
IPO candidate Swiss Marketplace Group sees 13-15% revenue growth in 2025
ZURICH, June 30 (Reuters) - Swiss Marketplace Group, which is considering an initial public offering, said on Monday it expects to post revenue growth of about 13-15% in 2025 after logging revenues of around 291 million Swiss francs ($364.39 million) last year.
The company, which operates online marketplaces, is ready to pursue its IPO, according to two people familiar with the matter. A company spokesperson said the process was in its early stages and that no formal decision had yet been made.
SMG, of which media company TX Group holds a stake of 30.7%, said it also forecast adjusted EBITDA margin expansion at a percentage approaching the mid-50s for 2025, up from 48% in 2024.
SMG intends to propose a dividend distribution of about 75 million francs for 2025, to be paid out in 2026.
TX Group founded SMG in 2021 together with insurer Mobiliar, media company Ringier and private equity firm General Atlantic.
($1 = 0.7986 Swiss francs)
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Times
10 minutes ago
- Times
It's still OK to like ‘American' food — here are London's best
'I wasn't looking to open a bagel shop,' says Dan Martensen, founder of It's Bagels ( 'I was just a New Yorker in London who wanted a proper bagel.' What began as a lockdown craving fast developed into an obsession, as Martensen strove to perfect the taste and texture of Manhattan's culinary icon. Yet the closer he came, the more he realised the final missing ingredient wasn't the Manhattan water, as many claim; it was the 'feeling of a bagel shop: the music, the photos of and by New Yorkers, the subway maps, the shouting servers.' Five years on, Martensen has three across London, in Primrose Hill, Westbourne Grove and Soho. It's a familiar tale among the new wave of restaurateurs dishing up regional American food in London — the realisation that the flavours they are looking to create are inextricably linked with the cultures that gave rise to them. This was true of the fast-food chains that gave American food culture a bad name — McDonald's and Burger King, say — brands that still capture a particular type of 1950s Americana. But it is even more pertinent when it comes to the regional cuisines that have historically not been well represented in the UK. • Read more restaurant reviews and recipes from our food experts 'The buffalo wings you'll get here are as good as any you'd get in Philly,' JP Teti says. He's founder of Passyunk Avenue ( London's 'First True Philadelphia Jawn'. 'My aspiration was more to sell the Philly lifestyle than it was cheese steaks and picklebacks,' he says. The walls are covered with Philadelphia Eagles merch and dollar bills, there's a lifesize model of Danny DeVito by the loos, and the service is generous and fun with a 'a little bit of Philly frankness' mixed in. It is, Teti says 'an intensely ethnic cultural experience'. 'Food is an output of culture,' Jacob Kenedy, chef patron of Plaquemine Lock ( points out, 'and the food of Louisiana is very symptomatic of where it has come from.' At Plaquemine Lock, Kenedy serves Cajun and Creole cuisine: a melting pot of Louisiana's French, African and American cultures. The restaurant is a love letter to New Orleans (where Kenedy has family) and to his fascination with how 'a truly repugnant period in history — slavery — resulted in a comfortable marriage of cuisines and cultures that permeates everyone's life, everywhere,' he says proudly, pointing out the city's formative influence on jazz and cocktails. Unlike more generic iterations of southern cuisine in the UK, this food feels as nuanced as the walls adorned with family memorabilia and hand-painted Mississippi murals. It is, on the one hand, part of a larger, longstanding trend toward more regionally specific restaurants in London. Just as Brat is Basque, not Spanish, and Bouchon Racine is Lyonnaise not French, so Plaquemine Lock is Louisianian, not American. Yet it feels more significant, in part because of the identity crisis gripping the States, in part because American food has been (and still is) so caricatured. 'Dude food, mama's mac and cheese, fast food — everything has been obvious pastiche,' the chef Tom Browne says. In 2014 he founded Decatur ( a pop-up restaurant showcasing southern specialities like shrimp boils. The clichéd American food that has made its way round the world, Browne reckons, 'has been linked to capitalism, rather than immigrants seeking a better life'. The truth is that most American food comes out of the waves of newcomers who have settled in different parts of the United States and made their culinary peace with what came before them. 'The regional foods which are associated with different immigrant communities, and the interplay between them, that's what's interesting,' the food writer Felicity Cloake reckons. Tex-Mex for her is a perfect example. Richard Burghardt, the co-founder of D Grande in Chiswick, agrees. 'It's wildly varied because it's had decades of evolution since Mexican immigrants first established Mexican restaurants in Texas — and the cuisines of Mexico are wildly varied in the first place,' he says. Hence a menu that includes fajitas, whose name is derived from the Spanish word for belt but which first emerged on the ranches of West Texas — only to be evolved into the sizzling, steak-and-salsa dish we know today. When the Philadelphian Teti opened Passyunk, it was because he would 'constantly see new American hospitality concepts here that were broad brush and generalist, when the America I know is idiosyncratic and regional.' Of course, it is impossible to talk about American food without mentioning the man in the White House. Not one of the restaurateurs I speak to are running 'political' restaurants — yet Trump's effect on their country's global reputation in the last six months has made their specificity interesting. 'Trump's own burger-based diet reinforces the very clichés that these restaurateurs have been trying to upend,' Browne says. Like his political ideology, Trump's view of American food is informed by 'a rose-tinted idea of America under Eisenhower in the 1950s: the glory days of fast food, and people getting refrigerators. They are his glory days — not the glory days of American cuisine,' says the journalist and podcaster Jon Sopel, who found much to love in its regional specialities during his six years as the BBC's North America editor. • Your guide to life in London: what's new in culture, food and property Nevertheless, 'Brand America suffers as a result of what Trump is doing, and that applies to food as much as anything else,' he continues, pointing out the declining interest in American tourism in the UK and in Canada, where he was struck recently by efforts of several restaurants to highlight their use of Canadian, not American, produce. 'When you're in the business of selling Americana via a hospitality medium, it is not entirely helpful when the government of the day launches a global insult tour that undermines the values that many people find so attractive about American culture,' Teti says. The specific cultural nuances of Passyunk Avenue, which Teti feared would be lost on non-Americans, have proved a saving grace. 'American regionality — its glories, weirdnesses and aspiration — is what we represent and it's a bite-sized interpretation of America which people everywhere can relate to or at least find curious.' Americans are proudly American — but their local identity matters as much, if not more. 'The way I feel when I say I'm American versus when I say I'm a New Yorker is very different,' says Martensen, who points out that New Yorkers are New Yorkers first and foremost. Equally, 'the people of New Orleans have this passionate, enchanted relationship with the place,' Kenedy says, 'which I can't recreate at Plaquemine, but I try.' Politics and dinner are not supposed to mix. 'One is powerful and scary, and the other is delicious,' says Kenedy. In their passionate regionality, these restaurants showcase what non-Americans love about American dining: the generosity, the familiarity, the funny blend of excitability and earnestness. In so far as these restaurants are political, it's as 'an antidote to the disappointment and malaise', Teti says. 'We're showing this positive form of America, which we hope will come again and will cling on to.'


Times
20 minutes ago
- Times
Energy firms missing Ofgem capital rules ‘should be named'
Energy suppliers that are failing to meet Ofgem's financial resilience targets are getting an unfair advantage and should be named, according to rivals. The regulator has come under fire from Utility Warehouse, Britain's seventh-largest supplier, and Good Energy, a leading smaller supplier, for failing to identify three companies that are falling short of the minimum 'capital target' that came into force at the end of March. The rules were introduced after dozens of poorly-capitalised suppliers went bust in the energy crisis of 2021-22, costing households billions of pounds. Octopus Energy, Britain's biggest supplier, told The Times in April that it was one of those that had not met its capital target. Ovo, Britain's fourth-largest supplier, is the only big company that has refused to say whether it has met its goal. Stuart Burnett, chief executive of Telecom Plus, the FTSE 250 owner of Utility Warehouse, and Nigel Pocklington, chief executive of Good Energy, both said they believed the situation created an uneven playing field and called for more transparency. Burnett told The Times: 'We estimate over one third of energy consumers are currently with a supplier that falls hundreds of millions below their capital target. The urgency of the situation will only grow as these suppliers continue to acquire more customers unchecked. 'Ofgem's approach is already creating an unlevel playing field, and should undercapitalised suppliers fail, it is the consumer that will suffer the most.' The financial resilience requirement comprises a capital floor of £0 at all times and a capital target of £115 adjusted net assets per dual fuel equivalent customer. Suppliers can be below the target if they have an Ofgem-approved plan to achieve it. Pocklington said that his company had had to turn down business because it 'didn't feel it prudent given both capital requirements and the lessons of the market over the last few years'. 'It's deeply concerning to see that others appear to be permitted to operate differently, effectively socialising risk while not meeting the same standards,' he said. • 'There needs to be far greater clarity over which suppliers are failing to meet minimum capital targets and how long they're being given to comply. The current approach risks creating an uneven playing field, where specialist and compliant suppliers like us are penalised for doing the right thing.' MPs on the energy security and net zero committee quizzed Jonathan Brearley, Ofgem's chief executive, last week about the lack of transparency, citing figures suggesting that one supplier had been almost £1.3 billion short of its capital target as of December 2023 and another almost £900 million short as of April 2024. Brearley responded: 'There remain companies of concern and we are working with those on transition plans to make sure that they get themselves into a place where they are meeting all of our capital adequacy rules.' He added that the regulator had not expected that every company would meet its criteria 'on day one' and that if they failed to meet milestones the regulator could stop them taking on new customers. Octopus has said it is 'fully compliant with Ofgem's new financial resilience rules'. It says it has a balance sheet of £1.7 billion and a trading arrangement with Shell 'that eliminates the key financial risks to which most suppliers are exposed' and gives it 'greater capacity to absorb shocks than many longer-established companies'. An Ofgem spokeswoman said: 'We've seen vast improvements in supplier financial resilience, and any company below the target has taken concrete action. We've taken a market-wide approach to the report, rather than focusing on individual supplier performance, and we've committed to reviewing how we publish this data in future.'


Auto Car
40 minutes ago
- Auto Car
Hyundai will reveal a new electric crossover in the "next few months"
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