Friday High Five – the news this week
The sunshine seems to have lifted everyone’s mood this week and in our two big cities there were important pieces of inward investment news.
My colleague Neil Hodgson was on the scene when US-based IT infrastructure services provider, Kyndryl, officially opened its new AI Innovation Lab in Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building, which aims to create up to 1,000 software engineering and AI-related roles in the city within three years.
The day before we reported that Manchester’s bustling tech quarter at Circle Square will soon be welcoming German sportswear giant Puma to the site.
Our focus on stories like this is the wow factor – a major brand arriving gives confidence to a place, while the number of planned jobs also sparks interest.
I wanted to just explain how we come to make some of the other news decisions we make each day.
We choose between ten and twelve stories to go on our newsletter each morning.
When the stock market opens at 7am we look out for results and strategic announcements from the listed companies in our region. Often, the full year results release will be enormous and we have only a short window to “find” the story in there.
As an example, THG’s full year results and first quarter trading update this week was 19,000 words, stretched over 280 pages. The helpful press release from their financial PR advisors was 35 pages.
Our policy on reporting numbers is simple. Top line turnover and pre-tax profit. Not EBITDA. Not Alternative Performance Measures, or even Adjusted EBITDA. Pre tax profit, or in this case, loss, which wasn’t outlined until page 12.
We operate the same rule for private companies, though we do additionally include a caveat for property companies where a valuation can eschew the final profit figure, and we do note that private equity backed businesses may have loaded the companies with debt, and so the interest payment line is important.
We also send out a breaking news alert if there is a story we genuinely think is worth interrupting your day for. It will usually have involved some actual journalism, or it could be an important public service announcement.
One this week was the trams going down because of a power issue in Manchester, the other was the collapse of Southport-based The 79th Group, following a fraud investigation by the City of London Police.
Do please contact us if you have any further information on this evolving story, which we have so far reported carefully, and with respect to a live investigation and potential litigation.
Have an amazing Bank Holiday weekend.
