Capital Radio host Lisa Snowdon manned the phones this week for interdealer broker Phoenix Partners, which donated a day’s worth of its trading revenues to charities Help a Capital Child and London Air Ambulance, raising more than £100,000. A rare chance for the City to polish its halo. Surely it can’t last...
Analysts bogged down in Bromley
No job is too small for JPMorgan Cazenove’s meticulous property team, nearly caught short on a visit to Capital Shopping Centres’ Glades shopping centre in Bromley. The broker’s weekly Property Ticker reveals their dismay at the toilets: “There were not enough of them and they were quite old and poorly located.” So poorly located they ended up nipping to “the bathroom in M&S, where we also had to queue for quite a while”. It wasn’t all bad for Bromley though. One team member who visited the centre thought it was great and “will definitely return”. Note to Capital Shopping Centres, soon to be known as intu: order some loo roll and get some new signs.
Bubb rubs it in on Republic
You always hear plenty of excuses when a retailer goes under. It’s frequently the “economic climate”, “big supermarkets” or “sky-high rents” — not to mention “Amazon” and “online shopping”.
So it was refreshing to hear Nick Bubb, the independent retail analyst, give an honest assessment of this week’s failure of 121-store fashion chain Republic, which US private-equity giant TPG acquired for an eye-watering £300 million in 2010.
Bubb said: “The key point is that three years ago, TPG thought they were buying a highly profitable and dynamic young fashion brand with lots of expansion potential, but they simply bought the wrong brand at the wrong time for the wrong price.”
Hear, hear!
* More from those cheery economists on Valentine’s Day: from the sounds of it, a few — including ING Bank’s senior economist Ian Bright — will be celebrating tonight instead of yesterday. He muses: “Rational decision-making processes, which economists often enthuse about, appear to be thrown out the window. Roses bought on 14 February are much more expensive than those bought on 15 February. Restaurant tables full on the day will be close to empty the night after. But it is possible to break out of this cycle. One idea is to bring in a substitute occasion and celebrate the day after on 15 February, as one of my economist colleagues does — it’s easier to get a restaurant booking and you might get flowers at half price.” Good luck with that.
