Facebook, Carillion, wage growth, passports, Snapchat, high street gloom: your commercial news round-up
updated on 22 March 2018
It’s been a bad week for Facebook, with news that 50 million of its US users may have had their data mined and misused, with Facebook’s knowledge. Zuckerberg has finally come out and made a statement about how sorry the company is about the whole debacle, but advertisers are demanding that Facebook change its ways. Could this be the catalyst for a sea change at the social media giant? For other commercially interesting topics, read on:
- News about failed Carillion keeps filtering out; this week, it centres on fact that two of the company’s finance directors are to be investigated by the Financial Reporting Council, in relation to financial statements made between 2014-17.
- Encouraging basic wage growth figures caused the pound to leap up against the dollar. In the three months to January 2018, unemployment figures fell (slightly) and wages grew (slightly).
- Oh the irony: the new British passports that will be required post-Brexit are to be made in France by Franco-Dutch company Gemalto, which put in a cheaper bid than UK rival, De la Rue. The new blue passports will be in use from October 2019.
- In 2019 Snapchat’s UK ad revenue is set to overtake that of Twitter. The popular app is surging ahead of its other social media rivals, with figures that don’t lie – it made £21.9 million in 2016 and is expected to hit £181.7 million in 2019.
- More depressing high street retail news, with Carpetright, New Look, B&Q and Moss Bros all in varying degrees of trouble, ranging from slow sales figures to closing stores to voluntary administration.
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