industry

Uprising set for Sports Direct AGM


Hellawell has been the target of shareholders at previous annual meetings.

Last year he survived a confidence vote after securing 53.2 per cent of independent shareholders’ votes.

In 2016 they voted to remove him from the board, only for majority share-holder Ashley to overrule them and keep him.

The AGM will the first chance for investors to question the board about Sports Direct’s acquisition of House of Fraser last month.

Ashley is skipping the meeting as he is locked in what have been described as “robust” talks with the department store chain’s landlords.

Ashley wants to keep 47 of House of Fraser’s 59 stores and said that it would be the fault of “greedy” landlords if stores are closed.

The owners of House of Fraser’s Oxford Street flagship site and its telford and plymouth stores have already cut deals with Ashley, but others are reluctant to do so due to the rent cuts Ashley has demanded.

A number of House of Fraser’s landlords are also holding talks with Edinburgh Woollen Mill tycoon Philip Day, who is keen to snap up as many sites as he can for his fledgling department store brand Days.

Apple to ring changes on iPhone X

Technology giant Apple is expected to unveil three new versions of its flagship iPhone smartphone on Wednesday.

Chief executive Tim Cook is also tipped to show off designs for an upgraded smartwatch.

The Apple Watch Series 4 will reportedly feature an edge-to-edge display.

However, the stars of the show are believed to be the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus, enhanced versions of the smartphone Apple released to mark the 10th anniversary of the device last year.

A budget version of the iPhone X, which costs £999, will be unveiled.

Apple was a successful manufacturer of computers but the iPhone transformed the business and its finances.

More than half of its revenues come from the iPhone according to its third-quarter results.

Last month Apple became the first-ever company to be valued at $1 trillion (£771.2 billion), followed last week by Amazon.

Students rely on parental help

Nearly 40 percent of parents will be the main source of funding for students’ personal expenses at university, according to data from GlobalWebIndex.

The market research group also found that of the parents that have chil- dren going to or already at university, only eight per cent said their offspring would have to fend for themselves.

GlobalWebIndex found that 34 percent provide monthly monetary hand- outs, while 15 per cent do so every week.

The rest either provide funds once in a while or only if their child asks and has a valid reason.

It added that 65.8 per cent of parents with children about to go to university tried to make their off- spring more nancially responsible by making them pay their own bills and getting a job over the summer.

COMMENT by Geoff Ho

THE global financial system is more secure than last decade, when the world was plunged into recession by the fall of Lehman Brothers, but do not be complacent as testing times are ahead.

The next crisis will not come from the same sources, which were a toxic mix of reckless lending, fraud, greed and the arrogant, messianic belief in the strength and invulnerability of the financial system.

All those factors, that caused the credit crunch, have largely been addressed.

Britain’s banks and their international counterparts are better prepared and more aware of risk than before the global recession.

However people should be worried about new risks that are developing.

For example, the use of artificial intelligence in business and finance is growing, but even supposedly “rational” machines may react in unforeseen, undesirable ways to a negative event and make matters substantially worse.

Similarly, the new wave of financial technology companies that are challenging the existing order of banks of insurers have not been tested yet.

How will they cope in a crisis?

Will troubles at one infect others and then the rest of the system? No one knows.

A decade on from Lehman, the lessons people should have absorbed is that there will always be shocks and crises and that the only real defences we have are vigilance and prudence.



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