Your commercial news round-up: Wiz, Labour and windfarms, CrowdStrike, Premier League

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In this week’s commercial news round-up, we delve into significant developments across various sectors. Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz has made headlines by rejecting a £17.8 billion takeover offer from Alphabet; the UK government has unveiled a new initiative to harness Royal Family-owned seabed for windfarms; and we take a look at the CrowdStrike IT outage. Meanwhile, the Premier League has joined forces with other football leagues and players’ unions to challenge FIFA’s expanded international calendar. Check out the round-up below.
 

• Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz has declined a £17.8 billion takeover offer from Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Despite Wiz’s CEO Assaf Rappaport being “flattered” by the offer, he explained that the company wants to reach £775 million in revenue before going public. According to the BBC, although the offer was allegedly “very tempting”, Wiz is confident “to continue on our path to building Wiz” and attempt to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company independently. The firm recently reported £387 million in annual recurring revenue and in 2022 claimed to be the fastest-growing software company in history after it reached £74 million in annual revenue within its first 18 months. It’s expected that Wiz will consider making an initial public offering after turning down the offer.
   
• The UK government plans to use seabed owned by the Royal Family to build windfarms, with the aim to power 20 million homes. The Labour Party’s partnership with the Crown Estate, which owns the majority of the seabed, is the first major initiative to be announced by the government’s new publicly owned energy firm Great British Energy (GB Energy). It’s hoped the initiative will eventually “lead to lower bills” for households, according to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, although it won’t “happen overnight”. Labour has said it plans to invest £8.3 billion in GB Energy over the next five years with the new company “at the heart of the government’s mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower”. That said, the Conservative Party called GB Energy a “gimmick that will end up costing families”.  
   
• You’d have had to have been living under a rock to have missed the CrowdStrike drama last week. Following a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, an IT outage caused global disruption last Friday – TV stations were offline, air travel was halted and hospital appointments were cancelled as millions of PCs across the world displayed what has been described as “blue screens of death”. Insurance firm Parametrix said it faced around £4.1 billion in financial losses as a result of the outage, with only £418 million to £840 million of these losses being insured. Following a review of the incident, CrowdStrike revealed that it had identified a “bug” in its system, which failed to detect “problematic content data” in a file. The company has since made a pledge to improve its software testing processes.  
   
• The Premier League is joining new legal action against FIFA over the expanded international football calendar, which could risk the health of players. The European Leagues organisation, which includes England’s professional leagues, along with the players’ union FIFPRO Europe, is filing a complaint to the European Commission. At the heart of the argument is the introduction of a new 32-team men’s Club World Cup next year, along with additional international matches, which leaves players with little time for rest and recovery. The complaint alleges that “FIFA’s conduct infringes EU competition law and notably constitutes an abuse of dominance”, while the leagues and players’ unions claim that FIFA has “consistently refused to include national leagues and player unions in its decision-making process”. They’re arguing that the international match calendar is now “beyond saturation and has become unsustainable”. 

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