Adele Ferguson November 24, 2014 The Age On November 10, Woolworths and its US partner, Lowe’s, quietly tipped another $90 million into their struggling hardware business Masters Home Improvement. According to the latest Australian Securities and Investments Commission filings, it brings total investment in the hardware joint venture to a whopping $2.91 billion – a whisker away from $3 billion. How much more it will need to pump in is subject to debate. The company won’t say. It is a big bucks investment – and a massive risk. An even bigger risk is the long-term impact on the rest of the Woolworths empire. Besides the amount of money already sunk into the business, accumulated losses are likely to clock up to more than $1 billion before hardware breaks even. The company previously flagged a break-even date of 2016 but in August was forced to retract that. The market now expects…

Sylvia Pennington November 17, 2014 The Age One entrepreneur has taken a huge risk on this ingenious device. What will you make with yours? Would you be brave enough to throw $1.5 million of your own money at a project to design and manufacture a high-resolution, desktop 3D printer in a market already well stocked with alternative offerings? Yes, if you think you can do it better and cheaper says Aussie expat and Rapide 3D CEO Ethan Hunt who’s spent the past year trying to do just that, with the help of a team of 10 designers. The result is Rapide Lite, a series of 3D printers slated to ship in time for Christmas. The launch has been partly funded by Indiegogo, the crowd-funding website that generates start-up capital for entrepreneurial hopefuls of all stripes. The company’s campaign has raised more than $200,000, 13 times its original funding target, from…

September 24, 2014 CSD Editor U.S. coffee sales are heating up and that trend is not expected to slow down. That is the conclusion of a new report released by research firm Packaged Facts, which forecasts that retail and foodservice sales of coffee will top $48 billion in 2014. Of this amount, the company expects $11.2 billion (or 23%) to come from retail sales and $37 billion (or 77%) to come from sales at food service establishments. For convenience stores, coffeehouse and quick-service restaurant (QSR) operators, attaching food to the purchase of coffee is more important than ever. Brands are aggressively innovating on both the beverage and food side of the menu to provide customers the ammunition needed for more pairing firepower. But more and more of these players are also branching into other beverages, which has the potential to dampen coffee sales growth. And yet, despite all the variety,…

Graham Ruddick Telegraph UK Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons are suffering from falling sales in their supermarkets, but strategic blunders, rather than a change in shopping habits, is at the centre of their problems Don’t blame a change in shopping habits, Britain’s supermarkets just got it so wrong “Change is the law of the life,” John F Kennedy said in 1963. “Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” A narrative has emerged in the UK grocery industry that the chaos engulfing the leading supermarkets is all down to a dramatic change in shopping habits. British shoppers, so the story goes, have abandoned their weekly food shop. Instead, they are spending their money across different trips to the supermarket, the local convenience store, a discounter, and the internet. There is of course some truth in this. Forecasts by IGD, the industry body, show…

CHRIS HERDE NOVEMBER 21, 2014 THE COURIER-MAIL IF YOU look around … they’re popping up everywhere. From being a retail oddity a few years ago, the pop-up shop phenomenon is here to stay, and has become an increasingly vital part of the market. POP STAR: Katy Perry opens pop-up store Laura Chong, director of online fashion retailer for the corporate woman 400 co, recently signed up for a two-week Pop Up lease on the ground floor of the JLL-managed Wintergarden off Queen Street Mall. “We’re an online boutique and being a new business it’s a good way for our customers to come in and try things on and feel the quality of our clothing,” she said. “But we’ve actually gained a whole heap of new customers just by opening this Pop Up shop. “We were meant to be here two weeks but now we’ve extended it to four months.” JLL’s…

NOVEMBER 21, 2014 AAP A NEW report shows the global cost of obesity has risen to $US2 trillion ($A2.2 trillion) annually – nearly as much as smoking or the combined impact of armed violence, war and terrorism. THE report, released by the McKinsey Global Institute on Thursday, focused on the economics of obesity, putting it among the top three social programs generated by human beings. It puts its impact at 2.8 per cent of global gross domestic product. “Obesity isn’t just a health issue,” one of the report’s authors, Richard Dobbs, said in a podcast. “But it’s a major economic and business challenge.” The company says 2.1 billion people – about 30 per cent of the global population – are overweight or obese and that about 15 per cent of health care costs in developed economies are driven by it. In emerging markets, as countries get richer, the rate of…