CEO INSIGHTS – Week Ending 19 September 2025

Animal Health & Livestock

"There are signs of recovery that are quite positive with the price of meat as well as the climatic situation. So, looking forward, we expect a progressive rebound of our activity in Australia." Habib Ramdani, CFO, Virbac SA [one of the world's largest animal health companies]

Content Creation

"The explosion of content creation and automation in the enterprise and the beginning of new marketing needs, such as LLM [large language models] optimisation, and LLM advertising, are a massive opportunity for Adobe." Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe Inc

Power Tools

"I do think in our industry, power tools, in particular, because we haven't been taking a lot of price [putting up prices], I don't want to say that means it's easy for retailers or end buyers to digest our price increases. But some other industries in pretty close adjacent spaces have been pushing that envelope, even way before tariffs, pretty hard, and I do think some other places are seeing some price fatigue." Patrick Hallinan, CFO, Stanley Black & Decker Inc

Global Consumer

"We think the consumer is going to stay relatively sluggish through the back end of the year. That's our expectation today." William Brown, CEO, 3M Company

"So generally, the way we describe the market is the word steady. We really think that's the theme, the word of where we are today, and steady is good for our industry because if we see steady growth in an industry that can be cyclical, that's a good position to be in." Ewout Steenbergen, CFO, Booking Holdings Inc

UK Economy

“For households, the savings rate is actually in quite a broad spectrum, from the bottom 20% plus in terms of income and wealth of households, has continued to strengthen. We've now seen 6, 7 quarters of real wage growth. We're seeing strong discretionary spending year-on-year… And businesses are the same.” Charles Nunn, CEO, Lloyds Banking Group plc

Cities

“All really global cities have more than one international airport." Scott Charlton, CEO, Sydney Airports Corp

Solar & Batteries

“Just as Australians have long understood the value of solar in lowering household energy bills, we are now seeing a surge in battery adoption, which allows households to store their own clean energy and maximise savings.” Con Hristodoulidis, General Manager - Distributed Energy, Clean Energy Council

Lawyers & AI

“I don’t think the billable hour is going to, like, go away in the next two or three years…I think what’s going to happen is a lot of tasks are going to turn into a fixed fee, and then I think the billable hour for high-end partners – that’s going to stay the same.” Winston Weinberg, CEO, Harvey AI [legal special AI company]

Insurance & Society

"I mean, if you look at the general trends that we have in our society, we have an aging society, and we have a society that needs to protect itself and needs to most likely protect beyond what we have today because the social systems that were traditionally provided by the states are not working anymore in the way they were working, both in terms of their way of delivering, but also in the way of them being financed. So this is a general trend that is an opportunity for us." Thomas Buberl, CEO, AXA [major multinational insurance group]

Retailers & Supply Chain

“It takes so long for a lot of the pricing to make its way through this industry because of the long supply chain.” Bracken Darrell, CEO, VF Corp. [retail brand conglomerate inc. Vans, Timberlands & The North Face]

Pest Control & AI

“So when we look to these types of technologies, we look to them as enablers because, like, there's no AI that's going to run out and go get a rat out of the kitchen. That's not really on our radar screen in the short term. But what we could do is use AI to help us use routing and scheduling to help get them there faster than we ever did before, right? So we are looking at AI enhancements to help us improve efficiency in our business.” Jerry Gahlhoff, CEO, Rollins Inc [world’s largest pest control company]

Luxury Goods

“The total addressable market we play in across premium and luxury is more than $400 billion and growing. We are a $7 billion company today and growing. And if you did the math correctly, less than a 2% market share, okay? That represents an incredible opportunity for this company, not just for the next 3 years, but for actually decades to come.” Patrice Louvet, CEO, Ralph Lauren Corp.

Consumer Electronics Vs. Smart Glasses

“Glasses are the only form factor where you can let it see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day and very soon, generate whatever [user interface] you need right in your vision, in real time.” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta Inc.