Luke Vargas

And let's spin through some headlines coming across markets this morning, starting with Danish shipping giant Maersk, which is cutting a thousand jobs to slash costs as it forecasts a sharp drop in earnings.

Oil major Shell is keeping the buyback train rolling, returning three and a half billion dollars to shareholders in spite of weaker prices.

Chinese search engine Baidu, meanwhile, is getting into the buyback game for the first time, to the tune of $5 billion.

And Europe's largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal, said that EU efforts to protect the industry from Chinese competition should help it to capture market share in the coming years.

Its stock is up today more than 3%.

And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning.

Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach.

Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal.

We will be back tonight with a new show.

Until then, thanks for listening.

Software stocks keep on sliding as AI's rapidly evolving capabilities rattle investors.

Plus, shares of Novo Nordisk plummet as price competition reshapes the market for weight loss drugs.

And China flexes its regulatory muscle, banning retractable door handles on electric vehicles.

It's Wednesday, February 4th.

I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Software stocks in Asia and Europe are sliding today following a rough day on Wall Street that saw the rise of new AI tools shave more than $300 billion off of companies that sell or invest in software.

Yesterday's big losers included Adobe, Salesforce, LegalZoom.com, PayPal, Expedia, and Equifax as traders called into question the competitive moats those businesses had built up.

And with more on this software sell-off, I'm joined by reporter Hannah Miao.

Hannah, what triggered this?

I kind of thought AI was a potential benefit for some of these companies, enabling them to kind of power up their professional offerings.