Next chief Simon Wolfson paid record £7.4m – and could get far more this year
The Next chief executive, Simon Wolfson, took home more than £7m last year, his highest ever pay package, and could be handed up to £9.27m this year after the retailer announced plans to increase his basic salary and bonuses.The listed company said it was increasing its pay deal for the long-term leader of the fashion and homewares retailer, which now controls a string of brands in the UK including Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Cath Kidston, Reiss and FatFace, as his remuneration was 30% below the average for FTSE 100 bosses.The directors on its remuneration committee said in the annual report published on Thursday that the changes were also being made as Next’s returns to shareholders had been higher than other leading listed companies over several years.“Given this sustained outperformance, the committee does not consider the current levels of remuneration to be appropriately aligned with performance,” the report said.
It also said pay needed to rise because of “the need to retain and motivate its high-quality management team, to support orderly succession planning, and where necessary, external recruitment”.Last year, Wolfson’s pay rose to £7.4m from £4.9m a year before after he earned £967,000 in basic pay during the financial year, a maximum £1.45m annual bonus and long-term bonus of £4.
7m as well as pension contributions and benefits such as a company car with driver.This year, Wolfson’s basic annual salary is increasing by 3% to £1m but his maximum annual bonus is rising to 200% of salary, up from 150%, and his long-term bonus to 400% of salary, up from 225%.Performance for the long-term bonus will be judged on growth in earnings for each share and dividends.The company said it was ditching its previous measure of total returns to shareholders compared with 20 other listed retailers partly because “many retailers have failed over the past two decades, such that it has become increasingly difficult to compose a basket of appropriately comparable businesses”.The long-term bonus potential of other Next non-executive directors will rise to 300% of salary and the company said it wanted to “reserve the right” to increase their annual bonuses to 200% of salary from 150% at present.
Four out of five Next executive directors earn more than £3m already, including bonuses.Despite warnings of potential inflation and dampening consumer confidence as a result of the Iran war, last month, Next upped its profit guidance by £8m, to £1.2bn, for the year to January 2027 after better-than-expected sales in January this year.It made £1bn of profits for the first time last year.The retailer was created in 1982, when the men’s suiting retailer Hepworths, founded in 1864 by the Leeds tailor Joseph Hepworth, bought the women’s clothing chain Kendall & Sons and set about reinventing it.
Wheat price heading for biggest jump in two months as Iran war threatens to drive food security higher – business live
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.A jump in the wheat price is adding to concern that the conflict in the Middle East will fuel food inflation this year.Chicago wheat futures are up almost 4.5% this week, heading for their biggest weekly jump since February. Concerns about dry weather in the US, and the Iran war, are both factors
Senate Democrats move to stall Trump’s ‘absurd’ bid to install new Fed chair
Democrats have moved to stall Donald Trump’s effort to exert greater control over the US Federal Reserve, condemning the president’s “absurd” bid to install a new leader of the central bank while it is targeted with criminal investigations.Democratic lawmakers on the Senate banking committee urged its Republican leadership on Thursday to postpone the planned confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, the financial executive and former Fed governor Trump has nominated to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair.In a letter to banking committee chair Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, the 11 Democrats called for a hearing currently scheduled for Tuesday to be delayed until investigations into Powell and Lisa Cook, a current Fed governor, are closed.Powell – whom the president has frequently and publicly chastised over his refusal to dramatically lower interest rates – is facing a criminal investigation into the renovations of the central bank’s headquarters, which he dismissed as a “pretext” tied to the Fed’s refusal to bow to Trump’s demands.The Trump administration also tried to fire Cook, an appointee of Joe Biden, for alleged mortgage fraud
Finance leaders warn over Mythos as UK banks prepare to use powerful Anthropic AI tool
British banks will be given access in the next week to a powerful AI tool that was deemed too dangerous to be released to the public, as a series of senior finance figures warned over its impact.Anthropic, which has so far limited the release of the new model to a small clutch of primarily US businesses, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, said it would expand that to UK financial institutions in the coming days.“That is in the very near term, in the next week,” Pip White, Anthropic’s head of UK, Ireland and northern Europe operations, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “As you would expect, the engagement I have had from UK CEOs in the last week has been significant.”Anthropic, which is the company behind the Claude family of AI tools, has said that its latest model, Mythos, poses an unprecedented risk because of its ability to expose flaws in IT systems
US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret
Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.The rise of AI chatbots has spurred a boom in the construction of chip-filled warehouses with a hunger for power that is being met, in part, by burning fossil gas. Legal scholars warn the blanket confidentiality clause may fall foul of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus convention on public access to environmental information
Inspirational success stories are great but is ADHD really a superpower for elite athletes? | Emma John
Kirsty Brown is a keen golfer. “If I could just transport myself straight to the first tee, that would be amazing,” she says. “But getting there on time, remembering all my kit, making sure I’ve eaten before I play – all those aspects are more challenging than competing itself.” Brown, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), admits that can be hard to explain to coaches or teammates. “It doesn’t necessarily make sense to them – it doesn’t really make sense to me either
Chess: Sindarov wins Candidates with record total, while Vaishali takes women’s event
Javokhir Sindarov finished with a record total in the world championship Candidates in Pegeia, western Cyprus, as the 20-year-old from Uzbekistan won the competition with a record 10/14 total, 1.5 points clear of his nearest rival, Anish Giri. The women’s Candidates was won by India’s 24-year-old Vaishali Rameshbabu, half a point ahead of Kazakhstan’s Bibisara Assaubayeva, who is also Sindarov’s girlfriend.Sindarov dominated the field with a controlled display reminiscent of the old Soviet master Mikhail Botvinnik. His pre-game preparation was exceptional, several times accurately predicting what would appear on the board right into the endgame
Labour and Lib Dem MPs demand ‘shameful’ Palantir NHS contract be scrapped
Man used AI to make false statements to shut down London nightclub, police say
NAACP lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s xAI of polluting Black neighborhoods near Memphis
Fisa surveillance vote sparks fierce debate as Congress splits on warrantless monitoring
Snap Inc blames AI as it lays off 1,000 workers
Amazon enters agreements for nine Australian renewable projects to power datacentres