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Former president Donald Trump has claimed the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania and increased his vote share across the nation.

Trump picked up more votes than in 2020 in every state apart from Utah and Washington. He was particularly strong in areas he had won in the last election, turning red states redder, in particular Florida and Texas. It has put Trump on track to win a majority of the national popular vote for the first time.

Trump also gained ground in traditional Democratic strongholds, closing the gap on Harris by 12 points in New York, 11 in Connecticut and 11 in New Jersey.

In Florida’s Latino-majority counties, Trump increased his vote share by almost eight points compared with four years earlier. He flipped Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county, clinching more than 55 per cent of votes. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county with 53.4 per cent.

Pennsylvania, which awards 19 electoral votes and was paramount for Harris to win after her losses in Georgia and North Carolina, has been called for Trump, who leads with 51 per cent compared with 48 per cent for Harris. Some remaining swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — are still in the balance but Trump has declared victory.

Across the US, the data shows urban voters did not come through strongly enough for Harris, while people in rural areas turned out for Trump.

The Republican candidate gained support among huge swaths of the electorate compared with 2020, according to exit poll data. Asian, Black, Hispanic and white voters all moved towards Trump. Harris only increased her vote share among the over-65s and with white college-educated women.

Long-shot goals for Harris went far by the wayside. A poll last weekend by “gold standard” pollster J Ann Selzer showed Harris leading by an unexpected three points in staunchly conservative Iowa, buoying Democratic hopes. With nearly all votes counted, Trump is 14 points ahead in the state.

In North Carolina, a state Republicans have won in every election since 2012 but with increasingly narrow margins, the former president increased his vote share. He also managed to flip three counties — Nash, Pasquotank and Anson — from the Democrats.

Georgia, another state where the Harris campaign poured in resources, has been flipped by Trump. He leads with 50.7 per cent of the vote compared with Harris’s 48.5 per cent.

In the “blue wall” swing states that remain in the balance, the current vote count largely favours a Trump victory.

In Wisconsin, Dane County is a reliably Democratic jurisdiction that has seen increasing vote share for Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 1992 — except this year.

Financial planning is of utmost importance in the constantly evolving business landscape. Some innovative companies are engaging diagrams and other visual tools to connect complicated financial data with clear, actionable insights.

Effective utilization of diagrams allows these businesses to spot trends, optimize budgeting allocations, and forecast more accurately.

This article will elaborate on how companies can use diagrams to ensure financial success.

Visualizing Data Trends

Data trends hold lots of insight into the company’s growth trajectory, market performance, and emerging risks or opportunities. While traditional tables and spreadsheets inform, spotting trends instantly takes time.

Diagrams such as line charts, heat maps, and waterfall charts turn such numbers into easily interpretable visuals, making it easier for businesses to identify patterns and plan their strategy.

Line charts convey trends in revenue or costs over various points in time. You can choose heat maps on Miro’s diagram templates to visualize a set of performance measures over any management aspect, helping your organization put together a rough analysis of which set of departments and product lines require attention and which are thriving.

Waterfall charts are becoming increasingly popular among financial analysts to show incremental effects contributing to profit and those drawing resources from profit.

Waterfall charts let one label income and expense categories as they contribute or detract to profitability step by step. This helps set more targeted budgets and operational shifts.

Enhancing Budget Allocation

Diagrams provide a more visual way of dispersing resources based on need, performance, or return on investment (ROI).

Pie charts, tree maps, and bar graphs are examples of diagrams that make it easier for organizations to see where budget money is allocated to analyze whether it is being appropriately distributed among various projects or departments.

• Pie Chart and TreeMap Displays of Departmental Budgets: Some organizations use pie charts to allocate and overview department budgets and clearly show which departments incur the highest costs or investments.

Then, there are tree maps that visualize the nested subcategories inside significant categories so that companies can track spending from both macro and micro perspectives.

• Comparative Bar Graphs for Tracking ROI: Comparative bar graphs for ROI analysis across departments or campaigns allow finance teams to see which investments quickly deliver the most significant returns.

This attachment of value is handy for companies with multiple product lines or initiatives because such products allow for prioritizing high-ROI projects to minimize expenditure on something that does not return value.

Creating Financial Projections and Scenarios

Forecasting diagrams, like predictive graphs and sensitivity analysis charts, enable businesses to visualize different possible futures. Such visualization allows companies to make moves beforehand to remediate variances of expected value.

Sensitivity analysis diagrams allow businesses to adjust the variables and visualize the underlying financial template.

For example, through changes in sales growth rates or interest, finance teams can prepare for best-case, worst-case, and moderate cases to support an adaptive approach to budgeting.

In predicting revenue growth and cost changes over time, tech-based companies increasingly use predictive modelling and multi-line graphs based on historical data. Using such tools helps with a more precise revenue forecast, which allows for appropriate scaling of content investments or subscriber acquisition costs.

Advanced Reporting and Real-Time Dashboards

Companies increasingly turn to interactive dashboards and real-time reporting to make rapid decisions. Interactive charts allow users to easily interact with the data, making it exceedingly easy to focus on specific areas. Live and dynamic reporting helps the financial roles recognize and act upon issues as they arise, maintaining flexibility in financial planning.

Real-time dashboards allow companies to track KPIs, for example, cash flows, revenues, and expenses, with the help of dynamic bar graphs, pie charts, and gauges. Companies can update operational budgets and marketing spending in real time because the information is continuously updated based on live data.

The Role of AI in Automated Diagram Creation for Financial Planning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing a sophisticated new dimension to financial planning by providing functions for automatic diagram creation from live data feeds. An AI algorithm can identify patterns in the data, automatically generate predictive models, and recommend the most appropriate visualizations.

AI-powered financial planning tools can analyze historical data to build automated forecasting diagrams so that businesses visualize future revenue, costs, and cash flow. For instance, AI-anchored facilitates real-time forecasting updates, furthering financial planning accuracy and freeing the finance team from other resource-consuming manual functions.

Some machine learning algorithms can spot variations from a given pattern in financial information and present this using colour-coded visuals and alerts. Companies such as Walmart employ these kinds of tools, indicating specific trends in sales data that allow finance teams to make prompt corrective changes.

Endnote

Innovative companies can leverage diagrams to turn complex financial data into easy-to-understand visuals that enhance data comprehension, budgeting accuracy, and strategic planning.

From predicting the future to tracking KPIs in real-time, these visual tools bring the financial health of organizations into clear view and permit well-informed and timely decision-making.

Introducing AI and real-time dashboards into financial planning allows for an even more sophisticated and dynamic application of diagrams, giving businesses the insight needed to thrive in a highly competitive market.

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Slowing demand in China led to steep falls in quarterly profit for Toyota, Honda and BMW, dragging even the strongest carmakers into a broader downturn hitting the sector.

Until now, Japan’s Toyota and Honda had outperformed their European and US rivals due to strong hybrid and petrol sales in North America.

But for the latest quarter, both groups suffered a sales decline in China due to increased competition with local brands, while Toyota and BMW were also hit by recalls.

China, the world’s largest market for cars, has become fiercely competitive as homegrown electric-focused brands such as BYD rapidly gain market share and consumer demand cools following the country’s property crisis.

Operating profit at Toyota dropped for the first time in two years, slipping 20 per cent to ¥1.16tn ($7.5bn) in the three months to the end of September after the world’s largest carmaker by sales was hit by a quality-testing scandal and suspended production of two models in the US.

The group also lowered its annual vehicle sales target to 10.8mn units from 10.9mn, even as it maintained full-year profit guidance. For the quarter, sales in China for Toyota and its luxury Lexus vehicles dropped 9.7 per cent to 456,000 cars.

At a news conference in Tokyo, Yoichi Miyazaki, Toyota’s executive vice-president, warned that there could be “more intensified” price competition in China to come but said Toyota’s profit levels in the country were at a similar level as Chinese rivals.

The company was seeking to move beyond simply “enduring” the price competition, he said, to creating cars better suited for Chinese consumers, who spend a significant amount of time relaxing in their cars without driving them.

Profits in North America plunged 83 per cent during the quarter due to recalls and production suspensions for the Camry sedan and Lexus models due to testing data falsification. Toyota truck and bus subsidiary Hino also recalled vehicles as part of the sprawling data scandal.

Still, Toyota executives said there was no slowdown in hybrid demand in the North American market, which is the key profit engine for the Japanese group.

Hybrid vehicle sales — which are more profitable for Toyota than regular vehicles — continued to power ahead, totalling a record 524,790 units in North America, with low inventory levels holding back sales numbers.

“We have not noticed in a straightforward manner any change in economic activities,” Miyazaki said. “Our hybrid cars are extremely popular.”

Honda cut its net profit outlook by 14 per cent to ¥950bn, due also to flagging Chinese demand.

Shares in Honda fell 6 per cent following the profit downgrade on Wednesday, while Toyota’s stock price was up 1.7 per cent as the company maintained its profit guidance.

On Wednesday, BMW said earnings before interest and taxes slid 61 per cent year on year to €1.69bn, which the company blamed on “extraordinary challenges”. Vehicle sales in China dropped 30 per cent.

In September, the Munich-based company cut its full-year profit forecast and warned that 1.5mn cars sold in the past two years could have faulty brake systems, adding that sales in China were also sliding.

The company’s comments on its woes in China came after German carmakers Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, which are also heavily dependent on China for sales, had similarly warned of big slumps in demand.

VW last week announced a 64 per cent plunge in quarterly net profits, following slow Chinese sales.

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Novo Nordisk maintained its sales growth momentum on booming sales of its weight loss and diabetes drugs, as it reported revenue and operating profit broadly in line with analysts’ expectations.

The maker of the blockbuster Ozempic and Wegovy drugs has benefited in recent years from huge demand for its products. It reported sales of DKr71.3bn ($10.2bn) in the third quarter, up 21 per cent from the same period in 2023 but slightly lower than analysts’ projections. Operating profit of DKr33.8bn was in line with expectations.

The company now expects sales to increase by 23-27 per cent on a constant exchange rate basis compared with previous estimates of 22-28 per cent. 

The results come as competition between Novo Nordisk and its main rival in the weight-loss category Eli Lilly continues at pace.

Eli Lilly shares tumbled by as much as 12 per cent last week after it lowered its revenue guidance because of high manufacturing costs and fluctuating inventory levels.  

Novo Nordisk’s revenue growth was driven by sales of its weight-loss drug Wegovy, which accounted for DKr17.3bn of sales, above analyst estimates of DKr15.8bn.

“The sales growth is driven by increasing demand for our GLP-1-based diabetes and obesity treatments, and we are serving more patients than ever before,” said chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen.

The Danish company’s share price rise of 7 per cent this year lags far behind its rival Eli Lilly’s 36 per cent, as the US company has gradually increased its share of the obesity and diabetes market and Novo Nordisk has faced lower prescriptions of Wegovy than expected.

Novo Nordisk is developing new drugs that could provide improved weight-loss results for patients, with investors waiting for late-stage results before the end of the year from CagriSema, a new treatment that could eventually replace Wegovy and Ozempic.

Both companies expect to see more competition in the years ahead, although the clinical development of drugs from rivals Roche and AstraZeneca are far behind those of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. AstraZeneca this week reported early data for a weight-loss oral pill that it said was safe and competitive with other drugs in the field.

Financial advice and investment management firm One Four Nine Group has acquired Nottingham-based Castlegate Capital, marking a “crucial step” in its growth journey.

The deal is the 10th acquisition for One Four Nine Group and the first of 2024 following a significant period of focus to integrate all firms into the business fully.

The launch in late 2023 of One Four Nine Wealth was an important moment for the evolution of the business.

It provided a “robust platform” to begin uniting all regional locations under one brand identity and to ensure the delivery a consistent client service proposition across the UK.

One Four Nine Wealth is the financial planning arm of the business, operating alongside One Four Nine Portfolio Management.

Castlegate is an independent chartered financial planning business established in 2016 catering to private and corporate clients across the UK.

It will rebrand to One Four Nine Wealth upon completion of the transaction taking the group’s client assets to over £1.6bn with over 30 financial planners and around 5,000 clients.

One Four Nine Group, chief executive Gabrielle Beaumont said: “This is an exciting time of growth for One Four Nine Group.

“Investing heavily in the last 12 months in people, integration and client proposition across our regional locations has put us in a strong position to continue to attract some of the best firms in the market as part of our continued acquisition strategy.”

She said the Castlegate team was a “natural fit” for One Four Nine Group and shares its vision of building an “energetic, forward-thinking” financial planning business with a “clear focus on delivering excellent lifetime financial planning to clients”.

One Four Nine Group corporate development director Sanjay Lukka added: “The acquisition of Castlegate Capital is an important milestone for One Four Nine Group.

“Having joined the Group in August, I’m delighted that my first acquisition marks such a crucial step in our growth journey.

“This acquisition reinforces our commitment to expanding One Four Nine Group’s footprint in the Midlands and beyond.

“Castlegate Capital’s expertise and strong client focus aligns fully with our own, and I look forward to working alongside their talented team to continue to deliver more value to our clients.”

One Four Nine launched in October 2021 with the acquisition of two advisory firms – Charter Financial Planning and Rice Whatmough Crozier.

The group primarily targets accountancy firms and other professional services firms which own or have a joint venture with financial advice firms.

It also considers standalone advisory firms which reflect its “collaborative, innovative and professional values”.

This includes advice firms either already or wanting to become experienced in recommending tax efficient alternative investments.