Liu Miao has sold clothing on Amazon to wholesale buyers in the United States for the past five years. That trade has come to an abrupt stop.

Mr. Liu owns a small factory in Guangzhou, long the center of China’s highly competitive garment industry. He and other factory managers, already dealing with tight profit margins, said last week that the combination of tariffs and President Trump’s new tax on cheap imports had cut deeply into their businesses. Costs along the supply chain are also higher.

The tariffs have made it impossible for Mr. Liu to continue selling on Amazon, where he previously made about $1 on every garment but now just 50 cents. And he felt he could not cut his employees’ pay, Mr. Liu said, as workers at a labor market crowded past his motorbike, which he had parked on the sidewalk with a dress sample draped over the handlebars.

“You can’t sell anything to the United States right now,” Mr. Liu said. “The tariffs are too high.”

Platforms like Amazon, Shein and Temu brought China’s vast manufacturing supply chain to the world’s doorstep. These online marketplaces made it possible for thousands of Guangzhou’s small factories to reach shoppers in the United States. And since packages worth less than $800 could enter the United States tax-free, the factories and, in turn, the platforms were able to charge very low prices.

Exports have been a major driver of China’s economic growth in the past few years. Business has been particularly good in e-commerce. In one Guangzhou neighborhood, foreign luxury cars — Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs — were parked outside factories that pay workers about $60 a day to churn out clothing sold on apps like Shein and Amazon.

But now as trade tensions force the world’s two largest economies apart, many businesses in Guangzhou are facing a tipping point.

The tariffs compound multiple challenges facing the garment makers. It is getting harder to make a profit as the Chinese government has struggled to get consumers spending more after the collapse of the country’s property market. Without rising home values, many Chinese people are curbing their spending.

That hurt business for Zhang Chen, who used to own six clothing stores in the central province of Hubei. But when shoppers didn’t return after the Covid-19 pandemic and rent stayed high, he decided to close them all.

“In 2020, business wasn’t coming back, and in 2021, it still wasn’t coming back. By 2022 when it was still like that, it looked like it was never coming back,” Mr. Zhang said. Now he makes about $100 a day delivering freshly sewn garments to Shein collection points near the airport.

The factories in Guangzhou are not the automated ones churning out electric vehicles or the manufacturing campuses making semiconductors that are key to China’s yearslong drive to secure geopolitical resilience through advanced technology. Yet China’s garment factories employ millions of workers hustling to make a living.

In interviews, nine factory owners and managers in Guangzhou said they were considering relocating their operations, some to provinces like Hubei, 600 miles away, where they could pay workers lower wages. A few owners said they could possibly move to countries like Vietnam, where many Chinese factories have set up to avoid potential new tariffs as high as those already set on China’s exports.

Many reported declining orders. Others said they had suspended some production lines. All described watching neighboring businesses shut their doors in the past few months.

On Friday as the U.S. policy to end tax-free imports from China took effect, Liu Bin packed up his sprawling garment factory where piles of Shein packages pressed against the windows.

Mr. Liu’s factory specializes in dresses and tops meant to be worn to a beach party or a date night, and Shein typically purchases about 100,000 pieces from him a month. But in April, after the company ordered about half that much, he started moving his production line to the neighboring province of Jiangxi. He could no longer afford rent in Guangzhou.

Mr. Liu said that Shein was offering incentives to help cover the cost of moving operations to Vietnam, and he had considered it, “but then the tariffs on Vietnam got even higher, too.”

He said he had also tried to find buyers on TikTok and Temu, but orders were down on every platform. “They’re all falling, and we are only waiting and watching,” Mr. Liu said.

Shein did not respond to a request for comment. Temu said on Friday it had stopped shipping products from China directly to buyers in the United States.

The Chinese government has been encouraging domestic e-commerce platforms to help small businesses sell to their home market. But with China’s consumers being careful about spending, it will be hard for factories to sell as much domestically as they were exporting.

Han Junxiu, who sells novelty socks on Shein and Temu, said she doubted that the U.S. government would be able to suddenly start collecting tariffs on low-priced packages, which had been coming into the United States at the rate of four million a day.

“I just don’t think it’s that realistic,” Ms. Han said after closing her booth for the night at the Canton Fair, Guangzhou’s annual export trade show.

Fluffy socks for pajama parties are some of her most popular products.

This is exactly the kind of thing Americans will still need to buy from Chinese businesses, Ms. Han said. “Where else are they going to buy all this?” she asked.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Oil prices resumed their downward slide after the OPEC Plus cartel of oil producers said over the weekend that it would pump more oil, despite concerns that President Trump’s trade war will curb demand.

The U.S. benchmark oil price fell to around $56 a barrel, from $58 on Friday. For many companies, the steady decline means it will not be profitable to drill wells in the United States despite Mr. Trump’s calls for increased production.

Prices were last around this level in early April, just before Mr. Trump said he would pause reciprocal tariffs on most countries for 90 days. That announcement led to rallies in both the stock market and the oil market, though oil prices have since waned.

That is partly because OPEC Plus is raising output at the same time that economists are warning that higher tariffs on most American trading partners will slow global economic growth and potentially cause a recession in the United States.

The eight countries that make up the OPEC Plus cartel said on Saturday that they would further ramp up production in June.

Lower commodity prices are causing some companies to pull back. There are about 9 percent fewer rigs drilling wells in the Permian Basin, the top U.S. oil field, than there were this time last year, when oil was trading near $80 a barrel, according to Baker Hughes.

On Friday, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two largest U.S. oil and gas companies, reported their lowest first-quarter earnings in years. Those financial results reflect the market before Mr. Trump further escalated tariffs on China in early April.

“It is clear that this uncertainty is weighing on economic forecasts, causing significant volatility and raising the prospects of slower growth,” Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, told analysts.

President Trump said he would impose a 100 percent tariff on movies “produced” outside the United States, proclaiming in a social media post on Sunday that the issue posed a national security threat.

Mr. Trump said he had authorized Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, to begin the process of taxing “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Mr. Trump added, “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat.”

The Motion Picture Association, which represents the biggest Hollywood studios in Washington, declined to comment. The association’s latest economic impact report, based primarily on government data and released in 2023, showed that the film industry generated a positive U.S. balance of trade for every major market in the world.

As often is the case with Mr. Trump’s declarations on social media, it was not entirely clear what he was talking about. Did he mean any movie, including independent foreign-language films destined for art house cinemas and movies that play exclusively on streaming services?

Would such a tariff apply only to movies receiving tax incentives from foreign countries — or to any movie with scenes shot overseas? What about postproduction visual effects work? A single superhero movie can often involve a half-dozen or more specialized firms scattered around the world.

Technically speaking, the vast majority of movies shown in American cinemas are produced in the United States — scripts written, preproduction planning handled, principal actors cast, footage edited and sound added. But Hollywood has increasingly turned to foreign locales for the cameras-rolling part of the moviemaking process because, as with so much traditional manufacturing, it is much cheaper.

Britain, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other countries offer tax incentives that Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and other major movie companies, including Netflix and Amazon, have used. International locales also often come with lower labor costs.

As a result, thousands of middle-class film workers in the United States — camera operators, set decorators, lighting technicians, makeup artists, caterers, electricians — have seen work evaporate. According to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, roughly 18,000 full-time jobs have been eliminated in the past three years, primarily in California.

“We’re allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,” Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the union, told The Times last month.

Sometimes the cost of shipping props and people overseas ends up costing studios more than they hope to save with tax credits. But more often, producers say, the cost of working in California is prohibitive. The budget is the budget, and those budgets keep getting tighter. Peak streaming is over, fewer people are going to movie theaters, and studios no longer get dollars from DVD sales.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed to more than double the available funding for the state’s tax incentive program. Under pressure from constituents and several coalitions that formed after the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, California lawmakers have also put forward bills that would increase its film tax credit.

In January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he had named Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight as “special ambassadors” for the purpose of “bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK — BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

The actors, each an enthusiastic supporter of the president, have yet to do anything publicly, although Mr. Voight, who is Angelina Jolie’s father, has met with a few unions and studio executives on a private fact-finding tour.

Matt Stevens contributed reporting.

Warren E. Buffett’s approach to investing is deceptively simple.

“Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” he once wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, his business conglomerate.

This method — known as value investing — had existed long before Mr. Buffett, now 94, began his career. But no one did it as well — or for as long — as he did. And in the process, he influenced generations of financiers, including Wall Street hedge fund moguls, and promoted the now-common advice about investing for the long term.

Over the 60 years that Mr. Buffett has controlled Berkshire Hathaway, he used value investing to turn a failing textile manufacturer into a $1.1 trillion conglomerate, corporate takeover machine and microcosm of the U.S. economy. One of America’s largest railroads? Owned by Berkshire. The biggest shareholder in American Express and Coca-Cola? Berkshire, too.

Mr. Buffett amassed a Midas-like personal fortune, valued at about $168 billion, and along the way became the avuncular avatar of American-style capitalism who was called upon for help by both corporate executives and government officials in the 2008 financial crisis.

That unparalleled success earned Mr. Buffett millions of admirers around the world. Tens of thousands of them were on hand at Berkshire’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday when he declared he finally planned to step down as chief executive.

His announcement was greeted with surprise and then minutes of thundering applause from shareholders — many of whom became millionaires by owning Berkshire stock and hang onto his every financial aphorism.

“I tell people everything I know about investing I learned from Warren Buffett,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who was in the crowd, said in an interview after Mr. Buffett’s announcement.

Mr. Buffett has acknowledged that his enormous fortune owes no small debt to pure luck. As he has put it, he won “the ovarian lottery” by being born in the United States, when stock markets were primed to create one of the biggest economic booms in modern history.

He learned about stock picking from a pioneer of value investing, Benjamin Graham, who was his professor at Columbia University. With crucial advice from Charles T. Munger, a fellow Nebraskan who became his longtime business partner, Mr. Buffett turned Berkshire, which he bought control of in 1965, into the best-possible argument for the discipline.

But few lived and breathed the discipline as he did, reading corporate balance sheets for research — and fun — from dawn to dusk.

Mr. Buffett then put that knowledge to work in several ways. Berkshire bought a vast array of successful businesses, including See’s Candy, Fruit of the Loom and the private jet service NetJets. But the most transformative were the acquisitions of insurers like National Indemnity and Geico, which sat on premiums that customers paid but hadn’t yet claimed.

That cash, known as the “float,” became the first financial engine of Mr. Buffett’s deal machine. He used that money, along with profits from the company’s other businesses, to buy what is now a collection of 189 companies. Among the biggest are the BNSF railroad, acquired in 2010 for about $26 billion; and the electricity producer Berkshire Hathaway Energy, purchased in 2000 for $2 billion that was then expanded via its own acquisitions.

As of March 31, that cash pile, which Mr. Buffett has called his “elephant gun,” was nearly $348 billion.

Those who have sat across from Mr. Buffett at negotiating tables over the years have said that he is friendly and courteous — but unyielding when it comes to the numbers. When he is involved, rounds of haggling over price are not in the cards; he is ready to walk away.

“Warren is the most disciplined investor and the clearest thinker I’ve ever known,” said Byron Trott of the merchant bank BDT & MSD, who as a Goldman Sachs deal maker became one of the few bankers Mr. Buffett said he trusted. “His ability to distill complexity into clarity, and to lead with humility and conviction, is unmatched.”

Mr. Buffett also used Berkshire’s cash to buy an array of stocks, with a portfolio that includes American Express, Bank of America, Coke, Chevron and — in one of his most profitable investments — Apple. For those companies, Berkshire’s ownership has tended to be the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.

And with Berkshire’s huge balance sheet and Mr. Buffett’s unparalleled control, the conglomerate has been able to swoop in at opportune times, buying when others must sell.

Mr. Buffett has been “an extraordinary investor in American Express and a personal friend to me,” Stephen Squeri, the chief executive of American Express, said after the Berkshire announcement.

Another key to his success was holding onto investments for ages — “our favorite holding period is forever,” he has said — letting returns compound again and again, a process that he has compared to a snowball rolling downhill. (A biography that Mr. Buffett cooperated with, but later critiqued, is named after the phenomenon.)

Berkshire’s other advantage for its investors is that it charges no fees, unlike mutual funds or hedge funds. In fact, Mr. Buffett has criticized the size of the fees charged by Wall Street vehicles.

That said, Mr. Buffett has admitted that he made plenty of mistakes over the years. One was passing up opportunities to invest early in technology giants like Amazon and Microsoft, whose businesses he said he didn’t understand at the time.

Still, despite several periods of underperformance, especially in recent years, Mr. Buffett’s track record is astounding. According to his calculations, Berkshire gained 5,502,284 percent from 1964 through 2024, compared with the S&P 500’s 39,054 percent over the same period. His average annual gain was 19.9 percent, while the S&P’s was 10.4 percent.

Mr. Buffett’s approach has inspired countless other financiers, including Mr. Ackman and the mutual fund mogul Mario Gabelli. (Others have sought to copy it more directly, including Sardar Biglari, whose own financial vehicle, Biglari Holdings, shares Berkshire’s initials, website design and investing focus.)

Yet Mr. Buffett transcended business renown and attained actual celebrity, drawing on a folksy Nebraska persona that eschewed the usual trappings of plutocratic wealth. Fans make pilgrimages to his longtime house in Omaha and favorably cite his preferences for mainstream products like Cherry Coke, Dairy Queen Blizzards and See’s fudge. (All, notably, are associated with Berkshire.)

He also became known in pop culture, via cameo appearances on television shows including “All My Children” and “The Office.”

He poked fun at what he saw as the failing of the business world and Wall Street, in particular, regularly deriding professional brokers and traders for turning the markets into a “gambling parlor” that could lure average investors into financial ruin.

He took a more serious stand against Wall Street’s excesses in 1991 when as a major shareholder of Salomon Brothers, he was forced to bail out the investment bank after a trading scandal. It was a low moment in Mr. Buffett’s career.

Called to testify before Congress about Salomon, Mr. Buffett delivered a steely message to the firm’s employees: “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

His fame also gave him unique sway in Washington, adding weight to his pronouncements on political and fiscal issues. Mr. Ackman said that policymakers also closely followed Mr. Buffett’s comments and annual letters, and acted on his ideas like treating stock options for executives as a corporate expense.

Though a Democrat who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and whose name graced an Obama-era proposal for higher taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Buffett advised presidents from both parties. That was most visible in 2008, when he was beseeched by corporate executives and the George W. Bush administration to help the global financial system from melting down.

Mr. Buffett eventually agreed to invest billions in Goldman Sachs and General Electric, moves that Mr. Ackman compared with J.P. Morgan’s efforts to save banks early in the 20th century. True to form, however, he charged both companies a then-astronomical interest rate of 10 percent — a burden executives have said they were willing to pay to gain his imprimatur and survive.

“Warren Buffett represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said after Saturday’s announcement.

While the future of Berkshire appears financially solid, with Mr. Ackman calling the company “the Rock of Gibraltar,” longtime Buffett followers say that it may not retain its seemingly mythical status without its chief architect.

Berkshire’s next chief executive, Gregory Abel, is regarded as an excellent operator of businesses and a savvy deal maker, and Mr. Buffett hired Todd Combs and Ted Weschler as high-level investment executives more than a decade ago.

To Lawrence Cunningham, a former law professor at George Washington University and a shareholder, Mr. Buffett has “given Berkshire the best possible chance for the next chapter.”

But other investors worry that the company will become a bit less special, and won’t revolve around the stock picking that put it on the map. Bill Smead, whose investment firm owns Berkshire stock and who attended this year’s annual meeting, said the company has already become less ambitious, eschewing potentially transformative deals.

“It’s the end of an era,” Mr. Smead said.

Warren E. Buffett’s approach to investing is deceptively simple.

“Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” he once wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, his business conglomerate.

This method — known as value investing — had existed long before Mr. Buffett, now 94, began his career. But no one did it as well — or for as long — as he did. And in the process, he influenced generations of financiers, including Wall Street hedge fund moguls, and promoted the now-common advice about investing for the long term.

Over the 60 years that Mr. Buffett has controlled Berkshire Hathaway, he used value investing to turn a failing textile manufacturer into a $1.1 trillion conglomerate, corporate takeover machine and microcosm of the U.S. economy. One of America’s largest railroads? Owned by Berkshire. The biggest shareholder in American Express and Coca-Cola? Berkshire, too.

Mr. Buffett amassed a Midas-like personal fortune, valued at about $168 billion, and along the way became the avuncular avatar of American-style capitalism who was called upon for help by both corporate executives and government officials in the 2008 financial crisis.

That unparalleled success earned Mr. Buffett millions of admirers around the world. Tens of thousands of them were on hand at Berkshire’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday when he declared he finally planned to step down as chief executive.

His announcement was greeted with surprise and then minutes of thundering applause from shareholders — many of whom became millionaires by owning Berkshire stock and hang onto his every financial aphorism.

“I tell people everything I know about investing I learned from Warren Buffett,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager who was in the crowd, said in an interview after Mr. Buffett’s announcement.

Mr. Buffett has acknowledged that his enormous fortune owes no small debt to pure luck. As he has put it, he won “the ovarian lottery” by being born in the United States, when stock markets were primed to create one of the biggest economic booms in modern history.

He learned about stock picking from a pioneer of value investing, Benjamin Graham, who was his professor at Columbia University. With crucial advice from Charles T. Munger, a fellow Nebraskan who became his longtime business partner, Mr. Buffett turned Berkshire, which he bought control of in 1965, into the best-possible argument for the discipline.

But few lived and breathed the discipline as he did, reading corporate balance sheets for research — and fun — from dawn to dusk.

Mr. Buffett then put that knowledge to work in several ways. Berkshire bought a vast array of successful businesses, including See’s Candy, Fruit of the Loom and the private jet service NetJets. But the most transformative were the acquisitions of insurers like National Indemnity and Geico, which sat on premiums that customers paid but hadn’t yet claimed.

That cash, known as the “float,” became the first financial engine of Mr. Buffett’s deal machine. He used that money, along with profits from the company’s other businesses, to buy what is now a collection of 189 companies. Among the biggest are the BNSF railroad, acquired in 2010 for about $26 billion; and the electricity producer Berkshire Hathaway Energy, purchased in 2000 for $2 billion that was then expanded via its own acquisitions.

As of March 31, that cash pile, which Mr. Buffett has called his “elephant gun,” was nearly $348 billion.

Those who have sat across from Mr. Buffett at negotiating tables over the years have said that he is friendly and courteous — but unyielding when it comes to the numbers. When he is involved, rounds of haggling over price are not in the cards; he is ready to walk away.

“Warren is the most disciplined investor and the clearest thinker I’ve ever known,” said Byron Trott of the merchant bank BDT & MSD, who as a Goldman Sachs deal maker became one of the few bankers Mr. Buffett said he trusted. “His ability to distill complexity into clarity, and to lead with humility and conviction, is unmatched.”

Mr. Buffett also used Berkshire’s cash to buy an array of stocks, with a portfolio that includes American Express, Bank of America, Coke, Chevron and — in one of his most profitable investments — Apple. For those companies, Berkshire’s ownership has tended to be the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.

And with Berkshire’s huge balance sheet and Mr. Buffett’s unparalleled control, the conglomerate has been able to swoop in at opportune times, buying when others must sell.

Mr. Buffett has been “an extraordinary investor in American Express and a personal friend to me,” Stephen Squeri, the chief executive of American Express, said after the Berkshire announcement.

Another key to his success was holding onto investments for ages — “our favorite holding period is forever,” he has said — letting returns compound again and again, a process that he has compared to a snowball rolling downhill. (A biography that Mr. Buffett cooperated with, but later critiqued, is named after the phenomenon.)

Berkshire’s other advantage for its investors is that it charges no fees, unlike mutual funds or hedge funds. In fact, Mr. Buffett has criticized the size of the fees charged by Wall Street vehicles.

That said, Mr. Buffett has admitted that he made plenty of mistakes over the years. One was passing up opportunities to invest early in technology giants like Amazon and Microsoft, whose businesses he said he didn’t understand at the time.

Still, despite several periods of underperformance, especially in recent years, Mr. Buffett’s track record is astounding. According to his calculations, Berkshire gained 5,502,284 percent from 1964 through 2024, compared with the S&P 500’s 39,054 percent over the same period. His average annual gain was 19.9 percent, while the S&P’s was 10.4 percent.

Mr. Buffett’s approach has inspired countless other financiers, including Mr. Ackman and the mutual fund mogul Mario Gabelli. (Others have sought to copy it more directly, including Sardar Biglari, whose own financial vehicle, Biglari Holdings, shares Berkshire’s initials, website design and investing focus.)

Yet Mr. Buffett transcended business renown and attained actual celebrity, drawing on a folksy Nebraska persona that eschewed the usual trappings of plutocratic wealth. Fans make pilgrimages to his longtime house in Omaha and favorably cite his preferences for mainstream products like Cherry Coke, Dairy Queen Blizzards and See’s fudge. (All, notably, are associated with Berkshire.)

He also became known in pop culture, via cameo appearances on television shows including “All My Children” and “The Office.”

He poked fun at what he saw as the failing of the business world and Wall Street, in particular, regularly deriding professional brokers and traders for turning the markets into a “gambling parlor” that could lure average investors into financial ruin.

He took a more serious stand against Wall Street’s excesses in 1991 when as a major shareholder of Salomon Brothers, he was forced to bail out the investment bank after a trading scandal. It was a low moment in Mr. Buffett’s career.

Called to testify before Congress about Salomon, Mr. Buffett delivered a steely message to the firm’s employees: “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

His fame also gave him unique sway in Washington, adding weight to his pronouncements on political and fiscal issues. Mr. Ackman said that policymakers also closely followed Mr. Buffett’s comments and annual letters, and acted on his ideas like treating stock options for executives as a corporate expense.

Though a Democrat who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and whose name graced an Obama-era proposal for higher taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Buffett advised presidents from both parties. That was most visible in 2008, when he was beseeched by corporate executives and the George W. Bush administration to help the global financial system from melting down.

Mr. Buffett eventually agreed to invest billions in Goldman Sachs and General Electric, moves that Mr. Ackman compared with J.P. Morgan’s efforts to save banks early in the 20th century. True to form, however, he charged both companies a then-astronomical interest rate of 10 percent — a burden executives have said they were willing to pay to gain his imprimatur and survive.

“Warren Buffett represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said after Saturday’s announcement.

While the future of Berkshire appears financially solid, with Mr. Ackman calling the company “the Rock of Gibraltar,” longtime Buffett followers say that it may not retain its seemingly mythical status without its chief architect.

Berkshire’s next chief executive, Gregory Abel, is regarded as an excellent operator of businesses and a savvy deal maker, and Mr. Buffett hired Todd Combs and Ted Weschler as high-level investment executives more than a decade ago.

To Lawrence Cunningham, a former law professor at George Washington University and a shareholder, Mr. Buffett has “given Berkshire the best possible chance for the next chapter.”

But other investors worry that the company will become a bit less special, and won’t revolve around the stock picking that put it on the map. Bill Smead, whose investment firm owns Berkshire stock and who attended this year’s annual meeting, said the company has already become less ambitious, eschewing potentially transformative deals.

“It’s the end of an era,” Mr. Smead said.