Watson’s Weekly 30-01-2021

This is an amalgamation of the “best bits” of the daily weekday newsletter/blog woven together to form a concise and coherent view on the things that matter in the commercial and economic news of the week. 

THE DAY IN BRACKETS REFERS TO THE EDITION WHERE THE STORY APPEARED IN WATSON’S DAILY. Clicking on the day will take you to the appropriate edition of Watson’s Daily.

• AstraZeneca got into hot water over vaccines because they were not able to provide enough of them to the EU (Monday). Rumblings have been intensifying over the last few weeks about the EU’s slow handling of the vaccines, then the Germans pushed for vaccine exports to stop and the Italians have threatened to sue drugmakers. It now appears that US biotech company Moderna is going to be cutting deliveries to France and Italy. Someone, somewhere made catastrophic errors here and people are going to die as a result while everyone plays the blame game. Getting vaccinated is going to be key to kick-starting economies and everyone is going to be racing to get this done. The UK seems to have been playing catch-up so far in most respects, but has actually been doing relatively well in comparison to other countries with regard to rolling out the vaccine – which must irk the Europeans even more. The drama continues…
• It’s good to hear that pharma companies are already working on booster jabs that combat new variants. Moderna’s launching a new version of the vaccine that better attacks the South African variant (Tuesday) although makers vary in their estimations of the length of time it takes to make vaccines that combat the variants (Wednesday). Variants are just a fact of life when viruses are concerned so I guess we just need to get used to it!
• In other vaccine-related developments, Panasonic has been inundated with requests (Monday) from European and US logistics companies to trial a super-cold freezer box (called “Vixell”) that it has developed specifically for transporting coronavirus vaccines. Samples will be distributed at the end of March and it will begin selling or leasing them soon afterwards. Sales will surely be huge – certainly for the short term at least! Also, the subject of verifying that you have taken the vaccines came up this week. Airlines are working on vaccine passports such as the “Common Pass”, “Verifly” and IATA’s own “Travel Pass” (Wednesday). They will need robust systems in place to get people up in the air as quickly as possible but, given the whole “no jab, no job” thing brought up by Pimlico Plumbers recently, the airline industry won’t be the only one to want to use some kind of verification system. I think that, unless the government steps in to legislate and clarify the law on this, lawyers will benefit from a blizzard of unfair dismissal and discrimination claims.

• Shares in GameStop, AMC Entertainment, Blackberry and others went through the roof (Thursday) as amateur investors acted as one by communicating on Reddit, buying stocks that were shorted by hedge funds. Things got so crazy that the White House said it was monitoring the situation (Thursday) and then the trading platforms they used freaked out and began to restrict trading (Friday). Retail investors complained about not being free to trade, unlike their professional cousins, and that it was one rule for the billionaires and another for the plebs. If the regulators don’t intervene here, I think that there will be huge scope for criminals with decent networks to game the system. I think that this is just more evidence of the sheer power of social media and will no doubt be brought up when lawmakers around the world consider what to do about Big Tech, their power over data and their power over shaping narratives
• There was some interesting news on Ant Group as Jack Ma suddenly popped up after an uncharacteristic absence (Thursday) making decisions that came as a surprise to everyone – that Ant Group would comply with the more restrictive conditions imposed on it and restructure accordingly. In return, it seems that the Central Bank will be prepared to let it carry out the IPO that it hoped to carry out at the end of last year (but we don’t know when this will happen). The key here is that things could have been much worse! OK, so it’s not going to have the stellar growth it experienced before, but at least it will fight to live another day…

• In DEAL news, Shell bought electric vehicle charging provider Ubitricity (Tuesday), the biggest on-street car charging company in Europe. This is good for Shell, who can use this acquisition to burnish its “green” credentials and great for Ubitricity who gets a sugar-daddy that can finance faster and broader expansion. Also, a joint venture was announced between Beyond Meat and PepsiCo (Wednesday) under the banner of “Planet Partnership”. It’s great for Beyond Meat because they will get access to Pepsi’s global network (and this company needs scale to keep driving prices down and benefiting from economies of scale) and it’s useful for Pepsi, which wants to broaden its product range to “healthier” options. This is a common thing for other beverage companies – it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Coca-Cola bought Costa Coffee, for example (although whether coffee can be judged to be healthy is another conversation!).
• The trend for troubled retail brands being bought but not their shops seems to be continuing. Boohoo bought Debenhams (Tuesday) and Asos looks like being the front-runner to buy Topshop (Monday) from the stricken Arcadia Group. At this rate, by the time lockdown lifts, there won’t be much of our high streets to go back to. Whoever is left should surely do a roaring trade! FWIW, I really think that this is not necessarily the death of the high street – but it might be the death of big chains that have homogenised our high street for the last few decades. I expect there to be a lot of pain at first but then I would think that we will see lots of independents popping up due to business start-up grants/loans and much more understanding landlords gracing our town/city centres. We let’s hope so anyway!

• Watson’s Yearly updates: These will be left until the next edition of Watson’s Yearly that will be published shortly

My favourite “alternative” story this week highlighted some amazing paper skills: Do NOT eat this delicious looking bento and other Japanese food…because they’re not food! (SoraNews24, Casey Baseel). Amazing!