GOOD WEEK

Peloton Interactive Inc PTON:NASDAQ are trading up as Investors sent Peloton shares up 13.6% on Friday.  The stock has tumbled more than 60% so far this year, with the company’s share price hitting an all-time low of $8.22 in mid-July. Shares had traded as high as $120.62 apiece roughly a year ago.  Under CEO Barry McCarthy, who took the reins from John Foley in February, the business has focused on ways to grow subscription revenue over hardware sales. Earlier this year, for example, Peloton raised the price of its all-access subscription plan in the United States to $44 per month from $39.

Mircon Technology Inc. up 65.04 following the CHIPS and Science Act being signed into law this week.  The bill establishes an International Technology Security and Innovation Fund, including $100 million annually over five years for the State Department, which will allow us to support secure semiconductor supply chains as well as the development and adoption of secure telecommunications networks.  According to Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, the CHIPS and Science Act is "an important step toward solidifying American semiconductor leadership for decades to come." Currently, the U.S. relies on East Asia for 75% of global production.
 

BAD WEEK
Best Buy Co. Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota.  The Retailer is down to USD$80.30 as anticipated slower sales after seeing a boom in demand for home theaters, office equipment, kitchen appliances and benefitting from stimulus dollars. Yet in late July, it cut its sales forecast for the second quarter and full year, saying consumers are skipping over big-ticket items as they get hit by inflation.

Walmart, Shopify and Peloton are also laying off workers as sales demand slows. Walmart cut about 200 corporate employees, according to people familiar with the matter. Shopify laid off roughly 1,000 workers. And Peloton said Friday that it is slashing about 780 jobs.  Amazon’s workforce has gotten smaller, too, primarily through attrition. The company’s headcount shrank by 99,000 people to 1.52 million employees at the end of the second quarter after almost doubling in size during the pandemic.


WHAT ELSE HAPPENED?

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong known in the West as Jay Y. Lee has won a presidential pardon by South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, allowing the grandson of Samsung’s founder to resume leadership of the powerful conglomerate. The pardon will be formalized on August 15th.  The presidential pardon is reminiscent of the two given to Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, who was convicted of corruption and tax evasion in 1996 and 2008.  The pardon is the latest turn in a bribery scandal that dates back to 2017, when Lee was accused of bribing then-President Park Geun-hye. The Samsung heir was initially sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of corruption but served less than one year of his sentence before being released on appeal. He was subsequently reimprisoned in January 2021 before being released again in August that year on parole. In total, he served a year and a half of his 30-month sentence.