Your commercial news round-up: Red Sea, mortgages, Hershey, wages in Britain

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Despite not winning the PDC World Darts Championship, even non-darts fans have been gripped by the success of 16-year-old Luke Littler, who beat some of the biggest names in the sport to reach the tournament’s final on Wednesday 3 January. While Littler’s success is exciting, we’ve picked out four other headlines from the past week and summarised them below. Read on to get your 2024 commercial awareness resolutions off to a good start.

• Shipments through the Red Sea are being paused following attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels along international trade routes. The group declared its support for Hamas and claimed it was targeting ships travelling to Israel. As the attacks continue, there are rising fears over the disruption’s impact on the world economy, with commercial shipping in the Red Sea having faced attacks more than 20 times since November. As a result, the world’s largest shipping firms (including Danish shipping company Maersk and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd) have put a halt on all cargo passing through the area until further notice. The extra fuel required to redirect ships for every round trip between Asia and Europe is expected to cost around $1 million. Diversions are in place for tankers transporting diesel and jet fuel from the Middle East and Asia, and there are likely to be delays to the shipment of consumer goods, commodities and food. In fact, high-street retailer Next has said that the disruption in the Red Sea could cause “some delays to stock deliveries in the early part of the year”. Meanwhile, 12 states, including Australia, Denmark, Italy, the UK and US, called the attacks “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilising”, adding that there’s "no lawful justification for intentionally targeting civilian shipping and naval vessels".
   
• Yorkshire Building Society found that around 290,000 first-time buyers entered the mortgage market in 2023 – the UK’s lowest level in a decade. However, Ben Merritt, director of mortgages at Yorkshire Building Society, said first-time buyers “are still clearly keen to buy” and explained that “the wider market relies on them, not least to support purchases higher up the chain”. Meanwhile, mortgage lenders have kicked off the new year by cutting rates. Halifax has cut some interest rates by close to one percentage point, while HSBC said it'll make cuts today. Despite these reported cuts, mortgage rates will continue to sit at a level that’s much higher than homeowners are used to, with 1.6 million homeowners set to see their current fixed-rate deal expire over the next 12 months.
   
• Hershey is facing a class action lawsuit after Cynthia Kelly, from Florida, claimed its Reese’s Halloween-themed chocolate didn’t match the packaging. She argued that she bought the chocolate, which cost $4.49 from an Aldi supermarket, because she liked the “artistic designs” on the packaging, particularly the “cute looking” eyes and mouth. However, when she opened the treat, Kelly said the facial features were missing and there were no carvings. The class action, which alleges that "numerous consumers have been tricked and misled by the pictures on the products' packaging”, is seeking at least $5 million or 1.1 million bags of peanut butter pumpkins. Kelly is seeking damages for people in Florida who’ve bought items including Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins, bats, footballs and Christmas-related treats.
   
• According to the High Pay Centre, the people in charge of Britain’s largest companies will have made more money by 1:00pm on Thursday 4 January 2024 than those on or below the annual median wage for full-time workers (£34,963). The centre revealed that top bosses’ average reward, including pensions, is around £3.81 million per year – broken down, this equates to £1,170 per hour. Top City lawyers are due to overtake the median worker’s annual pay next week, with leading bankers overtaking the figure on 17 January. These findings, which are based on salaries published in companies’ annual reports, indicate that the UK faced “obscene levels of pay inequality”.

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