News
There’s talk this week that the CEO of Boots owner Walgreen Boots Alliance could be planning to take the company private in what could potentially be the biggest leveraged buyout in history.
In the UK, Boots retains its status as the top health and beauty retailer and also has a very strong online operation. But its market share is being eroded by a hugely competitive environment and the company is cutting back its bloated store estate with plans to shut a large number of shops.
The giant operation has a market value of around £49bn and private equity firm KKR is being suggested as a potential buyer.
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Advertisers have almost doubled the amount they’re spending on Instagram influencer campaigns in the US and Canada since 2018. However in the past three months alone, $65m has been wasted reaching fake followers – with household names like P&G and Disneyland among the top spenders duped.
According to figures from influencer measurement company Instascreener, North American advertisers allocated a $478m slice of their budgets to influencers in Q3.
Instagram took the lion’s share of this, pooling in $340m worth of spend (an increase of 95% on the same period last year). Although, of this $65m was funnelled into reaching fake eyeballs.
P&G’s Febreze was crowned the “most fooled” brand when it came to investing in campaigns that reached bots instead of people. Analysis on its sponsored Instagram posts indicated that of the accounts that had engaged with the post 54% were fake.
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Adidas is taking its footwear to space. The sportswear giant announced on Tuesday a multi-year partnership with the International Space Station that will allow the company to explore product innovation outside of Earth.
The partnership is scheduled to begin with Adidas’ coveted Boost technology, marking the first time that any footwear innovation will be tested without the distraction of gravity. These tests outside of Earth’s gravitational pull are predicted to influence the performance and comfort of existing models and enhance innovation of new products.
Testing will begin as early as 2020. Adidas will send its signature Boost pellets and footwear to the ISS National Lab onboard a future SpaceX cargo mission where astronauts onboard the station will execute experiments to uncover if it is possible to produce Boost midsoles with regions of different particle sizes– something that scientists theorize could optimize footwear performance and comfort.
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Asos has announced that customers can now share their boards with friends and family.
The feature, launched last year to help shoppers organise their Saved Items, has a new shareable functionality, available on the Asos app on iOS.
This means users can instantly share their boards through social platforms and messaging apps, allowing them to receive feedback from friends on their curated boards and share gift ideas and wishlists.
The Pinterest-style boards are there to help consumers organise their wishlists. With over 80,000 products and over 850 brands available on its website, Asos has a massive inventory which can sometimes make navigation a struggle.
Asos said about 6 million boards have been created since the feature was launched in October last year. Customers are creating approximately 420,000 new boards each month.
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Mothercare, the baby goods retailer, plans to call in administrators to the troubled firm's UK business, putting 2,500 jobs at risk.
Mothercare has said its 79 UK stores were "not capable" of achieving a sufficient level of profitability and that so far they had failed to find a buyer. They added that stores would continue to trade as normal for the time being.
Analysts said Mothercare had been slow to adapt to competition from rivals and the switch to online retailing.
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The internet and search engines like Google have made the world our oyster when it comes to sourcing information, but in the world of business, there remains a persistent need for more targeted market intelligence, a way to get reliable data quickly to get on with your work. Today, one of the startups hoping to build a lucrative operation of its own around that premise is announcing a round of funding to get there.
Crunchbase — a directory and database of company-related information that originally got its start as a part of TechCrunch before being spun off into a separate business several years ago — has raised $30 million, a Series C that it plans to use to continue expanding its base of paid subscribers and expanding its product to include more predictive, personalised information for its users by way of more machine learning and other AI-based technology.
CEO Jager McConnell, who has long viewed Crunchbase as the “LinkedIn for company profiles,” said that of the 55 million people who visit the site each year, the company currently has “tens of thousands” of subscribers — subscriptions are priced at $29/user/month varying by size of company contract — which works out to less than 1% of its active users. That’s “growing quickly,” he added, speaking to site’s potential.
Indeed, he noted that since its last round in 2017, when it raised $18 million, Crunchbase has tripled its employees to 120 and has 10 times more annual revenue run rate. It’s also more than doubled its traffic since being spun out.
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Total technology industry M&A deals in September 2019 worth $9.4bn were announced globally, according to GlobalData’s deals database.
The value marked a decrease of 71.1% over the previous month and a drop of 69.2% when compared with the last 12-month average, which stood at $30.46bn.
In terms of volumes, North America emerged as the top region for technology industry M&A deals globally, followed by Europe and then Asia-Pacific. The top country in terms of M&A deals activity in September 2019 was the US with 161 deals, followed by the UK with 41 and Canada with 24.
In 2019, as of the end of September 2019, technology M&A deals worth $245.01bn were announced globally, marking a decrease of 24.5% year on year.
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Starling Bank has announced that it has launched the Starling Business Euro Account, giving business and personal customers the power to spend directly in pounds or euros with a single debit card.
The dual currency card feature goes live on the same day as Starling launches its Business Euro Account. The new account will help Starling’s 77,000 business customers make transactions across the Eurozone and reduce currency exchange costs.
The new multi-currency account can also help to reduce exchange rate risks, and unlike similar offerings on the market with other banks, there are no fees for euro to euro transactions.
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British travel tech company Duffel has raised $30m from investors to launch its innovative new booking platform with some of the world’s biggest airlines, including American Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa Group, Aegean Airlines, Vueling, Iberia.
Duffel enables travel agencies to plug in directly to airlines’ reservation systems via an API so that they can pull real-time flight offers, make bookings, access live seat availability, and buy extra services.
Until now, new digital and mobile travel agencies – Duffel’s target market – have long lead times and high costs to access clunky flight booking systems, legacy APIs and outdated, cryptic screens.
By giving agents a way to connect instantly with airlines, Duffel represents the biggest shakeup of the travel sector since the launch of budget air travel.
Index Ventures, the backers of Adyen, Dropbox and Slack, led the Series B round, and were joined by existing investors Benchmark Capital and Blossom Capital.
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Encouraging footfall is key to the success of physical stores these days and Next is aiming to boost its visitor traffic in select stores in a deal with O2.
It means Next shoppers will be able to buy a new smartphone or renew their O2 contract at the same time as they buy some clothes or homewares, or even as they pick up an order they’ve placed online.
The company has around 500 stores, but only two trial locations have the 650 sq ft O2 concessions in them so far (Warrington and Southampton), although two more (Swindon and Nottingham) will debut next month.
Deals such as this don’t only boost visitor traffic though. There’s the fee that concessionaires pay, of course, and they also help physical retailers make best use of the expensive space in their stores.
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