Eagle Eye jumps on float and closes its £4.5m 2ergo takeover April 16, 2014 RETAIL and hospitality voucher firm Eagle Eye Solutions, where former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy is an investor and director, saw its shares jump almost 10 per cent to 180p during its first day of trading yesterday. Eagle Eye raised £6m from its oversubscribed placing on London’s Alternative Investment Market, hitting a £36m valuation. “Today’s [...]
Letters to the editor – 12/09 – Tesco in the US, Pensions crisis, Best of Twitter September 11, 2013 Tesco in the US [Re: What Tesco’s US debacle tells us about the wisdom of markets, yesterday] Few UK companies can stand up to the price competition and, significantly, service levels of US retail. Even new car dealerships are open up until 10:30pm at night in America. Where else in the world could you find [...]
Transport for London looks for £3.5bn of commercial revenues June 2, 2014 TRANSPORT for London (TfL) has begun searching for a new sponsor of the city’s bicycle hire scheme, hoping to bring in more money and a long-term partner following Barclays’ departure. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has written to 200 of TfL’s biggest advertisers to gauge interest in sponsoring the bicycles, which were launched on [...]
What Tesco’s US debacle tells us about the wisdom of markets September 10, 2013 EVER since the nineteenth century, the leaders of businesses quoted on the stock exchange have bemoaned investors’ supposedly fickle nature, inability to understand their firms, general competence, and more recently, their relative youth and inexperience. So when back in 2010, Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco’s then boss, complained that fund managers were too risk averse and [...]
3 ways Morrisons will change your supermarket March 13, 2014 Morrisons’ extensive and rapid loss last year, and its foreseeable future profit warning, perhaps put it ahead of other supermarkets in terms of how quickly it needs to change. But the changes it needs and is planning to make affect all mainstream supermarkets. Indeed, the shares of all of them have lost this morning on [...]
Labour U-turn on criticism of Tesco and Next August 12, 2013 LABOUR’S immigration spokesman Chris Bryant yesterday endured a day from hell as he attempted to defuse a row with two retail giants while launching a new immigration policy. Bryant had planned to attack Tesco and Next for allegedly preferring cheap employees from eastern Europe at the expense of British workers. But after the firms complained [...]
Beyond billboards: Kinetic’s UK CEO Stuart Taylor on the new out-of-home advertising June 23, 2014 Liam Ward-Proud talks to Kinetic’s UK chief executive Stuart Taylor Once a relative backwater of the marketing landscape (compared to high-budget TV ads at least) the digital revolution is giving out-of-home (OOH) advertising a new lease of life. Static billboards and posters are being replaced with digital screens and moving images, increasingly able to interact [...]
What the other papers say this morning – 26 March 2014 March 25, 2014 FINANCIAL TIMES Banks pay out $100bn in US fines Wall Street banks and their foreign rivals have paid out $100bn in US legal settlements since the financial crisis, according to Financial Times research, with more than half of the penalties extracted in the past year. The sum reflects a substantial shift in political attitudes towards [...]
Best of the Brokers for 5 March 2014 March 4, 2014 To appear in Best of the Brokers, email your research to notes@cityam.com TESCO Cantor Fitzgerald has cut the supermarket from “hold” to “sell” and slashed its target from 333p to 282p. The broker thinks rivals can easily beat Tesco’s recent price promises, meaning the firm erodes its margins in the UK to little benefit. Cantor [...]
Sally Weavers of IPG Mediabrands’s Initiative agency on thinking laterally August 3, 2014 Liam Ward-Proud talks to Sally Weavers, UK managing director of IPG Mediabrands’s Initiative agency. Initiative holds a fairly unique place among UK media agencies. It’s big, placing thirteenth in last year’s rankings, with billings of over £169m, but nowhere near the scale of the outfits owned by the industry’s behemoths. According to Sally Weavers, [...]