The UK hospitality industry faces many challenges, not least its steadily deteriorating finances as detailed in our recent sector report. Among the most intractable are ongoing and chronic staff shortages, which undoubtedly underly a significant proportion of the financial pain. The situation has reached such a pitch that the All-party Parliamentary Group for Hospitality and Tourism had announced it was
Economic signals are still mixed but positive overall With the release of many more positive economic announcements in recent weeks, has the UK economy finally turned a corner as the government and the Bank of England are suggesting, or are we all getting ahead of ourselves? Only time can answer this question, but many, although not all of the signs
The development of cross-border restructuring We are nearing the end of the third decade since cross-border recognition of insolvency proceedings was codified through the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency, which was adopted in 1997 to create some order in the chaotic world that insolvency professionals faced when working on multi-jurisdictional failures or restructurings. The Model Law was never intended
Getting inventory levels wrong can easily happen within the retail industry, but it can be very damaging. Too little inventory and stockouts mean lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Too much and precious capital is tied up unnecessarily and expensively before the inevitable discounting wreaks havoc with gross margins and adversely affects the bottom line. Taken to extremes, excessive inventory can
For the overwhelming majority of retailers, the festive season is make or break. Christmas and New Year 2024 may have delivered surprisingly buoyant top-line revenues, given the consumer cost-of-living crisis, but profitability was another matter. The result has been another crop of high-profile failures, including Ted Baker, Matchesfashion, the Body Shop and FarFetch. Retailers account for 9% of all UK
The retail sector is crucial to the UK economy. It generates 6% of our GDP, receives a third of all consumer spending and employs 2.9m people (around 10% of all employment). Yet, it accounts for 9% of insolvencies and, as our latest sector report identifies, a further worrying decline in its overall financial health in recent months. Just at this
