Market Buzz
Friday newspaper round-up: Small businesses, ethical products, ports, Credit Suisse
The viability of thousands of small businesses is at risk as escalating energy costs take their toll on companies just as they try to recover from Covid restrictions, according to a stark warning from their federation. Small businesses, which employ almost 13 million people in the UK, are expected to feel the brunt of crippling energy costs in the coming weeks as firms begin to strike new fixed-term deals amid record high energy market prices across Europe. - Guardian.
Thursday newspaper round-up: Glaxo, London listings, energy suppliers, British Steel
A £350 million private equity-backed project to prevent the closure of GlaxoSmithKline’s manufacturing plant in Ulverston has “fallen over”. Tony Mallin, executive chairman of Star Capital, the London-based private equity firm, said the venture had been thwarted by the “lack of a long-term contract commitment” from the government. “This was not high up on their priority list at the moment and all the focus is on vaccines,” he said. - The Times.
Tuesday newspaper round-up: Walmart, hospitality, Unaoil, Selfridges
Major retailers are having to offload Christmas trees for £1 or less after shoppers shied away from UK high streets and retail centres in the last weekend before Christmas. B&Q has cut the price of its fresh trees – some costing £49 or more – to £1 or less at stores around the country. One shopper posted a picture on social media of trees priced as little as 10p in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. - Guardian.
Wednesday newspaper round-up: Sunak, nightclubs, Bulb, THG
Rishi Sunak has been accused of failing to do enough to help embattled hospitality businesses through the Omicron wave after refusing to bring back furlough for the hardest-hit firms. Succumbing to intense pressure to offer financial support amid a collapse in pre-Christmas trade for pubs, restaurants and hotels, the chancellor announced a £1bn bailout package on Tuesday consisting of business grants and help with sick pay. - Guardian .
Thursday newspaper round-up: Daily Mirror, Tesla, Unaoil
Nurses, care home staff and police officers working on Christmas Day will be thousands of pounds worse off than they were a decade ago as a result of wages failing to keep pace with prices, Trades Union Congress analysis has shown. Urging the government to raise the minimum wage to £10 an hour, the TUC said the key workers expected to keep Britain going on 25 December had taken real pay cuts since 2010. - Guardian.
Friday newspaper round-up: Selfridges, energy prices, Treasury
The family owners of Selfridges have sold out to a Thai retailer and an Austrian property company for an estimated £4bn ($5. 36bn) in a deal which sees the return of the luxury department store’s former boss Vittorio Radice. Thailand’s Central Group and Austrian real estate company Signa Holding already jointly own major department stores in Italy, Germany and Denmark via a division run by Radice, who left Selfridges in 2002, the year before Canada’s Weston family bought it for £628m.
Monday newspaper round-up: Aptamer, household savings, hospitality
City firms are likely to revive plans to shift staff to the EU once Covid-related travel restrictions ease next year, a financial sector report has said, as the number contemplating such moves continues to rise. Of the 222 largest UK financial services firms monitored by accountancy firm EY since the 2016 referendum, 97 of them (44%) have confirmed they are relocating staff or operations to the continent, or are considering it – up from 41% in January 2020. - Guardian.
Tuesday newspaper round-up: Hospitality, UK food security, mortgages
Pubs and restaurants predict that Christmas cancellations made following the introduction of measures to limit the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 in England will cut their festive takings by 40%. While hospitality venues have not yet been forced to reimpose measures such as social distancing or mandatory mask-wearing, industry leaders said tougher restrictions had already caused irreparable damage to trade, especially in city centres. - Guardian .
Wednesday newspaper round-up: Food security, Tesla, furlough
Farmers have accused the government of failing to listen to their warnings over the future of domestic food production, after concerns ministers would not increase the number of seasonal worker visas next year. The criticism came at a summit convened by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and attended by the environment minister, George Eustice, where food producers, processors and retailers urged government to fix supply chains to ensure food security. - Guardian .
Thursday newspaper round-up: GSK/Sanofi, NIESR, Heathrow
Efforts by the British and French drugmakers GSK and Sanofi Pasteur to produce a Covid-19 vaccine have suffered a further setback, with final clinical data on the jab and a potential launch delayed until next year as they struggle to find enough uninfected people to test it on. The two vaccine specialists announced positive preliminary results from a trial that showed the vaccine raised antibody levels against Covid by nine to 43 times when given as a single booster shot in people who had already received doses of AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, for all age groups.
Friday newspaper round-up: PCR tests, hospitality firms, Mike Lynch
Poor service from suppliers of PCR travel tests is “an issue of national significance”, and regulators are not doing enough to police hundreds of new businesses that have moved into the market, the former competition boss Andrew Tyrie has said. In an interview with the Guardian, Lord Tyrie, who was chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority until last year, called for a clean up of the list of PCR test providers published on the government website, which many travellers consult before buying a kit.
Wednesday newspaper round-up: Kaisa Group, Porsche, British Airways, Zopa
Trading in shares of embattled Chinese developer Kaisa Group Holdings have been suspended on the Hong Kong stock exchange, prompting fresh nerves about the financial stability of the country’s massive property sector. The suspension on Wednesday comes after Kaisa was reportedly unlikely to meet a dollar bond repayment of $400m (£301m) by the deadline of Tuesday night in the US, Reuters said, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. - Guardian.
Thursday newspaper round-up: Rail unions, Mike Ashley, energy bills
The government is facing growing pressure to relaunch furlough and other emergency financial support schemes after imposing working from home orders in England because of the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus. Business leaders and unions warned that failure to provide assistance to companies and their workers in the hardest-hit sectors of the economy risked squandering progress made since the easing of pandemic restrictions earlier this autumn. - Guardian.
Friday newspaper round-up: Energy companies, work from home, challenger audit firms
Energy companies face deepening scrutiny over their response to Storm Arwen after the opening of an official investigation into their handling of the crisis, which left almost a million homes without power for up to 12 days. The government’s review into the “unacceptable” power cuts, which followed the storm, aims to identify any issues with the resilience of the electricity network companies worst affected, and how they communicated with households after of the outages.
Thursday newspaper round-up: Anglo American, BT, Selfridges
A Teesside factory that makes Covid-19 vaccines has received a £400m injection from its Japanese owners, the largest single investment in UK pharmaceutical manufacturing in decades. The biotechnology arm of the Japanese conglomerate Fujifilm, which is better known for its photography heritage, said the package would more than double its Billingham site’s development and manufacturing capability, creating the largest biopharmaceutical factory with several different technologies in the UK.
Wednesday newspaper round-up: Shell, Wise, Sensyne Health
It has been another record year for renewable energy, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and rising costs for raw materials around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). About 290GW of new renewable energy generation capacity, mostly in the form of wind turbines and solar panels, has been installed around the world this year, beating the previous record last year. On current trends, renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026.
Tuesday newspaper round-up: Bacanora Lithium, Tesla, Vodafone-Orange
China’s politburo has signalled measures to kickstart the faltering economy as the crisis gripping the country’s debt-laden property sector continued to blight prospects for growth. President Xi Jinping’s senior leadership committee rubber-stamped a plan from the central bank on Monday for more targeted lending to businesses and outlined support for the housing market. - Guardian.
Friday newspaper round-up: Arm, UK hotels, Rolls-Royce
The $75bn takeover of Cambridge-based chip designer Arm by its rival Nvidia is in jeopardy after US regulators followed the UK and Europe in moving to block “the largest semiconductor chip merger in history”. The Federal Trade Commission has sued to stop the takeover of Arm, which has ballooned in value from $40bn to $75bn since the offer was made last September due to a stock market surge in the chip sector, as seemingly almost insurmountable opposition now mounts after regulator action in Europe and the UK.
Wednesday newspaper round-up: Cost of living, Tesco, Starling Bank
UK households face a hit of £1,200 next year as stalling wages and rising tax and energy bills cause a “cost of living catastrophe” in the spring, a leading thinktank has warned. Government measures, including the new social care levy on national insurance and the freezing of the personal income tax allowance, will combine with high inflation to make 2022 the “year of the squeeze”, the Resolution Foundation said. – Guardian.
Sunday newspaper round-up: Omicron, Cineworld, Imagination Technologies
Omicron may yet force the health secretary to impose tougher Covid restrictions in England before Christmas. In remarks to the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Sajid Javid said: "there's a lot of uncertainty, there are gaps in the data, but we must work with the data we've got, we mustn't let perfection be the enemy of the good. " The government's Sage committee has warned that hospitalisations might peak at between 3,000 and 10,000 per day unless action is taken. - Guardian.