MINNEAPOLIS — Jeffrey Harmening, chairman and chief executive officer of General Mills Inc., said the food company is “off to an encouraging start in fiscal ’27,” as top-line results in the first quarter built on momentum in latter part of fiscal 2026.

“Our ‘remarkability’ playbook is working, driving improved top-line performance by delivering stronger product innovation and renovation focused on the benefits consumers are looking for today,” Harmening said in reporting quarterly results on Sept. 23. “And we have more work to do.”

For the quarter ended Aug. 30, net income fell 67% to $397 million, equal to 74¢ per share on the common stock, from $1.2 billion, or $2.22 per share, a year earlier. General Mills attributed the decrease primarily to lower operating profit.

Excluding a valuation loss on held-for-sale business, transaction and acquisition integration costs, asset impairments, and restructuring and transformation charges, among other items, adjusted net earnings fell 14% to $403.6 million, or 75¢ per share, from $469 million, or 86¢ per share, a year ago. The result topped Wall Street’s average estimate for adjusted earnings per share of 72¢.

Operating profit dropped 63% to $633.6 million and on an adjusted basis was down 11% to $634 million. General Mills said the decrease mainly reflects a year-ago $1 billion gain from the divestiture of its yogurt business a year ago, along with lower gross profit dollars this fiscal year.

“We’re continuing to deliver industry-leading cost savings in a volatile environment,” Harmening noted. “We are on track to deliver $750 million in savings this year between our holistic margin management program, our transformation initiative and other efficiency efforts. This work is about more than cost mitigation and reduction. It’s about making General Mills future-fit, modernizing how we operate, reimagining our supply chain and building the flexibility to innovate faster.”

First-quarter net sales totaled $4.39 billion, down 3% from $4.52 billion a year earlier. General Mills said the decline came primarily from the impact of the US yogurt divestiture, while “organic net sales essentially matched year-ago levels.” Organically, net sales in the 2027 quarter were flat, including a 1% decrease in volume.

“In terms of first-quarter performance, organic net sales were flat to last year, adjusted operating profit was down 11% and adjusted diluted EPS was down 13%,” Harmening said. “These results finished ahead of our expectations, driven largely by improved retail sales trends in North America Retail, North America Foodservice and International, as well as a good start on our cost savings programs.”

Dana McNabb, chief operating officer, noted that General Mills “entered fiscal ’27 with a stronger foundation,” citing “decisive action we took last year to bring more value to consumers by adjusting base prices to address key price cliffs and gaps.”

Brands such as Pillsbury, Cheerios and Annie’s have seen more innovation and renovation this year, General Mills said.

| Photo: ©JAMMER GENE – STOCK.ADOBE.COM

“With that investment behind us, our full focus this year is on accelerating our pace of product innovation and renovation to deliver more of the lasting benefits that consumers are looking for today,” she said. “This includes more protein and fiber, clean labels, bold flavors, fun and indulgence, and pet humanization. And we’ll leverage our strategic revenue management toolkit to strengthen price/mix, with a particular focus on mix. I’m encouraged by the early signs of progress we’re seeing in Q1, driven by our focus on Remarkability, and it is evident in the results we delivered this quarter in North America Retail (NAR).”

For the core NAR unit, first-quarter net sales fell 7% to $2.45 billion from $2.63 billion, reflecting a 4-point headwind from the sale of the US yogurt business. Organic net sales were down 3% on decreases of 2% in volume and 1% in price/mix. Segment operating profit declined 15% to $478.6 million.

General Mills said NAR’s performance included year-over-year net sales decreases of 14% for the Big G Cereal & Canada business unit (reflecting the impact of the yogurt divestitures) and 6% for US Snacks, while sales came in flat for US Meals & Baking Solutions. The company said that, “as expected,” organic sales lagged Nielsen-measured retail sales by about 1 point, pointing to changes in retailer inventory, but noted that dollar share trends strengthened in most of its priority categories.

“NAR retail sales improved by roughly 2 points versus fiscal ’26, as we made our products and brand communications stand out more for consumers,” McNabb said. “We’ve increased the contributions from innovation and renovation in NAR this year, with core brands like Cheerios, Annie’s and Pillsbury and new brands like La Tiara and Wanchai Ferry. We’ve also stepped up our marketing game, bringing in new agency partners, building a next-generation content studio and doubling our use of influencers to maximize our reach and engagement.

“And we have further to go,” she said. “While most of NAR’s priority businesses delivered improved market share trends in Q1, some are not yet back to absolute share growth, and we’re focused on improving this trajectory.”

Quarterly net sales rose 1% to $523.1 million for the North America Foodservice unit and climbed 4% to $794.3 million for International. North America Pet sales were flat at $612.8 million. Operating profit rose 12% for Foodservice and 14% for International but sank 12% for Pet.

“With solid first-quarter results, improving in-market momentum, and our transformation and cost savings work on track, we are reaffirming our full-year fiscal ‘27 guidance,” Harmening said.

For fiscal 2027, General Mills forecasts adjusted EPS of $3 to $3.20, organic net sales of down 1.5% to up 0.5%, and an adjusted operating profit decline of 8% to 13%.

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There’s a version of me from a few years ago who spent $340 on a candle-making kit, four bags of soy wax, and a stack of amber glass jars, convinced I’d stumbled on the one small business idea that would finally make me my own boss. Six weeks later, I’d set off my smoke alarm twice, given away eleven candles to neighbors who hadn’t asked for them, and quietly returned the wax to the back of a kitchen cabinet, where- if I’m honest- it might still be.

Was the idea bad? Not really. Was I ready to execute it? Absolutely not. That’s the gap nobody warns you about: there are a thousand small business ideas floating around the internet, but almost nothing written about how to tell a genuinely good one from an expensive way to occupy a weekend.

So is there a formula for picking a winner? Not exactly, but there’s a much better filter than “this seems fun,” and we’ll get to it. First, a running start: 80 real ideas, organized by the situation you’re actually starting from, each with a plain-English note on why it works and who it’s for.

The Highlights, If You’re Short on Time

Pulled from the full list below, these are the ones with the clearest path from “idea” to “first paying client” right now:

1. Freelance writing or copyediting
2. Virtual assistant services
3. AI workflow consulting for small businesses
4. Bookkeeping for solo entrepreneurs
5. Mobile pet grooming
6. Residential or office cleaning
7. Niche e-commerce (one tight category)
8. Personal training or nutrition coaching
9. Local SEO consulting
10. Home organizing services
11. Senior companion care
12. Meal-prep delivery service
13. Online course creation
14. Web design for local businesses
15. Handyman or small home-repair work

That’s the appetizer. The full 80 are below, grouped by category, but the list isn’t actually the hard part. The decision is.

What Makes a Small Business Idea Good, Instead of Just Cute?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: almost any idea on this list can work, and almost any idea can fail. The difference usually comes down to four things:

• You already have the skill, or can get good at it fast. Starting from zero adds months, sometimes years, to your runway.
• The startup cost is low enough to survive being wrong. If your first attempt flops, can you try again, or are you done?
• There’s a repeatable way to find customers — not just the first ten, who are usually friends and family, but the hundred after that.
• It can grow without your hours growing at the same rate. A business that only makes money when you’re personally trading time for it has a ceiling built in.

It also helps to remember what “small business” actually means at scale: according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, small businesses make up 99.9% of all U.S. businesses and employ roughly 62.3 million people, nearly 46% of the private-sector workforce. This isn’t a fringe category. It’s most of the economy.

With that filter in mind, here’s the full list.

Low-Cost Small Business Ideas (Almost No Startup Capital Required)

Low-cost doesn’t mean low-quality, it means the idea is built around your time and skill instead of inventory and equipment. This is usually the right starting category if you’ve never run a business before and want to test the water without draining your savings.

1. Freelance writing or copyediting — turns existing writing ability into paid work with essentially zero equipment cost beyond a laptop.
2. Virtual assistant services — inbox management, scheduling, and admin support for founders who’d rather not do it themselves.
3. Social media management — running content calendars and posting schedules for small businesses too busy to do it consistently.
4. Proofreading and transcription — detail-oriented work with low startup cost and steady demand from authors, students, and podcasters.
5. Voiceover work — a home mic and some patience are the main barriers to entry; auditions do the rest.
6. Online research services — freelance research for writers, analysts, and small firms that need a second set of eyes.
7. Academic or test-prep tutoring — built directly on a subject you already know, with pay that scales with your track record.
8. Resume and LinkedIn profile writing — steady demand from job seekers, especially during hiring-season spikes.
9. Bookkeeping for solo entrepreneurs — recurring monthly work once you land a handful of regular clients.
10. Independent consulting in your current field — the fastest route from “employee” to “business owner” because the expertise already exists.

Service-Based Small Business Ideas (Skills You Already Have)

If you’ve spent years getting good at something inside someone else’s company, that skill doesn’t stop being valuable the moment you leave. It just needs a new home.

11. Marketing or brand strategy consulting — for small businesses that know they need better positioning but not how to get there.
12. Web design and development — a service almost every small business needs and few want to learn themselves.
13. Real estate or product photography — recurring work tied to two industries (real estate, e-commerce) that never stop needing images.
14. Interior design or home staging — project-based work with strong word-of-mouth potential once you have a portfolio.
15. Financial or tax consulting — high-trust, high-repeat-business work, especially for other small business owners.
16. HR consulting for small teams — hiring, policy, and compliance help for companies too small to have an in-house HR person.
17. Graphic design and branding — logos, packaging, and visual identity work for businesses at the “we finally need this” stage.
18. Video editing services — demand driven by every small business now needing short-form content for social platforms.
19. Career or executive coaching — one-on-one work that scales through referrals and testimonials more than ads.
20. Grant writing for nonprofits — a narrow, specialized skill with less competition and often better pay than general freelance writing.

“Take what I already know how to do” is unglamorous advice compared to “chase a trend,” but it’s the version with the shortest distance between idea and first paying client.

Product and E-Commerce Small Business Ideas

Service work trades hours for dollars. Product work can, eventually, decouple the two – though it usually asks for more patience and more upfront cash before that happens.

21. Niche e-commerce store (one tight category) — outperforms general stores by giving customers an actual reason to choose you over Amazon.
22. Handmade goods on Etsy or your own site — low overhead, direct customer relationships, and full control over pricing and quality.
23. Print-on-demand apparel — no inventory risk, since items are made only after they’re ordered.
24. Interest-based subscription boxes — recurring revenue built around a specific hobby or identity rather than a general category.
25. Specialty food products sold online — sauces, snacks, and baked goods with a shelf-stable format and a built-in gifting angle.
26. Curated vintage or resale — sourcing is the real skill here; a good eye is worth more than a large budget.
27. Digital products (templates, planners, courses) — sell once, deliver infinitely, with no shipping or inventory involved.
28. Pet products for a specific niche — senior dogs, allergy-prone cats, exotic pets — narrower focus, more loyal customer base.
29. Home goods with a sustainability angle — appeals to buyers actively looking for lower-impact alternatives to mass-market options.
30. Custom stationery or invitation design — event-driven demand (weddings, showers, milestone birthdays) with strong repeat referrals.

Local and Mobile Small Business Ideas

Not everything needs to scale nationally to be worth doing. Some of the steadiest small businesses are the ones that never leave a five-mile radius.

31. Residential or office cleaning — dependable recurring revenue once you build a regular client roster.
32. Mobile pet grooming — convenience-driven pricing premium over storefront groomers, with lower overhead than a physical shop.
33. Dog walking and pet sitting — low startup cost, flexible hours, and strong demand in dense residential areas.
34. Lawn care and landscaping — seasonal but reliable, with equipment as the main upfront investment.
35. Home organizing services — a fast-growing niche driven by decluttering trends and smaller living spaces.
36. Handyman or small home-repair work — broad demand and minimal competition in most residential neighborhoods.
37. Power washing and exterior cleaning — low equipment cost relative to the price customers are willing to pay per job.
38. Senior companion care — non-medical support work with rising demand as the population ages.
39. Mobile car detailing — comes to the customer, which is the entire value proposition and pricing justification.
40. Moving and junk removal — physically demanding but reliably in-demand, especially in areas with high rental turnover.

Local services tend to have something the internet-first ideas don’t: word-of-mouth that compounds. One good review in a neighborhood Facebook group can outperform a month of ads.

Tech-Enabled and AI-Adjacent Small Business Ideas

Every wave of new tooling creates a matching wave of people who need help using it. Right now, that’s AI and the businesses built around helping other small businesses adopt it are among the fastest-growing ideas heading into 2026.

41. AI workflow consulting for small businesses — helping owners figure out which tools are actually worth adopting, and which aren’t.
42. Custom chatbot or GPT setup for local companies — practical, narrow-scope tech work most small businesses can’t build themselves.
43. Data cleanup and automation services — unglamorous but consistently in-demand as businesses accumulate messier spreadsheets and systems.
44. No-code app or website building — technical results without requiring the client (or you) to write code.
45. AI-assisted content editing and fact-checking — a service layer on top of AI writing tools, for businesses that don’t trust raw output.
46. Basic cybersecurity services for small businesses — most small businesses have none in place and don’t know where to start.
47. Tech support for non-technical business owners — patient, plain-English troubleshooting that IT firms often price out of small-business range.
48. Paid social media ad management — running and optimizing campaigns for businesses that don’t have the time to learn the platforms.
49. E-commerce store audits and optimization — improving conversion rates on stores that already have traffic but weak sales.
50. Local SEO consulting — helping brick-and-mortar businesses actually show up when someone searches nearby.

Wellness and Health Small Business Ideas

Wellness spending has kept climbing for years, and it’s increasingly treated as a routine expense rather than a luxury- which is the kind of demand a small business can build a real practice around.

51. Personal training — one-on-one or small-group fitness coaching, in a gym, at home, or outdoors.
52. Nutrition and health coaching — personalized guidance that goes beyond generic diet plans.
53. Mobile massage therapy — brings the service to the client, commanding a premium over studio-based competitors.
54. Yoga or Pilates instruction — can run in-person, online, or both, with low equipment costs to start.
55. Non-clinical mental wellness coaching — support-focused work distinct from licensed therapy, with its own growing demand.
56. Sleep coaching — a narrow, underserved niche with a clear, specific customer pain point.
57. Postpartum support services — doula-adjacent, non-medical support for new parents in the weeks after birth.
58. Senior fitness classes — a growing demographic with specific, underserved mobility and strength needs.
59. Corporate wellness consulting — bringing wellness programming into small and mid-size workplaces.
60. Assisted stretching or mobility studio — a newer fitness-adjacent model built around guided, hands-on flexibility sessions.

Food and Beverage Small Business Ideas

61. Home bakery under a cottage food license — one of the lowest-overhead ways to turn a baking hobby into real income.
62. Small-batch hot sauce or condiment brand — a manageable production scale with strong farmers-market and gift-market appeal.
63. Mobile coffee cart — lower buildout cost than a café, with the flexibility to work events and high-traffic locations.
64. Food truck — higher startup cost than a cart, but a full menu and a loyal local following to match.
65. Personal chef service — in-home cooking for clients who want restaurant-quality meals without eating out.
66. Meal-prep delivery service — batch-cooked, ready-to-eat meals delivered on a weekly schedule, distinct from one-off personal-chef visits.
67. Small-batch beverage brand — cold brew, kombucha, or specialty sodas, often starting at farmers markets before retail shelves.
68. Cooking or baking classes — turns existing kitchen skill into a teaching business with strong repeat-attendee potential.
69. Farmers market vendor — low commitment way to test a food product before investing in a storefront or full production.
70. Small-event catering — a natural next step for anyone already cooking at scale for friends and family.

Creative, Content, and Education Small Business Ideas

71. Freelance illustration or design commissions — client work ranging from branding projects to personal commissions.
72. Stock photography or video licensing — passive-leaning income once a library of work exists.
73. Niche YouTube channel or content creation — monetized through sponsorships, ads, or a related product line once an audience builds.
74. Paid newsletter publishing — subscription-based writing built around a specific topic and a loyal reader base.
75. Ghostwriting for executives or founders — high-paying, relationship-driven work once you’ve built a track record.
76. Online course creation — packages existing expertise into a product that can sell without your ongoing time.
77. Children’s enrichment classes — art, coding, or music instruction for kids, often run through schools or community spaces.
78. Music lesson instruction — steady, recurring income built on regular weekly sessions with the same students.
79. Craft workshop hosting — paint nights, pottery sessions, and similar hands-on events with built-in social appeal.
80. Podcast production and editing services — technical and creative support for the growing number of small businesses launching their own shows.

How Do You Actually Narrow This Down?

Take whichever three or four ideas from this list made you sit up a little straighter, and run each through the same four questions:

1. Do I already have this skill, or could I realistically learn it in a month?
2. Could I lose the startup cost entirely and still be okay?
3. Do I know exactly where my first ten customers would come from?
4. Is there a version of this that doesn’t require me personally, forever?

An idea that answers “yes” to all four isn’t just cute anymore. It’s a plan.

What Actually Trips People Up

It’s rarely the idea itself. It’s usually one of three things: underpricing out of nerves, waiting for a perfect logo and website before ever taking a paying client, or picking something with no clear path to customer number two. Every idea on this list can survive a rough first attempt. Almost none of them survive six months of avoiding the actual work of finding customers.

I think about the candle wax still sitting in that cabinet sometimes- not as a failure, exactly, more as a $340 lesson in doing the filtering before the buying spree. If you take nothing else from this list, take that: the idea rarely fails you. The lack of a plan usually does.

Wordle players faced puzzle number 1,923 on Thursday, a five-letter word built around disorder and clutter that puzzle trackers described as a common, everyday term made slightly trickier by a repeated letter buried within it.

For those still working through the puzzle, several hints circulated Thursday to help point solvers toward the answer without giving it away outright. The word describes something untidy, dirty or disorganized, and can be used to describe a room, someone’s appearance, their handwriting, or a broader situation that has become complicated or difficult to sort out. It rhymes with words like “dressy” and slant-rhymes with “blessy.” Structurally, the word contains one vowel, the letter E, and one repeated letter, begins with the letter M, and ends with the letter Y.

SPOILER WARNING: Today’s Wordle answer follows below. Stop reading now if you’d rather solve the puzzle without assistance.

The answer to Wordle #1,923 for September 24 is MESSY, an adjective meaning characterized by a dirty, untidy or disordered condition, whether describing a physical space, a person’s appearance, or a more abstract situation that has grown chaotic or hard to manage.

Puzzle trackers covering Thursday’s word generally described it as a familiar, everyday term, though several noted that the puzzle’s repeated letter, appearing twice within the five-letter word, could cause a brief moment of hesitation for solvers who had not yet accounted for the possibility of a duplicate letter in their guessing strategy. One outlet advised that players who tested the letters S and E early in their guessing sequence should be able to narrow down the answer relatively quickly once they recognized the word’s general theme.

Strategy guides accompanying Thursday’s puzzle reiterated broader tips relevant to Wordle players generally, encouraging solvers to open with strong, letter-diverse guesses to maximize the information gathered in the first one or two attempts, and to remain open to the possibility of repeated letters appearing in a word rather than assuming Wordle answers never include duplicates. Guides also recommended paying close attention to word patterns once several letters have been confirmed, since narrowing from a partially solved word down to the single correct answer often depends on correctly accounting for any repeated letters within the remaining possibilities.

Wordle, created by software engineer Josh Wardle before being acquired by The New York Times, continues to release a new five-letter target word to players worldwide at midnight local time each day, giving solvers six total guesses to identify the correct word. The game’s familiar color-coded feedback system, green for a letter in the correct position, yellow for a correct letter placed in the wrong spot, and gray for a letter absent from the word entirely, continues to guide players toward the solution with each subsequent attempt. Because the puzzle refreshes at midnight in each player’s own local time zone, solvers across different regions, including areas observing Philippine Standard Time, various Australian time zones, and New Zealand time, begin their attempt at each day’s puzzle at staggered points relative to players elsewhere, even though every solver worldwide is working toward the same single answer.

Puzzle number 1,923 followed Wednesday’s answer, FORTH, continuing a run of daily words that trackers use to help players identify broader patterns in how frequently the game’s word selection rotates between everyday, high-frequency vocabulary and more specific or evocative terms. Players tracking their personal performance on Thursday’s puzzle, or comparing notes with friends, can share their results through Wordle’s built-in results screen, which uses colored emoji squares to display a player’s guessing sequence without revealing the actual answer, a sharable format that has remained a familiar sight across social media since the game’s earliest days of viral popularity. The New York Times’ companion analytical tool, Wordlebot, offers players a further way to review how efficiently they solved the day’s puzzle relative to the broader player base and their own historical performance on similar words.

For solvers looking for an added challenge, Wordle continues to offer a “Hard Mode” setting, which requires players to reuse any previously revealed correct or partially correct letters in all subsequent guesses, removing the option to test entirely new, unrelated letter combinations once useful information has already been uncovered. That setting can be toggled from the game’s settings menu before starting a new puzzle each day.

Beyond the daily Wordle puzzle, The New York Times has continued expanding its broader portfolio of daily word and logic games in recent years, including Connections, which challenges players to sort 16 words into four hidden categories, Strands, a themed word-search game, and the Mini Crossword, a condensed version of the paper’s traditional crossword format designed to be completed within just a few minutes.

With Thursday’s word now revealed, players who came up short on the day’s puzzle, or those simply looking to extend an active streak, will have a fresh five-letter word and a new set of six guesses to work with when Friday’s edition of Wordle resets at midnight local time.

Puzzle number 1,201 of The New York Times’ Connections game challenged solvers Thursday with a grid blending Halloween costume pieces, spring-loaded objects, gestures involving pointing, and a set of wordplay-based anagrams, giving the day’s puzzle an unusually playful mix of categories.

Connections presents players with 16 words that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four, with each group sharing a common category. The puzzle rates each group’s difficulty using a color system: yellow for the most straightforward connection, green for slightly trickier, blue for more difficult, and purple, typically the most wordplay-heavy or misleading group, as the hardest.

For those still working through Thursday’s puzzle, here are hints for each category, organized from easiest to hardest, without giving away the specific words involved.

The yellow category groups together items associated with a classic Halloween costume built around a certain nocturnal, blood-drinking creature. The green category brings together objects and toys that share a common mechanical feature involving stored and released energy. The blue category, traditionally more difficult, connects words and phrases tied to a shared physical gesture involving an extended digit. The purple category, usually the trickiest of the four, groups together words and phrases that can each be rearranged into one another using the exact same letters.

SPOILER WARNING: The full solution to Thursday’s Connections puzzle follows below. Stop reading now if you’d rather work through the categories on your own.

Thursday’s puzzle resolved into the following four groups. The yellow category, Parts of a Vampire Costume, consisted of CAPE, FACE PAINT, FAKE BLOOD and FANGS, four items commonly associated with dressing up as a classic vampire for Halloween. The green category, Things With Spring/s, grouped BOBBLEHEAD, POGO STICK, SNAKES IN A CAN and TRAMPOLINE, four objects that each rely on a spring mechanism to function, whether for a bobbling head figurine, a hopping toy, a prank canister that launches fake snakes, or a bouncing surface. The blue category, Featuring Pointing, brought together CREATION OF ADAM, FOAM FINGER, I’M WITH STUPID SHIRT and UNCLE SAM, four references united by their association with an extended, pointing finger, whether Michelangelo’s famous fresco depicting God and Adam reaching toward one another, a foam sports novelty item, a joke T-shirt design, or the iconic recruitment poster figure. The purple category, Anagrams, consisted of BEER HAT, BREATHE, HERB TEA and THE BEAR, four entries that can each be rearranged into one another using precisely the same set of letters.

The puzzle’s central trap centered on the overlapping wordplay between the green and blue categories, according to puzzle guides covering Thursday’s grid. Some solvers reported initially grouping BOBBLEHEAD with items related to pop culture figurines or collectibles rather than recognizing its connection to spring mechanisms specifically, while others noted that UNCLE SAM’s inclusion in the pointing-themed blue category required recognizing the specific pose associated with the classic recruitment poster imagery rather than any more general association with the patriotic figure. The purple anagram category also proved deceptive for some solvers, since BEER HAT, BREATHE, HERB TEA and THE BEAR share no obvious thematic connection beyond their shared letters, a hallmark of the kind of misdirection Connections’ purple category is specifically designed to produce.

Connections has grown into one of the Times’ most consistently played daily puzzles since its official launch in 2023, expanding the newspaper’s games portfolio well beyond its traditional crossword offerings. The daily puzzle is written by Wyna Liu, the Times’ Connections editor, who has built a reputation for grids that reward careful attention to both category themes and potential red herrings planted throughout each day’s set of 16 words.

Players attempting Thursday’s puzzle are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends, with each group color-coded upon a correct guess to indicate which of the four difficulty tiers it belongs to. Standard strategy for tackling the puzzle involves scanning the full grid first for any words that seem to have an obvious connection, then working through the remaining words methodically to identify the less immediately apparent categories, a process puzzle guides say worked particularly well for Thursday’s grid given the more literal nature of its yellow and green categories relative to the wordplay embedded in its purple category.

Players looking to track their performance on Thursday’s puzzle, or compare notes with friends, can share their results through Connections’ built-in results screen, which uses colored emoji squares to display a player’s guessing sequence without revealing the actual category words, a sharable format that has become a familiar sight across social media in the years since the game’s launch, echoing the same format that helped popularize Wordle before it.

With Thursday’s puzzle now solved, players will have a fresh set of 16 words and four new hidden categories to work through when Friday’s edition of Connections goes live at midnight local time, continuing the daily puzzle’s steady run as one of the Times’ most widely shared games alongside Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword.

This article was written by

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PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — Shares in BSP Financial Group Ltd. rose 8.07% to $7.97 in trading Thursday, adding 59.5 cents, as the Pacific region’s largest bank by branch network extended a recent run of gains on the Australian Securities Exchange, where the company trades under the ticker BFL.

Thursday’s advance leaves the stock within its broader 52-week trading range of $6.79 to $9.50, a range reflecting the swings the bank’s shares have experienced over the past year even as the underlying business has continued generating strong profitability and consistent dividend income for shareholders. No specific company announcement had been identified as the direct catalyst behind Thursday’s sharp single-day gain as of the time of this report.

BSP Financial Group owns and operates Bank South Pacific, the dominant banking franchise across much of the Pacific region, with the largest branch network of any bank operating in Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu. The bank maintains branches and sub-branches in major cities and towns across those markets, as well as in more remote rural locations, a footprint the company has said reflects its deep, longstanding commitment to the region and what it describes as its own Melanesian identity. That physical branch network is complemented by an electronic banking platform offering online business and mobile banking, payments, payroll processing, ATM access and bill payment services.

Beyond its core retail and commercial banking operations, BSP Financial Group operates through dedicated business units covering corporate banking, retail banking, a premium banking division known as Paramount, and treasury services, drawing on the bank’s broad geographic presence and range of financial capabilities to serve clients across the Pacific. The company also owns three wholly owned subsidiaries: BSP Capital Ltd, which provides stockbroking and funds management services in Papua New Guinea; BSP Finance, a specialist asset finance company operating in Fiji and Papua New Guinea; and BSP Life, a dedicated life insurance provider based in Fiji.

Founded in 1957 and headquartered in Port Moresby, the company was formerly known as Bank of South Pacific Limited before adopting its current name, BSP Financial Group Limited, in March 2021. The company maintains a dual listing structure, trading on the Papua New Guinea Exchange under the code BSP and on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code BFL, giving investors in both markets direct access to shares in the bank.

Financially, BSP Financial Group has maintained a relatively attractive profile for income-focused investors, with a dividend yield around 7.43% based on recent trading levels, alongside trailing twelve-month earnings per share of approximately $2.51. Those figures reflect a bank that has continued generating substantial profitability from its dominant position across Pacific banking markets, even as its share price has fluctuated within a fairly wide range over the past year.

The bank’s business spans a comprehensive suite of both retail and business banking products. On the business side, the company offers business, solicitor’s trust and SME current and deposit accounts, business overdrafts, insurance premium funding, and a range of specialized financing products, including asset financing, bridging finance, tailored business loans, commercial and residential property investment financing, construction development finance, and seasonal finance products aimed at supporting agricultural and other seasonal industries across its Pacific markets. The bank also provides international money transfer, foreign exchange and trade finance services, along with foreign currency accounts, term deposits and loans, reflecting the cross-border financial needs of businesses and individuals operating across the multiple island nations the bank serves.

BSP Financial Group publishes its interim and full-year financial results, along with regular earnings updates and its annual report, to both the Papua New Guinea Exchange and the Australian Securities Exchange, with dividend information disclosed as part of those half-year and full-year results announcements. Shareholders can manage their holdings through either PNG Registries for shares held on the Papua New Guinea Exchange, or through MUFG Corporate Markets, formerly known as Link Market Services, for shares held on the Australian exchange.

As the largest bank operating across much of the Pacific region, BSP Financial Group’s performance is closely tied to broader economic conditions across Papua New Guinea and the smaller island economies where it operates, including trends in commodity exports, government spending, remittance flows and regional trade activity, all of which can influence lending demand, deposit growth and overall profitability for the bank’s diversified operations across its various Pacific markets.

With no specific catalyst confirmed for Thursday’s sharp gain, investors are likely to continue watching for the bank’s next scheduled financial disclosure to the PNGX and ASX for further clarity on the underlying operational trends driving the stock’s performance, alongside broader developments across the Pacific banking and economic landscape that could continue to influence trading in the shares in the sessions ahead.

Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a new $1,299 virtual reality headset Wednesday that undercuts Apple’s Vision Pro on both price and size, marking a significant shift in headset design that the company says puts its Reality Labs division on track toward profitability.

The device, called Meta VR Glasses, was revealed by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg during the company’s annual Meta Connect developer conference at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. It represents a fundamentally different approach to headset engineering compared with Meta’s earlier Quest-branded devices and Apple’s own Vision Pro. Rather than housing the processor, battery, cooling fan and other computing components inside the headset itself, as Meta’s previous models have done, the new device shifts nearly all of that hardware into an external pack that can clip to a user’s pocket or sit on a nearby table, connected to the glasses by a cable.

That redesign dramatically reduces the weight users must wear on their face. According to reporting on the device, Meta VR Glasses weigh approximately 100 grams, roughly one-sixth the weight of Apple’s Vision Pro and about one-fifth the weight of Meta’s own Quest 3S headset. Apple’s Vision Pro, by comparison, moves only its battery to an external pack while keeping its processor and other core computing components inside the headset itself.

Zuckerberg framed the device as a breakthrough in delivering immersive computing in a genuinely wearable form factor. “We have built a new kind of VR device that delivers the same magical feeling of presence and immersion, high-resolution displays and views of the world around you in a form factor that is a pair of glasses for the first time,” Zuckerberg said on stage at the conference.

The glasses feature a 5K micro-OLED display and are equipped with sensors that track users’ eye and hand movements, reducing the need for separate handheld controllers to interact with the device, according to details shared at the event. Because users view the surrounding world through two screens rather than direct optical passthrough, the glasses include external cameras that capture and display the wearer’s physical surroundings in real time. The device supports up to three hours of playback on its external battery pack and offers many of the same core capabilities as Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s existing Quest lineup, including immersive video playback, office productivity apps, the ability to function as an external monitor for a Mac or PC, and web browsing.

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth acknowledged in an interview that the company’s shift toward an external computing architecture owes something to the trail Apple blazed with the Vision Pro’s own partial external-pack design. Bosworth said Meta owes Apple “a little bit of a debt of gratitude,” crediting the Vision Pro with helping generate broader entertainment industry enthusiasm for immersive computing and with giving the industry, in his words, “permission to explore split architectures,” a dynamic he said helped inform Meta’s approach to the new glasses.

During an extended hands-on demonstration that included watching immersive highlights from an NBA game, navigating Meta’s redesigned headset operating system, and working on a connected PC, the lighter design reportedly made the device notably more comfortable to wear for extended periods compared with bulkier prior-generation headsets.

Meta VR Glasses are scheduled to go on sale in spring 2027, marking the company’s first new VR headset release since the $299 Quest 3S debuted in 2024. The $1,299 price positions the new glasses well below the Vision Pro’s price point while still representing Meta’s most expensive VR device to date, a pricing strategy the company has said is designed to ensure the product does not sell at a per-unit loss, supporting its broader goal of pushing the Reality Labs division toward sustained profitability.

Meta VR Glasses were not the only wearable device unveiled at Wednesday’s event. The company also introduced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses, a camera-free version of its existing smart glasses line priced at $349, along with the third generation of its standard Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Zuckerberg additionally revealed the Muse Charm, a handheld accessory device designed to work alongside Meta’s recently released Muse artificial intelligence personal agent.

Meta enters this next phase of the smart glasses and VR market from a position of considerable strength. According to data from the International Data Corporation, Meta accounted for 68.7% of global smart glasses shipments during the second quarter of 2026, making it the clear market leader heading into an increasingly competitive stretch. Rivals Samsung and Google are both preparing to launch their own competing smart glasses later this fall, with designs from eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster built on Google’s Android XR platform, developed jointly with Samsung and Qualcomm. Snap Inc. is separately rolling out its own Specs AR glasses, adding a further competitor to the increasingly crowded field of companies racing to bring wearable augmented and virtual reality devices to a broader consumer audience.

With Meta VR Glasses not set to reach consumers until spring 2027, the device’s ultimate commercial success remains untested, but its combination of a substantially lower price point and dramatically reduced weight relative to Apple’s Vision Pro sets up a direct point of comparison between the two companies’ competing visions for how immersive computing hardware should be designed, as both companies continue working to build broader mainstream demand for a product category that has so far struggled to move meaningfully beyond early adopters and niche professional use cases.

Six in 10 UK business owners would be discouraged from founding a new company if John Healey, the chancellor, raises capital gains tax (CGT) in next month’s budget, according to a survey commissioned by S&W, the professional services group.

The survey of 500 business owners, carried out by the research consultancy Censuswide, also found that half would consider leaving the UK if the tax was raised in the budget on 28 October.

Higher and additional rate taxpayers currently pay 24 per cent CGT on their gains, according to government guidance.

There are growing fears that Healey will raise the tax, or equalise it with income tax, as the government contends with higher borrowing costs and a shrinking fiscal buffer and seeks to fund Andy Burnham’s localism and cost of living agenda.

Toby Tallon, a tax partner at S&W, said the business owners are “sending a clear warning to the chancellor”. He added that CGT and the possible introduction of a wealth tax “are areas business owners will be watching particularly closely”.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, co-chairman of Enterprise Britain and the billionaire founder of Ovo, Kaluza and Vertical Aerospace, said: “Nobody likes tax, but it’s part of what makes our country work. And how we pay taxes matters. To create a prosperous society, we need more than hard work. We need people who are willing to risk everything … time, money, humiliating failure.”

He added: “If the government decides to tax capital gains at the same rate as income, I am not going to leave. This is my home, and my children are growing up here. But would I want to risk everything again? I really don’t know.”

Andreas Adamides, chief executive of the scale-up founders network Helm, is leading a Stop the Creep campaign against tax rises, backed by more than 150 business leaders. He said: “For many founders, selling their business is their pension. Taxing it like a pay cheque would hit them just as years of hard work finally pay off, and push them abroad, taking with them the capital, experience and jobs Britain desperately needs for growth.”

Earlier this month it emerged that Chris Rokos, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Britain’s third-highest taxpayer, is moving to Greece.

Others have argued for an increase. Dale Vince, the founder of Ecotricity and a Labour donor, has proposed equalising CGT with income tax in increments over several years, to help fund a £20bn increase in the income tax personal allowance. Vince said wealth was “taxed more lightly than work”.

Louise Haigh, the first secretary of state, and Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, have both called for a rise in CGT this year.

Asked on Wednesday about the prospect of raising the tax, Emma Reynolds, chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “I can’t give any reassurance on the budget. All I can say is that one of the reasons we are doing the budget earlier than last year is that we are trying to, as much as we can, reduce the amount of speculation, because there is a lot of it. And it’s very often inaccurate and unhelpful.”

The Investment Association, in its pre-budget submission this week, called on the Treasury to avoid further increases to CGT, “which would send the opposite signal to people being encouraged to move from cash savings into long-term investment”.

Robert Salter, a director at the advisory firm Blick Rothenberg, said raising the higher rate of CGT to 34 per cent from 24 per cent would cut receipts by £540m in the 2026-27 tax year, £2.06bn in 2027-28 and £3.5bn in 2028-29. He based the figures on an HMRC bulletin published in June last year. Salter added that most CGT comes from a small number of taxpayers, who are likely to be the most mobile.

A Treasury spokesman said: “As has always been the case, decisions on tax are a matter for the chancellor to set out at fiscal events, rather than routinely commenting on rumour, speculation or proposals.”

About the author

Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.

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