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On Today's Bloomberg Intelligence Show, we dig inside the big business stories impacting Wall Street and the global markets.
Each and every week we provide in depth research and data on some of the two thousand companies in one hundred and thirty industries our analysts cover worldwide.
Today, we'll break down a merger between two of the world's largest advertising groups PLAUS.
We'll discuss why shares of the computer tech company Oracle fell by the most in a year.
But first we dive into how I planned US supermarket merger between Kroger and Albertson's crumbled. And this came after Albertson terminated their.
Packed Albertson's also set a file the lawsuit against Kroger, claiming the company failed to exercise best efforts to secure regulatory approval.
The lawsuit comes after our federal judge blocked the deal, saying the merger with lesson competition and raise prices for your shoppers. For more.
We are joined by Jen Ree Bloomberg Intelligence senior litigation analyst.
We first asked Jen if it's common for merger partners on a broken deal to suit each other.
It happens once in a while. Well, I'll say it's pretty rare, but it has happened. I mean, think about Anthemin Signa. I don't know if you remember that deal from back in twenty fifteen. It fell apart also, and there was litigation for a couple of years after the deal was terminated in Delaware. And you know, they both came out with nothing. Spent a lot of money and both came out with nothing.
Is it true that you think that Kroger didn't do enough here? Like, do they have a leg to stand on Alberson?
I think a breach of contract claim based on you know, failing to abide by sufficiently defending against the antitrust claims is very difficult because you know, this is really very subjective and to some extent, when companies go to court and they have a remedy, they're sort of rolling the dice. They're hoping they'll convince the judge, even though they didn't convince the FTC. And I'm not so sure that you can think of that as a breach in this case though,
having meant a trial, the remedy really was deficient. I mean, it was very difficult to understand how a judge, after the FDC presented their case on how this deal could cause harm in thousands of markets, how a judge could accept the remedy that had been put forward by Kroger, which was really very piecemeal, very complicated and difficult, and didn't really have the best buyer. So you know, we're gonna have to see what happens here with this.
I mean, so again, I kind of thought that's kind of what a partially what a breakup fee kind of covers there. I mean, if this deal doesn't go through for whatever reason, you guys wanted to buyas you initiated the deal, if it doesn't go through, right, you got to compensate.
Me right, right, that's exactly right. The seller is really has a.
Difficult time during that interim period, right, they lose employees. They can always enter new supply contracts, So this is really intended to make that seller whole, you know, in this case, I think now Kroger's turned around and said, no, it was it was Albertsons that breached the contract, you know, And of course they're probably doing that to get a
little bit of leverage here. Maybe the hopes would be that they could settle for something less than that six hundred million breakup fee in order to make all the litigation go away. Maybe maybe that's what's happening here, just a little bit of leverage.
But you know, again, we'll have to see what happens.
It would be a shame if they continue to litigate this and spend millions more dollars.
Good for the lawyers.
A deal, dumb question? Is a deal really done?
Oh?
Yes, they killed for sure, it's done.
So Albertson's is already terminated. They exercised their right under the agreement to terminate, so it is done.
The deal.
Agreement is no longer good. So if they even wanted to do another deal, they'd have to enter a new agreement. And now obviously there's antagonism between the.
Companies, all right, in your world of antitrust, What is the expectation of change given a new administration, given you a Republican control House and Senate, is there any expectation that things will get easier?
I think it get better.
I think some of the exuberance on Wall Street is maybe a little overdone. These huge deals between competitors are still going to get challenged. And we have to remember that the two Republican FTC commissioners who will still be there on the Commission both voted yes to sue the Tapestry could pre deal and to sue the temper See Le Mattress Firm deal. They both said yes we should sue, so they are aligned in some restricts with suing the
deals that could cause harm. I do think what we're going to see though, is an uptaking deals that can close with settlements. We didn't have any of that in Biden. The Biden enforcers did not want to settle deals if the deal was bad. They wanted to challenge the deal, and that's what they did. I think in this case, once we have a majority of the FTC and new people at the DOJ. We're going to see that list of settled deals that then go on to close grow.
What do you make of the potential new FTC people coming in, Well.
I'll just say this.
If Lenakon's mission was to stop consolidation and revitalize antitrust, their mission is going to be to stop with they perceive as censorship of conservative viewpoints by big tech platforms. There has been a lot of talk about that, even suggesting that there could be collusion amongst big tech platforms to censor conservative viewpoints and that the FTC should be going after these companies under the anti trust laws to stop that. And I think that's going to be a big focus.
So what's the timing there at the FTC and the DOJ. When do the new sheriffs, if you will, kind of get in town.
The FTC could be DOJ will be quick, these people will leave. The appointees by Biden will leave in January, and that is the expectation also that Lena Kon at the FTC will leave in January. As soon as Trump is inaugurated January twenty, then Andrew Ferguson will become the chair. If Lena Khan is still there, she'll then just become a commissioner, but she will probably leave and then at that point he just has to get his new appointment
mark meter through the Senate confirmation process. It could take a few months. He has a majority in the Senate in the House. I don't think it's going to be too difficult. So it'll be a few months and in the meantime it'll be a two to two FTC. Probably the DJ will change over more quickly, probably in January.
So if I'm a company and I'm interested in buying another company, do I get on the list now? Do I wait until all this stuff is cleared and then I get on the waiting list to get my deal done? Like what's my strategy?
I think if you know that it has some issues, if you know you're probably going to get investigated, you can go ahead and file it now because you have eight months ahead of you and the new people will be the decision maker.
So if you have a deal you.
Think has no issues and could get through in thirty days, maybe you wait right because you have a greater hope of just getting get cleared in thirty days once the new people are in all right.
Thanks to Jen Rey, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation analyst.
This week we focused on a Bloomberg Big Take story entitled Jane Fraser stares down skeptics ahead of City's critical year.
You can find it on Bloomberg dot Com and the Terminal, and the story looks at extensive reporting and an exclusive interview with Citygroup CEO Jane Fraser, and it illustrates her five year plan to turn the bank around.
For more.
We were joined by the story's author, Todd Gillespie, a Bloomberg Finance reporter.
We first asked Todd to break down his reporting and how Citygroup has done recently.
Thanks generally speaking as a sector have done really well this year. You know, Citi's kind of sitting the middle of the pack of the top six major US banks, so they're doing okay.
You know.
Mark Mason, the CFO, said that the bank is set to hit the top end of its revenue guidance for the end of this year. So after years of disappointing people, you know, investors, analysts, slowly maybe starting to think that she can turn the ship around.
But it's a huge task.
Why is the ship so big and why is it so hard to turn Well.
City Group is you know, was once before the financial crisis, the world's largest financial company. It was the US's largest bank. This is a company that is probably the most global bank in the world. It's the only bank, for instance, that has a significant presence in Lebanon, where it had to evacuate staff earlier this year.
We reported that earlier this year.
And yeah, so you know, it's one of those banks that is so sprawling, which is one of its advantages because it gets, you know, it enables it to have this incredible global network of payment systems and m and a advice and you know X in all sorts of different countries.
But it's also a big hindrance.
And one of the things that Jane Fraser has tried to do is pull in exit you know, thirteen of its retail markets where it has retail banking presence. It's about IPO, it's retail business in Mexico by twenty twenty six. So it's really kind of trying to straighten, you know, downsize in the right ways she's saying, and also increase its feed businesses like wealth management and banking as well.
What does City want to be when it grows up? Does it want to be JP Morgan? Is that the aspiration for City or they have a different strategy.
I mean, it's hard to com bear, but yeah, I mean I probably say JP Morgan is a bank. I mean i'd say small steps, you know, I think Bank for America. The way that Bank of America came out of the financial crisis was something that City could have only hoped to emulate.
Right.
City has really been a laggard since the financial crisis in a way that Bank of America was able to suddenly turn that ship around fairly strongly. City is only just managing to maybe start to start do that.
You know.
It has very large servicesiness payment system, just like JP Morgan. It's obviously it's banking business has been traditionally one of the smaller on the M and A side, but larger on the DCM and ECM side. So it's trying to trying to see if it can kind of even out those businesses as well. So yeah, it's unclear. I mean, yeah, maybe if Jamie Diamond had stayed at City Group back in the day, it.
Would have had a very different trajectory In talking.
To shareholders and talking to analysts, what's the vibe on Jane Fraser, like, is she doing a good job?
Is it?
I realize it's only halfway through, but what's the confidence level?
Yeah, well she's passed halfway through now. I mean she set out these targets in March twenty twenty two. She says that by the end of twenty twenty six she can get to a return on tangible common equity of eleven to twelve percent. They're sitting rather unhappily just under seven percent right now, which is one of the key metrics that investors an analyst, are quite unhappy with, to be honest. But people like her as a CEO, you know,
people respect her. She's pretty forthright, she's got empathy, you know, regulators, you know folks. I think people like dealing with her as a person. But obviously, when you take a bank through this massive change, you know, right, they announced twenty thousand job cuts at the beginning of this year, nine thousand of those still to go in the next two years.
It's it's, you know, you're obviously going to have enemies and people who really don't like the way that you're you're moving this thing around.
What's next for city in their turner REMP plant. Is there a mile post that investors are saying for this is the next thing we need to see.
The next thing everyone needs to see is positive operating leverage that really consistently comes through. That's you know, that's that's revenues outpacing growth and revenues outpacing expenses for them
in the next twelve months. And they also really want to see strong growth towards that RTC that returns target every quarter, quarter by quarter, and that's the kind of consistency that city has lacked for the past decade that Jane Fraser is really trying to bring back to the business and show investors that they can believe the targets that she and her CFO Mark Mason set out and actually stick to those so that they have that confidence in the market, they can get rid of those regulatory
burdens that have kneecapped them for so long, and that city can really come out of this stronger, more streamlined, and finally, you know, put behind it this bloat that has really weighed it down.
You also mentioned in the piece, but how they do good numbers, They deliver good numbers, they don't get the credit for it and earnings.
What's up with that?
Totally?
I mean every you know, every quarter there. You know, if they post strong revenues, it's the ROTC number that's not quite right. If the ROTC number is good, it's revenues that aren't quite right, or it's something like that. And you know these are often battles really on earning schools. These are longer arning schools than most banks have, and
you can really listen to those yourself. They do get quite colorful and quite lengthy, so you know you need to have an extra shot of espresso while they're going through.
Thanks to Todd Gillespie, Bloomberg Finance.
Reporter, coming up well, break down the carbon market and why it's a key part to transforming the energy landscape.
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We move next to a big deal in the media space.
This week we heard that Onakrom Group is acquiring inner Public Group to create the world's largest advertising company.
The deal values into Public at thirteen point three billion dollars and the merger has seen as a response to the changing advertising landscape.
For more.
We are joined by Githermongana than Bloomberg intelligence analysts on US Media.
We first asked Githa exactly why this deal happened.
Over the past ten to fifteen years, advertising has been completely disrupted by the likes of you know, Google and Meta where we've seen a complete shift of ad budgets from traditional mediums like you know, TV and radio and newspaper to really all digital forms of advertising to the Internet. And so there has been a lot of disintermediation with the ad agency holding companies all of these you know Madison Avenue type of agency companies that are only really
a handful of them left. So you have the big four omnicommon Interpublic are of course two US based agencies, but the bigger ones are their European rivals, Publicies and WPP. And really what we're trying, what they're trying to do here is, you know, it's become such a data driven business. There is so much competition from big tech and now of course with the advent of AI, you know, this
threat of disintermediation is only growing more and more. And I think this is absolutely the right time for consolidation. And this really just tells us about the amount of secular pressures in this industry, very very similar to the linear TV model in a way.
How cost intensive is this business? How much do they spend on labor?
For instance, sixty percent, sixty percent of all of their costs are are on labor. So really, this merger, in so many ways, John is really about saving costs. They already outlined about seven hundred and fifty million dollars in cost energies, and of course that is likely to go up as they kind of eliminate redundancies. And if you just kind of look at it over the course of the next ten years, I mean there have been multiple studies that have been conducted that have said that you know,
with AI being able to create campaigns. Being able to create all of these the creative elements of what an ad agency does, almost thirty three thousand jobs or post to almost forty percent of the ad agency sector's jobs would have anyway been eliminated. So it is really going to come down to saving on on labor.
Wow.
So in this world where it's it's Facebook and it's YouTube, and if I'm Coca Cola and I'm Ford Motor Company and I'm going to do a big advertising buy on one of these digital platforms, how different is is than forty years ago when I was just advertising on network television.
Yeah, it's really different now because all of these small businesses actually now just go directly to Google and Meta. So the way that it is now working is all of the small mom and pop stores, medium sized businesses are not going to these ad agency networks anymore. So it's really only a handful of these big brands that are really still you know, having their campaigns kind of
designed by the big you know, ad agency networks. And even in those big brands, even brands like p ANDNG, even brands like Apple are really kind of going more and more in house. So it has become really difficult for the ad agency companies to kind of survive in this changing world, and they have to keep adapting, and they have to keep acquiring more data centric businesses. They have to keep investing more in AI really and in data.
And if you kind of just look at omnicommon Interpublic versus their European rivals, they're actually lagging behind a little bit in terms of AI and tech investments. And I think this deal was kind of prompted a little bit by that as well.
Can AI really deliver a creative execution for these firms?
Yes, it can, maybe not at the highest level, but I think as you know, the algorithms kind of keep getting refined, we are definitely going to see a huge level of disintermediation. And even today, you know, we talk about, you know, these companies talk about how AI is helping them kind of refine their campaigns, kind of refine the messaging, get to better targeting. So AI is definitely a very
very useful tool. And if you just kind of look at even Omnicom and Interpublic over the past year, one of the reasons why Interpublic has kind of been so keen to for the sale is because it has been losing so many clients. They lost a very very important client with Amazon, and really a whole string of account losses kind of precipitated this whole sale process. And on the other hand, if you look at Omnicom, they've actually have an AI assist tool called Omni which has helped
them kind of really win a lot of clients. So we've kind of seen the two agency groups have very differing performances all right.
Thanks to Keith Raganath and Bloomberg Intelligence Analysts on US media, each week.
We look at research from Bloomberg and EF previously known as New Energy Finance.
They're the team at Bloomberg that tracks and analyzes the energy transition from commodities to power, transport, industries, buildings, and agricultural sectors.
This week, we took a look at the carbon market, a key part of transforming the energy landscape for more. We were joined by bo Chin b n EF, head of America's Environmental Markets and Weather analysts.
We first asked bo to discuss what she's currently seeing in the US carbon market and what she expects in the year ahead.
The US carbon market is now going through ups and downs, so this year has been super exciting year for US carbon markets. We have hit record highs. The most interesting carbon markets in US are on the coasts, so we have on the West coast California linked with Quebec, and then on the East Coast we have Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a power sector specific carbon market focused on ten states. Both of these markets have seen price records.
So looking at just West Coast, the California carbon price went up forty percent since twenty twenty three, hitting a record forty four dollars per ton, and we have seen this price is actually, unfortunately this year, come down thirty percent this year, and this is because of the reforms that have been proposed and also the delays of these reforms.
On the East Coast we have a similar story. So it was a very polish story up till September with prices moving up seventy percent to twenty eight dollars per short ton, and then prices have since also come down twenty five percent because of their reforms.
But we do expect next.
Year to be a very exciting year as these reforms get concluded and we see more policy certainty within these markets.
Explain it to me like I'm a five year old. What drives the price of carbon?
I was going to ask that to you. Actually, yeah, carbon markets really is like commodity.
Yeah, commodity, so demand, Yeah, it's demand.
It's basically think it as a farmer's market where polluters go to buy permits and then abaters go to sell their permits. It depends how big family are feeding, how much demand is for that abatement, then that drives the price. In our world, we call that demand, and the price is a marginal abatement cost curve. So if you have a strong demand or a strong climate ambition and a very limited marginal abayment cost curve, that would lead to
a high carbon price. And then vice versa. If you have low demand or low climate action and a very significant marginalbayment cost curve, meaning that you have cheap abatement and a vast amount of it, then you would have typically a lower carbon price.
So to me, also the idea what the carbon price is, If you get it high enough, then companies are going to want to store their carbon because they're going to be able to then trade that credit and get money for it. Right, So the higher it is, the better it is for the environment because companies will be more incentivized to store their carbon or not produce it or to sell it.
Right, Yeah, but what is that price?
It really depends on the supply and demand assets a commodity.
But like every talking about like eighty dollars, would it really be a good incentive?
Is it one hundred?
I mean any commodity is going to have that incentive price?
Yeah, exactly. It depends on what technology you're looking at. What is the trigger point for a trigger price? So if you're like we typically say that the cheapest is the call to gas field switch in, and that also depends on the market, So in a Europe that typically is higher than US where gas is already very low.
We also looked into this that not only a power sector now is the ones that are being trigger but also transport where you tilt from ice vehicle to a EV and a carbon price can help you to do that. And also carbon price doesn't work alone, so there's a lot of complementary policies. We are pretty much the yeah, final defense. So if other complementary policies didn't deliver the results we wanted to see, then carbon price can do the final lift.
Hopefully interesting, So real quickly change in administrations coming up. What does that mean for your world?
Yeah, it's really exciting actually for US. Maybe for the clean energy sector it's maybe not such positive news as potentially some subsidies like Inflation Reduction Act and other complementary policies for renewables and clean transport will be now reduced and there will be more support for oil and gas industry. But for carbon market this could be a good thing because we would have more emissions that would support carbon prices. But also a lot of states could now really double
down on carbon market as a policy tool to support prices. Also, for investors, carbon price could become an attractive tool to invest because carbon markets, particularly those compliance carbon markets, can hedge inflation, which could become a topic now with the immigration rules and twists being changed with the new admin quickly.
Is it a bad thing that it's so fragmented?
Yes?
Do we ever get to a place where there's like a US carbon price?
We do hope.
So for.
National level carbon price, it will most likely not become a realistic thing in the next few years, but we could see more states linking like even right now we are seeing that Washington, which survived the repeal actually.
In November as well.
So now there's more opportunity for Washington state to be linked with a California.
There are also other states that.
Are talking about having a compliance carbon market. Actually right here in New York, very excited about Niki. I'm excited to make the sun O Mikid become a Hey Nikki.
So New York is going to.
Be a economy wide and it's going to be a similar size to California. So if these all get linked, then we could have a like maybe not an official national but a benchmark price our.
Thanks to bo Chin b n Ef, head of America's Environmental Markets and weather analysts.
Coming up on the program, we'll discuss why the department store chain may See has trimmed its profit outlook for the year.
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Eleven thirty We moved next to the computer tech company Oracle.
This week's shares of Oracle fell by the most in a year.
That's after the company reported second quarter profit and revenue that missed analysts expectations from more.
We are joined by anaag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence technology analyst.
First, ask on Arov what Oracle's results say about its business.
See, when you look at the constant currency growth for a cloud infrastructure, it was fifty two percent. I think consensus was fifty one, so a slight beat, but the reaction tells me it was not good enough for byside investors. You know, from our side, there's no problem in terms of future growth prospects for that business because backlock's very strong.
The demand is there. And for Oracle, they're actually getting work from Microsoft because Microsoft is leasing their data centers because it is having a huge backlog of work on their end.
So does that mean this is just a Hey, the stock could run up really fast. Therefore, the expectator, just the expectation game, is that what I can read into the equity.
I would absolutely say that because right now this has been the trade for twenty twenty four has been the infrastructure that's related to AI, so whether that's the chips, even the numbers were pretty good, and twenty twenty five could be a year where you will see the downstream impact of some of these AI infrastructures, which is cloud companies or other software companies coming up with applications that
are based on some of these AI infrastructures. So we have a long way to go before we realize the true value of AI spending across the entire value chain. For this year, we just saw it in the you know, the cloud and the chips part of it.
The demand is so robust on a rock that I've heard companies talk about maybe even some shortage of some components of some of the things they want to buy. Talk to us about that. What did Oracle say?
Yeah, Oracle is no different than other companies because even for Microsoft, they cannot get up data centers at the same rate as they're seeing demand coming from open AI. They are not They are everybody's having struggled to procure in video GPUs to train some of these models. And that's the case. Oracle's backlock is so strong. But you know there has been supply challenges. They are spending a lot of money on capital expenditure. Last year approximately, they
spent about seven billion dollars in capex. This year is going to be double of that fourteen billion dollars. So I mean it we see that when these companies spend money to expand their capacity, we know that demand is behind it.
So this is like the software stuff.
So Nvidia supplies the chips for Oracle, who then uses builds the software stuff for companies like Eccentric or Amazon AM I is that correct?
Yeah, it's you got it right. In this case, what's happening is companies like Microsoft, Google, AWS, and Oracle are building an infrastructure on which companies can build applications. So these companies could be accentual, it could be JP Morgan, it could be Citybank, et cetera. These companies will go out and create their own AI apps that can then
be used internally by the companies. And I mean you can do this in house also by buying AI servers but cloud is usually a better and each cheaper way to go because you can turn it off if you don't like it. So that's what we are seeing right.
Now is peak AI anywhere on the horizon there on a rug.
That's a very very good and tough question, frankly, because the question is going to be will people get bored in the AI infrastructure space, and they will will they move to somewhere else? We saw that in the last three months suddenly the interest in Salesforce, for example, and that is because Salesforce is the second leg of this equation. One is the infrastructure we talked about. Second is the application.
Salesforce created some AI application that can help you do you know, fix your online orders, automatically, do some referns, et cetera. So that's the application part of it. We think next yer is going to be a lot of Salesforce like applications that will come to the market by different software companies that will help people be more productive. And then the third and the final layer would be the consulting companies that are helping in the implementation of
that that goes in tandem with software companies. But we think there are multiple years before we see the true realization of the funding that's happening right now.
All right, quickly on a rag.
Adobe is a competitor Oracle and what do we learn from Oracle as relates to Adobe.
Yeah, from a from Wells. They're both software companies, but they do slightly different things. For Adobe, the big question is going to be is their business being cannibalized by open source AI tools. We don't think that's the case right now, but that's a big argument in this space.
If you look at the entire software space right now, Adobe's probably the one where do you have the biggest argument whether they're going to be the net beneficiaries of AI or whether they're going to get hurt by I. For Adobe, we expect them to go out and come out and say that the adoption rate of their own AI tools is picking up, and that's really what we are looking for. All right.
Thanks to Anna Agrana Bloomberg Intelligence and your technology analyst.
We move next to the retail space and Macy's. This week, the department store chain said it had trimmed its profit outlook for the year.
This comes after Macy's concluded its investigation into an employee that hid millions of dollars and expenses. The discovery of the accounting eras led Macy's to delay its full earnings report back in November.
For more, we were joined by Mary Ross Gilbert Bloomberg Intelligence senior Ecuadanalysts. We first asked Mary to walk us through Macy's recent investigation.
What happened here is that they had a single employee who basically hid small package delivery expenses of about one hundred and fifty one million. That was over a three year period, so were the year to date. I think it was about nine million is the effect in the for that period. So the company, of course had to lower their guidance, and the gross margin figures anyps of course because it drops all the way down there, but it doesn't affect cash. So that's the good news and
it's put behind him. What they have done is they've improved their financial controls. They've added some additional checks and balances there. So I think this is now behind them, and I think the real focus here is on the go forward operations. And I say go forward meaning let's exclude the one hundred and fifty stores that they're going to close. Sixty five of those stores will close in
the fourth quarter. That's ahead of the original fifty they slated to close, and then the other eighty five maybe that'll get done by next year instead of the next two years. Nonetheless, if you put those aside and you look at what's going on with the go forward business, we're seeing sequentially sequential improvement with the first fifty stores
that they've completely revamped actually posting a positive increase. They were up one point nine percent in the third quarter, and that's the third quarter of positive comp improven there. So we're actually seeing signs that the plans, the initiatives that they're employing are working. So we see some green shoots in there. What does it let me think this accounting issue is behind them all right?
What does a revamped store look like? What's the strategy behind a revamped store?
Paul, That's a good question.
So what that means is is they've really up their game in terms of merchandising. They brought in new brands like Lafitte, La Levec Fee, Donna, Karen, Carl Lagerfeld, Steve Madden. These brands offer great style and value to the company. Their private label program has been completely revamped. Now that's only about fifteen percent of sales. So the biggest part is really bringing me in these other brands. But not only that, they've uped their game in terms of service.
They now have salespeople in the shoe department and then they have runners. So what happens is a salesperson will be working directly with a client and they'll say, hey, I need size eight, size eight and a half in this, and then they run and go get them. And then also they have service in handbags and in women's ready to wear. So having boosted the service levels also improving
the overall appearance throughout the stores. We've been in our channel checks watching this happen, and we see the improvement. We see how that they got rid of some brands that were less relevant, brought in these newer ones. And we also saw during that Black Friday, we saw this year more traffic in the stores than we saw in the.
Prior two years.
And of course when you look at the data, their sales were better this year. They saw an increase in the Black Friday through Cyber Monday and the consumer transaction data, and that's something the company mentioned on the call today that yes, they're seeing strong you know, or sort of sequential improvement versus the third quarter into the fourth quarter.
So I think those are some of the part.
You're describing Mary. The revamped stores. It sounds a little bit like Bloomingdale's Light.
You know what.
That's exactly if you look at a let's say, one of their better what what they would call that, one of their flagships. So we have one here right next door in Century City, it does very much look like a Bloomingdale's.
The store is interesting. It's brand new.
I mean they've remodeled it four or five times within the last few years. What I mean by that is they've expanded beauty. So you walk in, it's an incredible showcase of beauty.
Also includes Blue Mercury, of course.
So we we've seen just and the stores so much brighter. But even in a tired old mall down in southern California that I will go to, even that store looks much better, even though it's sort of a tired location.
They've really improved it.
The better brands that they've incorporated, making these little Calvin Klein they look like little boutique shops, Michael Core's, Calvin Kleine, Tommy Hillfigure those are all in there and beautifully appointed. It's much more open. There's not just a sea of merchandise. It just makes more sense. So that's been extended across another hundred stores, so not just a fifty, but another one hundred.
All right, So what's the company saying just about holiday sales so far? It is kind of confirmed what you've seen.
Yes, they did.
They said that they saw a good start to the holiday season, but of course we still have more to go. So no, and they act actually raised their guidance ATAD so I thought that was also an indication of what they're seeing, and so they could potentially beat the guidance because when they put things the guidance out, they really attempt to exceed those figures.
Right. Thanks to Mary Ross Gilbert, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Equity Analyst.
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