders than they actually need. Suppliers, seeing only the order log, interpret this as sustained demand and expand production capacity. But as supply normalises, those customers start to pull back, reducing or deferring the volumes previously committed to.

Global chip revenue is expected to grow just 15 per cent this year, according to IDC, a rate far below previous cycles of industry growth. That modest figure, given the scale of AI hype, signals that the current boom is concentrated in a narrow segment of the chip supply chain rather than the industry as a whole. That also makes any slowdown in AI growth easier to spot.

Meanwhile, the US tech groups leading the AI push, where bubble fears are loudest, are not where the real risk lies. Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are spending aggressively on infrastructure for the technology, but AI is not their main profit driver. Their revenue bases remain diversified across advertising, cloud and productivity software. Operating margins do not depend on factory capacity utilisation. Capital spending can be redirected if the financial case for AI weakens.

That is not the case for Asia’s chipmakers. AI and high-performance computing-related products are now their main growth engines. At TSMC, for example, high-performance computing made up 57 per cent of net revenue in the third quarter. Because chipmaking depends on volume and carries heavy fixed costs, even moderate dips in demand can show up quickly in earnings.

This sensitivity is exactly why chipmakers’ data will matter so much in assessing the true state of AI demand going forward. It is one of the few places where results cannot be smoothed over with long-term product visions. AI may well reshape the economy, but its foundations remain tied to the realities of long-standing chip cycles.

june.yoon@ft.com

Meta Platforms META 3.78%increase; green up pointing triangle is in talks to use chips made by Google in its artificial-intelligence efforts, a step toward diversifying away from its reliance on Nvidia NVDA -2.59%decrease; red down pointing triangle, according to people familiar with the matter.

A deal could be worth billions of dollars, but the talks are continuing and may not result in one. It is still up in the air whether Meta would use the chips, known as tensor processing units or TPUs, to train its AI models or to do inference, one of the people said. Inference, the process a trained model uses to generate the response to a query, requires less computational power than training.

The health regulator extended its review by 3 months to February 28, 2026.

Sign up here.

The FDA extended the deadline after Ascendis submitted additional information on November 5 regarding a required follow-up study, prompting a major change to the application, the company said.

Ascendis had answered all remaining questions from the agency, including providing a revised plan for the post-approval study, and would continue to work closely with the FDA to finalize the requirements, CEO Jan Mikkelsen said.

The rare disorder, called achondroplasia, is caused by a genetic mutation that affects a protein in the body called fibroblast growth factor receptor 3, or FGFR3, resulting in dwarfism.

Ascendis’ therapy, TransCon CNP, targets a naturally occurring peptide called C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP), which has been shown to counteract the growth-inhibiting effects of the FGFR3 mutation and stimulate growth.

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Plans to relax restrictions on new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea will be unveiled on Wednesday under the government’s North Sea Strategy.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce the publication of the strategy as part of her Budget speech, the BBC understands. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will release a document on it shortly after.

The strategy is expected to confirm the government is relaxing its moratorium on new drilling for oil and gas in a form in which it can argue the new areas are extensions of existing infrastructure.

This idea for allowing new drilling in a way that can be “tied back” to existing fields was first floated at the Labour conference in September.

The results of the North Sea review will not directly reference the decision being considered by ministers over whether to give the go ahead to the controversial Rosebank field, which Ed Miliband was vocally opposed to while in opposition.

That project is the subject of a separate and ongoing regulatory and judicial process. However, the wider relaxation in rules is widely thought to increase the chances Rosebank will ultimately be approved.

Tiebacks have historically been used for small remote extensions to existing oil and gas fields which geologically stray into currently unlicenced areas of seabed.

Rosebank is a much larger facility which requires its own production infrastructure.

There has also been speculation that the windfall tax of 78% – due to expire in 2030 – might be phased out earlier.

The oil and gas industry has been lobbying hard in recent months for changes to the windfall tax, or energy profits levy, which they say has been crippling the industry.

Investment is at an all-time low with operators instead looking to spend their money in parts of the world with more favourable tax rates.

Research from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen estimates that about 1,000 jobs a month are currently being lost.

It is understood the green light for “tie backs” would be viewed as a hollow gesture without at least some concessions on taxation.

A kind of “cap and floor” mechanism would seem like the most likely move from government, which would kick in if oil prices returned to high levels like they did in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The industry argues that subsequent falls in the price of crude oil demonstrate that the “windfall” has now ended and that taxation should reflect that change.

CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla., Nov. 14, 2025 — Boeing [NYSE: BA] mission controllers confirmed the second ViaSat‑3 satellite, built on the company’s high‑power 702MP+ platform,…

Italian company Bending Spoons flew largely under the radar — until last month. In a span of 48 hours, the company announced the acquisition of AOL and a massive $270 million raise, quadrupling its valuation to $11 billion, up from $2.55 billion set in early 2024.

Bending Spoons has grown rapidly by acquiring stagnating tech brands like Evernote, Meetup, and Vimeo, then turning them profitable through aggressive cost-cutting and price increases. While the company’s approach is similar to private equity, there is one key difference: Bending Spoons has no plans to sell these businesses.

Andrew Dumont, the founder and CEO of Curious, a firm that also acquires and revitalizes what he calls “venture zombies,” is convinced this “hold forever” strategy will become increasingly prominent in the coming years as AI-native startups make older VC-backed software businesses less relevant.

“Our belief is that the venture power law, in which 80% of companies ‘fail,’ produces many great businesses, even if they’re not unicorns,” Dumont told TechCrunch.

Dumont defines a “great business” as one that can be purchased at a low price and quickly revived to generate substantial cash flows. This “buy, fix, and hold” strategy is the playbook for a growing number of investors, from the 30-year-old Constellation Software, which pioneered the model, to newer players, including Bending Spoons, Tiny, SaaS.group, Arising Ventures, and Calm Capital, according to Dumont.

“Our whole model is to buy these companies, make them profitable, and use those earnings to grow the business,” Dumont said.

In 2023, Curious raised $16 million in dedicated capital for buying software companies that have stalled and can no longer secure follow-on investment.

Since then, the firm has bought five businesses, including UserVoice, a 17-year-old startup that raised $9 million in VC funding from Betaworks and SV Angel.

“It’s a great business, but the cap table wasn’t aligned with keeping it. These funds get old, and these companies just sit there,” Dumont said. “We provide liquidity and also reset these companies for profitability.”

Although Dumont didn’t disclose how much he paid for UserVoice, he said that stagnant companies sell for a fraction of the valuation commanded by healthy SaaS startups, which typically sell for 4x annual revenue or more. Based on our conversation, we estimate that “venture zombies” sometimes sell for as low as 1x yearly revenue.

By implementing cost-cutting and price increases, Curious can push these businesses to achieve 20% to 30% profit margins almost immediately. “If you have a million-dollar business, you’re kicking off $300,000 in earnings,” he offered as an example.

They achieve the turnarounds because, unlike the stand-alone companies, they can centralize functions like sales, marketing, finance, and other admin roles, across all of their portfolio companies. “We’re not trying to sell the businesses we acquire and don’t need VC-scale exits, so we can balance growth and profitability more sustainably,” Dumont said.

When asked why VCs don’t urge their startups to be profitable like Curious does, Dumont responded by saying: “Investors don’t care about earnings; they only care about growth. Without it, there’s no VC-scale exit, so there’s no incentive to operate with that level of profitability.”

The cash generated from Curious’ companies is then used to buy other startups, Dumont said.

The firm plans to buy 50 to 75 startups like UserVoice over the next five years, and Dumont is certain he won’t have a shortage of targets to choose from. Curious is focused on acquiring startups that generate $1 million to $5 million in recurring revenue annually, a segment of the software market that, according to Dumont, private equity shops and secondary investors have historically ignored.

“We’ve been doing this for a little under two years now, and we’ve probably looked at at least 500 companies, and we bought five,” Dumont said.

While Bending Spoons’ big valuation hike may validate the “venture zombie” acquisition model, Dumont doesn’t expect a lot of new competition. Turning profits out of stagnation isn’t easy. “It’s a ton of work,” he said.