The push to allow IPOs to buy back shares to prop up prices
Its first two changes – surprisingly made at only the halfway point of a broader review into public and private markets – were ideas straight from the top end of town, the investment banks and law firms present whenever an Australian company taps public markets.
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Sky News AU
an hour ago
- Sky News AU
Albanese has a ‘narrow conception' of Australia's interests ahead of meeting with Xi Jinping
Sky News host James Morrow says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's trip to China to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping is 'commercially based'. 'Labor and the Albanese government pulling further and further away from the United States and moving closer and closer to China,' Mr Morrow said. 'The excuse that Albanese gives for this is he says, 'I'm acting in Australia's interest', but he has got now such a narrow conception of what Australian interests are that they are entirely commercial and economic, and they have no idea about principle. 'The great failure of this government has been that it has thought that we could shelter under the security umbrella of the United States while still maintaining trade with China.'
West Australian
3 hours ago
- West Australian
Anthony Albanese to tout tourism before tough talk on China's military ambitions
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will opt for a soft launch on his six-day official trip to China on Sunday, promoting Australia to Chinese tourism groups ahead of tough talks with the country's leaders over their threatening military buildup and territorial ambitions. Mr Albanese will use the backdrop of Shanghai's glittering skyline in his bid to lure more Chinese visitors to enjoy Australian landmarks while boosting the country's economy. But as he makes his pitch alongside Tourism Australia's 'Ruby the Kangaroo', Chinese spy vessels are expected to be monitoring the biannual Talisman Sabre war games taking place off the Queensland and Northern Territory coastlines. On the eve of his trip, Foreign Minister Penny Wong paved the way for uncomfortable conversations over strategic rivalries in the region and the risk of escalating conflict. It is understood that Senator Wong used a meeting with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Malaysia on Friday to underscore stern Australian security concerns over China's unsafe actions in the South China Sea, the stability of the Taiwan Strait and human rights violations in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang. The minister also reiterated objections over a Chinese naval flotilla's circumnavigation of Australia and live fire exercises that were conducted with insufficient notice earlier this year. The more confrontational interaction between the two foreign ministers illustrates the diplomatic tightrope Mr Albanese must walk this week to maintain a firm stance on regional security while also dialling down tensions and talking up economic opportunities. Mr Albanese will visit Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu this week on a three-city sweep that will be heavily focussed on strengthening economic, tourism and trade ties and expanding cooperation in education, clean energy, agriculture and banking. His trip comes at a sensitive time in relations with China, which is both Australia's largest trading partner and the most significant strategic rival of Canberra's main security ally, the United States. The Prime Minister must balance the economic opportunities offered by China without upsetting Australia's defence and security relationship with an increasingly unpredictable Trump administration which has stoked anxiety in Canberra by launching a snap review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine program. Mr Albanese will likely face questions on AUKUS and US demands for Canberra to lift defence spending when he holds direct talks with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang in Beijing later this week. While much of his itinerary will revolve around the soft diplomacy of pandas, sport and cultural and business relations, the Prime Minister pledged he would not avoid 'honest conversations about some of the disagreements that are there.' On Sunday, however, he will make a gentler start in the financial metropolis of Shanghai where he will oversee the signing of a new cooperation deal between , a major online travel agency connecting Chinese tourists with Australian destinations, and Tourism Australia. 'Expanding our tourism relationship with China will mean more jobs for Australians and a boost to Australian businesses,' Mr Albanese said. 'Not only is Australia's beef, barley, red wine and lobster the best in the world – we're the best place in the world to come for a holiday. China is Australia's largest market by spend and second largest inbound tourism market by visitor numbers after New Zealand. There were 860,000 trips to Australia by visitors from mainland China - in the 12 months up to March 2025 - with a total spend valued at $9.2 billion, representing around a quarter of all short-term international visitor spend in Australia for that period. Tourism between the two countries is rapidly expanding in both directions, with a 26 per cent increase in visitors and a 28 per cent increase in spend from March 2024 to March 2025. For Australians, China was a top-five visitor market for every state and territory except the Northern Territory, and the number one international visitor market in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT. Mr Albanese has been accompanied on his tour by a high-level delegation of senior executives from some of the country's top companies and universities, who will take part in a roundtable discussion on Tuesday in Beijing, hosted by the Business Council of Australia and the China Development Bank, to thrash out a series of recommendations to tighten investment ties. The business leaders, who include Fortescue's Andrew Forrest, BHP's Geraldine Slattery, Rio Tinto's Kellie Parker and the vice-chancellors of Monash and UNSW universities are expected to centre their calls for more collaboration on green iron and metals, research and development, education and on clean energy technology. Rio Tinto boss Kellie Parker said the company was working closely with Chinese customers to support the development of low-carbon steelmaking technologies, 'leveraging Australia's high-quality iron ore and China's manufacturing expertise to drive real progress on emissions reduction.' SunRice Group Chief Executive Officer, Paul Serra, touted the potential of the Chinese market for the food giant. 'China's evolving consumer market - shaped by rising demand for premium, safe, and health-focused foods - presents long-term opportunities for trusted food producers like SunRice,' he said.
Sydney Morning Herald
5 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
The clean energy era is arriving. Is your power company ready?
As long as the lights stay on and power bills aren't too high, most of us aren't overly fussed about who supplies our electricity. That may be about to change, executives in the industry believe, as Australians' booming uptake of solar panels and batteries radically reshapes the market, sending customers searching for the most effective plans to help run their homes on cheap or free energy and profit from selling surplus solar to the grid. Origin Energy was first among the nation's big power companies to start preparing for a future that looks something like this. Five years ago, it purchased a minority stake in UK-based power retailing disruptor Octopus Energy and, with it, the perpetual licence to use its market-leading customer software platform, known as Kraken, in Australia. 'Just like in fintech, there is a digital revolution in energy,' Octopus co-founder Greg Jackson explains. The heart of Kraken is its advanced data and machine learning capability, which collapses multiple legacy customer-service functions, like billing, sales and meter enquiries, into just the one, avoiding the need to bounce callers between departments, and cutting down the company's 'cost to serve'. But perhaps its most important feature in the accelerating shift to green energy is its ability to give customers access to real-time variable power pricing (think Uber as opposed to taxis), and products that automate when to run households' solar panels or hot-water units, charge electric cars and discharge batteries based on when they will get the best price. Octopus, it turned out, was onto something. In less than 10 years, it has gone from a tech start-up selling energy to zero customers to 7.5 million accounts – more than a quarter of all homes in Britain – and is considered one of the world's most valuable unicorns. Its Kraken platform, meanwhile, has proven so successful that it is licensed to utilities in 18 countries. Now, Kraken is poised to be spun out into a standalone entity with a possible valuation of up to £10 billion ($20 billion), according to British media reports earlier this week. Australian investment analysts at UBS and Macquarie value Kraken considerably less than that – UBS's Tom Allen assumes a valuation of £3.4 billion ($7 billion) to £5.8 billion, depending on its growth in sales. Either way, he says, Origin had made a 'fantastic' investment and may be headed for a considerable payday. But Kraken is paying off for Origin in more ways than that, says Jon Briskin, the company's executive general manager of retail. Since Origin migrated its 4.7 million Australian customers onto Kraken in 2023, customer loyalty scores have lifted, customer churn has been falling and complaints to the ombudsman have been fewer. Loading In a fast-changing world where more customers have solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, the tech has also enabled Origin to become more nimble in developing and rolling out futuristic retail products, such as the EV Power Up. With more than 2 million EVs projected to be on the road by 2030, the product means customers can use their app to nominate when they want their EV charged by, and the software automatically chooses the best times of day to charge at an ultra-low capped rate of 8¢ a kilowatt-hour (that could charge up a Tesla Model Y for $5). With home battery uptake on the brink of surging since the Albanese government this month introduced rebates wiping 30 per cent off the cost, Kraken has also given Origin an edge in building out its 'virtual power plant' (VPP) network, whereby Origin pays customers a fee to let it aggregate the energy stored across thousands of their homes. Origin's VPP called Loop – a far-flung network of interconnected household devices including solar panels, batteries, electric cars and appliances that can be ramped up or down to inject bursts of energy into the grid or help address imbalances – is the biggest in the nation, with more than 400,000 devices under orchestration. Briskin says the Loop virtual power plant today sits at 1.5 gigawatts – bigger than a typical coal-fired power station. 'This orchestration is real, it's here, it's building fast,' Briskin says. 'I certainly feel like we are at a competitive advantage to have that technology that can move at greater speed.' While the value of Kraken to Origin's operations today overwhelmingly stems from the lower cost to serve customers, its ability to expand VPPs and co-ordinate household electricity usage and output would become increasingly critical in the fight for customers in the future, UBS's Tom Allen says. 'Energy retailing in the next five to 10 years will be won by who has the best technology to orchestrate behind-the-meter loads and be able to offer incentives to customers and dynamic pricing signals,' he says. 'That's what the future model will look like – it makes sense to be investing in that extra capability now.' While not everyone will be hyper-engaged and may not want to think about optimal times to run appliances, more than 80 per cent of Origin customers are already 'digital-only', Briskin says, with many simply using their app to track their energy usage, and receive alerts if it is trending too high. Origin is not alone in recognising the need to more efficiently manage customers and their energy usage in the shift to cleaner, more dispersed sources of power. We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision. Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer Last year, AGL snapped up a 20 per cent stake in the scalable and flexible Kaluza technology platform for $150 million, and has begun the process of migrating its 4 million power and gas customers in the coming years. Key drivers behind its adoption of the platform were the need to bring new and innovative energy retail products to the market more quickly in response to customers' fast-changing needs, says Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer. 'We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision … it's a completely different model,' says Egan. 'When you are working in a world like we are now, where the energy market is changing so frequently, the best situation is that you can deploy and innovate products quite rapidly and at low cost.'
