Oil prices extended losses on Friday as investors assessed Saudi Arabia’s proposal to lead a multinational maritime defense coalition aimed at bolstering security along key Red Sea shipping routes.

Saudi Arabia is seeking to spearhead a coalition to enhance defense cooperation in the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Saudi defense ministry said 14 countries, including Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and Djibouti, had issued a joint statement backing the proposed maritime security alliance.

Brent crude prices traded at $88, down 1.16% or $1.03 per barrel, while US West Texas dipped over 2% to $81.70 per barrel. In the previous session, Brent crude settled down $1.71, or 1.88%, at $89.03 a barrel, although prices fluctuated sharply during the session.

Also read: Oil crosses $100: A ‘perfect hurricane’ can trigger bigger shock soon

The benchmark briefly climbed to an intraday high of $93.31 after Washington and Tehran exchanged strikes on each other’s military targets once again. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures fell 87 cents, or 1.03%, to settle at $83.59 a barrel after touching a session high of $85.94.

Tensions remain high

The latest developments came after Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen announced a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia last week, threatening shipping through the Red Sea, a crucial route for Saudi oil exports and an alternative to the largely blockaded Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Iran and Oman continued discussions on the management of the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Iranian Labour News Agency. However, on Wednesday, a senior Iranian official said Tehran had rejected Oman’s proposal for regional joint management of the strategic waterway.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which around one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows normally pass, has remained a key focus for energy markets since the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran on February 28.
In another development, Egypt confirmed on Thursday that a drone strike caused the fire aboard two gas vessels at the Mediterranean port of Damietta, ruling out the possibility of an accidental blaze.

The confirmation followed an earlier assessment by British maritime security firm Ambrey, which said on Wednesday that a drone had struck a U.S.-owned gas storage tanker docked at the port, raising fresh concerns that the conflict in the Middle East could spread further, Reuters reported.

The U.S. military said it had struck dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran in response to Tehran’s ballistic missile attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East. The U.S. military also said no American aircraft were destroyed or damaged in the recent attempted Iranian attacks, rejecting a claim it said was made by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards that three U.S. F-35 fighter jets and three other aircraft had been destroyed.

Where are prices headed?

The direction of oil prices will depend heavily on how long the disruption lasts. JPMorgan estimates that every additional month of supply disruption could add around $7 to $8 a barrel to Brent prices. A three-month disruption could push monthly average Brent prices to about $114 a barrel.

Goldman Sachs has similarly warned that Brent could climb to $120 a barrel if shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil transit route, continue. Its base case is still that tensions in the Middle East will eventually ease.

Under that scenario, Goldman Sachs expects Brent to average $80 a barrel in the fourth quarter and $75 next year. However, the bank said the risks to those forecasts remain “tilted to the upside”, pointing to the possibility that shipping disruptions could persist through both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Anindya Banerjee, Head of Commodity Research at Kotak Securities, said geopolitical developments were once again driving crude oil prices. “Any strike on major Gulf export infrastructure could force a retest of $95-100 and beyond,” he said.

Read more:Indian refiners scout new crude sources as Gulf risks rise

According to Banerjee, the market has shifted its focus from the military action itself to the declining chances of a diplomatic breakthrough. Tehran has set new conditions for restarting negotiations, he said, while successive developments have delayed the return of normal tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping activity through the waterway remains well below pre-war levels.

Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is still far below normal, keeping the underlying supply risk in place despite the easing of immediate price pressure.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)

Shares in WiseTech Global climbed 6.67% on Thursday, closing at $37.89 after adding $2.37, extending a gradual recovery in the logistics software company’s stock following one of the most punishing periods in its history as a publicly listed company.

The gain builds on a rebound that has taken shape over the past several weeks, as investors have moved to accumulate shares following an extended selloff tied to a governance crisis involving WiseTech’s billionaire co-founder, Richard White. The stock’s woes trace back to a report that the Australian Federal Police’s human exploitation taskforce had opened an investigation into White over allegations that he provided false information on a visa application and used a woman’s immigration status to exploit her, a series of escalating personal conduct claims that had kept institutional sentiment toward the company deeply negative for months.

That selling pressure pushed WiseTech shares down as much as 66% over the trailing 12 months and more than 45% on a year-to-date basis, at their lowest point trading in the low $30s, a dramatic decline from the stock’s 52-week high above $120 reached earlier in the year. The scale of the drawdown reflected not only concern over the allegations against White personally but also broader uncertainty about the company’s governance and leadership stability during a period when the underlying business continued posting double-digit revenue and profit growth.

A significant turning point came in early July, when WiseTech announced that White would step down from his role as executive chair, a move the company positioned as a way to separate the personal legal scrutiny facing its founder from the company’s ongoing operations. Under the restructured arrangement, White remained with the company as chief innovation officer and retained a seat on the board as an executive director, while relinquishing his formal leadership role at the top of the organization. Shares surged as much as 11.1% in the immediate aftermath of that announcement, marking what analysts described at the time as a significant clearing event for a stock that had become one of the ASX’s most troubled large-cap names.

Even after stepping back from his chair position, White remains WiseTech’s largest shareholder, holding close to 40% of the company’s shares, meaning his influence over the business has not disappeared entirely despite the governance changes. That continued ownership stake has left some analysts cautious about whether the leadership shuffle fully resolves the uncertainty hanging over the stock, particularly with the Australian Federal Police investigation into White still unresolved as of recent reporting.

WiseTech’s recovery has continued in fits and starts in the weeks since White’s resignation as chair, with the stock posting a series of strong single-session gains interspersed with periods of consolidation. The shares climbed roughly 30% over a two-week stretch in early July, though that bounce registered as barely visible against the backdrop of the stock’s yearlong chart, given the scale of the preceding decline. More recently, the stock halted a four-day slide with a 4.05% gain that left shares up 21% from a prior late-June low, even as the stock continued trading well below both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages, a technical pattern some analysts have characterized as more consistent with a counter-trend bounce within an established downtrend than a definitive turnaround.

Wall Street sentiment toward WiseTech has remained notably bullish throughout the turbulence, even as the stock price itself has swung dramatically. Recent analyst compilations show 13 analysts recommending the stock as a buy and none suggesting a sell, translating into an overall “strong buy” consensus rating. The average 12-month price target for WiseTech has stood at approximately $69.25, implying substantial potential upside from recent trading levels, with individual targets ranging as high as roughly $128.71, though some market watchers have cautioned that consensus targets set before the scandal fully unfolded may not yet fully reflect the governance risk still facing the company.

WiseTech Global, headquartered in Alexandria, in Sydney’s inner suburbs, develops and sells software used by logistics providers to manage the movement and storage of goods and information across the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company’s core offerings include software for freight forwarding and customs management, landside logistics, digital documentation, transport and warehouse management, carrier rate management, and broader enterprise logistics functions, positioning it as a significant player in the global supply chain technology sector.

Founded in 1994, WiseTech built its reputation over three decades as one of the standout success stories among ASX-listed technology companies, with a business model that continued generating strong underlying growth even as its share price came under severe pressure amid the governance controversy. That divergence between the company’s operating performance and its market valuation has been a central point of debate among analysts and investors throughout the stock’s recent volatility, with some contrarian and value-oriented funds treating the extreme drawdown as an opportunity to accumulate shares at what they view as a significant discount to the underlying business’s worth.

With the Australian Federal Police investigation into White still ongoing and the stock continuing to trade well below both its technical moving averages and analyst price targets, investors are likely to remain focused on further governance developments and any additional legal updates involving WiseTech’s founder as key factors that could determine whether the current rebound continues to build or gives way to renewed volatility in the sessions ahead.

Some Pandora users across the United States reported difficulty accessing the music streaming service Thursday, after outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded a noticeable rise in user complaints throughout the day.

Listeners described a range of problems, including playback interruptions during streaming, trouble loading the Pandora app, and login failures when attempting to sign into their accounts. The reports prompted many users to turn to social media and outage-tracking sites to ask whether Pandora was experiencing a broader, platform-wide service disruption.

As of Thursday afternoon, Pandora had not issued an official confirmation of a widespread outage affecting the service, despite the increase in user-submitted reports on Downdetector. The company has not released a statement identifying a specific cause for the issues some users experienced, and the scope of the disruption, whether it affected a small subset of users or a larger portion of Pandora’s overall user base, remained unclear based on publicly available information.

Downdetector, the outage-tracking platform where many of Thursday’s complaints were logged, works by aggregating user-submitted reports about service disruptions across thousands of websites and applications, rather than directly monitoring the internal systems of the companies it tracks. Because the platform relies on self-reported user complaints rather than direct access to a company’s server infrastructure, spikes in reported issues can sometimes reflect genuine service outages, while other spikes may result from more localized problems affecting individual users, internet service providers or specific devices rather than a true platform-wide failure.

Separate monitoring services tracking Pandora’s status, including those affiliated with Sonos, which integrates Pandora’s streaming service into its home audio products, reported the platform as operational during checks conducted around the same period Thursday. One such service noted only a single user-submitted outage report over a 24-hour window, a volume of complaints within the range the service characterized as normal rather than indicative of a significant disruption.

Pandora, founded in 2000, has grown over more than two decades into one of the best-known platforms for personalized internet radio and music streaming in the United States. The service uses a recommendation system built around what the company calls the Music Genome Project, which analyzes musical attributes of songs to generate personalized listening stations based on a user’s stated preferences. Pandora has faced increasing competition in recent years from rival streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music, both of which have continued to expand their own personalized recommendation features in ways that have narrowed some of the differentiation Pandora’s algorithm-driven approach to music discovery once offered.

For users experiencing difficulty accessing Pandora, general troubleshooting steps commonly recommended for streaming service disruptions include restarting the Pandora app or closing and reopening it entirely, checking for available app updates through a device’s app store, verifying that the device’s internet connection is functioning properly by testing other online services, and, if accessing Pandora through a web browser, performing a full page refresh or clearing the browser’s cached data. If a service-side outage is confirmed to be the underlying cause of access problems, however, individual troubleshooting steps taken by users are unlikely to resolve the issue until the company restores normal service on its end.

Thursday’s reported issues with Pandora were not an isolated case of technology service disruptions drawing attention that day. Separate reports also surfaced regarding possible chat, login and API issues affecting Anthropic’s Claude AI system across multiple regions, including the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, according to outage-tracking reports published around the same time, suggesting a broader pattern of scattered technology service disruptions being reported and tracked across different platforms that day, though the reported issues involving Pandora and other services do not appear to be directly connected to one another based on currently available information.

Users seeking updates on Pandora’s service status are generally advised to monitor the company’s official social media channels or support pages for any formal acknowledgment of an outage, since third-party outage-tracking platforms like Downdetector, while useful for gauging the scale of user-reported complaints in near real time, do not have direct access to a company’s internal systems and cannot independently confirm whether reported issues stem from a true platform-wide outage, a more limited regional or device-specific problem, or unrelated individual technical issues affecting different users simultaneously.

As of the most recent available information, Pandora had not provided an estimated timeline for resolving the issues some users reported experiencing Thursday, and the company had not responded publicly to inquiries about the elevated complaint volume registered on Downdetector throughout the day. Users continuing to experience problems accessing the service were encouraged to check for updates directly through Pandora’s official channels rather than relying solely on third-party outage trackers for the most current and authoritative information about the platform’s operational status.

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Cerus Corporation’s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Please be advised, today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Tim Lee, Cerus’ Head of Investor Relations. Tim, you may begin.

Timothy Lee
Head of Investor Relation

Thank you and good afternoon. I’d like to thank everyone for joining us today. As part of today’s webcast, we are simultaneously displaying slides that you can follow. You can access the slides from the Investor Relations website at ir.cerus.com. With me on the call are Vivek Jayaraman, Cerus’ President and Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Green, Cerus’ Chief Financial Officer. Cerus issued a press release today announcing our financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026, and describing the company’s recent business highlights. You can access a copy of this announcement on the company’s website at www.cerus.com.

I’d like to remind you that some of the statements we’ll make on this call relate to future events and performance, rather than historical facts and are forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include those related to our future financial and marketing results, including our 2026 product revenue guidance, our expectations for gross margins, non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA performance, and our expected expense levels, as well as our commitment to achieving GAAP profitability. Expected future growth in our growth trajectory and market opportunities, our expectations that we will deliver P&L leverage in 2026, the availability and related timing of data from clinical trials, planned regulatory submissions and

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