Saudi Arabia’s biggest chemical company reported lower-than-expected profit as a global industry downturn persisted and pressured selling prices, margins and utilization rates.
Saudi Basic Industries Corp. posted third-quarter net income of 440 million riyals ($117 million), according to a statement on Sunday. While the company returned to profit after a string of quarterly losses, the figures trailed the consensus forecast of 729 million by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Adventure (TSE:6030) continues to operate at a loss but has managed to narrow its losses at a steady 5.1% annual rate over the past five years. The stock trades at ¥2,610, just under its estimated fair value of ¥2,624.71, and its Price-To-Sales Ratio of 0.8x remains more attractive than both industry (0.9x) and peer (1.1x) averages. With no major risks flagged and valuation multiples pointing to good value, investors are likely focused on whether this steady improvement in losses sets up a turn to profitability.
See our full analysis for Adventure.
Now we will see how these results compare against the core narratives in the community. In some cases, the numbers will reinforce the story, while in others, they may challenge the prevailing view.
Curious how numbers become stories that shape markets? Explore Community Narratives
Adventure has reduced its losses by an average of 5.1% annually over the last five years, which is a notable multi-year turnaround pace given ongoing unprofitability.
Recent performance highlights the prevailing market view that steady progress toward narrowing losses, even without profits, helps strengthen the fundamental case for patient investors.
This gradual improvement, supported by multi-year incremental gains, challenges the idea that only profitable companies deserve investor attention.
The persistence in shrinking losses, despite lack of headline profitability, underpins why some investors stay positive on the path toward better financial health.
With a Price-To-Sales Ratio of 0.8x, Adventure trades at a level lower than both its industry (0.9x) and peer (1.1x) averages, giving it an edge on traditional valuation metrics.
The prevailing market view leans on this discount as a key reason the stock’s risk/reward skews positively despite the lack of near-term profits.
A lower multiple compared to both industry and peer benchmarks provides support for the view that the downside may be more limited at current prices.
Investors seeking a bargain often prioritize stocks trading below peer averages, especially when other risks are not dominant in recent filings.
The share price of ¥2,610 sits just under the DCF fair value of ¥2,624.71, indicating the market price is essentially aligned with modeled intrinsic value as of the latest filing.
The prevailing market view points out that this tight gap between price and DCF fair value removes a major stumbling block for value-focused investors.
With so little difference between price and calculated fair value, the stock may draw attention from those who see minimal over- or undervaluation right now.
This alignment can also shift the investor focus toward fundamentals and earnings trajectory, rather than chasing a large value gap.
Aker BioMarine (OB:AKBM) remains unprofitable, with losses deepening at an average of 15% per year over the past five years. The latest report highlights no turnaround in net profit margin or high-quality earnings. However, the company’s revenue is forecast to climb 10.8% per year, significantly outpacing the broader Norwegian market’s expected growth of 2.4%. Shares trade at NOK86, well below an estimated fair value of NOK196.27. For investors, the story has shifted to AKBM’s path toward profitability and its rapid earnings growth potential, balanced against stretched price-to-sales multiples compared to peers and continued losses.
See our full analysis for Aker BioMarine.
The next section takes these headline results and sets them directly against Simply Wall St’s community-driven narratives, highlighting which stories hold up and which are challenged by the numbers.
See what the community is saying about Aker BioMarine
Analysts expect profit margins to reverse from negative 6.3% today to a healthy 16.2% in three years, as AKBM’s efficiency initiatives take effect.
According to the analysts’ consensus view, several factors are expected to drive this turnaround:
Centralizing the Human Health Ingredients segment in Houston is intended to streamline production and bring down costs. Successful launches in large U.S. retail chains are anticipated to lift sales volumes and push margins higher.
Efforts to mitigate tariff and supply chain pressures, through programs like duty drawback and optimized export routes to China, are forecast to help stabilize earnings and support margin expansion.
Results reinforce the consensus take that margin improvement depends on both internal cost control and overcoming external headwinds.
📊 Read the full Aker BioMarine Consensus Narrative.
Aker BioMarine carries $157 million of interest-bearing debt, so rising net profits will need to balance against sizable financial obligations as revenue scales up.
Consensus narrative highlights both opportunity and risk:
While revenue is projected to jump 14% a year, high debt levels may restrict the benefits of stronger operations, especially if market conditions become less favorable.
Analysts caution that ongoing restructurings, such as relocating resources to Houston, remain a potential source of extra costs that could impact margin gains expected from growth initiatives.
Shares trade at NOK86, which is well below the DCF fair value of NOK196.27, but remain expensive on a price-to-sales ratio (3.5x) compared to Norwegian food peers (1.3x) and the industry average (1.8x).
Analysts’ consensus view points to an apparent disconnect:
Based on the current share price, the analyst target is 69.12, which is 19.6% lower and implies skepticism about AKBM hitting projected growth and profitability milestones.
Consensus sees future upside as possible but stresses that improvement in operating results is key, not just narrative momentum or sector optimism.
Lemonsoft Oyj (HLSE:LEMON) posted a net profit margin of 14.5%, down from 16.9% a year ago, with its revenue forecast to grow at 4.1% per year, just trailing the Finnish market average of 4.2%. Earnings are projected to increase at 13.6% per year, compared to the broader market’s 16.7% outlook, and the company has delivered an average annual earnings growth of 11.3% over the past five years. With earnings quality described as high, these results suggest a steady, if slightly slowing, operational performance that positions Lemonsoft as a value contender among its software peers.
See our full analysis for Lemonsoft Oyj.
Next up, we will put these numbers in context by comparing them to the wider market narratives and expectations, spotting where Lemonsoft’s story aligns or veers off track.
Curious how numbers become stories that shape markets? Explore Community Narratives
Lemonsoft’s Price-to-Earnings ratio stands at 28.1x, which is not only right in line with the European software industry average (28x), but also sits well below the immediate peer group average of 42.7x. This gives the stock a relative value edge that was not deeply apparent from first-glance headline metrics.
What stands out for newer investors is that the share price trades below discounted cash flow (DCF) fair value (€7.00 versus €8.34), heavily supporting the view that Lemonsoft offers a margin of safety despite trailing revenue growth.
The DCF fair value calculation is even higher than the industry peer average, suggesting that current market pricing underappreciates Lemonsoft’s underlying fundamentals.
This valuation disconnect is especially notable considering the firm’s recent net profit margin decline, offering a defensive angle even with sector growth cooling.
Lemonsoft’s share price has not been particularly stable over the past three months, even though the company’s forecast profit and revenue growth are positive and not far off the market average.
While recent price fluctuations might concern cautious investors, prevailing analyses suggest that Lemonsoft’s defensive characteristics, such as high earnings quality and continued profit growth at 13.6% per year, help balance out stability risks.
Share price volatility has not corresponded with a sudden deterioration in the company’s fundamentals, which reassures those focused on sustained results rather than short-term price moves.
The company’s average annual earnings growth of 11.3% across five years also offers a buffer that tempers the significance of recent share price swings.
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Artificial intelligence groups are on a hiring spree for a rare kind of software developer who can code and talk to customers, as they race to increase adoption of their cutting-edge technology.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Cohere are recruiting for so-called forward-deployed engineers, a new job for generative AI companies, as part of a push to generate more revenues by installing specialists within businesses to help them customise their AI models.
OpenAI set up an FDE team at the start of this year and expects to grow it to about 50 engineers in 2025, Arnaud Fournier, who heads up the company’s FDEs in Europe and the Middle East, told the Financial Times. Anthropic said it would grow its applied AI team, which includes FDEs and product engineers, fivefold this year to meet customer demand.
Job advertisements for these type of customer-facing AI roles have rocketed in 2025, according to data from jobs platform Indeed. Monthly job listings for FDEs increased more than 800 per cent between January and September this year.
The move comes as businesses across industries from manufacturing to healthcare are increasingly keen to adopt AI tools, but are often unsure how to use the technology and generate a return on investment.
“A Fortune 500 bank has completely different needs than a start-up building an AI-native product,” said Cat de Jong, head of applied AI at Anthropic.
Nic Prettejohn, head of AI in the UK at Palantir, the data intelligence group, called the approach “product discovery from the inside”.
“You want to build something that when you present to the customer, they say, ‘that’s a game-changer’,” he added.
Palantir said it pioneered the job almost two decades ago, with FDE’s now representing about half of its workforce. The concept stems from the military, where soldiers were forward deployed into foreign countries. Palantir has sent its FDEs to Afghan and Iraqi military bases, factory floors in the US midwest, as well as oil refineries.
The company often sends customers a pair of employees, dubbed internally as “Echo” and “Delta”. The former is charged with deducing what the customer needs, while the latter has the technical skills to create it.
Prettejohn said: “[Forward-deployed engineers] know that the only valuable software is not how exquisite its code is or how beautiful the language . . . It’s only valuable if it means something for the end customer.”
AI start-ups are hoping to emulate Palantir’s use of the role. Cohere’s co-founder and chief executive Aidan Gomez said deploying engineers at the beginning of the customer’s contract helps build long, durable relationships.
“We embed engineers at the start of work to ensure customers get exactly what they need and scale back once companies are up and running,” Gomez said.
While FDEs represent a relatively small number of AI groups’ workforce, OpenAI said demand for these roles has exceeded its expectations.
The group used this approach to customise its technology for John Deere, an agricultural machinery manufacturer, to help create more precise farming tools. This resulted in farmers reducing chemical spraying by 60 per cent to 70 per cent.
OpenAI’s Fournier said: “We learn what customers in different industries really need, we experiment and innovate together, and then those insights help advance OpenAI’s research and product offerings based on what works in the real world.”
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The European Commission is drawing up plans to expand central supervision over key financial markets infrastructure, including stock exchanges, crypto exchanges and clearing houses, in an effort to eliminate fragmentation in one of the single market’s core areas.
The move is part of a broader effort to bolster the EU competitiveness in relation to the US by ensuring that companies can access funding and scale up on the continent rather than across the Atlantic. The current landscape, with dozens of national and regional regulators and hundreds of trading and post-trading institutions, raises the costs for cross-border trades, a significant obstacle for start-ups to scale up in Europe.
A single supervisor modelled after the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US is seen as a significant step to completing the EU’s “capital markets union”. The move is backed by ECB President Christine Lagarde and her predecessor Mario Draghi, who mentioned this in a report he drafted last year on improving Europe’s competitiveness.
The commission has said it will put forward proposals in December for a “markets integration package”.
The most contentious idea is to expand the powers of the existing European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) to also cover “the most significant cross-border entities”, including stock exchanges, crypto assets service providers, and post-trading infrastructure such as central clearing counterparties and central securities depositories, according to people briefed on the matter.
The commission will also call for Esma to have the last say on disputes between large asset managers. While not directly in charge of supervision, Esma would issue binding decisions in case of disputes between national supervisory authorities, the people said.
Central supervision has long been opposed by Berlin, but the government led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz has recently signalled openness and is exploring options together with France, a strong backer of the capital markets union. The Financial Times previously reported that the asset management industry was among the areas where the German government could envisage Esma supervision, but not crypto exchanges.
Other capitals, notably Luxembourg and Dublin, are still balking at the idea of handing over oversight powers to the Paris-based authority. They argue that the move could disadvantage their national financial sector, as they remain sceptical that EU regulators would act in the best interests of smaller nations.
“We would like to have [supervisory] convergence rather than creating a costly and ineffective centralised model,” said Gilles Roth, Luxembourg’s finance minister.
One European exchange group said it saw little benefit in shifting oversight of crypto assets service providers to Esma, citing a good working relationship with its national supervisor, and expressing concerns about higher compliance costs and potential Esma over-reach.
“Expanding Esma’s supervisory responsibilities would mean higher fees paid by the industry,” said Marin Capelle, policy adviser at Efama, the fund industry lobby.
The commission said it was “still exploring the potential of EU level supervision in relation to some critical infrastructures, such as central counterparties, central securities depositories and trading venues, as well as in relation to big cross-border entities such as asset managers”.
“We are considering different models for single supervision . . . from the perspective of balancing the EU interest with local expertise,” it added.
Additional reporting by Florian Müller in Frankfurt
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Hoping to reinvent the way we view holiday homes, a new breed of co-ownership companies now offers the benefits of flexibility, variety and hassle-free fractional ownership within a freehold basis. August has more than 500 homeowners and manages 80 renovated properties across Europe. Its CEO Mélie Dunod claims that the average holiday home is used for just 35 days every year.
“Why own 100 per cent of an asset that you visit just 10 per cent of the time?” she asks. August’s co-ownership model gives you a choice of shared properties and locations, as well as regulated access to the calendar to pick your time away (shares from €700,000). “We’re real-estate matchmakers,” says Dunod.
The march of five-star branded residences continues, with a recent report from marketing agency Graham Associates indicating growth of almost 180 per cent in the past decade. It’s a sector predicted to more than double by 2031, but a lack of viable space in Paris has meant the major players have largely bypassed the capital. Until now. Among the vanguard is The Maybourne Residences Saint-Germain, a reinvention of the former Ministry of Defence across two creative streets of the Rive Gauche, which will create 23 luxury homes alongside a 101-key hotel (from €3.5mn for a one-bedroom residence at rue de l’Université).
The 17th-century buildings will be “re-concepted for the 21st century… to be the living room of Saint-Germain”, says Maybourne of the properties, which will provide owners with exclusive access to a 25m pool and hotel facilities that include six cafés and restaurants, and one of the city’s largest spas and health clubs, Surrenne, a sister to those at The Emory in London and The Maybourne Riviera.
One successful way to reinvent an area in need of a fillip is to designate it as a Design District. Miami is one blueprint, where real estate investor Craig Robins has transformed 18 low-level blocks of unprepossessing furniture depots into an art and architectural must-visit hub. The latest neighbourhood to get official Design District designation is Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).
An 1890s industrial area reinvented for 21st-century creatives and loft-loving tech bros, it has more than 150 design firms, showrooms and studios. When David Walentas, founder of Two Trees Management, bought two million square feet in this area in 1978 for $12mn, he had to entice early arrivals with free or heavily reduced rent. Today, penthouses sell for up to $17mn, Walentas is a billionaire and Dumbo is one of Brooklyn’s most expensive and desirable neighbourhoods. Available through Sphere Estates, this three-bedroom waterfront Dumbo apartment, for sale at $5.5mn, has views across the East River taking in Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.
Say what you like about the Emirate – and plenty do – but its transformation from a 1960s fishing village into a global playground is a lesson in what ambition and barrels of oil money can achieve. In a world where wealth is ever more mobile, Dubai is an undisputed winner, says Jeremy Savory, co-founder and CEO of citizenship and residency investment firm Savory & Partners, who has reported a 41 per cent rise in Golden Visa applications over the past year.
The top of the market is booming too: Savills’ figures show that transactions in the Dh10mn-plus market (about £2mn) saw a tenfold rise over the past four years. Rosewood is the latest five-star brand to arrive, announcing plans for Rosewood Residences Dubai, 63 residences alongside a 195-key hotel on Jumeirah Beach. The apartments will be priced on average at $3,000 per sq ft.
Tuscany can seem little changed since Michelangelo picked up his paintbrush, thanks to the heavily protected landscape across this central Italian region. In fact, artful reinvention has saved innumerable historic estates and farmhouses from decay, turning them into desirable rural homes. The Ricasoli family, who have produced wine on their Chianti Classico Brolio Estate for centuries, were among the first to sell rundown estate farmhouses to foreign buyers 50 years ago.
This autumn they unveiled a further six unrestored homes for sale, exclusively through Knight Frank (from €1.8mn). “These farmhouses, including one that featured in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Stealing Beauty, offer a rare opportunity to get a foothold in prime Chianti on a world-famous estate,” says Bill Thomson, chairman of Knight Frank’s Italian Network.
London’s successful reimagining of some of its classical landmarks into modern branded residences has been mirrored in the Spanish capital, where new developments in historic buildings by investment firm Persepolis include Banyan Tree Padilla Madrid Residences and SLS Madrid Infantas Residences. It’s also the city that designer Patricia Urquiola has chosen for her first Spanish mainland project: Casa Lamar Cedaceros 9 will have 22 one- to five-bedroom residences with five-star wellness and concierge services (from €2.3mn).
The timing could not be more fortuitous, with estate agency Lucas Fox reporting the number of international buyers up 80 per cent between mid-2022 and mid-2025. “Madrid is where the smart money is going,” says Marco Gramaglia from Lucas Fox. “No wealth tax, a thriving cultural scene and a lifestyle to match. With names like Soho House setting up shop, and seven five-star hotels opening since 2021, Madrid is not just on the rise, it’s front and centre.”
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Gold’s recent rally has boosted the prospects of cyanide producers as they increase production to meet rising demand for chemicals to process the metal.
Two of the largest suppliers of sodium cyanide, which is used to leach gold specks from crushed rock, said they had rapidly expanded production on the back of rising gold prices and increased mining activity.
Orica, which acquired US rival Cyanco for $640mn last year, plans to accelerate production as North American operators look to restart mothballed gold mines, said Andrew Stewart, head of Orica’s speciality chemicals division.
“We’re enjoying the volatility coming out of the White House,” he said, referring to the trade uncertainty from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which has driven much of gold’s record run.
Australian Gold Reagents, another sodium cyanide producer, this year applied to the state government to boost production capacity at its Western Australia facility to 210,000 tonnes a year in the future.
The company, which supplies miners in Africa, Australia, South America and south-east Asia, has already started to raise capacity by 30 per cent to 130,000 tonnes this year.
“Within chemicals, [the sodium cyanide plant] is one of our strongest return on capital investments and will continue to be so,” said Aaron Hood, managing director of Wesfarmers’ chemicals, energy and fertiliser division, which owns AGR.
The price of gold has risen 15 per cent in the past two months and hit an all-time high of $4,381.52 a troy ounce last week before settling at about $4,000 this week.
The sharp rally, partly driven by a dash to safer assets amid geopolitical uncertainty, comes as the mining sector undergoes consolidation and has spurred more mining activity.
Gold groups Newcrest, Northern Star and Gold Fields have acquired smaller rivals in the past two years, while smaller miners have begun to look at gold deposits previously deemed unviable.
Ramoun Lazar, an analyst with Jefferies, said the rally “incentivises gold exploration and, in turn, increases the demand for . . . sodium cyanide given ore bodies become deeper and harder to mine”.
Orica’s history dates to the Victorian gold rush of the 1870s when it supplied explosives to miners. It later became part of UK chemicals group ICI before being spun out in the 1990s. “We started in gold and we’ve gone back there,” said Stewart.
Wesfarmers, which started as a farmers’ co-operative and owns several Australian retail chains, has invested in a wide array of minerals and chemicals, including lithium.
But the sodium cyanide business, which it has owned alongside Coogee Chemicals since 1988, has been a “quiet achiever”, said Hood. “It’s one of our largest export businesses.”
The Australian companies compete with Czech chemicals group Draslovka and Chinese rivals, which make it as a byproduct of nylon manufacturing.
A longer-term threat to cyanide producers could be less toxic alternatives, said Paul Breuer, a scientist at the government research institute CSIRO, who has led a research team to develop an alternative gold leaching product called thiosulphate.
Breuer said government regulations on cyanide use were becoming more stringent — especially around the risk of the chemical entering water supplies — but it has been a struggle to convince the conservative gold industry to switch from a chemical considered effective and robust.
Wesfarmers’ Hood said he was unconvinced that alternatives would make much of a mark given the mining industry’s cost pressures, adding: “If you’re a metallurgist, why would you take the risk?”
Elon Musk isn’t afraid to commit to the bit.
One day before he officially acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, he shared a video on his account that showed him carrying a sink into the social media platform’s former headquarters in San Francisco.
“Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!,” Musk wrote.
During Friday’s episode of the “All-In” podcast, Musk said that the video, which now has 1.2 million likes and 202,000 reposts, almost didn’t happen.
“Well, I think the store was confused because my security team was asking for any kind of sink, and normally, people wouldn’t ask for any kind of sink because you need a sink that fits in your bathroom or connects to a certain kind of plumbing,” Musk said. “So, they’re trying to ask, ‘What kind of faucets do you want?’ No, I just wanted a sink.”
Musk said the store almost didn’t sell them a sink out of concern.
“The store was confused that we just wanted a sink and didn’t care what the sink connected to,” Musk said. “They were, like, almost not letting us buy the sink because they thought maybe we’d buy the wrong sink.”
“It’s just rare that somebody wants a sink for sink’s sake,” Musk said.
Representatives for Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Twitter, now known as X, underwent major changes after Musk completed his takeover, including layoffs, office closures, and the discontinuation of the original blue checkmark verification feature.
Another significant shift happened this March when Musk announced that his AI company, xAI, acquired X in an all-stock deal.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk wrote. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Grok, a generative chatbot that debuted on the social media platform in November 2023, is just one example of how Musk is encouraging synergy.
The chatbot, powered by a large language model with the same name, can answer users’ queries on X and in Tesla vehicles. It also has a stand-alone website.
Although Musk has shared plans to expand Grok’s capabilities, the system has encountered some challenges. In July, the chatbot faced criticism after it shared several antisemitic posts, prompting xAI to apologize for its “horrific behavior.”
“After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company wrote on X.
The incident occurred days before xAI debuted Grok 4, the latest iteration of the chatbot.
A new feature lurks in the backroom of a Whole Foods Market in suburban Philadelphia: the ShopBots, a group of robots that fetch Tide Pods and Pepsi for shoppers who aren’t fully satisfied by Whole Foods’s selection of organic kale and craft beer.
It’s an experiment run by a team of Amazon AMZN 9.58%increase; green up pointing triangle and Whole Foods staff, who have strategized about how to get a wider range of groceries into the hands of customers without diluting a 45-year-old brand defined by its strict ingredient standards.
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