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THE HEADLINES

 

HATERS WILL SAY IT’S PHOTOSHOP

Beyond Meat continues to show that America has an insatiable appetite for fake meat. Well, that or BYND has hired Arthur Andersen and gone full Enron on us.

The plant-based meat-substitute maker nearly quadrupled its sales last quarter, beating analyst expectations of $52.7M with a $67.3M haul.

And in case that doesn’t tickle investor’s faux-meat fancy, the meat beater has hiked its full-year revenue projection to $240M from $210M on the strength of its restaurant partnerships and grilling szn.

So, nothing to see here, right?

Wrong. It wasn’t all vegan rainbows and gluten-free butterflies. Despite “hockey stick” top-line growth, earnings disappointed. A Q2 loss of $9.4M or 24 cents per share was far worse than the 8 cents per share loss expected.

The widening loss helped send shares spiraling 14% in after-hours trading …

What else?

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good … except in this case. You see, the company is planning a secondary share offering of some 3.25M shares, 3M of which represent shareholder’s equity. At Monday’s closing price, the offering will raise more than $700M. It’s worth noting only 250k shares sold by the company will benefit it directly.

 

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

Fat lines at the IPO party aren’t the only things getting cut these days at ride-hailer Uber. Uber is laying off about 400 people, about one-third of its marketing department, in an effort to slim down and become more agile.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent a letter to the company informing employees of the reduction in staff and that while the company is growing, it needs to grow faster … especially now that it is public. Investors certainly aren’t thrilled that Uber hasn’t gained much momentum at any point since it IPOed back in May.

C-oh-no

Not to be outdone in the way of bad news, Lyft COO Jon McNeill is leaving the company after less than two years. The former President of Tesla’s global sales and services came to Lyft in 2018 to help with driver retention. Judging by every ride-share driver’s car donning both Uber and Lyft signage, that didn’t go as planned.

It’s unclear as to why McNeill is leaving but per Lyft’s public filing, he helped the company drop from $22.2B to $18.6B in market value and got paid $32.8M.

Neither Lyft nor Uber has found its way since going public earlier this year and it remains to be seen if either can figure out how to become profitable.

 

FIGHTING THE MAN

European food delivery services have had enough of Jeff Bezos’ shit. Takeaway.com and Just Eat agreed to combine food delivery forces via an all-share transaction worth more than $10B in an effort to take on the powers that be (read: Uber and Amazon).

Is it worth it?

Well, last year, Takeaway and Just Eat combined to deliver more than 360M orders worth $8.1B (that’s a lot of doner kebabs). Scale remains the name of the game when it comes to delivering to millennials (read: lazy people) who are willing to pay double for mediocre fare, as long as someone delivers it to their apartment, er flat.

Face race

The competition to shovel fast food down willing participants’ gullets has been heating up as of late. Takeaway.com agreed to acquire Delivery Hero’s German wing in a deal worth more than $1B in December. And just this year, Amazon led a $575M funding round for UK based Deliveroo as it fights to make up ground in the UK delivery game … which is currently controlled by Uber.

The only issue? Amazon delivers groceries in the UK, which Deliveroo also does, drawing scrutiny from competition regulators. Takeaway and Just Eat won’t have to worry about those pesky regulators for now, as the companies operate in separate geographies, with their only shared market being Switzerland. And Switzerland more or less sticks to the G-code as is evidenced by their snitches get stitches approach to banking.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS

• Move over Wells Fargo, there’s a new dumpster fire coming for the crown. Capital One suffered a data breach of epic proportions between the dates of March 12 and July 17. A Seattle woman, who was arrested yesterday, is accused of stealing data from 100M customers in the US and 6M people (and moose) in Canada via her access to an Amazon Web Services server. 140k social security numbers and 80k bank accounts were compromised, with the rest of the stolen data comprised of names, addresses, dates of birth, and credit scores. No word on if Jennifer Garner and Samuel L. Jackson’s data is safe.

 

• Smooth criminal. Citigroup has been fined $1.25M after ‘allegedly’ hiring three individuals convicted of crimes due to its piss poor background checks. Between January 2010 and May 2017, the bank insufficiently screened over 10k employees, of which, 520 weren’t fingerprinted. It’s worth noting that those workers weren’t brokers.

 

• Some Deutsche Bank employees were still able to access the DB email system after being laid off. Another shining example of the bank’s crack compliance operations. However, DB did not find any evidence of communication of price-sensitive info or wrongdoings. It is worth questioning why tf these individuals were on their work emails after being fired. Odds are they were going through the motions of responding to a ‘pls fix’ email.

 

• “You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. You take the blue pill—you get a boner.” Pfizer will spin off its off-patent branded drug business, Upjohn, and combine with Mylan in an all-stock deal that will be funded by $12B of new debt. The worlds of EpiPens and viagra will collide, with Mylan shareholders owning 57% of the post-merger company. The current president of the Upjohn segment, Michael Goettler, has been named as the post-merger president. Mylan shares jumped 20% initially but settled up about 12% on the day, while Pfizer stock dropped almost 4%.

 

• Colon cancer testing company Exact Science will buy breast and prostate testing company Genomic Health for roughly $2.8B. In the part stock, part cash deal, Genomic shareholders will receive $27.50 in cash and $44.50 in Exact stock for every share owned as of Monday.

 

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