Business News Roundup, March 1
Salesforce gave a first-quarter revenue forecast that fell short of analysts’ projections, hampered by rising competition from rivals with cloud products.
Profit is expected to be 25 to 26 cents a share, compared with the analysts’ average estimate of 30 cents.
CEO Marc Benioff has been trying to bolster Salesforce’s product line through acquisitions, seeking growth in new markets as bigger companies such as Oracle and Microsoft pursue its traditional cloud turf.
The company’s annual revenue growth has slowed to less than 30 percent.
Target reported a 43 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit and weak store sales overshadowed an improving online performance.
The Minneapolis company had warned about results after a disappointing holiday season, but investors were still rattled by the numbers released Tuesday.
SoftBank, the Tokyo telecommunications firm that owns Sprint, is investing $1.7 billion to combine Intelsat, a Luxembourg satellite company with London’s OneWeb.
Founder Greg Wyler’s goal is to entirely erase the digital divide in 10 years by launching hundreds of cheap, compact satellites into orbit.
OneWeb’s largest engineering center is in northern Virginia, and a new manufacturing facility in Florida promises to hire close to 3,000 people as part of an earlier investment from SoftBank.
The PayPal Charitable Giving Fund was accused in a lawsuit of failing to tell donors that their gifts may not reach their intended charities if the organizations aren’t registered with the online payment service.
An Illinois resident alleged that she used PayPal’s charity site to make $3,250 in year-end donations last year to 13 charities, only to learn that 10 of the groups wouldn’t receive the funds because they weren’t registered.
The San Jose company doesn’t tell donors that unregistered charities won’t receive their donations, and it also doesn’t inform those groups that contributions have been made to them, according to the complaint.
If the groups don’t open PayPal accounts within six months, their donations are confiscated and redirected to organizations of the company’s choosing, Jay Edelson, an attorney who specializes in consumer-privacy litigation, wrote in the suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Chicago.
“Tens of thousands of generous individuals have made donations, after placing their trust in PayPal, that, unbeknownst to them, have never reached their chosen charity,” according to the complaint.
Terry Kass, who brought the case, said she discovered the flaw in PayPal’s system when she contacted a legal-aid clinic she had pledged money to and learned that her donation hadn’t been received.