Frasers Group takes over XXL as largest shareholders sells its shares
UK sportswear and fashion group Frasers said that, according to preliminary results, it now controls over 92% of share capital in the struggling Norwegian sporting goods retailer XXL.
Frasers Group, majority owned by billionaire Mike Ashley, has been expanding its global retail investments, raising its stake in fashion retailer ASOS and closing deals in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Gulf and Egypt.
However, in Norway it faced resistance from XXL's board of directors.
The UK-based company first made a bid for XXL in December but dropped it two months later, saying it could not secure acceptances from other large shareholders.
XXL's board of directors recommended shareholders rejected Frasers' second bid made in March, saying it did not offer a sufficient premium.
However, on May 27, XXL's largest shareholder Altor Invest decided to sell all its shares to Frasers.
Since 2019, XXL has been struggling with declining sales and liquidity constraints amid a weaker market, and began downsizing its retail network.
"Frasers is acquiring a business which is in significant distress. As such, all stakeholders, including but not limited to, brand partners, landlords, suppliers and partners, will need to work collaboratively with Frasers in its efforts to save the XXL business in its current form," Frasers said in a statement.
The British retailer warned, however, that given limited information it had at the moment "there is no guarantee that XXL can be saved in its current form or at all."
Frasers is set to buy the remaining XXL shares, based on the March offer document. No plans for XXL's delisting have been proposed yet, but this could change pending approval from a general meeting.
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The Journal
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Carolan says it's impossible to know exactly what has happened within Google's algorithm, but the quality filters that were once in place to keep low-quality results further down the ranking seem to be struggling to hold back the tide. Visibility on Google can be gamed using certain practices known as search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the reason why, for example, online recipes often contain weird, boring essays above the list of ingredients. All publishers use SEO, but the quality of search results is degraded when low quality websites are able to abuse SEO to boost their Google ranking. 'Maybe investment within search engines are going more towards AI than they are towards just sustaining the core search product,' Carolan says. 'It's very hard to say because all of this is happening in very untransparent ways. Nobody gets to see how decisions are being made.' McIlraith says it's widely believed in her industry that recent changes to Google's algorithm – in particular an August 2022 update called, ironically, 'Helpful Content' – have corrupted results. She believes this is having a bigger impact in smaller markets such as Ireland, with more . websites appearing in Irish users' results, for example. 'A lot of people in my industry have been shouting about this, particularly in the past 18 months,' McIlraith says. Google said it makes thousands of changes to search every year to improve it, and it's continuously adapting to address new spam techniques. 'Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,' it said. For what it's worth, Shrisnak doesn't use Google now, favouring DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine based on Google that feels a lot like the Google of old. It doesn't collect user data (and is capable of correctly identifying the current government of Ireland). What happens next? Google says AI is getting us to stay where it wants us: on Google. CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested that AI encourages users to spend more time searching for answers online, growing the overall advertising market. Google says AI Overviews have increased usage by 10% for the type of queries that show overview results. Soon, Irish users are likely to see advertising integrated into AI Overview. The company is telling advertisers this will be a powerful tool, putting their ads in front of us at an important, previously inaccessible moment when we are just beginning to think about something. But AI raises existential questions for the production of content for the web as we know it, both in its ability to generate content and as it's being applied in search. In the jargon of digital marketing, the problem is known as 'zero click'. You ask Google a question and get an answer – maybe an AI-generated one – without ever having to click on a blue link. McIlraith says: 'The biggest challenge for all of my clients and the wider industry is that Google is flatly refusing to give us any data around zero click. We cannot see how much our brand is showing up in search results where no click is being attributed.' Until now, there was an unwritten contract: websites provided Google with information for free, and benefited from Google-generated traffic. This contract is broken when Google morphs into a single interface scraping the web to feed its AI in a way that negates the need to click through links to websites to find information. 'The challenge then really becomes, why would I create content?' McIlraith says. 'Why would I create content on my website just for these AIs to come along and scrape it?' Already there are challenges to ChatGPT's practices, with publishers led by the New York Times suing OpenAI over its use of copyrighted works. News/Media Alliance, the trade association representing all the biggest news publishers in the US, last month condemned AI Mode as 'the definition of theft'. 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,' the alliance said. 'Now Google just takes content by force.' Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about this by US tech news website The Verge last week. He said AI Mode would provide sources, adding that for the past year Google has been sending traffic to a broader base of websites and this will continue. He did not give a definitive answer when asked by whether a 45% increase in web pages over the past two years was the result of more of the web being generated by AI, stating that 'people are producing a lot of content'. Carolan speculates that in the single interface, linkless future, with the business model of web publishing broken, the risk is that the internet starts to eat itself: regurgitating AI slop rather than sustaining the production of original material. The information Google's AI Mode and ChatGPT and the rest are feeding off will then degrade. Late stage enshittification. AI search itself may improve, but these improvements will be undermined by this disintegration of the information environment. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... Our Explainer articles bring context and explanations in plain language to help make sense of complex issues. We're asking readers like you to support us so we can continue to provide helpful context to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Learn More Support The Journal
