CEO INSIGHTS – Week Ending 12 December 2025

Mega Media Company Mergers

“Like, historically, many of these mergers haven’t worked. Some have, but you really have to take a look at this on a case-by-case basis. A lot of the failures that we’ve seen historically are because the company that was doing the acquisition didn’t understand the entertainment business. They didn’t really understand what they were buying.” Gregory Peters, Co-CEO, Netflix Inc.

Reinsurance Cycles

“I wanted to say there are so many temptations around in the market and huge expectations. What is the temptation? Temptation is growth at the moment. Everybody thinks we have to grow. There are so many opportunities. There's so much demand in the market. So, let's go and grow. In our business -- sorry to say, it's a recipe for disaster.” Andreas Berger, CEO, Swiss RE

AI Agents, Contracts & eSignatures

“I think for all the noise, I think we're still in very early days of enterprise evaluations of these things. But we think it's inevitable that a number of contractual workflows will ultimately be automated with agents.” Allan Thygesen, CEO, DocuSign Inc.

Premium Consumers & Experiences

“We're uniquely able to leverage the shift to premium and consumer demand for great experiences.” Richard Gelfond, CEO, IMAX Corp.

Movie Making

“There's no question in my mind that more content is going to be coming out of AI. The costs are lower. Special effects' price comes down.” Richard Gelfond, CEO, IMAX Corp.

Emerging Markets

“For the first time last year, we actually have more of these households in Emerging Markets than we have in Europe and North America combined. And I would say this is probably the single largest fact in terms of where incomes are increasing, that makes us very excited about the potential of our business.” Nitish Kapoor, President, Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc [major consumer goods conglomerate inc. brands Dettol, Finish & Strepsils]

Macroeconomic

"When you look around the globe, I think central banks have acted appropriately in a responsive way with monetary actions that needed to have been taken to contain inflation. There's still a fair amount of uncertainty out there around tariffs and what that ultimately means for the consumer and how much kind of gets pushed out versus retained by corporate clients." Mark Mason, CFO, Citigroup Inc.

“I don’t think there are interest rate cuts on the horizon for the foreseeable future.” Michele Bullock, Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia

Domestic Smelters & Governments

“Critical infrastructure and smelting capacity is a national security issue and therefore needs to probably have some sort of government ownership or significant government support for it because it is not competitive on an international basis compared to the Chinese smelters.” Richard Holtum, CEO, Trafigura Group [one of the world’s largest commodities companies]

Ice Creams & Snacks

“People are pivoting away to higher quality [snacks], more healthy and smaller. It’s not that they stop snacking; they become much more conscious of what they want and what they do not want. And ice cream fits that really well because the nutritional profile of ice cream is way better than people believe.” Peter ter Kulve, CEO, The Magnum Ice Cream Co.

Safety

“If you can improve your [safety] score, we want to reward you…What we've seen is that for the number of miles that are being driven, by those who are in the highest rated safety category, is growing significantly over time. So the behaviour nudges are working, and we are seeing the driver patterns and behaviour respond accordingly.” Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah, CFO, Uber Technologies Inc.

Price Elasticity

“Customers aren’t prepared to pay a lot more for air tickets, so we’ve always got to stare into our cost base, use automation, use digitalisation and say ‘how can we continue to be efficient?’ because you need a really effective cost base,” Cam Wallace, CEO, Qantas International

M&A, Advisory & Restructuring

“With regard to restructuring and liability management, I think one of the key facts about business and the economy today that was not true 20 years ago is that the diversion across companies in performance is much wider today than it was 2 decades ago. And that means there's a strong incentive for M&A, but also a lot of restructuring and liability management.” Peter Orszag, CEO, Lazard Inc.

Payment Processing

“Goods & Services and retail spending continue to be strong.” Stephen Squeri, CEO, American Express Co.

Electric Vehicles

“I think the value you can get now is so significant, and I think Aussies are seeing that you can now get a whole lot of car in a way that just wasn’t an option 12 months ago.” Julie Delvecchio, CEO, Electric Vehicle Council Australia

Womenswear

“I couldn't agree more that this is a much more sophisticated consumer than 20 years ago.” Hillary Super, CEO, Victoria’s Secret & Co.

“We are particularly pleased with the performance of our Myer Exclusive Brands in the Homeware and Womenswear categories.” Olivia Worth, Exec. Chair, Myer Group Ltd‍