Apple in India

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has launched the company's first retail store in India in the financial capital Mumbai. Videos showed Mr Cook waving to customers and opening the store's doors as employees clapped and cheered. He also greeted customers who visited the store and posed for selfies with some of them. Mr Cook will also attend the opening of a second store in the capital Delhi on Thursday. Reports say that people from across India came to Mumbai to participate in the opening event, which also featured local music and folk dance performances. The design of the Mumbai store - which is located in an upscale neighbourhood - has been inspired by the black-and-yellow taxis that are ubiquitous in the city. Until now, Apple products have been available in India either online or through a vast network of resellers. The new stores come at a time when Apple is trying to deepen its retail push in India, the world's second largest smartphone market. The iPhone is still an aspirational product in the price-sensitive Indian market, where more than 95% of smartphones run on Google's Android platform.India is also rising as a manufacturing base for the iPhone as Apple diversifies its supply chains away from China. India now accounts for 5% of total iPhone production.

 Apple India

Disney Restructuring

Walt Disney Co has begun a second round of layoffs as part of an earlier announced restructuring expected to result in 7,000 job losses. The media giant has been under pressure as its traditional television and film business shrinks, while its streaming unit continues to post big losses. Chief executive Bob Iger announced the $5.5bn cost-cutting drive in February. This week's cuts are expected to bringing the total number of reductions so far to 4,000. The losses will fall across the company, including at sports channel ESPN and film studios. The firm has said frontline workers at the park are not expected to be affected. "The difficult reality of many colleagues and friends leaving Disney is not something we take lightly," Disney officials said. The redundancies are indicative of a larger retrenching across the entertainment industry, as executives refocus on profits, after years in which many traditional media firms spent heavily to launch streaming platforms and win subscribers.

Disney Cuts

Prezzo Closures

Italian restaurant chain Prezzo will shut a third of its restaurants after being hit by rising costs for pizza and pasta ingredients and energy. The group said closing the 46 loss-making sites will put 810 staff at risk of redundancy. It said its utility bills had more than doubled in the past year along with sharp rises in costs for dough balls, pizza sauce, mozzarella and spaghetti. The cuts will affect sites with footfall still below pre-Covid levels. Prezzo said it would keep its restaurants in busier shopping areas, such as retail parks and tourist destinations. Staff were informed about the closures on Monday morning and the chain said it would work to redeploy "as many staff internally as possible".

 Prezzo Closures

Tupperware to be History

 

The brand Tupperware has become so synonymous with food storage that many people use its name when referring to any old plastic container. But the 77-year-old US company is seeing cracks form in the once revolutionary air-tight sealing business that made it famous, with rising debts and falling sales prompting a warning it could go bust without investment. Despite attempts to freshen up its products in recent years and reposition itself to a younger audience, it has failed to stop a slide in its sales. The firm's 'Tupperware parties' made it an icon during the 1950s and 1960s consumer revolution, and its air-tight and water-tight containers took the market by storm. But its core business model of using self-employed salespeople who sell primarily from their own homes has been going out of fashion for a while, and was retired altogether in the UK in 2003. Now company bosses have admitted that, without new funding, a brand name which has passed into common parlance could vanish from the market. Sales have slid again since then, largely because the firm has not been "innovative enough" over the past 10 to 20 years to keep up with its rivals, according to Ms Shuttleworth.

Tupperware

Sega buys Angry Birds

 

The maker of Angry Birds video games has agreed to be bought by the Japanese gaming giant behind the Sonic the Hedgehog character. Japan's Sega Sammy Holdings is paying €706m (£625m) for Finland-based Rovio Entertainment. Rovio has said Angry Birds was the first mobile game to be downloaded one billion times, and the brand has also produced two Angry Birds movies. Sega is seeking to tap into Rovio's expertise in mobile gaming. Last year, Rovio - which has about 550 employees across its eight game studios around the world - said downloads across its stable of games had reached five billion. Announcing the deal, Sega said its decision to buy Rovio had been driven by the need to "strengthen its position" in the global gaming market. It said this market is projected to grow to $263.3bn by 2026, with the percentage of mobile gaming expected to increase to 56%.

Sega Takeover

Pepsi Recipe Change

 

When it comes to fizzy drinks most of us sit firmly in one camp or the other: you’re either team Pepsi or team Coke. But those die-hard Pepsi fans might be swapping allegiance, as the brand has changed it’s recipe. Pepsi’s new reformulated recipe contains approximately 57% less sugar meaning a 330ml classic can of Pepsi will now contain only 15 grams of sugar rather than 36 grams. A two litre bottle will now contain 91 grams of sugar down from 213 grams. The move has seen long-time Pepsi fans vowing they will be ‘coming home’ to Coke. The "reformulated" Pepsi is sweetened with a blend of acesulfame potassium and sucralose, PepsiCo said in a statement. Shops will sell all their original recipe stock first before beginning to sell the new recipe. While Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max will not have a recipe change, drinkers have taken to social media to express their dissapointment with the new taste. A spokesperson for Pepsico said in a statement: ‘We are making changes to improve the nutritional profile of our snacks and beverages, building on nearly two decades of work prioritising low or no-sugar drinks in the UK and Ireland. ‘Today, over 90% of the colas we sell in the UK and Ireland are sugar-free versions.’

Pepsi Recipe Change