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By Linda Pasquini and Leo Marchandon (Reuters) -Gucci-owner Kering has agreed to sell its beauty business to L'Oreal for 4 billion euros ($4.7 billion) in a strategic shift by new CEO Luca de Meo, who is trying to cut the luxury group's debt and refocus on its fashion business. WHAT IS THIS SALE ABOUT? The sale, which includes fragrance line Creed and long-term fragrance licences for Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Gucci, is a big step in cutting Kering's debt, a key investor concern. "The proceeds will strengthen the balance sheet and support deleveraging, adding to the 1 billion euro reduction in net debt already achieved in the first half of 2025," Juliane Barthold and Stoyan Toshev from Frankfurt-based brokerage Metzler told Reuters in an email. Royalties from these brand licenses will ensure a continuing income stream from the beauty segment for Kering, they added. Kering's net debt was 9.5 billion euros at the end of June. It also had 6 billion euros of long-term lease liabilities. Kering did not give any detail on the deal's impact on its debt. L'Oreal and Kering agreed to set up a 50/50 joint venture to explore further business opportunities beyond cosmetics. KERING STRATEGIC U-TURN Kering set up its beauty business in 2023 after buying Creed for 3.5 billion euros in an effort to diversify and reduce its reliance on the Gucci brand, which makes up most of its profit.  But it has struggled to ramp up the business, posting a 60 million euro operating loss for the first half of 2025. Kering is also battling declining growth at Gucci, which has been hit by slowing demand in the key Chinese market. Gucci made up 44.5% of its revenue and 63% of its operating income in 2024. Sarah Thirion, an analyst at Paris-based Midcap, said in a note to investors that Kering was "demonstrating strategic realism", adding: "(It) must choose its battles, and beauty is clearly no longer one of them". DE MEO FIRMLY IN THE DRIVING SEAT The sale marks a shift by CEO De Meo, backtracking on one of the big strategic pivots of recent years by his predecessor Francois-Henri Pinault, whose family controls Kering. De Meo, who took over as CEO in September, told shareholders he planned to take some difficult decisions to cut Kering's debt, including rationalising and reorganising where necessary. Kering has also postponed a plan to fully acquire Italian fashion brand Valentino, and aims to sell stakes in its real estate to raise cash. "This highlights that Luca de Meo has the mandate to make big changes and is acting quickly to make things happen," Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a research note. WHAT'S NEXT FROM DE MEO? "Luca de Meo has already laid the foundations for his ascendancy. He will certainly not fail to act quickly on the excessively high operating costs, which, together with the decline in sales, have contributed to the decline," Midcap's Thirion told Reuters in an email. Meanwhile, the joint venture will mean Kering benefits from L'Oreal's beauty expertise, Barthold and Toshev said. "We are awaiting more details from the strategy in spring 2026, which we expect to boost the operating performance further," they added. Kering is set to publish its third-quarter results on Wednesday, after the market close in Paris. ($1 = 0.8575 euros) (Reporting by Leo Marchandon and Linda Pasquini in Gdansk; editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak and Alexander Smith)

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By Caroline Valetkevitch and Naomi Rovnick NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) -Major stock indexes gained on Monday as investors awaited more quarterly results from some big U.S. companies this week, with U.S. Treasury yields edging lower ahead of upcoming U.S.-China trade discussions. Gold prices rose more than 2% on expectations of further U.S. interest rate cuts and sustained safe-haven demand. Investors are also monitoring the U.S. federal government shutdown, now in its 20th consecutive day. Key economic reports have not been published by government agencies as a result, although the September U.S. Consumer Price Index report is expected to be released on Friday. The U.S. quarterly reporting period has unofficially entered its second week, and investors are keen to see reports this week from Tesla, IBM, Netflix, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and other big names. On Wall Street, Nasdaq led gains and was more than 1% higher. The S&P 500 technology sector was leading gains among the benchmark's sectors. "Some big, large-cap stalwarts are going to be reporting," said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "Of course, if we see some disappointing earnings, that could affect the market negatively. But investors come into the week with rose-colored glasses on, feeling very good about where we've gone this year." The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 362.24 points, or 0.79%, to 46,553.87, the S&P 500 advanced 61.30 points, or 0.92%, to 6,725.42 and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 298.30 points, or 1.32%, to 22,978.27. As U.S. regional banks' earnings keep rolling in, some market watchers said tighter credit conditions could remove some froth in the market. MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe rose 10.95 points, or 1.11%, to 994.85. The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 1.03%. Japan's Nikkei jumped 2.8% to a record as a coalition deal set the stage for pro-stimulus Sanae Takaichi to become prime minister. On the U.S. trade front, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Friday he expects to meet this week with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Malaysia to try to forestall an escalation of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods that U.S. President Donald Trump said was unsustainable. Trump also confirmed he would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in two weeks in South Korea and expressed admiration for the Chinese leader. The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes fell 1.7 basis points to 3.992%, from 4.009% late on Friday. The dollar was little changed against the yen and other currencies. Markets were reducing the odds of a Bank of Japan rate hike this month to just over 20%, while in France political tensions eased. The Federal Reserve still is widely expected to cut interest rates by a quarter-point next month and again in December. The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, was down 0.02% at 98.51, with the euro up 0.03% at $1.1655. Against the Japanese yen, the dollar weakened 0.06% to 150.53. Spot gold rose 2.29% to $4,346.16 an ounce. U.S. crude fell 0.83% to $57.06 a barrel and Brent dropped to $60.62 per barrel, down 1.09% on the day. (Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch in New York and Naomi Rovnick in London; additional reporting by Wayne Cole in Sydney; Editing by Alex Richardson, Jan Harvey and Richard Chang)

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(Reuters) -Apple shares surged to an all-time high on Monday, with the iPhone maker close to becoming the third company to hit a $4 trillion market valuation as data showed strong momentum for the latest iPhone. Data from research firm Counterpoint showed the iPhone 17 series outperformed its predecessor in early sales in China and the United States, with the newer models out-selling the iPhone 16 series by 14% during their first 10 days of availability in the two countries. Apple shares jumped 4.2% to $262.9, giving it a market capitalization of about $3.9 trillion and making it the second most valuable company in the world after AI-chip giant Nvidia. Over the weekend, Evercore ISI added the stock to its Tactical Outperform List as the brokerage expects Apple to beat market expectations for the current three-month period and issue upbeat forecasts for the December quarter. "The recent launch of online orders in China may be a positive tailwind for the Dec-qtr, as initial delivery time data reflects stronger initial demand relative to other regions at launch," Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note. Apple unveiled in September an upgraded line of new iPhones, including a slimmer iPhone Air, and held prices steady amid U.S. tariff concerns. "They rolled out the latest version of their iPhone and it's doing much better than anticipated … the demand trends for the company's iPhones are now on the front foot," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B Riley Wealth. Apple shares had struggled earlier this year on concerns over tough competition in China and uncertainties around how the company would navigate high U.S. tariffs on Asian economies such as China and India, its major manufacturing hubs.  However, the stock has risen modestly since early August after the company pledged $100 billion in additional U.S. investment, a move that could help it sidestep potential tariffs. The stock is set for its biggest one-day jump in four weeks if gains hold and will be up more than 5% for the year. Apple will report quarterly earnings after the bell on October 30. (Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan and Twesha Dikshit in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Arun Koyyur)

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By Deborah Mary Sophia and Shubham Kalia (Reuters) -Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally. The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. After about eight hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 12:00 p.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services. AWS was down for more than 7,800 users as of 11:46 a.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET. "We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said in the latest update on its status page. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal's Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services. Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. HOURS LATER, A ROCKY RECOVERY Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances seen at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.  Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work.  OUTAGE EXPOSES RISK OF DEPENDENCE ON HANDFUL OF PROVIDERS In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. While there has been no indication of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation. "When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos. "AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset." (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson and Jaspreet Singh; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier and Richard Chang)

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(Reuters) -Apple shares surged to an all-time high on Monday, with the iPhone maker close to becoming the third company to hit a $4 trillion market valuation as data showed strong momentum for the latest iPhone. Data from research firm Counterpoint showed the iPhone 17 series outperformed its predecessor in early sales in China and the United States, with the newer models out-selling the iPhone 16 series by 14% during their first 10 days of availability in the two countries. Apple shares jumped 4.5% to $263.7, giving it a market capitalization of about $3.91 trillion and making it the second most valuable company in the world behind AI-chip giant Nvidia. Over the weekend, Evercore ISI added the stock to its Tactical Outperform List as the brokerage expects Apple to beat market expectations for the current three-month period and issue upbeat forecasts for the December quarter. "The recent launch of online orders in China may be a positive tailwind for the Dec-qtr, as initial delivery time data reflects stronger initial demand relative to other regions at launch," Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note. Apple shares struggled earlier this year on concerns over tough competition in China and uncertainties around how the company would navigate high U.S. tariffs on Asian economies such as China and India, its major manufacturing hubs.  The stock is set for its biggest one-day jump since early August if gains hold and will be up 5% year-to-date. Apple will report quarterly earnings after the bell on October 30. (Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)

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