♪ emily: i'm emily chang in san -- and this is "best of bloomberg technology." we bring you all our top interviews from this week in tech. coming up volatility is the main , headline. apple and tech at large is leading the way. we break down tech's role in the slump. plus, facebook divided. a new report of tension between zuckerberg and sandberg. how are the troops responding? almost a year ago, bitcoin hit the $20,000 mark.

it has now tumbled more than 75% from the peak. have the cryptocurrency's best days come and gone? first to our lead. tech rout in the stock market. combined, apple, amazon, facebook, netflix, and alphabet have lost over $800 billion combined since the end of august, putting silicon valley on edge and raising concern, have we reached peak tech? tuesday, we caught up with bob o'donnell and jim wheaton who says tech regulatory risks are just beginning. >> the biggest thing in the room is that the u.s. economy is probably headed for a fairly significant slowdown -- not necessarily a recession, but growth is headed toward 2% or less. and that is more than wall street expected for the slowdown. i think that is why this is not just a tech event, it is an entire market event. and it goes beyond the stock market. there's falling commodity prices. blowing out in bond spreads. i think there is recession fear. but certainly what has added

fuel to this fire is that the leadership, the place where everyone has money, the faang stocks have started to really unravel, and that has generated more fear than having the rest of the stock market fall. i do not think we will have a christmas rally. i think ultimately we might have a capitulation panic here, maybe before the year is over, where this thing goes below -- the overall stock market -- below the overall lows we had this year and probably goes lower and creates panic about imminent recession in the end of the bull market. i think that could be a good buying opportunity. but we we have to wait and see. emily: is the fear warranted? bob: short-term, warranted. we have been living in an area where there are unrealistic valuations for big tech companies. i think we have to pull back and look at this more macro level. fundamentally, we have had these

companies build up valuations that most people have said this is just not realistic. in a way, it is not surprising. we are getting there. we are finally seeing a mature tech industry that is being perceived not as a teenager, but as somebody in their 30's and more mature in terms of their perspective on the world. i think all of these things influences. and fundamentally, these are strong companies long-term. near-term, valuations need to be corrected. wall street is taking advantage of this turn down to readjust these valuations. so is this about valuation or is this about sustainability of business models? if people are not buying as many iphones or buying into facebook, isn't that a problem? i think it is more about the latter. i think it is more about not so much adjusting valuations as it is adjusting growth rates for the industry as a whole as well as for these popular companies. i am not a tech expert. but it just seems to me that the

pace of innovation in technology has really slowed from what it was that really drove this. the last big thing, at least from the outside of you, was the iphone. the ipad was big, but it becomes a bigger iphone. the iwatch has not been earth shattering. and things like twitter and facebook are hugely popular, but they basically have been the same now for a period of time. i think the constant pace of innovation to more dramatic products that drove demand has slowed. and it brings into question, not so much valuation, but what growth rate are you going to put on a company like apple? is it hitting the ibm microsoft mature cycle, where you have to downgrade that? there is also challenges to the entire internet. who gets to decide what hate speech or what constitutes fake news or manipulation? or is it all free speech? are we going to have the internet be open or is it going

to be regulated, and who gets to be the moral authority to do that? the decisions on that will greatly affect the business models of a number of companies, no doubt. not to mention, how much can you use user information in reselling? there are challenges to amazon's monopoly status, much like there was to microsoft in the past. so i think there are a number of challenges to an industry that was way over-owned from an investment perspective. when you put those two together, it is a challenge with the sector, as well as the overall mark. emily: bob, how big a threat do you think regulation is? or is it more about trust in these companies, as people start to fundamentally questioning, do i want to share my data? can i trust them? bob: regulation is an issue for facebook. i am not as concerned for the other faang stocks. emily: despite the monopoly prospect? bob: yes. i think there are issues. i understand there are concerns around specific areas and the rate of innovation. fundamentally, if you look at

what is going on in tech, there are actually a lot of interesting technologies developments. but they are taking longer to play out. and growth expectations are what have been pulled back. these valuations were based on growth expectations that could not continue forever. i think what we are seeing is, yes, growth expectations are coming down, and there is a recognition that they cannot possibly continue. but there are things coming. there will be interesting things in 2019. foldable phones, for one. a lot of people have their doubts. [laughter] emily: you are bullish on foldable phones. i am not so sure. bob: here is the thing. all kidding aside. the truth is, the general market has been concerned with smartphones being the last big innovation. i am saying, is there a different way to think about these devices? i think it is an interesting category. it brings a wow factor back that we have not had in a wild. and it gives people a new way to consume services, netflix on

different types of devices. emily: that was jim paulsen of leuthold and bob o'donnell. the gloom around the global electronics industry getting gloomier with foxconn. the biggest supplier of iphones is cutting $2.9 billion from expenses in the next year, citing a very difficult and competitive year ahead in an internal memo. the company also said the iphone business will need to reduce expenses by $900 million next year as it plans to eliminate 10% of non-technical staff. the news follows a bad week for apple, as we have mentioned, after four suppliers cut their revenue estimates because of weak iphone demands. tim copelandnion's joined from taipei to discuss. tim: 50% of foxconn's revenue does come from apple. so of course they are the number one supplier. they are very important to foxconn. $6 billion of the $20 billion in cuts is in the iphone division, the part that assembles iphones.

there is a lot more another divisions. what this tells us is this is not an iphone only problem. it is broader. foxconn's catalogue of clients includes hp, sony, nintendo, cisco, dell, a long list of international names. they are all impacted. certainly, they all feed into this wider issue that we are seeing in the electronics industry, and foxconn is the one company that gets hit by all of it. emily: what is the wider issue? that people are just not buying hardware anymore? or the market is not growing as much as it has been? tim: it is all of those things. we have a macro economic headwind. a lot of people are getting caught up in trade tensions, u.s.-china tensions and so forth. it is actually bigger and deeper than that. that is, in a way, a smokescreen, a distraction. we know that apple itself is trying harder and harder to sell more units.

in fact, in the last earnings, they said, we will not tell you how many we ship anymore. we are only going to focus on revenue. that means internally it will not be good news on the shipment side. the smartphone market overall has basically reached its peak in terms of growth numbers. sure, more and more people will continue to buy smartphones, but not at the same level. pc's are not back in vogue. we are looking at other areas of hardware. iot products. the apple watch might take up some of the slack. and of course, things like servers. a lot of the devices they made are being sold our stock never seen by consumers like you and me. they serve server farms and netflix and apple music and spotify. we never see the hardware, but it is there. if there is a slowdown elsewhere in the industry, in the internet area, in spotify or facebook or google, if any of those slow down, then we could see that wider and wider.

-- we could see that impact wider and wider. again, it comes back to foxconn, the company that has its finger in all of these companies because it is the largest manufacturer. it does something for everybody. emily: bloomberg opinion's tim culpan in taipei. third-quarter revenue soared 49% at xiaomi. the chinese smartphone maker relied on its presence in emerging markets to offset demand for devices. shipments rose while the global smartphone market shrank 6%. coming up next, will those who hold the power at facebook ever change? our next guest says they have to. we speak to julie goodrich next. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio, listen on the bloomberg app, bloomberg.com, and, in the u.s. on sirius xm. , this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: now to our continued coverage of facebook in crisis.

while the critics are out in full force following reports of bad management, the board still has ceo mark zuckerberg and coo sheryl sandberg's backs. in a public statement last week, the board said to suggest that they knew about russian interference or tried to ignore or prevent investigations into what happened is grossly unfair. in the last 18 months, facebook, with the full support of the board, has invested in more people and better technology to prevent misuse of its services, including during elections. we should note zuckerberg and sandberg are members of that very same board that is standing behind them. now my next guest has been sounding the alarm for a change in the power structure at facebook. julie goodridge is the ceo of northstar asset management, and they currently hold over 37,000 shares in the company. now, theyr years, have been clamoring for a one share one-vote policy at facebook, something zuckerberg has worked to avoid.

she joined us from boston monday. julie: this is the problem with an insider board. -- this is the problem with corporate governance, when you have an insider board. really, mark zuckerberg has the power to fire any one of his board members at any time. what that does, as you probably understand, is takes away the sense of autonomy that other ared members have, if they at all concerned about maintaining their relationship with the company. i think it is problematic. emily: do you sense an opportunity now to re-agitate for this? and do you have plans to do so? julie: well, we have the same shareholder resolutions file. just so folks know, and probably everyone listening to this does, mark zuckerberg has primarily class b shares, which give him 10 times the voting power. and so, what that means is he controls 51% of the vote but he only owns 30% of the stock. so that is a problem for other shareholders.

for example, in the shareholder resolution we filed last year, asking for there to be one vote per share, so to only have one class structure, class a, what ended up happening was we only got, overall, 21% of the vote. but if you looked at all of the other shareholders who voted in favor of our resolution, that were not insiders, we actually received 81% of the class a share vote, which is really high. emily: so you have other investors calling for an actual board shakeup, calling for mark zuckerberg to step down as chair. take a listen to jonas crome from trillian asset management. jonas: it needs to be somebody genuinely independent, who can

speak with gravitas and can speak with authority and with the confidence of the rest of the members of the board. they need to be somebody with a broad diversity of experience, tech experience and there could also be merit in having someone from a traditional media, the newspaper industry that has a deep understanding of the role of media and society. somebody with time on their hands because this is going to be a long few years ahead of the company. emily: zuckerberg responded , saying this is not part of the plan as of now. would you like to see him step aside? julie: actually, the person i would like to see step aside is peter thiel. and i would like to see the vote structure changed. i actually think it might not be great for him to completely step aside, although i would certainly vote in favor of that. we would support trillium on that resolution. the issue, for me, is that when you take a founder like zuckerberg and you have them step aside, it means something very scary for all of the shareholders, right?

and i actually think that what he needs is better corporate governance. he needs to let go of his insider shares and go back to a one vote per share structure. even when the "times" tried to throw sheryl sandberg under the bus, these guys are responding to issues that occurred in the course of doing business over several years. what is scary about it is that they did not anticipate that these kinds of things could happen. that is the scary thing. where you look at somebody like peter thiel, who, in fact, was very instrumental in supplying cambridge analytica, through the other company that he is the ceo of, with ways to sort of access this information and to infiltrate the facebook system. he is the one who could have said, hey, guys, we want

to be careful about our governance here. emily: i want to dig a little deeper into your thought here on peter thiel, who is very controversial on the facebook board for a number of reasons, not the least of which is support for president trump. mark zuckerberg has said -- has come out and said he supports thiel remaining on the board because he as to the diverse set of views that they would like to see represented. i think we are talking about his association where he is a cofounder, not the ceo. but talk to me about why you want to see peter thiel of all these board members, many of whom have presided for many years to step down. ,julie: i think because when he came out with his outrageous support -- hugely public support of donald trump, he ends up holding himself high as a representative of facebook. now, of course, it was not facebook that came out with

that, but basically what has happened the last couple of years is facebook, by virtue of the way it started to change the way it did business, and instead of taking regular old advertising for people -- you know, people were looking for shoes or computer equipment or things like that, they really started taking money for political ads. and that is very similar to the way that peter thiel came out publicly about his support of a political candidate. i really do not think -- and this is, of course all since , citizens united. but i really do not think it is appropriate. and, in fact, it is illegal for facebook to have taken ads from a foreign power to support or in any way have a say on any sort of elections in the united states of america. it is not legal to do that. so i do not know if they need a

corporate governance guy on theire or a government affairs person who really understands how security laws work. if they need somebody to think about, are they making so much money from running political ads that they need to keep running political ads or people and running commentary that is from paid sources around political matters? i do not really think that is how facebook imagined itself. and i am is not how, you know, all of the what are now middle-aged people who are still facebook, still using it, i really do not think that is why they go on facebook. it is one thing to report the news. it is another thing to create the news. emily: that was julie of northstaro asset management. coming up, it is nasa's turn to go after elon musk. why? that story is ahead.

follow @tictoc on twitter. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: nasa is going to launch a safety review of boeing and spacex, the two companies it has hired to fly astronauts to the space station. according to the "washington post," the review was prompted by the behavior of spacex's founder elon musk, who was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast that went online. spacex says it actively works to promote workplace safety. alexander weygers is a forgotten figure in silicon valley history. he was artist, a blacksmith, an aerospace engineer, and, more, a true renaissance man. but if one art dealer has his way, he will not be forgotten for much longer. bloomberg's ashley sense -- zan

ts has the story. ♪ ashley: this is the story about a forgotten genius. a gifted sculptor, artist, and modern day leonardo da vinci. whose ufo invention was the realm of pure science-fiction. but it is also a story about this man, his fixation with the past, and living on borrowed time. this is the guy he wants everyone to know about. alexander weygers. >> this is probably the most photographed weygers so far. >> randy discovered weygers in 2008 when, for the first time, his sculptures were put on sale. randy snapped up the lot. as an art dealer, he had dreamed of hitting it big by finding an

unknown artist and making him famous. and figured weygers was his man. during his time into weygers' life, randy discovered something extraordinary. hand-drawn designs for an exotic aircraft dating back to the 1920's. alex appeared to have invented the very first flying saucer. >> that was an amazing find in itself. blueprints, it was undeniable that he was the creator. ashlee: weygers called his futuristic flying machine a disk copter. it was a unique concept and one he thought cities of the future would make use of. weygers patented the discopter

in 1944 and then tried sell it. >> he started sending all of these letters to companies, telling them about his invention. ashlee: as word of the discopter began to spread, alex felt that the u.s. military stole the idea. it was an accusation that they denied. but for weygers, evidence of the theft was there for all to see. as images of his flying saucer seeped into popular culture, influencing everything from architecture to cars and movies. >> a two-seater, ready soon, may be the car or chopper of the future. >> there was this whole flurry of stories. weygers' first saucer. the dutchman designed a flying saucer 23 years ago. the man who invented the flying disc. he did not really seem to be after compensation as much as recognition that he had done something important. he wanted the credit for it.

ashlee: in weygers, randy discovered a kindred spirit, a man who chose to live by his own rules and who created a legacy, using his own two hands. what would you say to alex if you saw him now? >> i wonder if he had dreamed of that moment. >> i did dream about meeting him. >> yeah? >> i figured it was a spirit of weygers basically telling me i was doing the right thing, and i should continue with my mission. ♪ emily: that was bloomberg's ashlee vance. coming up, it has been almost a year since bitcoin's skyhigh $20,000 mark. and now, it is piercing the $4,000 mark. what is behind the plunge? we will discuss, next. this is bloomberg. ♪

i am a family man. i am a techie dad. i believe the best technology should feel effortless. like magic. at comcast, it's my job to develop, apps and tools that simplify your experience. my name is mike, i'm in product development at comcast. we're working to make things simple, easy and awesome.

♪ emily: welcome back to the "best of bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang. well, that cousin who peddled bitcoin to you last thanksgiving has some explaining to do this year. this time last year, recent adopters were bragging of their good fortunes at the dinner table as the cryptocurrency was in the middle of a bull run that would see more than double to a record of $19,511 just before the christmas season. this year, however, the story is quite different. bitcoin is piercing $4,000 and does not seem like there will be a turnaround soon. itpayught up with b chief commercial officer sonny

singh to discuss. sonny: bitcoin has become mainstream adoption around the world. good brand recognition. we should not look at the price so much, because it is what is happening behind the scenes. i do not think we will see any price movement until there is new direction, and that will mean things like fidelity launching their product next year or square next year or blackrock launching. come out, iproducts do not think there is any market catalyst either way. emily: jamie dimon is saying that bitcoin has gotten a lot of play. but i think it bears worth re-listening. take a listen to what they had to say last year. jamie: it will blow up. china just kicked them out. do not ask me to short it. it could be $20,000 before this happens. but it will eventually blow up. it is a fraud. emily: now he later said he regretted saying that, but i wonder right now if it looks like he is being vindicated. sonny: so i completely disagree with him on the fraud

comment. prices can go up and down. something that goes up that fast would obviously come down. i would imagine next year, when jamie dimon is trying to launch a product, his bank will also be launching a product. companies and coin space doing ipo's -- there is a bank with a lot of crypto -- bitcoin minors there could be a coin-based ipo , next year. jp morgan will probably try to get in. i think he will be changing the tune soon next year. but again it could be q1 or q2. , these big companies take a long time to launch products. do you think we start looking at cryptocurrency as different currencies? do you think the other currencies break away from bitcoin, or are they basically all the same? sonny: there is a big, night and day difference between bitcoin and everything else. bitcoin is the hundred pound gorilla. that is the one that has the mass network effect, the traditional one. the other ones, i do not know

what will happen to them. some are being ruled over by the sec right now. the market is dead right now and maybe a couple will survive. but none of them will survive unless bitcoin survives first. so that is the one everyone is focused on. emily: that is what you say this year. what does uncle sonny think next thanksgiving? sonny: i would say next year may be an etf launched by a blackrock-type company. the traditional incumbent fighting that bitpay's, coinbase's of the world. it should be an exciting time. that is in america. around the world, we are seeing adoption by bitcoin. bitpay will process over $1 billion this year, even though the price dropped 75%. we processed over $1 billion last year, because people are using bitcoin as a way of payment transaction. emily: where is the price next year? sonny: i would say if the traditional incumbent to launch their products, you would see $15,000, be around

possibly $20,000, by the end of next year. but again that depends on when , the incumbents launch and they move slow in fundtech. emily: that was chief commercial officer for bitpay sonny singh. airbnb is one of the most anticipated ipos for 2019. but could a crackdown on illegal renting across the u.s. stand in the way of the public debut? ans, weight watchers is iconic american company, but it has got a new name and a new approach to business. so how does tech fit into that vision? we will find out. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: 2019 is expected to be a big year for ipo's. from uber to airbnb. in a public memo last friday, the home sharing startup announced more than $1 billion in third-quarter revenue, calling it its strongest order to date. since 2008, the company has

become one of the most valuable startups in the u.s., with a current valuation of $31 billion and listings in 191 countries. we spoke with airbnb's global head of policy and public affairs, chris lehane, on monday and started by talking about how airbnb has been handling the deadly wildfires that have been raging across northern california. chris: obviously what we see in , northern california and southern california is just devastating. obviously, we have seen some tremendous heroism from first responders and just everyday people. we have just been honored by our hosts. we have had over 2500 hosts open up their homes to over 1800 people who have been displaced by the fires. that is not really airbnb. that is our hosts. and we are grateful for that. i think they are appealing to the higher angels in all of us. it is awesome to see amidst all of the catastrophe. thank you for asking.

obviously, we are seeing the air here, we are feeling it in san francisco but nothing like what , people are going to on the ground. emily: our hearts go out to them. i want to talk about growth. you are going into the holiday season, typically a very big season for airbnb. and you just reported a record quarter. you say you have record bookings over thanksgiving weekend. how long can you sustain that kind of growth? chris: as we released on friday, significantly over $1 billion in revenue in q3. our single biggest quarter ever. we are blessed, ultimately, by this significant and robust growth. but ultimately, that is tracking to the community model on airbnb. we only do well if the hosts do well, hosts only do well if the guests do well. guests only do well if the community does well. it creates a network effect globally. you can see that underneath growth numbers, 91% growth in beijing. over 70% growth in places like mexico city or edinburgh and

birmingham in england. ultimately, what is underlying the foundation is people are looking for this type of travel. more people are going to be looking to do home sharing travel, people to people travel tomorrow. this is not new. abraham lincoln and gandhi did home sharing. in particular, this is what consumers are looking for, particularly millennial consumers, who will be 75%+ of all consumers going forward, this is how they like to travel. emily: give me an estimate on beijing. you had a head who resigned over there on a #metoo issue. one of the founders went last year. you mentioned 91% growth. you are starting from a fairly low bar, because the business was small to begin with, but how do you expect that to expand? chris: again, looking at our global numbers, what we are seeing in china really reflects the same thing we are seeing globally. which is we are blessed with growth being driven by the network effect that exists locally. what we are seeing in china is really interesting. the same underlying dynamics and

trends that we saw with the business earlier, which -- when airbnb was first launched, the majority of the users were millennials. if you look in our china market right now, about 85% of consumers are millennials. a similar trend. keeping in mind there are 400 million millennials in china. we are really a significant player in what is called outbound travel, people going from china abroad. but what is happening is they come back, and they begin to travel domestically, and airbnb begins to grow as a result of that. so the type of growth in beijing is replicated in similar numbers, depending where you are looking, throughout the country. china is a place you have to get up every day and you have to work incredibly hard. we do have a president of the business who is from china, on the ground there. we have an incredible team made up of chinese folks on the ground in beijing and other offices around the country. we feel good about where we are, but we know we need to keep working. emily: you quietly removed listings in the jewish west bank settlement.

this is something pro-palestinian groups have been pushing for for a long time. why now? chris: i am not the first want to say this -- this is an incredibly complex part of the world. an incredibly difficult issue. this first came up in early 2016 when we were confronted with questions about 150 to 200 listings that exist in the west bank occupied territory. since then, we have spent a lot of time trying to understand the to experts,ing stakeholders, and put in place a framework to really help us reach a decision. that framework includes understanding that every situation is case to case, talking with experts and stakeholders, taking a look at the degree of human suffering and what is contributing to it, and really looking at trust and safety issues, and, ultimately, looking at whether our product or business are contributing to issues. using that framework, ultimately we made the decision to remove those listings. we are saying that knowing it is controversial. we will not necessarily make anyone happy. i have traveled to israel.

it is an incredible part of the world with incredible people and this is a really hard choice we struggle with. we are not the government. we are not the experts on this. but because we are in homes, we often get put into these situations and believe -- a lot of people are talking about tech companies taking responsibility, we wanted to act as opposed to react to situations. we used that framework to drive the decision. a cfo you are looking for since lawrence -- laurence tosi left. why is it taking so long? chris: are you interested? [laughter] emily: it might be a conflict of interest. chris: a little. not surprisingly, given the historic nature of the company, some of the issues we have talked about, there is incredible interest in this particular role. we have had incredible folks that we have had conversations with. i will be sure to let you know when we have reached a decision. but we have talked about the fact that we want to be ipo ready by 2019. we have not announced if and when we would take the next step beyond that.

but ultimately, we are going to be looking for someone who really does appreciate that community model. that we are looking to be a 21st century company, that we get growth in the following way -- do we deliver for host? do our hosts then deliver for the guests? do the guests then deliver to the community? why we have gotten so much interest is if we drive a social value proposition, that drives our growth. and that comes back to the early question you asked us of how do we continue the growth? we deliver growth by continuing the community model. emily: you ended forced arbitration, not just for sexual harassment but for discrimination, which is very progressive. we have not seen other companies do that yet. how do you plan to handle this between hosts and guests? chris: it is a great question. our model is a little bit different than some other sharing company models. our hosts are really our partners. we do have a really aggressive

policy called "we accept," which broadly deals with discrimination types of issues. and you have to agree to the standards before you can even come on the platform. but as it relates to our employees, which we announced last week, that is another example of how we are trying to build that community model. i come out of come as you know, democratic politics, originally, in the u.s. i did labor politics while i was working in democratic politics. for me personally, it is incredibly interesting and really exciting to see that companies understand the value of their employees and their community. employees are pushing for companies to be responsible. i think it is awesome. and i think it is great that you have these employees. in these companies understand -- they only succeed if they can attract and recruit these great candidates. it is a pretty cool thing to see that develop and hopefully a good indicator of where we're going as a society. emily: you mentioned your time at the white house, which is a perfect segue for me, because i

have to mention you are the master of disaster, known as the master of disaster. how would you master facebook's disaster right now? what are they doing wrong? why are they not able to contain this? chris: i will be very careful here, because i do not work at facebook and i want to be respectful. i would say, without talking about facebook specifically, but as a general approach, i do think, ultimately, people have to be comfortable with the is, whatheir mission their principles are, what their values are, and really actively do their best to proactively execute those. we talked about being proactive versus reactive. i am not talking specifically about facebook, just at large, in the context of how people should think about these things. at the end of the day, you have northstar, you have mission, principal. those are only really truly unviable if you are actually executing them. and that has to be when you have hard decisions. it is easy to say all of those things when it is an easy

decision. it is when it is a hard decision, you really get tested. i remember working in politics. politicians are always tested -- not on the easy stuff, but in the cauldron of a crisis, because that is where your character gets exposed and you have to make decisions. i know some of the folks at facebook at the top and throughout the company -- i think are good people and ultimately they will be doing those. i think they have tried to do those. i think i'm on some level, they have done productive stuff. but ultimately i do not know , what is going on there. and i am not in a position to evaluate exactly what they are doing. emily: airbnb's global head of policy and public affairs, chris lehane. still ahead, weight watchers is no more. instead, now rebranded as ww, the company is looking to woo new users with a new digital strategy. our conversation with president and ceo mindy grossman is next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: there is a signal that t-mobile's arguments for buying sprint may not be winning over u.s. officials responsible for approving the deal or not. t-mobile is now telling regulators the tie-up would help it compete more vigorously against rivals at&t and verizon. in september, t-mobile focused on how taking over sprint would give it an edge in quickly building a 5g network.

the company wants known as weight watchers is in full rebranding mode. called, is it's looking at 20 as the year capture the holistic wellness two space. they started with key partnerships with startups like blue apron and a digital strategy targeting beyond the base as ww, reaching out to young moms, dads, college kids, and more. we spoke with ceo mindy grossman. mindy: there are so many avenues of work that are happening right now. again, if you just look at the last year, we launched freestyle, which is the best efficacious most program, in the company's history for eating. we launched fit points 2.0, which took the science similar to what we do in nutrition, and used it for customize activity. we are integrating active audio fitness within our app. we integrated headspace for content.

very excited about our rewards program that has been working for almost a year. it launched four weeks ago. it does not reward you for spending money. it rewards you for everything you do on behalf of your health and nutrition. you win, wellness wins. we are seeing an increase in 20% of nutrition tracking and 80% of activity tracking. and then connect communities just launched in canada. it will be rolling out to the rest of the world. and that is for people to find and inform. so we have a whole universe of activations that not only will happen between now and the end of the year and into 2019 when we really do the big brand relaunch, but even from there, they are constantly innovating. we have teams around the world, big teams in new york, a group out here. we are looking to double our tech footprint out here. exciting. emily: there was a big run-up in

the stock. shares are down since june. what do you think investors are not getting? mindy: we have a lot of new investors, new coverage. i think it is a matter of educating everyone on the seasonality of the business. i think that has been the biggest confusion. you need to look at the member base year on year versus quarter by quarter, based on the business that we are in. emily: because january 1 is a big day. mindy: that is certainly -- we are kind of wellness 365 now. but there is no doubt that january has loads of people deciding they want to get healthier. it is important to note that results this year have been fantastic. our subscriber base is almost up over 25%, even in the last quarter. sales at 17% year to date. operating income significantly above where we have ever been.

and we have hit every single quarter all-time highs for the company. so the team has done an incredible job. and it is a matter of just getting people to understand the trajectory of the business. i think the second thing is, as much as we have announced what has been launched and is launching, the reality is that the true brand launch and everything inherent that we will be offering to the customer is really happening at the beginning of 2019. and that is what we have been preparing for and activating. what we have already activated, we are already seeing the impact on retention and the impact on recruitment. emily: so you have new partnerships. you mentioned headspace. there is blue apron. integration with the voice assistants. how do you think this will bring the business forward? mindy: so if you look at where we have prioritized, it is will it recruit?

willie -- will it retain? and will it elevate the brand? when you look at partnerships like headspace, we are providing greater value for our members. similarly with the rewards program, which we know will have an impact on retention. and certainly, with the move from not just being weight loss, but giving people a whole wellness platform, that is a very big recruitment message and allows us to have a much broader range of partners. so what we said is we want to own the healthy kitchen. so our partnership with blue apron, we launched the first ww freestyle cafe in berkeley center with cat cora. we have a whole line of kitchen products. every single food product we make -- you do not eat weight watchers food. you can eat anything you want on weight watchers. the food products we make have been 100% reformulated to reflect a healthy living brand. and that will be launched on all of our direct channels in january.

and then our first branded store for all of the products will launch on amazon at the beginning of february. emily: you are also a global company. you are in 11 countries. are there any plans to expand? mindy: yes. what we have said in february, when we came out with our impact manifesto and our new purpose, we inspire healthy habits for real-life. people, families, communities, the world, for everyone. and that means the world. today, about 70% of our business is in north america. the next three largest markets are u.k., germany, france. other markets in continental europe, new zealand, australia. we deftly have a big opportunity, and there is a have a- we definitely big opportunity, and there is a great need, in both latin america and asia. what we have said is we will be doing the strategic work. by the end of 2020, we will start the development in new markets while we are building the markets we are in. emily: our conversation there with ww ceo mindy grossman.

and that does it for this edition of the "best of bloomberg technology." we will bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. tune in every day, 5:00 p.m. in new york, two in san francisco. we are of course livestreaming on twitter. check us out, @technology. and be sure to follow our global breaking news network, @tictoc on twitter. have a wonderful holiday. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: i am jason kelly. we are here at bloomberg's global headquarters in new york. carol: in this week's issue, the predatory lending machine crushing small businesses in the united states. jason: the shocking downfall of auto executive ghosn. carol: some stocks have lost over $800 bi