The day after tomorrow
The business news that matters
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
It’s the day after the UK officially fell into recession and, shockingly, the fabric of the world has clung together and people still headed to work this morning.
Nonetheless, after gloomy economic news on Thursday, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt woke to more bad news today. Labour overturned two big Conservative majorities to win by-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood, with Reform UK also taking support from the government and winning more than 10 per cent of the vote. You can read more about what these votes mean in an analysis for the BBC by Sir John Curtice, the politics professor, here. The short answer - really not good. The image above shows the votes being counted in Wellingborough.
In terms of other news today, The Times says that businesses are concerned about the cost of proposed new employment laws that a Labour government could introduce…
You can read that story in full here
Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph says that the chancellor has scrapped plans to cut income tax in the Budget next month…
You can read that story here
One of the reasons the UK slid into recession was disappointing retail sales in December. So the figures for January released by the Office for National Statistics this morning are more interesting than usual. They show that the retail sales volumes (the quantity of products bought in the UK) rose by 3.4 per cent month-on-month and 0.7 per cent year-on-year. That is a stark improvement on the 3.3 per cent recorded for December. It rather suggests that the economists who are predicting the UK will face only a mild recession are right. You can find the ONS data here
Other stories that matter…
1. Paul Thwaite has been confirmed as the new chief executive of NatWest, replacing Dame Alison Rose, who was forced out last year following a debanking scandal with Nigel Farage. Thwaite has been interim chief executive since last summer and previously ran NatWest’s commercial bank. Statement from the company here
2. The founder of the UK luxury fashion retailer Farfetch has left just weeks after it was acquired by South Korean group Coupang. José Neves founded Farfetch in 2007 but the company had been struggling and needed a cash injection. You can read more in a story by The Telegraph here
3. An interesting column by Soumaya Keynes in the Financial Times about what the consequences are when companies are transparent about pay. “Pay can be based on a mix of vibes, outside offers and the hassle of replacing someone,” she writes. “But as companies increasingly have to justify their pay gaps, it seems likely that more will move towards formalised, rigid pay structures.” You can read the column here
4. The Independent is in talks to takeover BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the UK in the latest evidence of the upheaval in the media industry. The story was first reported by the Financial Times. More here
5. Harvard Business Review has identified three warning signs that you are overthinking a decision - rumination (dwelling on past events), future tripping (being too concerned about what lies ahead) and overanalysing (getting bogged down in details). You can find that piece here
Podcast…
A new episode of our Business Leader podcast will be with you on Tuesday. In the meantime, a reminder that the latest episode features an interview with Marc Allera, the chief executive of EE and BT’s consumer business. He explains how EE went from being an upstart mobile phone brand to a key part of BT and a business with big ambitions for the future. Plus, Allera explains what he learned from launching Sega’s Dreamcast games console and mobile phone brand Three in the early 2000s, which had mixed success.
You can listen to the episode via Substack here, Apple here or Spotify here
And finally…
Cal Newport, the American author, has written about the success of the US business podcast Acquired. I have mentioned the podcast before in Off to Lunch and it is definitely worth checking-out. Acquired takes a deep-dive into successful businesses and how they were built. When I say deep-dive, the latest episode on Novo Nordisk is 3 hours 45 minutes long. If you enjoyed our podcast episode with Marc Allera, then I recommend listening to Acquired’s episodes on Sega, Nintendo and the fierce battle in the games console industry. You can find those episodes below and the link to Cal Newport’s newsletter here
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Best
Graham