After spiraling from crisis to crisis over much of the past seven years, Boeing is stabilizing under CEO Kelly Ortberg’s leadership.

Ortberg, a longtime aerospace executive and an engineer whom the manufacturer plucked from retirement to fix the problem-addled company last year, is set this week to outline significant progress since he took the helm a year ago. Boeing reports quarterly results and gives its outlook on Tuesday.

So far, investors are liking what they’ve been seeing. Shares of the company are up more than 30% so far this year.

Wall Street analysts expect the aircraft manufacturer to halve its second-quarter losses from a year ago when it reports. Ortberg told investors in May that the manufacturer expects to generate cash in the second half of the year. Boeing’s aircraft production has increased, and its airplane deliveries just hit the highest level in 18 months.

It’s a shift for Boeing, whose successive leaders missed targets on aircraft delivery schedules, certifications, financial goals and culture changes that frustrated investors and customers alike, while rival Airbus pulled ahead.

“The general agreement is that the culture is changing after decades of self-inflicted knife wounds,” said Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm.

Analysts expect the company to post its first annual profit since 2018 next year.

“When he got the job, I was not anywhere as near as optimistic as today,” said Douglas Harned, senior aerospace and defense analyst at Bernstein.

Ortberg’s work was already cut out for him, but the challenges multiplied when he arrived.

As the company hemorrhaged cash, Ortberg announced massive cost cuts, including laying off 10% of the company. Its machinists who make the majority of its airplanes went on strike for seven weeks until the company and the workers’ union signed a new labor deal. Ortberg also oversaw a more than $20 billion capital raise last fall, replaced the head of the defense unit and sold off its Jeppesen navigation business.

Ortberg bought a house in the Seattle area, where Boeing makes most of its planes, shortly after taking the job last August, and his presence has been positive, aerospace analysts have said.

“He’s showing up,” Aboulafia said. “You show up, you talk to people.”

Boeing declined to make Ortberg available for an interview.

Boeing’s leaders hoped for a turnaround year in 2024. But five days in, a door-plug blew out of a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9 as it climbed out of Portland. The almost-catastrophe brought Boeing a production slowdown, renewed Federal Aviation Administration scrutiny and billions in cash burn.

Key bolts were left off the plane before it was delivered to Alaska Airlines. It was the latest in a series of quality problems at Boeing, where other defects have required time-consuming reworking.

Boeing had already been reeling from two deadly Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that sullied the reputation of America’s largest exporter. The company in May reached an agreement with the Justice Department to avoid prosecution stemming from a battle over a previous criminal conspiracy charge tied to the crashes. Victims’ family members slammed the deal when it was announced.

For years, executives at top Boeing airline customers complained publicly about the manufacturer and its leadership as they grappled with delays. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary told investors in May 2022 that management needed a “reboot or boot up the arse.”

Last week, O’Leary had a different tune.

“I continue to believe Kelly Ortberg, [and Boeing Commercial Airplane unit CEO] Stephanie Pope are doing a great job,” he said on an earnings call. “I mean, there is no doubt that the quality of what is being produced, the hulls in Wichita and the aircraft in Seattle has dramatically improved.”

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby cast doubt over the Boeing 737 Max 10 after the January 2024 door-plug accident, as the carrier prepared not to have that aircraft in its fleet plan. The plane is still not certified, but Kirby has said Boeing has been more predictability on airplane deliveries.

Still, delays for the Max 10, the largest of the Max family, and the yet-to-be certified Max 7, the smallest, are a headache for customers, especially since having too few or too many seats on a flight can determine profitability for airlines.

“They’re working the right problems. The consistency of deliveries is much better,” Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan said in an interview last month. “But there’s no update on the Max 7. We’re assuming we are not flying it in 2026.”

Boeing under Ortberg still has much to fix.

The FAA capped Boeing’s production at 38 Maxes a month, a rate that it has reached. To go beyond that, to a target of 42, Boeing will need the FAA’s blessing.

Ortberg said this year that the company is stabilizing to go beyond that rate. Manufacturers get paid when aircraft are delivered, so higher production is key.

“I would suspect they would be having those discussions very soon,” Harned said. “It’s 47 [a month] that I think is the challenging break.”

He added that Boeing has a lot of inventory on hand to help increase production.

Its defense unit has also suffered. The defense unit encompasses programs like the KC-46 tanker program and Air Force One, which has drawn public ire from President Donald Trump. Trump, frustrated with delays on the two new jets meant to serve the president, turned to a used Qatari Boeing 747 to potentially use as a presidential aircraft, though insiders say that used plane could require months of reoutfitting.

Ortberg replaced the head of that unit last fall.

A strike could also be on the horizon at the defense unit after factory workers “overwhelmingly” rejected a new labor deal, according to their union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 837.

“The proposal from Boeing Defense fell short of addressing the priorities and sacrifices of the skilled IAM Union workforce,” the union said Sunday. “Our members are standing together to demand a contract that respects their work and ensures a secure future.”

There is a seven-day cooling off period before a strike would begin, if a new deal isn’t reached.

“They’re not totally out of the woods,” Harned said.

Boeing and Ortberg also need to start thinking about a new jet, some industry members said. Its best-selling 737 first debuted in 1967, and the company was looking at a midsize jetliner before the two crashes sent its attention elsewhere.

“Already there’s been a reversal from ‘read my lips, no new jet.’ I would like to see that accelerate,” Aboulafia said. “He is the guy to make that happen.”

Samsung Electronics has entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to Tesla, based on a regulatory filing by the South Korean firm and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s posts on X.

The memory chipmaker, which had not named the counterparty, mentioned in its filing that the effective start date of the contract was July 26, 2025 — receipt of orders — and its end date was Dec. 31, 2033.

However, Musk later confirmed in a reply to a post on social media platform X that Tesla was the counterparty.

He also posted: “Samsung’s giant new Texas fab will be dedicated to making Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip. The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate. Samsung currently makes AI4.TSMC will make AI5, which just finished design, initially in Taiwan and then Arizona.”

“Samsung agreed to allow Tesla to assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency. This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress,” Musk said on X, and suggested that the deal with Samsung could likely be even larger than the announced $16.5 billion.

Samsung earlier said that details of the deal, including the name of the counterparty, will not be disclosed until the end of 2033, citing a request from the second party “to protect trade secrets,” according to a Google translation of the filing in Korean on Monday.

“Since the main contents of the contract have not been disclosed due to the need to maintain business confidentiality, investors are advised to invest carefully considering the possibility of changes or termination of the contract,” the company said.

The company’s shares rose over 6% in trading on Monday to reach their highest level since September 2024.

Tesla was a probable customer, Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group, told CNBC before Musk’s post. Bloomberg News had earlier reported that Samsung’s deal was with Tesla, citing a source.

Samsung’s foundry service manufactures chips based on designs provided by other companies. It is the second largest provider of foundry services globally, behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The company stated in April that it aimed to commence 2 nanometer mass production in its foundry business and secure major orders for the next-generation technology. In semiconductor technology, smaller nanometer sizes signify more compact transistor designs, which lead to greater processing power and efficiency.

Local South Korean media outlets have also reported that American chip firm Qualcomm could place an order for chips manufactured using Samsung’s 2 nanometer technology.

Samsung, which is set to deliver earnings on Thursday, expects its second-quarter profit to more than halve. An analyst previously told CNBC that the disappointing forecast was due to weak orders for its foundry business and as the company has struggled to capture AI demand for its memory business.

The company has fallen behind competitors SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory used in AI chipsets.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has become the main supplier of these chips to American AI behemoth Nvidia. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

Palantir has hit another major milestone in its meteoric stock rise. It’s now one of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies.

The provider of software and data analytics technology to defense agencies saw its stock rise about 3% on Friday to another record, lifting the company’s market cap to $375 billion, which puts it ahead of Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The company’s market value was already higher than Bank of America and Coca-Cola.

Palantir has more than doubled in value this year as investors ramp up bets on the company’s artificial intelligence business and closer ties to the U.S. government. Since its founding in 2003 by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, the company has steadily accrued a growing list of customers.

Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business increased 45% to $373 million in its most recent quarter, while total sales rose 39% to $884 million. The company next reports results on Aug. 4.

Earlier this year, Palantir soared ahead of Salesforce, IBM and Cisco into the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap.

Buying the stock at these levels requires investors to pay hefty multiples. Palantir currently trades for 273 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. The only other company in the top 20 with a triple-digit ratio is Tesla at 175.

With $3.1 billion in total revenue over the past year, Palantir is a fraction the size of the next smallest company by sales among the top 20 by market cap. Mastercard, which is valued at $518 billion, is closest with sales over the past four quarters of roughly $29 billion.

Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people so far in 2025. The stress of the belt-tightening has gotten to CEO Satya Nadella.

“Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.

After Microsoft’s latest labor reductions, investors pushed the stock’s closing price above $500 for the first time on July 9. The company announced the layoffs of about 9,000 people a week earlier. Microsoft employed 228,000 people as of June 2024. It hasn’t provided a new figure that takes into account its layoffs this year, but Nadella wrote that headcount is basically flat.

“This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he wrote. “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”

The cuts at Microsoft are reflective of an overall trend across the tech industry, with over 80,000 positions eliminated to date in 2025, according to one count. Recruit Holdings announced earlier this month that it would lay off 1,300 people from its human resources technology segment that includes the Indeed and Glassdoor websites. The company’s CEO pointed to artificial intelligence in a memo, Bloomberg reported.

On social media in recent months, some Microsoft employees have become disheartened about the company’s cutbacks, given its stature.

“I have loved working for this company, still do, but this has done so much damage to that loyalty because it has shown that Microsoft’s espoused values do not apply to business decisions at the macro level,” a person who lists themselves as a Microsoft directed on LinkedIn posted last week.

Microsoft is the world’s most valuable public company after Nvidia, whose chips have become a critical piece of the AI arms race. Microsoft’s Windows and Office franchises remain dominant, and its Azure cloud services have seen faster growth in recent years as OpenAI and other companies rent out Nvidia graphics cards to run AI models.

In the memo, Nadella touched on Microsoft’s mission for the past 10 years, which has been to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and how the rise of AI is changing it.

“We must reimagine our mission for a new era,” he wrote. “What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools. That’s the shift we are driving — from a software factory to an intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve.”

Trump administration regulators have approved Skydance Media’s $8 billion bid to acquire CBS News parent company Paramount, paving the way for a tectonic shift in ownership of one of America’s three major networks.

The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it had approved the acquisition, with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr adding in a news release that the move would bring change to the company’s news coverage. Paramount owns CBS, which includes CBS News.

‘Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,’ Carr said. ‘That is why I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network. In particular, Skydance has made written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.’

‘Today’s decision also marks another step forward in the FCC’s efforts to eliminate invidious forms of DEI discrimination,’ Carr added.

David Ellison; Shari Redstone.AP; Getty Images

In recent days, Paramount’s new owner made a number of concessions to the FCC, including agreeing to not implement any diversity, equity or inclusion programs. Skydance also said it would ‘undertake a comprehensive review’ of CBS and ‘will commit, for a period of at least two years, to have in place an ombudsman.’ That role would report to the president of the new company.

A number of companies that have billion-dollar transactions pending before Carr’s FCC have also backed off of DEI programs, including Verizon and T-Mobile.

The concessions also came after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit with President Donald Trump for $16 million. Trump brought that suit, saying the way CBS edited a ’60 Minutes’ interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris was ‘election and voter interference.’

The lone Democrat in FCC leadership, Commissioner Anna Gomez, did not mince words about the push to secure promises from the companies.

“After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted,’ she said in an emailed statement.

‘In an unprecedented move, this once-independent FCC used its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom,’ she added. ‘Once again, this agency is undermining legitimate efforts to combat discrimination and expand opportunity by overstepping its authority and intervening in employment matters reserved for other government entities with proper jurisdiction on these issues.’

‘Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.’

Skydance is run by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison. While the younger Ellison made a donation to President Joe Biden’s re-election fund in February 2024 shortly before the former president bowed out of the race, Trump recently signaled his comfort with his takeover of Paramount and its assets, which in addition to CBS News include Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, The CW, MTV, BET and film franchises like “Smurfs” and “Sonic the Hedgehog.”

“Ellison is great. He’ll do a great job with it,” Trump said in June.

There is likely to be a sea change in the editorial direction of CBS News under its new ownership. In a recent filing, Ellison and Skydance said they’d told Carr that they were committed to pursuing a focus on “American storytelling” while touting a new, “unbiased” editorial direction for CBS News. Their meeting came shortly after Paramount agreed to settle Trump’s lawsuit.

It also came just days after CBS announced it was canceling “The Late Show,” currently hosted by Stephen Colbert — an announcement Trump praised on social media. Colbert had recently criticized the parent company’s multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump, while CBS said the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”

There had been signs of an editorial shift ahead of the merger. Most notably, longtime “60 Minutes” editor Bill Owens announced he was stepping down this spring, citing CBS News’ fading editorial independence. Shortly after, CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon was pushed out. Last week, The New York Times reported Skydance was in early talks to acquire the conservative-leaning The Free Press media outlet. Meanwhile, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart has said he did not know whether his program would survive the merger.

Skydance has spent years pursuing Paramount and eventually realized it could successfully execute the transaction by purchasing Paramount’s parent, National Amusements, the company once helmed by Sumner Redstone, the father of the company’s current chairwoman, president and CEO, Shari Redstone. Yet the proposed deal continued to face hurdles, first under the Biden administration then at the outset of Trump’s term. Its approval came in what was its third deadline extension period.

UnitedHealth Group revealed Thursday it is facing a Justice Department investigation over its Medicare billing practices.

It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported in May that the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into the health-care giant over possible Medicare fraud. In response at the time, the company said it stands “by the integrity of our Medicare Advantage program.”

In July, the Journal also reported that the DOJ interviewed several doctors about UnitedHealth’s practices and whether they felt pressured to submit claims for certain conditions that bolstered payments from the Medicare Advantage program to the company.

That marked the second time this year that the insurer’s Medicare Advantage business has come under federal scrutiny. The Journal also reported in February that the DOJ is conducting a civil investigation into whether the company inflated diagnoses to trigger extra payments to its Medicare Advantage plans.

But in March, UnitedHealth moved a step closer to ending a yearslong legal battle with the DOJ that began with a whistleblower who alleged the company illegally withheld at least $2 billion through the Medicare Advantage program. A special master assigned to the case by the judge issued a recommendation in favor of UnitedHealth, saying the DOJ lacked evidence.

UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare and retirement segment, which includes the Medicare Advantage business, is UnitedHealth Group’s largest revenue driver, raking in $139 billion in sales last year.

The update in the probe comes after a tumultuous last year for UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest and most powerful private health insurer. Shares of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, are down more than 42% for the year after it suspended its 2025 forecast amid skyrocketing medical costs, announced the surprise exit of former CEO Andrew Witty and grappled with the reported probe into its Medicare Advantage business.

The company’s 2024 wasn’t any easier, marked by a historic cyberattack and the torrent of public blowback after the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson.

Uber announced a new feature Wednesday that pairs women drivers and riders, in its latest move to address safety on the ride-hailing platform.

The new tool, which the platform will begin piloting next month in the U.S., allows women passengers to match with women drivers when booking or pre-booking rides, and create a preference in their app settings. Women drivers can also choose to drive women.

“It’s about giving women more choice, more control, and more comfort when they ride and drive,” Camiel Irving, Uber’s vice president of U.S. and Canada operations, said in a release.

The company said the rider’s preference isn’t guaranteed but the feature increases the chances women will be paired in the app.

Uber will pilot the program in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit. The company also said it tested the feature in countries such as France, Germany and Argentina.

This isn’t Uber’s first foray into gender preferences on its platform.

In 2019, Uber rolled out a women rider preference feature for female drivers in Saudi Arabia after women won the right to drive in 2018. That offering later expanded to about 40 countries. A survey from the company in 2015 found that about a fifth of its U.S. drivers were women.

Over the years, ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft have faced safety concerns and questions over the roles these platforms have played in various sexual assault and harassment incidents.

Uber has rolled out several features in recent years to improve safety on the platform, including teen accounts and rider and pin verification.

Competitor Lyft launched an option in late 2023 that pairs women and nonbinary drivers and riders.

Alphabet reported second-quarter results on Wednesday that beat on revenue and earnings, but the company said it would raise its capital investments by $10 billion in 2025.

Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

The company’s overall revenue grew 14% year over year, higher than the 10.9% Wall Street expected, but Alphabet is going to spend more on artificial intelligence in 2025 than it anticipated.

In February, the company said it expected to invest $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as it continues to expand on its AI strategy. That was already above the $58.84 billion Wall Street expected at the time.

The company increased that figure on Wednesday to $85 billion, saying it was raising it due to “strong and growing demand for our Cloud products and services.” The company expects to further increase capital expenditures in 2026, Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said on an earnings call.

The company reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing business, which is a 32% increase from a year ago. Last week, OpenAI announced that it expected to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT service. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “we are very excited to be partnering with them.”

Alphabet’s net income increased to $28.20 billion, up nearly 20% from the previous year.

The company’s search and advertising units still showed growth in the second quarter despite AI competition heating up. The company’s search unit brought in $54.19 billion during the quarter, and its advertising revenue grew to $71.34 billion — up about 10.4% from $64.61 billion the year prior.

YouTube advertising revenue came in at $9.8 billion, higher than Wall Street expected.

The company said its “Other Bets” segment, which includes its self-driving car unit Waymo and life sciences unit Verily, brought in $373 million — up from $365 million a year ago. Other Bets reported a loss of $1.25 billion, up from the $1.13 billion a year ago.

AI Overviews, Google’s AI search product that summarizes search results, now has upward of two billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories, Pichai said during Wednesday’s earnings call. That’s up from 1.5 billion monthly users last quarter.

The Gemini app, which has the company’s AI chatbot, now has more than 450 million monthly active users, Pichai said.

When asked about large spending on AI talent, Ashkenazi said Alphabet makes “sure that we invest appropriately to have the best and brightest minds in the industry.”

Google made a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing earlier in July that it would bring in Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and other top researchers at the AI coding startup as part of a $2.4 billion deal that also includes licensing the company’s technology.

Total operating expenses increased 20% to $26.1 billion, Ashkenazi said on Wednesday. The biggest driver of growth was expenses for legal and other matters due in part to a $1.4 billion charge related to a settlement, she said on Wednesday’s earnings call. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in May announced a $1.37 billion settlement with Google related to a data privacy rights lawsuit it made against the company in 2022.

Ashkenazi said Alphabet’s third-quarter revenue “could see a tailwind” due to several reasons. That includes a negative impact for advertising, which benefited from “strong spend on U.S. elections” in late 2024, particularly on YouTube, she said.

UnitedHealth Group revealed Thursday it is facing a Justice Department investigation over its Medicare billing practices.

It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported in May that the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into the health-care giant over possible Medicare fraud. In response at the time, the company said it stands “by the integrity of our Medicare Advantage program.”

In July, the Journal also reported that the DOJ interviewed several doctors about UnitedHealth’s practices and whether they felt pressured to submit claims for certain conditions that bolstered payments from the Medicare Advantage program to the company.

That marked the second time this year that the insurer’s Medicare Advantage business has come under federal scrutiny. The Journal also reported in February that the DOJ is conducting a civil investigation into whether the company inflated diagnoses to trigger extra payments to its Medicare Advantage plans.

But in March, UnitedHealth moved a step closer to ending a yearslong legal battle with the DOJ that began with a whistleblower who alleged the company illegally withheld at least $2 billion through the Medicare Advantage program. A special master assigned to the case by the judge issued a recommendation in favor of UnitedHealth, saying the DOJ lacked evidence.

UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare and retirement segment, which includes the Medicare Advantage business, is UnitedHealth Group’s largest revenue driver, raking in $139 billion in sales last year.

The update in the probe comes after a tumultuous last year for UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest and most powerful private health insurer. Shares of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, are down more than 42% for the year after it suspended its 2025 forecast amid skyrocketing medical costs, announced the surprise exit of former CEO Andrew Witty and grappled with the reported probe into its Medicare Advantage business.

The company’s 2024 wasn’t any easier, marked by a historic cyberattack and the torrent of public blowback after the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson.

Corporations are continuing to spend on business travel, but are being strategic about how they allocate those dollars amid ongoing trade uncertainties, according to new reports from the travel and expense platform Navan and the Global Business Travel Association.

Corporate travel spending activity increased 15% year over year in the second quarter of 2025, according to a business travel index published Tuesday from Navan.

Navan’s index, backed by Nasdaq, is derived from millions of corporate business transactions on its platform. It examines the amount spent and number of transactions relating to airline travel, hotel reservations and expense transactions from corporate cards.

Amy Butte, Navan’s CFO, said during an interview that from talking with other chief financial officers over the past few months, she never got the sense that corporate leaders would stop spending on business travel altogether. Instead, they are in “wait and see” mode.

“If you’re making choices about where you’re being cautious, we’re not seeing people be cautious in the area of relationship building, either with their customers or with their teammates. We’re still seeing the spend allocated towards travel as a key component of any business strategy,” Butte said.

But while global business travel is expected to reach a new high of $1.57 trillion in 2025, according to a Monday report by the Global Business Travel Association, that total represents 6.6% year-over-year growth, which is less than the 10.4% increase that was previously predicted. GBTA cited trade tensions, policy uncertainty and economic pressures as the reasons for the more moderate growth.

A string of sentiment polls by GBTA also shows that corporate travel optimism for the rest of 2025 appears muted. The percentage of respondents who said they were optimistic about the overall outlook for the business travel industry in 2025 dropped sharply from 67% in November 2024 to 31% in April and declined slightly again this month to 28%.

The findings from both reports, grouped together with commentary from airline CEOs last week, show C-suite leaders are still largely left in wait-and-see mode amid President Donald Trump’s fluid tariff policies, but companies appear now to have a better read on how they will manage the uncertainty.

“Historically, corporate travel has been the first thing, one of the easiest things, to minimize if you’re a company,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said during the company’s earnings call this month, adding that corporate travel on the airline has been flat on a year-over-year basis.

But Butte said that Navan has not seen a drop-off in business travel. Instead, businesses are shifting how they are spending.

For example, Butte said businesses are continuing to commit to individual, face-to-face meetings, rather than spending on large group outings. The Navan index shows that spending on personal meals, meaning one-on-one meetings held over a meal, was up 9.8% from last year, while spending on team events and meals was the only category in the report that declined.

Navan did see some compression earlier in the year in the share of higher-priced airline tickets purchased that were first class or business class, Butte said, but she added that the platform has since seen an acceleration as uncertainty has lessened.

Airfare prices have also declined so far this year, which means business and consumers alike are spending less on plane tickets. Airfare fell 3.5% in June from a year earlier while inflation overall rose, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

GBTA CEO Suzanne Neufang said during an interview that CFOs have not cut travel spending off entirely, but are looking for efficient ways to get employees on the road. This may look like booking multicity trips, scheduling multiple meetings per trip or booking fewer trips per month, she said.

Neufang said the business travel industry has been focused over the past five years on making sure every trip has a purpose and delivers a return on investment.

“Gone are the days when there’s really frivolous business traveling,” Neufang said.

The new findings on business travel spending also come as airlines are reporting their quarterly earnings.

When Delta reported earnings on July 10, Bastian said he expects both consumer and corporate confidence to improve in the second half of the year, creating an environment for travel demand to accelerate.

Delta and other airlines saw travel demand come in weaker than expected at the beginning of the year, especially from price-sensitive customers traveling domestically. Bastian said back in April that Trump’s trade policies were hurting bookings.

Bastian took a more positive tone this month, telling CNBC that corporate travel has stabilized as businesses have more clarity and confidence than they did earlier this year. But he said corporate travel is in line with last year, not the 5% to 10% growth Delta expected at the start of the year.

Meanwhile, Delta President Glen Hauenstein said on an earnings call this month that corporate travel trends are “choppy” and overall corporate volumes are expected to be “flattish” over last year.

United Airlines reported earnings last week. CEO Scott Kirby said during the company’s call with analysts that so far this month, the airline has seen a double-digit acceleration in business demand as uncertainty has declined.

Andrew Nocella, United’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, added that the business traffic growth is “across the board” and not restricted to any singular hub or vertical, which he said reflects lessening macroeconomic uncertainty.

Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines are scheduled to report their quarterly results this week.