Festivalgoers help drive Burberry to best sales performance in 18 months
Shoppers snapping up Burberry wellies, scarves and light jackets to wear at music festivals have helped the fashion brand to its best sales performance in 18 months despite lacklustre spending by tourists around the world.Sales of the luxury British brand fell by 2% to £433m in the three months to the end of June, with a 1% decline at established stores, an improvement from the 6% fall in the previous quarter and the best performance since Christmas 2023.Shares in Burberry rose by more than 4% on Friday morning on the better-than-expected performance, as CEO Joshua Schulman, who was appointed a year ago, attempts a turnaround.Sales rose in Europe and the Americas but continued to fall in Asia, including its all-important Chinese market, which accounts for 30% of sales.Schulman, the former boss of the US fashion brand Coach, said: “Its a tough macro [environment] out there and we are taking things step by step but we are optimistic about the quarters ahead and the business in general.
”He said the company had appealed to “elite VIP” customers with events linked to its partnership with King Charles’s Highgrove estate and also to a younger luxury customer through festival-linked pop-ups featuring DJ sets located in shopping centres,A trial of dedicated “scarf bars” within stores have also gone well and the company plans to install 200 in total,“We are appealing to a much broader range of luxury consumers,” he said, with the change in marketing drawing in younger, high-spending extrovert consumers who want to stand out from the crowd, as well as more mature brand loyalists,Adam Cochrane, an analyst at Deutsche, said further growth was largely dependent on Burberry’s ability to “replicate the success” of its core products in other areas,The company said it was “still in the early stages of our turnaround” with aims to continue simplifying the business and improving productivity and cashflow.
It expects to achieve £80m of its planned £100m cost cuts this financial year, with the remainder next year, and has already reorganised the business under four regional heads,The company said in May it was cutting up to 1,700 jobs, including an entire shift at its Yorkshire raincoat factory, in an effort to make £60m in cost savings on top of a £40m savings programme announced in November,Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionSchulman said Burberry’s autumn ranges were being “well received”, although the external environment “remains challenging”,He added: “Over the past year, we have moved from stabilising the business to driving Burberry forward with confidence,“The improvement in our first-quarter comparable sales, strength in our core categories, and uptick in brand desirability gives us conviction in the path ahead.
”He called on the UK government to implement policies that would “encourage tourism” as he said: “International consumers are not shopping in the UK to the extent we would like due to the lack of a VAT refund scheme.” The scheme was phased out under the last government.“All luxury brands and all retail brands would benefit from that,” he said.
AI firms ‘unprepared’ for dangers of building human-level systems, report warns
Artificial intelligence companies are “fundamentally unprepared” for the consequences of creating systems with human-level intellectual performance, according to a leading AI safety group.The Future of Life Institute (FLI) said none of the firms on its AI safety index scored higher than a D for “existential safety planning”.One of the five reviewers of the FLI’s report said that, despite aiming to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), none of the companies scrutinised had “anything like a coherent, actionable plan” to ensure the systems remained safe and controllable.AGI refers to a theoretical stage of AI development at which a system is capable of matching a human in carrying out any intellectual task. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has said its mission is to ensure AGI “benefits all of humanity”
Zuckerberg says Meta will build data center the size of Manhattan in latest AI push
Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing artificial intelligence products in the near future and, to that end, construct a data center planned to be nearly the size of Manhattan.The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals, and doled out multimillion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers in recent months – some as high as $100m – to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks, a concept known as “super-intelligence” or “artificial general intelligence”.Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years, Zuckerberg said.“We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” the billionaire CEO said
Sage iPhone for children review: ‘Would it make me want to divorce my parents?’
I was intrigued to find out how this would work but a bit freaked out too. I use my iPhone non-stop: four hours each day during school terms; eight during holidays. Snapchat matters most, but I’m often following friends on TikTok and Instagram.The prospect of not having access to any apps or the internet was just “ugh”. Part of me wanted to scream at the thought of being cut off by this Sage phone
Internet-safe iPhone for children goes on sale for £99 a month
A neutered iPhone, stripped of web browsers and social media apps, is going on sale to parents worried about their children’s phone use, but the “peace and freedom” its creators promise will come at a steep price.The pared-back version of the top-selling handset, which will not allow internet searches, gaming or downloads of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and other social media, is being offered in the UK for £99 a month by a US company that wants children to “reconnect with real life, not just reduce screen time”.At more than double the price of a typical two-year iPhone contract, Sage Mobile, an iPhone 16 handset loaded with custom software, will be a pricey way to avoid online harms. But it reflects growing parental dilemmas over the best way to start their children’s digital lives.Research has shown children with problematic smartphone use are twice as likely to experience anxiety and almost three times as likely to experience depression compared with those whose use did not resemble addiction
WeTransfer says user content will not be used to train AI after backlash
The popular filesharing service WeTransfer has said user content will not be used to train artificial intelligence after a change in its service terms had triggered a public backlash.The company, which is regularly used by creative professionals to transfer their work online, had suggested in new terms that uploaded files could be used to “improve machine learning models”.The clause had previously said the service had a right to “reproduce, modify, distribute and publicly display” content, and the updated version caused confusion among users.A WeTransfer spokesperson said user content had never been used, even internally, to test or develop AI models and that “no specific kind of AI” was being considered for use by the Dutch company.The firm said: “There’s no change in how WeTransfer handles your content in practice
Apple inks $500m deal for rare earth magnets with US mining firm
Apple has signed a $500m deal with a US firm for rare earth magnets, essential for manufacturing electronics, after China curbed exports of the scarce, vital materials.The backing from one of the world’s most valuable companies comes after MP Materials, which operates the only US rare earths mine, last week agreed to a multibillion-dollar deal with the US Department of Defense that will see the Pentagon become its largest shareholder. Both deals are aimed at mitigating supply chain risks after China limited the outgoing supply of rare earths earlier this year in response to Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.The deal, announced on Tuesday, guarantees Apple a steady flow of rare earth magnets free from China – by far the world’s largest producer. For Apple, the cost to support US magnet production pales in comparison to the long-term risk that it could lose access entirely to the critical components, analysts said
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