Ikea promises to adopt the living wage for its 9,000 UK employees July 19, 2015 Home furnishing giant Ikea yesterday pledged to adopt the living wage from 1 April next year – a move that will affect more than half its 9,000 UK staff. Describing the pay increase as “part of a holistic transformation of basic co-worker conditions”, Ikea said UK employees will receive a minimum of £7.85 per hour [...]
Retail veteran Browett joining Octopus board as non-executive July 19, 2015 Retail guru John Browett has been appointed to the board of fund manager Octopus Investments as non-executive director. Browett, best known for heading Dixons Retail for five years between 2007 and 2012, is currently the boss of homewares store Dunelm. He also had stints as chief executive of Monsoon Accessorize, boss of Tesco’s online arm [...]
Eurozone investor sentiment collapses as investors flock to “safe havens” of gold and UK government bonds July 19, 2015 Eurozone shares have had the largest annual decline in sentiment on record, dropping 19 percentage points in just a month. New figures from Lloyds show investors’ sentiment for Eurozone shares have crashed to -48 per cent, down 30 percentage points over the past year. Ashish Misra, head of portfolio specialists at Lloyds, said the drop [...]
Capita: UK dividend payments hit highest point since 2008 as Lloyds and HSBC return to financial health July 19, 2015 Dividends paid out by UK companies have soared to their highest level since 2008, buoyed by banks hiking their payouts and a lower pound. A total of £29.2bn was paid out during the second quarter, shows data collected by Capita Asset Services, the highest second quarter on record. “To say income investors had a bumper [...]
Royal Dutch Shell expects to save “billions” through BG Group deal July 19, 2015 Royal Dutch Shell has told investors that the massive £55bn takeover of BG Group will produce “billions” in savings. Projected savings from cost reductions verifiable under takeover rules, such as merging headquarters, come to about £1bn, but the company has said that savings are actually likely to be a “multiple” of this, because of “value [...]
Iceland boss Malcolm Walker: Which? supercomplaint over supermarket offers was “b*****ks” July 17, 2015 Iceland boss Malcolm Walker – the supermarket sector's answer to Michael O'Leary – has blasted the Which? supercomplaint over misleading deals as “bollocks”. The consumer group took a petition signed by more than 100,000 to the Competition and Markets Authority earlier this year, claiming it had found examples of “dodgy special offers” that led [...]
Royal Mail’s share price just fell off a cliff as Ofcom revealed the scope of its review July 17, 2015 Royal Mail's share price has dropped this morning as Ofcom revealed the scope of its wide-ranging review of regulation for the business. Shares, which had been trading slightly up, suddenly fell off a cliff as the watchdog released its “discussion document” settting out its remit for the review. Royal Mail's share price was down [...]
Surge in Airbnb for business trips as travellers prefer flat rentals to hotels July 17, 2015 Do business travellers prefer Airbnb? The flat rental site has become a popular lodging option for cheap getaways – but now it seems Airbnb is on the rise for business trips as well. Rather than using it to source wacky budget holidays – whether you fancy an Alaskan cabin in the woods or a Mongolian [...]
888 share price bounces as it agrees to buy Bwin.party for £900m July 17, 2015 888 put it all on red, and has now emerged triumphant, having agreed to buy rival Bwin.party for £898.3m. That values Bwin.party at 104.09p per share, a premium of 16.4 per cent to the closing price on 14 May, the original day the offer was made. Since then, shares have risen as high as 108p [...]
Dragon Oil share price falls while Elliott Advisors says Enoc offer undervalues company July 17, 2015 Activist investor Elliott Advisors has become the latest Dragon Oil shareholder to say Emirates National Oil Company's (Enoc) takeover bid "substantially undervalues the company". Enoc, which owns 54 per cent of the Turkmenistan-focused oil producer, offered 750p per share in June. But Dragon Oil's second- and third-largest shareholders, Baillie Gifford and Setanta Asset Management, have said they want [...]