Apple, Google and Microsoft top list of the 100 most valuable brands September 25, 2017 Apple and Google have once again take the two top spots in a list of the world’s 100 most valuable brands, according to rankings by consultancy group Interbrand. Five UK firms made into into the 2017 best global brands list. These were Burberry, HSBC, Land Rover, Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker. This is the fifth consecutive [...]
The company profits at risk from rising carbon prices September 5, 2017 The extent to which company profits and investor returns could be at risk from tougher climate policies and higher carbon prices has been set out by a new model developed by Schroders. The “Carbon Value at Risk” (Carbon VaR) framework, developed by the Sustainable investment team, highlights the inadequacies of traditional measures of climate risk [...]
Apple’s driverless car project Titan has morphed into a staff shuttle bus as reports suggest a scaling back of ambitions August 23, 2017 Apple’s driverless car project, long-rumoured and only recently confirmed by boss Tim Cook, looks like it might be taking a back seat at the company. Its ambitions have been scaled back from a fully autonomous Apple car, to a shuttle bus for staff. Read more: “Hey Siri”: Now you can transfer money with just your [...]
Amazon: Is this the end for ‘old-school’ retailers? August 22, 2017 If you are a regular reader of the financial press, you could be forgiven for thinking some kind of corporate serial killer is currently on the loose. On an almost daily basis, fresh obituaries appear for retail businesses and there is a strong consensus on who is to blame – the global phenomenon that is [...]
Global dividends hit record highs, according to Janus Henderson Global Dividend Index, as oil prices rally and banks begin to heal August 21, 2017 Global dividends have hit an all-time quarterly record of $447.5bn (£347.6bn) in the second quarter of this year, according to Janus Henderson’s Global Dividend Index, notching up the highest growth rate since 2015. The amount in dividends paid out by companies across the globe rose 5.4 per cent year-on-year, or 7.2 per cent when exchange [...]
Embracing a brilliant new era of close UK-South Korea relations July 27, 2017 Anyone who has walked through the graves at the UN Memorial Cemetery in Busan will never forget the huge sacrifices made by British forces in the Korean War. Yet, whether because of insufficient media coverage or post-World War II fatigue, many veterans returned to a country which did not acknowledge their service, and the Korean [...]
Graphcore lands $30m from top AI experts Demis Hassabis from Deepmind, Uber’s Zoubin Ghahramani and more along with Atomico and others | City A.M. July 20, 2017 Some of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence are among fresh investors to plough $30m into a Bristol-based chip startup. Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and Zoubin Ghahramani, Uber’s chief scientist and Cambridge university professor, are among new investors in Graphcore, which makes chips that can process machine learning faster and more efficiently. It [...]
The new 10.5 inch iPad Pro is the best tablet there is – but is it too good? July 6, 2017 Apple is so far ahead of the pack when it comes to tablets that it inadvertently invented an entire class of products of which it has never made a single one. All those hybrid laptops, where the screen snaps off, for reasons largely unspecified, are the result of the technology industry shrugging its shoulders in [...]
Transport for London (TfL) says one billion contactless payment journeys have now been made across London’s transport network July 6, 2017 Over one billion journeys have now been made on London’s transport network using contactless payment cards, according to new figures from Transport for London (TfL). Almost £2bn has been spent by customers using pay as you go with contactless since it was introduced at the end of 2012, And TfL said that customers have saved [...]
Is South Korea still an investment ‘value trap’? June 23, 2017 ‘Value trap’ is a term used by investors to describe an asset that appears to have been under-priced by the market but turns out to be cheap for a reason. This is often because its ability to make profits has in some way been severely and permanently impaired. It tends to be used in relation [...]