Business
Starbucks reports same-store sales growth for the first time in nearly two years
The American multinational chain Starbucks Coffee store and logo seen displayed.
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Starbucks on Wednesday reported that its quarterly same-store sales returned to growth for the first time in nearly two years, showing that its turnaround strategy is winning over lapsed customers.
The coffee chain’s global same-store sales rose 1%, lifted by international markets. Its U.S. same-store sales were flat for the quarter but turned positive in September. Wall Street was projecting global same-store sales declines of 0.3% and a 0.9% decrease in U.S. same-store sales.
“We’re a year into our ‘Back to Starbucks’ strategy, and it’s clear that our turnaround is taking hold,” CEO Brian Niccol said in a statement.
Domestic same-store sales turned positive in September, and the company has held onto that momentum through October, Niccol said on the company’s conference call. However, CFO Cathy Smith cautioned analysts against cheering too soon.
“Turnarounds are difficult to forecast, and while we have good reason to believe that our U.S. company-operated [same-store sales] should build through the year, we also know that recoveries are not always linear,” she said.
The company suspended its annual forecast a year ago, and it is not expecting to release a near- or long-term outlook until an investor day slated for late January.
Shares of Starbucks rose 2% in extended trading.
Here’s what the company reported for the quarter ended Sept. 28 compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 52 cents adjusted vs. 56 cents expected
- Revenue: $9.57 billion vs. $9.35 billion expected
The coffee giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter net income attributable to Starbucks of $133.1 million, or 12 cents per share, down from $909.3 million, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier.
Excluding restructuring costs, litigation settlements and other items, Starbucks earned 52 cents per share. During the quarter, the company closed 627 locations and laid off roughly 900 nonretail employees as part of a restructuring plan.
In addition to the restructuring plan, Starbucks has been investing heavily in labor, including adding assistant store managers to many North American cafes. The added labor costs weighed on its operating margin this quarter.
Net sales rose 5% to $9.57 billion.
To revive U.S. sales, Starbucks has focused on improving the in-store experience for customers and cutting service times to under four minutes per order. More than 80% of company-operated locations have an average service time of four minutes or less, even as the chain saw a rise in traffic after it launched its fall menu, according to Niccol.
The company’s marketing efforts have switched from promotions and limited-time items to highlighting its coffee and trendy innovation, like protein-packed cold foam.
The strategy has succeeded in winning back some U.S. customers. Smith said that the number of 90-day active Starbucks Rewards members grew 1% both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.
Outside Starbucks’ home market, same-store sales increased 3%, fueled by a 6% jump in traffic.
In China, the company’s second-largest market, same-store sales rose 2%, boosted by a 9% climb in traffic. Under pressure in the country from home-grown rivals with cheaper beverages, Starbucks has lowered prices on many of its iced drinks to bring back customers.
The company is also exploring selling a stake in its China business after years of sales declines in the competitive market. Niccol previously told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the company values the China business at more than $10 billion.
“On the strategic front, we have had very strong interest from multiple high quality partners, all of whom see significant value in the Starbucks brand and team,” Niccol said on Wednesday. “We expect to retain a meaningful stake in Starbucks China and remain confident in the long term growth potential in the region.”
TOKYO: Japanese carmaker Honda Motor will make India a global manufacturing hub for its upcoming electric, Honda 0 α (alpha), whose prototype was unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show.The car has been developed for the Indian and Japanese markets, apart from other Asian countries. Its India debut will be in fiscal 2026-27. Honda Motor Co president and global CEO Toshihiro Mibe said the launch will further the company’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality and zero traffic collision fatalities worldwide by 2050.Honda 0 α (alpha) will be manufactured at Honda’s plant in Alwar, Rajasthan. Honda also launched other electric prototypes, including a green saloon. Honda India MD and CEO Takashi Nakajima said India is one of the top three markets for the company globally in terms of corporate focus and investments. Speaking on the eve of Honda’s new car launch at the Japan Mobility Show, Nakajima said, “Our top management has decided to focus on India among the three key markets for Honda’s future growth alongside the US and Japan.” Nakajima acknowledged that while Honda’s business scale in India is still low compared to the US or Japan, its future ambitions are substantial.He admitted that expanding the product line-up in India will take several years, but hinted at imminent progress. “India is one of the most promising and exciting markets in the world today. Our two-wheeler business is already very big, and now we aim to pursue strong growth in our four-wheel business by building both brand and volumes.” On ethanol blending, Nakajima said that while the higher ratio of ethanol posed challenges, Honda’s engineers were up to it. (The writer is in Tokyo at the invitation of Honda Motor Co.)
The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on artificial intelligence, as they rush to reap the benefits of an AI boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.
Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft on Wednesday reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips, even as questions swirl about returns on the investments.
Meta said its capital expenditures for 2025 will be between $70bn (£53bn) to $72bn, up from an earlier estimate of $66bn to $72bn.
Its spending growth in 2026 is poised to be “notably larger” than this year, the company said. Meta is seeking to compete with companies like OpenAI.
On a call with analysts, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg defended the firm’s investments, saying he saw big opportunities ahead driven by AI, both in terms of new products and for honing its current business selling ads and feeding people content.
“The right thing to do is accelerate this,” he said, adding later: “We are sort of perennially operating the family of apps and ads business in a compute-starved state at this point.”
Google and YouTube owner Alphabet similarly raised its forecast for this year to $91bn to $93bn, up from an earlier outlook of $85bn in the summer, in the latest sign of its increasingly lofty spending goals,
That estimate is nearly double the capital expenditures that the company reported for 2024.
Microsoft’s capital expenditures in the quarter through to 30 September, including on data centres, totalled $34.9bn, the company reported on Wednesday – a larger spending figure than analysts had expected, and up from $24 billion in the previous quarter.
“We continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said.
Azure, the firm’s cloud computing unit, and Microsoft’s other AI products have a “real-world impact”, Mr Nadella said.
Exuberance among investors about massive AI spending has helped all three tech firms outperform the broader S&P 500 index.
But Wall Street is also focused on whether these firms’ investments are starting to yield tangible returns.
The two things holding up the US economy in the last several months have been consumers and AI-related business investments, said Aditya Bhave, senior US economist at Bank of America.
“To the extent that the latter remains strong, it’s a bullish signal for GDP growth,” he said.
Imran Rahman-Jones,Technology reporter and
Lily Jamali,North America Technology correspondent
Getty ImagesWebsites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.
Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365 saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00 GMT.
It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
Amazon said AWS was operating normally.
Other sites that were impacted in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile phone operator O2 – while in the US, people reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
The M&S website remained unavailable late on Wednesday even after many others returned online.
Microsoft said business Microsoft 365 customers experienced problems.
Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notifications that read “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”
The tech giant resorted to posting updates to a thread on X after some users reported they could not access the service status page.
While NatWest’s website was temporarily impacted, the bank’s mobile banking, web chat, and telephone customer services remained available during the outage.
Meanwhile, business at the Scottish Parliament was suspended because of technical issues with the parliament’s online voting system.
The outage prompted a postponement of debate over land reform legislation that could allow Scotland to intervene in private sales and require large estates to be broken up.
A senior Scottish Parliament source told BBC News they believed the problems were related to the Microsoft outage.
Azure’s crucial role online
Exactly how much of the internet was impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
Recent outages have laid bare the fragility of the modern-day internet, according to engineering professor Gregory Falco of Cornell University.
“When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it’s thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together,” said Mr Falco.
He noted that some of those pieces are managed by the companies themselves while others are overseen by third parties such as CrowdStrike, which last year deployed a software update that affected more than eight million computers run on Microsoft systems.
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