Hello! Since we last spoke, the UK has moved on to its third Prime Minister of the year and, like any good employee, Rishi’s already updated his LinkedIn profile. Today we're exploring:
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Corporate catch-up
The last 48 hours have been abuzz with business news — here are 4 of the biggest stories of the day:
Adidas: The German sportswear giant answered calls to drop Kanye West (now known as Ye), joining the list of brands that have distanced themselves from the rapper-turned-fashion-magnate after he made a number of anti-Semitic remarks on podcasts and social media. Adidas’s move was well received by the public and will come with a substantial financial cost. Some estimate that terminating the partnership will roughly halve the company’s profits for 2022 — a year that’s already seen the company plagued by slowing sales and a share price that’s fallen more than 60%.
Tech: It's been a tough week in big tech. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported its slowest growth since the pandemic, with users and brands skipping ads on YouTube. The video platform's ad revenue actually shrunk 2% year-on-year, spooking investors. Microsoft didn’t fare much better, as the company’s cloud division, Azure, missed expectations.
Economy-proof: Coca-Cola earnings were a rare bright spot in the busy earnings calendar yesterday, with a refreshingly positive set of numbers. The drinks conglomerate, which owns Sprite, Fanta and a number of other brands, raised prices to contend with commodity costs and shipping expenses and still saw their year-on-year revenue rise 10% last quarter. Not many products can claim to be recession-proof; Coca-Cola might be one of the few.
It’s fair to say that Taylor Swift’s latest release has gone down well. With rave reviews, reports of streaming service outages, and two Spotify records laying in its wake, her album Midnights has dominated the musical landscape since its release last Friday.
Wildest streams
Friday was a particularly big day for Tay — Swift became Spotify’s most-streamed artist in a single day and her 10th studio offering became the most-streamed album over the same time frame.
The album’s lead single, Anti-Hero, is yet to drop below 10m daily listens and other tracks like Lavender Haze and Snow On The Beach nearly double the streaming stats for almost all of Swift’s chart competition. Indeed, Taylor currently occupies 13 of the top 14 places on Spotify’s daily streaming chart, with Sam Smith filling the only blank space in the rankings.
Even Swift’s new-found penchant for swearing clearly can’t stop fans from streaming their beloved singer-songwriter.
Jump around
Tenures of ten years or longer are down across the board in the US and, with younger generations reportedly more restless than predecessors, it seems that being in it for the long run may not mean quite what it used to.
Attitudes towards the concept of the ‘career’ have shifted. Workers no longer seem bound to live out their working lives at one company for large chunks of time, particularly in the post-pandemic workforce. Indeed, less than a third of workers over 25 in the US have been at the same company for over ten years, with just 31% of employees reaching the decade stage with their current employer.
The data becomes particularly interesting when split out by gender. In the 80s, with fewer women in the workforce, the gap between the number of men and women reaching the 10-year milestone was wide (38% for men, 25% for women in 1983). However, as more women joined the workforce and climbed the corporate ladder, that gap has narrowed — although never completely disappeared.
Shortening stints
Unsurprisingly, the median tenure length for workers is also down across the board too — the typical worker now spends just over 4 years at each company, on average. Given how many Americans have quit, or made plans to quit, in the last year, that figure — and the number reaching the 10-year milestone — is likely to fall even further.
• Forget spooky season, October is officially spouse season, with 17% of the year’s marriages taking place this month according to this study.
• American home prices fell by 2.4% between June and August, the first sign that rising mortgage rates might be curbing demand.
• Only 0.6% of travellers polled said they preferred the middle seat — so Virgin Australia are launching a $145k lottery only open to those who sit in the middle seat during a flight.
• A deep dive into the damaging world of plastic waste.
• California's economy is set to surpass Germany's, which would make it the fourth largest in the world were it an independent country.
• Interesting map from The Economist assessing the wide-ranging wholesale price of cocaine from country to country.
Quick Cut: YouTube sensation MrBeast is looking for investment for his media empire — but how does the valuation he's seeking compare to list-makers BuzzFeed, once the kings of new media? Answer here.
