Dixons cuts costs and vows to pay £150m bond on time September 7, 2011 DIXONS is cutting more costs and trimming investment plans to counter a drop in sales and profit margins as shoppers rein in spending. Europe’s second-largest electricals retailer and home to the Currys and PC World chains said it would cut an extra £10m of costs and limit capital spending to £100m, down from an original [...]
Keep football safe from the stats bores September 7, 2011 FOOTBALL magazine FourFourTwo has launched Stats Zone, which will “change the way you watch football”. For the worst, if you ask me. I can’t stand the kind of “name tag and goody bag” corporate football fan who spends all game staring at his iPhone working out pass rates and possession percentages. If you think football [...]
Dixons sales fall as shoppers cut back September 7, 2011 Dixons , Europe’s second-biggest electricals retailer, has posted a drop in first-quarter underlying sales and profit margins as shoppers reined in spending on discretionary items amid rising prices and austerity measures. The group, which owns the Currys and PC World chains, has said sales at stores open at least a year fell seven per cent [...]
Dell to launch a tablet in China in deal with Baidu September 6, 2011 DELL and China’s top search engine Baidu plan to jointly develop tablet computers and mobile phones, targeting the Chinese market dominated by Apple and Lenovo. China is one of the fastest growing markets for tablets and is home to more than 900m mobile phone subscribers, but analysts were sceptical that the partnership would unseat Apple [...]
Apple is still shining despite the loss of Jobs September 6, 2011 A fortnight ago Steve Jobs announced that he was resigning as chief executive of Apple with Tim Cook, the former chief operating officer, taking over. Jobs guided the company he had founded in 1976 from the difficult days of the late 1990s to become one of the most successful and biggest companies in the world. [...]
German court blocks Samsung September 5, 2011 Samsung Electronics has stopped promoting its new tablet computer at Europe’s biggest consumer electronics fair after a court-ordered sales injunction in Germany, the latest setback in its global patent battle with Apple. A Dusseldorf court ordered the South Korean company to stop selling Galaxy Tab 7.7 when the annual IFA electronics show started in Berlin.
The HTC Titan is an impressive but flawed beast September 4, 2011 You could tell the launch of HTC’s latest handsets was going to be sexy. I had to sign a form swearing not to breath a word of it to anyone. Like a super injunction, I wasn’t even allowed to mention the existence of the hypothetical event, let alone what said event may have been about, [...]
FT app dropped from Apple store over fee and data row August 31, 2011 APPLE yesterday kicked the Financial Times from its App Store after the two failed to reach a compromise over subscription fees and user data. The Cupertino-based firm insists on taking a 30 per cent slice of ongoing subscription revenues as well as collating valuable customer information. There has been animosity between the FT’s publisher Pearson [...]
Wall St edges into positive territory August 31, 2011 US stocks closed out the worst month in more than a year on an up note yesterday, with sharp gains in the last several days still not enough to repair the damage from a US credit downgrade and fears of a slide back into recession. Sentiment turned dramatically in recent days on expectations the Federal [...]
SO MUCH FOR A QUIET AUGUST August 29, 2011 TRADERS who stayed on the floor throughout August 2011 will remember it for many things, but tranquility will not be one of them. While European chief executives left the office for their customary four-week holiday, global equity markets kicked off a month of instability as US lawmakers dithered over a last-minute increase in the country’s [...]