Friday, November 6, 2026
Delta Air Lines now expects adjusted earnings of $5.10 to $5.60 a share this year, down from the $6.50 to $7.50 it affirmed in July. Its third-quarter fuel bill rose 62 per cent. Fares rose almost as fast, and that is why the quarter's operating profit barely moved.
Humana said on Friday that 95 per cent of its Medicare Advantage members are in plans rated four stars or higher for 2027, up from 20 per cent this year. Four stars is the threshold for federal bonus payments. The shares jumped about 15 per cent. Analysts expect UnitedHealth and CVS to go the other way.
The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin are discussing a deal for the F-35 that could run for up to ten years and cover both building the jet and keeping it flying, Breaking Defense reports. Production would stay at about 156 a year. The prize, and the problem, is spare parts.
Viatris has agreed to buy Pacira BioSciences for $36.50 a share in cash, about 45 per cent above Wednesday's close. It gets two non-opioid pain drugs with about $692 million of sales last year. Generic versions of the larger one, Exparel, are due to start arriving in early 2030 under patent settlements.
SpaceX has agreed to buy a nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz licences from Grain Management, the low-band airwaves that Grain bought from T-Mobile earlier this year. SpaceX says they close one of the last technical gaps between Starlink Mobile and a full mobile network. The carriers' shares fell. The tower companies' rose.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Raytheon a five-year contract for Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors with a base value of $4.4 billion, rising to $6.3 billion with two option years. It follows multi-year deals for the SM-6, the Tomahawk and AMRAAM.
Stelco has begun issuing layoff notices at its Hamilton plant, with the first cuts effective on Sunday. Cleveland-Cliffs' chief executive says the layoffs are temporary and tied to the trade war. Ottawa says the jobs were promised when Cliffs bought the company in 2024, and has given it until next week to explain.
PepsiCo beat revenue forecasts on the strength of its international business but lowered its earnings outlook for 2026, said recovery in North America was taking longer than planned, and confirmed it will raise prices on some chips and sodas after cutting them earlier in the year.
Gallagher Re puts insured losses from Hurricane Isaias in the low to mid-single-digit billions of dollars if it comes ashore at Category 1 or 2 strength, and says reinsurers have the capital to absorb that. The larger risk falls on households: in many inland counties, take-up of federal flood insurance is 2 to 5 per cent or less.
General Dynamics' board has elected Danny Deep, the company's president and a 25-year insider, to succeed Phebe Novakovic as chief executive on 1 January 2027. She becomes executive chairman. He inherits a backlog worth about 2.6 years of revenue and a company that says its task is to produce faster.
Anduril plans a shipyard at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County to make components and large assemblies for Virginia-class attack submarines, backed by a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion. It will not build whole submarines, and the yard is not expected to start work until 2030.
Hanwha Philly Shipyard said on Wednesday it has a contract to build the Missile Defense Agency's new Missile Range Instrumentation Vessel, for up to three ships with one firm. In July, the White House budget director announced two of them for $2 billion. This week's announcements gave no price.
The Port of Savannah handled 504,015 twenty-foot equivalent units in September, a record for the month and 3.7 per cent more than a year earlier, led by imports. Georgia's other big port, Brunswick, handled 22 per cent less roll-on, roll-off cargo, the ships that carry vehicles and machinery.
Wittington Investments, the holding company of Canada's Weston family, agreed on Wednesday to buy Boots from Sycamore Partners and the Pessina family for $8.9 billion including debt. Fairfax Financial, a Toronto insurance and investment group, has agreed to put up as much as $2.3 billion and is expected to own half of the equity. The family gets operational control.
Informa, the London-listed events and publishing group, agreed on Tuesday to buy Clarion Events from Blackstone for an enterprise value of £2.24 billion, and launched a process to separate Taylor & Francis, its academic publisher. It raised about £940 million by selling new shares at 860p and paused its share buyback to pay for the deal.
KKR has agreed to buy Gen II Fund Services, which does the accounting, tax and reporting work for more than 275 private investment managers, for an enterprise value of $5.1 billion. The sellers are Hg and General Atlantic, which invested in 2020, along with other minority investors. Gen II says its revenue and earnings have roughly quadrupled since.
Clayton Dubilier & Rice and McKesson agreed on Monday to take Option Care Health, the largest independent home infusion company in the United States, private for $32.05 a share. McKesson is putting in about $1.4 billion for 49 per cent, and the agreement sets out a framework for it to buy the private equity firm's majority later. Lenders have committed more money to the deal than the two buyers have.
Emera and Canadian Utilities agreed on Tuesday to combine in an all-share deal that the companies say is the largest merger ever between two Canadian companies, with a combined enterprise value of about C$72 billion. ATCO, the family-controlled group that has held Canadian Utilities since 1980, will give up that control and spin its housing, defence and ports businesses into a new company.
Uber agreed on Tuesday to buy ezCater, the Boston workplace catering marketplace, for $2.3 billion in cash. The company handled more than $2.5 billion of orders over the past year, at an average of more than $400 each. Six years ago its sales fell 85 per cent when offices emptied, and it rebuilt around workplaces where people still had to turn up.
Lamb Weston, a leading supplier of frozen fries to restaurant chains, grew North American sales volume for a seventh consecutive quarter even as fast-food traffic fell. Its executives credit chicken chains, whose traffic rose 4 per cent, for part of the gain. In Europe, where it says the industry had too much capacity, it has stopped making fries at a Dutch plant.