Hi, 3 charts for you today:
Nestlé takes a break
Food giant Nestlé has been under pressure. Ukrainian leaders, users on social media and even the hacker collective Anonymous have all been calling on Nestlé to pull its products from Russia — and yesterday the world's largest food company finally obliged, announcing that it would stop selling "non-essential" products in Russia.
All told Nestlé sold about $1.8bn worth of products in Russia last year. That's a huge dollar amount but in relative terms it only makes up about 2% of the company's total sales, which topped more than $94bn in 2021.
Nestlé's withdrawal is focused on non-essential products, like confectionery, coffee and pet food - which are major categories for the group globally. Products deemed "essential" will continue to sell, albeit with a promise that any profits from those sales will be donated to humanitarian relief charities.
Name calling
Nestlé's decision to pull out of Russia is another win for Ukrainian leaders that have been targeting specific companies and calling them out for doing business in Russia - a strategy that is working well alongside Ukraine's appeal to governments and trade organizations. The latest companies in the spotlight are French carmaker Renault, supermarket group Auchan and retailer Leroy Merlin, which Zelensky called out this week for their continued Russian operations.
Back in 2011 Uber launched in New York City as a scrappy tech start-up that was hoping to disrupt the billion-dollar taxi industry. And disrupt it they did.Within 6 short years, Uber drivers were doing more trips per day than the iconic New York yellow cabs. That sent the cost of a taxi medallion, the transferable permits that allow taxicabs to operate in New York, plummeting down from the $1 million+ they cost at their peak to closer to $100k today.
A taxi truce
So it's something of a surprise that Uber has just announced a deal to list the city's taxicabs directly through the Uber app, ending more than a decade of fierce competition between Uber and the taxi companies.
Once launched, the integration means 14,000 taxis will be able to take trips from Uber customers through the app. That seems like a win for the tech company at a time when demand (and prices) have been surging, but it also means more potential customers for the taxi drivers, who are set to be paid at the same rate they always have been for any rides.
The box office is bouncing back... just really, really slowly.
Thanks to a big boost from The Batman, the US box office has now taken a little over $1.2bn so far in 2022 according to data from Box Office Mojo. That's about 5x more than at this time last year, when most cinemas were still closed, but relative to the previous 15 years, it's still massively underwhelming.
A slow start
From 2005 to 2019, the US box office took anywhere from $2bn (2005) to $2.9bn (2017) in the first 3 months of the year, meaning that 2022 is tracking at roughly half the pace it used to.
Interestingly the average gross per movie this year is still around $10m, but there have only been 120 releases. Typically by the end of March US cinemas have seen somewhere between 250-300 movies come out.
Straight to streaming releases, or just a backlog of filming, have changed the game, and the box office just isn't drawing people back like it used to. Case in point: a majority of Americans have only heard of 2 of the Oscars’ 10 Best Picture Nominees (more on that here).
1) Bankers are getting paid — the average Wall Street bonus just hit $257k, up 20% on last year.
2) The case of a missing $31.8 million Tyrannosaurus rex fossil — named Stan — has been solved.
3) The US has agreed to welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war, around 3% of the 3.6 million that have been displaced thus far.
4) Contemporary art has more than doubled the S&P 500's return since 1995, and thanks to Masterworks you don't need to be a billionaire to get in on the action. Check out the revolutionary art platform today.**
5) Mortgage rates have risen again, touching 4.5% in the US for the first time since 2018 — here's a chart of what that means you can borrow, if you're an "average earner".
6) Cool interactive map of America's 50 most filmed streets.
7) Wordle creator Josh Wardle has opened up on how his partner ranked every five-letter word in the dictionary, roughly 13,000 words, into whether she knew them, maybe knew them, or didn't know them — to build the original Wordle word bank.
*Past Performance Doesn’t Guarantee Future Results.See important Reg A disclosures.
**This is sponsored content.
