CEO INSIGHTS – Week Ending 5 December 2025

Shade Projects

“What we're seeing in the first quarter is that business is broadly holding up, although we are now seeing what's impacting particularly those larger-scale projects is more the associated construction materials around steel and concrete, which is the majority of the cost in a shade project. Our fabric is only anywhere between 5% to 7% of an overall project cost. That's where we're seeing some projects now starting to be deferred.” Troy Mortleman, CEO, Gale Pacific Ltd

Trades

"Signs of improvement in the subdued Trade market seen in the fourth quarter of FY25 continued into FY26, with the rate of growth accelerating through the second quarter in both Hardware and Total Tools." Market Statement, Metcash Ltd.

Chemicals & Industrials

“Markets have been challenging the last 3 years, and they are still challenging.” Thomas Hasler, CEO, Sika A.G. [one of the world’s largest construction and industrial chemicals companies]

Google Gemini 3.0 AI Model Launch

“The leap is insane; everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.” Marc Benihoff, CEO, Salesforce Inc.

Winter Planted Crops

“National winter crop production expected to increase by 10% to 66.3 million tonnes in 2025–26, the second largest winter crop on record. Harvest is now well underway in all states, with significantly above average yield results in northern New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.” Market Statement, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences [ABARES]

Diseases & Climate Change

“The World Health Organization has a list of diseases that do not have adequate therapies available. We see that about 2 billion people struggle to have even access to basic medicines, and more than 1.5 billion people suffer from neglected tropical diseases. And we have seen recently, particularly as a consequence of climate change, further spread in those diseases and an increase in the disease epidemiology.” Lutz Hegemann, President, Novartis Global Health [one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies]

Inflation & Deflation

"We expect to see continued investment in value for consumers who continue to face cost-of-living challenges. We also expect to see a return to cost inflation across key commodities, such as poultry, after a period of deflation. And inflation continued to be a feature of the Australian labour market." Xavier Siminot, CEO, Collins Foods Ltd

“There was some hope earlier this year that residential construction costs were starting to stabilise in Western Australia. Unfortunately, that hope is now gone.” David Anderson, Deputy Executive Director, Property Council WA.

Domestic AI Usage

“Australia ranks highly in AI use by consumers. After adjusting for population size, Australia ranks third globally in the use of Claude, a popular AI tool developed by leading technology company Anthropic.” Market Statement, Australian Government National AI Plan

Websites

“If you build an online store and you are selling furniture, how will you be recognised? How will you be discoverable with ChatGPT? You need to build those capabilities. There's no way that you can do it yourself, as there's no way that you can build the best security.” Lior Shemesh, CFO, Wix.com Ltd [one of the world’s largest website building companies]

Money Transfers

“We've also seen the principal per transaction higher for someone who is a debit card transaction versus someone who's doing cash, which then provides us more revenue per transaction.”  Matthew Cagwin, CFO, The Western Union Co.

Cybersecurity & Agentic AI

One, AI is rapidly expanding the attack surface. Businesses are onboarding a whole new type of workforce today, the agentic workforce…While the benefits of this newfound workforce are exciting and increasingly vital for market competitiveness, the rapidly expanding risk profile of this realm cannot be ignored. Every single agent expands the attack surface, necessitating protection.” George Kurtz, CEO, CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.

Energy Drinks & Affordable Luxuries

“So, at the end of the day, we're sending a product that is at its core an affordable luxury. People love to hold the can, the Monster can, and they love to show what they're drinking.” Hilton Schlosberg, CEO, Monster Beverage Co.

Prescription Glasses

“So, the glasses that I'm wearing now cost $95, including prescription lenses and all the coatings…And this is a category where most of our peers consistently raise prices every single year.” David Gilboa, CEO, Warby Parker Inc.

Consumer Staples

“I would say on aggregates, the promotional environment has been fairly rational from competitors.” Luc Bellet, CFO, The Clorox Company [household product conglomerate inc. brands Chux and Glad]

Consumer Credit Scores

“The technology has evolved over the past 30 years, but the concept of the credit score has not. And so the way in which a given consumer is traditionally being underwritten is it's using a subset of data and it's using really lagged data, and then it updates very infrequently. This doesn't make sense to us. And so the score that we've built is based on all of the signals we have about a given consumer.” Owen Jennings, Head of Product, Block Inc.