Waitrose to build on export success with premium brands June 18, 2014 WAITROSE yesterday announced plans to expand its own-label export business by selling products from brands including Cornish Sea Salt, Windsor and Eton Brewery and Pooch and Mutt pet food. In the last financial year, Waitrose saw a 30 per cent uplift in its export business, which provides its own brand label products to markets ranging [...]
Bottom Line: As the going gets tough, Justin King gets going June 11, 2014 There was a lot of back-slapping at Sainsbury’s yesterday, with Justin King talking up his successor, and his successor lavishing praise on the soon-to-depart chief executive. “When Justin started at the business we were serving 14m customers a week, and now we’re serving 24m a week. That’s a great achievement,” enthused Mike Coupe. King insists the [...]
Aiming for the stars June 8, 2014 Annabel Palmer speaks to Jenny Biggam, media veteran and co-founder of the7stars AS the media landscape becomes ever more complex, media giants like Mindshare or OMD are having to look beyond the traditional recipe for success (small distribution networks, multiple revenue streams) towards greater innovation and efficiency. But Jenny Biggam, co-founder of the7stars (an independent [...]
The week in brief June 8, 2014 UK E&M market to be worth £64bn by 2018 According to PwC’s latest Global entertainment & media (E&M) outlook report, the UK E&M market is expected to grow by 3.1 per cent from 2013 to 2018 – to a value of £64bn in 2018. In 2013, Britain had the second largest E&M market in Europe, [...]
Tesco share price is falling after sales plummeted again June 4, 2014 Another set of falling sales figures from Tesco this morning. The UK supermarket giant has reported a 3.7 per cent drop in like-for-like sales – 3.8 per cent when including petrol. That does mark the store’s third drop in a row but is, however, better than the four per cent decline analysts were expecting. Revenues [...]
LondonMetric returns to profit June 3, 2014 LondonMetric reported a leap in full-year profits yesterday thanks to a surge in the value of its portfolio and a revival in the property market beyond south east England. The group, which buys and develops distribution warehouses for retailers such as Waitrose, said profits rose to £125.3m in the year to 31 March from a [...]
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 [...]
L&G buys Waitrose warehouse May 27, 2014 The property arm of insurance firm Legal & General has agreed to forward fund a new distribution warehouse for Waitrose in Milton Keynes, in a deal worth £114m. The 100,000 square feet warehouse in Milton Keynes’ Magna Park is being built by logistics developer Gazeley and has been pre-let to Waitrose on a 30-year term. [...]
Get your just dessert by investing in sweet wine from Bordeaux May 13, 2014 Bottle.opener@cityam.com IF THERE is one crumb of comfort to be taken from the miserable 2013 Bordeaux vintage – which, by the way, has also been remarkable for the carnival of desperate euphemisms employed by vignerons and wine merchants alike – it is that last autumn’s mists and incessant rain provided perfect conditions for the region’s [...]
Bottom Line: Discount retailers keep surging whatever the economic weather May 11, 2014 IT’S NOT exactly a dramatic rebirth but there are some stirrings of spring in these figures. Unsurprisingly, particularly at a time of year when the national imagination turns to home improvement, UK consumers invested even more this April in their fastest-appreciating assets than they did 12 months before, with DIY spending up 11.9 per cent [...]