Homebase named the UK’s worst retail website in rescue deal aftermath November 13, 2018 DIY retailer Homebase has been named the UK's worst online shopping website, alongside a plethora of other familiar names in a survey conducted by independent consumer body Which?. Homebase received a rating of 55 per cent as part of a survey with over 10,000 consumers evaluating their experiences online. Customers said they found the site [...]
Top of the class: London retailers post best results in Europe to push Paris into second place November 12, 2018 London’s West End has weathered problems on the high street to keep its position as the top of the European retail league, while seven of the top 10 shopping centres are in the UK. Shoppers spent almost €10.4bn (£9.1bn) on and around Oxford Street, Knightsbridge and Kensington for the year ending November, a 12 per cent [...]
Check it out: There’s a new Fortnum & Mason restaurant in the heart of the City November 12, 2018 Fortnum & Mason today opened a new restaurant and shop in the Royal Exchange in a move it said marks its commitment to London as a global financial capital. The restaurant will be the luxury department store’s first outlet in the City. In addition to its flagship Piccadilly location, which opened in 1707, the company [...]
How London’s high streets can weather the brewing retail storm November 12, 2018 London rightly bears the distinction of being one of the world’s most attractive places to live and work. But with that label comes risks as well as opportunities – and often, trends that we see across the country play out far more dramatically when it comes to our capital. Take our latest research into the [...]
City Moves for 12 November – who’s switching jobs at UHY Hacker Young, Panmure Gordon and McCarthy Denning? November 12, 2018 Who’s on the move today? UHY Hacker Young UHY Hacker Young, the national accountancy group, has appointed Myles Jacobson as partner in its Turnaround & Recovery team in London. Myles has over two decades of experience working in insolvency and restructuring and joins from specialist business recovery practice Streets SPW, where he was a partner. He [...]
SSE expected to announce profit drop as Npower merger hits snag November 11, 2018 Big Six energy company SSE is expected to announce a 43 per cent drop in profit for the first half of the year in its results on Wednesday. On Thursday SSE said the anticipated merger of SSE Energy Services with Npower would be delayed beyond the first quarter of 2019 in order to renegotiate commercial [...]
Alibaba’s record-breaking Singles Day sales hit $10bn in first hour November 11, 2018 Online retail giant Alibaba today smashed records for the largest shopping day on the planet, making sales of over $1bn (£770.5m) in just 85 seconds. The sales came during Singles Day, the world’s largest online retail festival. Alibaba’s total sales hit $10bn after one hour and had reached over $24bn after 16 hours. The festival's sales eclipse the estimated [...]
Be wary of taking the golden goose of London for granted November 8, 2018 Last week’s Budget saw two infrastructure spending announcements for London. The first was a cool £291m to buy more DLR trains and convert a depot into housing. This will facilitate 18,000 homes – in reality, about four months’ worth of London’s annual need for housing. The second was £5m for a Westminster Ceremonial Streetscape project. [...]
Co-op hopes new depot will fuel growth in its London stores November 6, 2018 Food retailer Co-op will open a new depot to serve its London shops as it looks to grow in the south of England. The new 660,000 square foot distribution centre will create up to 1,200 jobs when it opens in 2022, Co-op said. Co-op said it has signed a 20-year lease for the depot in Biggleswade, [...]
Shocktober: Seven charts that tell the story of the stock market’s worst month in six years November 6, 2018 World stock markets fell 7.4 per cent in October as investors fretted about issues such as US-China trade tensions, European political uncertainty and the end of quantitative easing. The sell-off made it the worst monthly performance for stocks globally in the last six years and it’s the tenth worst in the last decade, as measured by the [...]