Coronavirus: Guinness owner Diageo pauses £4.5bn shareholder returns scheme April 9, 2020 Guinness owner Diageo has scrapped its financial guidance and suspended a £4.5bn shareholder returns programme after bars and restaurants across the world closed due to coronavirus. The drinks giant has not scrapped its interim dividend, however it has paused a three-year shareholder returns programme after governments ordered pubs to shut. Diageo said it had seen [...]
Bank of England reaction: Will interest rates go negative? September 18, 2020 The Bank of England (BoE) held monetary policy steady yesterday for the second meeting in a row. Interest rates were left at 0.1 per cent and bond-buying at £745bn in a business-as-usual decision. All nine members of the monetary policy committee (MPC) voted in favour of continuing this monetary policy. But analysts, investors and traders [...]
Westminster Council: West End to receive millions in recovery support fund February 1, 2022 Westminster Council is to inject millions of pounds into reviving the borough’s hospitality industry. Within a £190m investment to support the area, the council has announced a dedicated £1m to recruit waiters, baristas and bar staff, it said yesterday. Some £150m is to be used to redesign the Oxford Street district and make Strand Aldwych [...]
China hands out new fines to tech giants in anti-monopoly crackdown November 20, 2021 Chinese tech giants including Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings have been fined for failing to report corporate acquisitions, adding to an anti-monopoly crackdown by the ruling Communist Party. The companies failed to report 43 acquisitions that occurred up to eight years ago under rules on “operating concentration”, according to the State Administration for Market Regulation. [...]
The A-Z of wine: This week, E is for… England April 12, 2022 We continue to march through the alphabet in search of new wines and old favourites. What’s this then? A green and pleasant land bedeviled by internal strife caused by a single contentious issue – namely, what do you call a soft bread roll? Also home to a burgeoning wine industry fuelled by centuries of wine [...]
Fast Lane: Lookers raises profit guidance despite challenging market conditions October 6, 2021 Lookers, a leading UK motor retail and aftersale group, has lifted profit expectations for the year on the back of promising Q3 results. While new car sales flagged amid a global semiconductor chip shortage Lookers has outperformed the market by around 3.4 percentage points. Despite the dip the company has said it is expecting profit [...]
Cut off from the world November 18, 2021 [Re: US-China rhetoric won’t save our climate woes if Beijing stays hooked on coal, November 12] It is depressing that countries such as China, India and Russia appear unwilling to stop burning coal within timescales necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. At the same time, other countries are continuing to allow large scale deforestation of [...]
Top Dog: Shiba Inu takes on Dogecoin after it cracks top 10 October 28, 2021 Shiba Inu coin has blasted its way into the top ten crypto currencies with a market cap of $40bn, briefly surpassing rival meme-coin Dogecoin. Shiba Inu’s price has exploded this year, up by 83m per cent in the past 12 months and 147 per cent just this week to make it the world’s tenth largest [...]
Coronavirus: Retailers pause online shopping over safety fears March 26, 2020 Retailers have started to close down their online operations as well as physical stores in response to the coronavirus outbreak, citing concerns over the safety of their warehouse workers. High street chains Next, Moss Bros and River Island have today temporarily closed their internet shopping services, despite government guidance that online retailers can continue to [...]
UK shoppers sticking with online shops despite restrictions relaxing June 29, 2021 Online e-commerce sales continued to grow in April, despite the reopening of non-essential retail across the UK. Demand for e-commerce packaging, a barometer for industry and sector performance, grew 11.7 per cent in April, despite brick-and-mortar shops reopening in the same month. This followed a 35.6 per cent increase in demand in the year up [...]