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Reuters
15-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Avolta posts higher quarterly sales growth, shrugs off North America slowdown
May 15 (Reuters) - Swiss travel retailer Avolta (AVOL.S), opens new tab posted a 5.3% organic increase in first-quarter turnover on Thursday, driven by its diversified business structure, despite headwinds in North America from lower traffic volumes earlier in the year. The Basel-based company also confirmed its full-year outlook and mid-term targets. The company, which runs shops at airports, on cruise liners, in seaports, and other tourist locations worldwide, posted a core turnover of 3.05 billion Swiss francs ($3.63 billion) for the reported quarter, up from 2.78 billion francs a year earlier. Avolta's stock has climbed 23% since the start of the year, fuelled by investor confidence in its strategic diversification across various channels and regions, particularly amid uncertainty in the U.S. travel market. Amid Avolta's growth momentum, U.S. consumer confidence recorded its sharpest drop in nearly five years this April, marking the sixth straight monthly decline. This downward trend has been compounded by persistently high inflation and mounting concerns over the economic impact of potential tariffs, which are clouding the broader economic outlook. "While North America faced headwinds due to lower traffic volumes in Q1 2025, performance in other regions more than compensated," Chief Executive Officer Xavier Rossinyol said in a statement. "We are actively monitoring the geopolitical evolution, mitigating against potential impacts as needed with a continued focus on growth and profitability," Rossinyol added. In North America, core turnover for the quarter reached 991 million Swiss francs, up from 974 million francs in the same period last year. The region remains Avolta's second-largest market, accounting for 32% of the group's total turnover in 2024. ($1 = 0.8394 Swiss francs)
New European
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The forgotten, formidable Medardo Rosso
In a bid to correct this historical amnesia, a new show has opened at the Kunstmuseum Basel. It brings together 50 of the artist's sculptures, with 250 of his photographs and drawings, and places them in dialogue with another 60 sculptors from the 20th and 21st centuries. When Auguste Rodin died in 1918, Guillame Apollinaire, French writer and chronicler of the artistic avant-garde wrote: 'Medardo Rosso is now without a doubt the greatest living sculptor'. Hailed as the 'founder of impressionist sculpture' and feted by later generations of sculptors including Henry Moore, Rosso remains the greatest European sculptor of the modern age that no one has ever heard of. Born on a train in Turin in 1858, Rosso went to art school in Milan where he railed against the hoary traditions of academic art and was expelled for punching a fellow student. In 1889 he relocated to Paris where he became acutely attuned to the rush of modernity, and the new age of mechanical reproduction, one in which photographs, moving images, and objects mass-produced in the factory became ubiquitous. Like the circle of Impressionist painters who were his direct peers, Rosso became interested in attempts to capture the transient flow of life, and the fleeting nature of perception. This was a radical goal for sculpture, an art form defined by stillness and claims to permanence. Long considered turgid and old-fashioned, French writer Charles Baudelaire deemed sculpture to be 'boring' in 1846. Rosso went further and rejected it as a category altogether, claiming: 'There is no painting, there is no sculpture, there is only a thing that is alive.' The exhibition is unapologetically intelligent (this is a good thing), and meanders thoughtfully across the spaces of the vast Kunstmuseum, beginning already in the museum's imposing courtyard, where Rodin's pathos- laden sculpture The Burghers of Calais sits next to a stone fountain bubbling with a pink pool of viscous liquid by Basel-based artist Pamela Rosenkrantz. Side by side, the two works represent the polarised extremes of what sculpture can be. Les bourgeois de Calais, Auguste Rodin (1884–1889, cast 1942/43). Photo: Martin P. Bühler On the one hand, Rodin's work, cast in bronze immortalises a heroic event from medieval history. On the other, Rosenkrantz's bubbling Skin Pool lacks any narrative and is permanently in flux, couched instead in conceptual ideas about materials, and their ability to dissolve and transform. The allusion here is to the traditional world of 19th-century sculpture that Medardo Rosso emerged from, and the impact his revisions of the medium had on future generations of sculptors who embraced liquidity and movement. The opening room sets the tone with an array of Rosso's sculptures set on their original plinths or in small vitrines or gabbie (Italian for 'cages'). Among them is Uomo chi legge (The reading man), cast in wax, one of the artist's signature materials, appreciated for its malleability and suppleness. What first appears to be a glossy piece of paleolithic bone slowly reveals the subtle delineation of a standing figure reading an open newspaper, a quotidian figure to be found in the boulevards and cafes of the Parisian metropolis, and not the idealised heroic figure that sculpture historically had depicted. Rosso's subject matter was found in the everyday: mothers and children, the sick, the drunk, the desperate. Recurring motifs include the forlorn Jewish boy, Sick child and the anonymous building concierge. There are examples of his experiments with the portrait bust, a form weighted with lofty traditions of grandeur. In Rosso's hands, Henri Rouart – a French painter, engineer and prolific art collector – appears with furrowed brow and artist's cocked beret, a tiny head poking through a roughly formed hunk of plaster like a seedling through a clump of soil. It has, like all of Rosso's sculptures, a feeling of the unfinished and imperfect, full of gashes, bubbles, holes from the casting process, and places in which the material has escaped the mould to create unpredictable effects. A contemporary critic even described Rosso's works as 'gaseous', as if they were made up of unanchored particles that cohere and disperse. In another portrait of Madame Noblet, a barely perceptible face is consumed by a mass of stone, and slips in and out of recognition depending on where the light falls. Around the edges of the room are Rosso's experiments in photography, which made up an integral part of his artistic process. Sculptures were staged in varying settings and light conditions, then cropped and collaged together with drawings and even photographs of drawings to make new montages which would influence further adaptations to the sculpted works. As co-curator Elena Filipovic suggests, 'the photograph is a tool for him in the process of making – while some artists use a chisel, Rosso uses a camera.' Working at a time in which photography itself was still an emergent experimental medium, Rosso's sculptures were described in 1905 by critic Ludwig Hevesi as a type of 'photo-sculpture', drawing similarities between the blurred, indistinct edges of the artist's three dimensional sculptures and the halo effect of light on photographic paper. Ecce Puer in the studio on Boulevard des Batignolles, Paris Artist, Medardo Rosso (Credit: mumok / Markus Wörgötter) Ecce Puer. Credit: courtesy Galleria Russo, Rome The exhibition continues upstairs where Rosso's broader legacy is considered in a sequence of rooms drawing parallels between his practice and a host of 60 other artists, a mode of display that Rosso himself cultivated in his own time, staging his work alongside peers such as Rodin and Cezanne. Here, echoes are sought out in works as diverse as Louise Bourgeois's stuffed and sewn soft sculptures to a gleaming bronze head by Constantin Brancusi and a Francis Bacon painting. Connections are largely forged through meditations on material and process, for example, the 'Repetition and Variation' theme takes Rosso's compulsive reworking of his core motifs as a starting point to think about serial production in a new cultural climate informed by factory lines and the mechanical reproduction of objects and images. Here, Andy Warhol's repetitive screen print Optical Car Crash (1962) sits next to Richard Serra's Candle Piece (1968) of identical mass -produced candles all burning with different flames and configurations of dripping wax. The 'Anti Monument' room brings together works that are deliberately off-kilter, an approach Rosso himself took as a way of undermining the traditional idea of what 'sculpture' should be. It includes Degas's peculiarly awkward Fallen Jockey, a painting that comments on the end of the traditional equestrian statue and portrait, one that defined a certain type of authority and status. Elsewhere, a room on the ubiquitous mother and child motif explores Freudian themes around parental touch as something that consumes as well as generates. Rosso's sculpted study of his wife embracing their child depicts a dyad hidden in what looks like volcanic rock, and reminds me of whimsically searching for faces in clouds. The approach is largely successful although occasionally risks overstretching the analogies, and at times verges away from engaging with the elusive Rosso, who remains a sculptor who is hard to grasp. I found myself distracted by a wonderfully creepy Eva Hesse sculpture, or documentary photographs of Alina Szapocnikow making a plaster cast of her nude, adult son, or ruminating on one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres 'candy works' of glistening, wrapped sweets stacked in a pile for visitors to consume and take away (a comment on the dispersal of the HIV virus that consumed Gonzalez-Torres and his partner). Rather than focussing on Rosso's biography, or the artistic milieu of early 20th century Paris, the curation favours a constellation of connections relating Rosso to developments in modern sculpture from his time to today. Among these threads are how sculpture has subverted convention and how it has approached the cultural themes of its time. It's an approach that rewards a thoughtful audience with suitably heavyweight ruminations on 20th century sculpture (reflected in the hefty exhibition catalogue, which weighs in at a whopping two kilos and includes an essay by erudite French philosopher Georges Didi Huberman.) The show marks the debut for curator and newly appointed Kunstmusuem director Elena Filipovic who co-curated the project with Heike Eipeldauer from mumok museum in Vienna, where the exhibition initially went on display. I ask Filipovic why despite the eulogies from his peers in his own time, Rosso was left behind by art history. Her answer is Rodin. '[He] took up all the space, he understood the importance of how to make things big,' Filipovic says. Moreover, Rodin also knew how to lean into his network, calling on the professional photographer Edward Steichen to take glossy commercial photos of his work. (While Rodin was initially effusive with his admiration for Rosso, the relationship soured when Rosso accused him of pilfering his ideas.) Filipovic is keen to emphasise Rosso's potential to inflect meaning on the here and now. 'I think we are living in an Instagram-promoted moment of product production and selfie production. You take a picture of any Rosso and it doesn't read well in photos. It wasn't made to be easily consumable… it's about close looking, it doesn't sit still and doesn't look cosmetically beautiful, and in this moment we need the artists who stand for that to be given their place,' she says. Despite the curator's judgement, there are undeniable moments of searing beauty – the veiled face of child peeking through a curtain and cast in wax, bronze and plaster is a poetically delicate and tender meditation on vulnerability, reminiscent of religious sculpture. There are also other aspects that offer pause for thought. Between 1906 and his death in 1928, Rosso stopped making new work, instead committing himself to undoing and remaking his suite of favourite motifs, rethinking and recasting them over and over, subtly adjusting and restaging them, breaking them apart to remake them. There is something in this that kindles thoughts of sustainability in our hyper consumer-capitalist age, of satisfaction with what we have acquired and allowing things to fall apart and be remade; an argument for maintaining curiosity with what we have before us and of jumping off the endless carousel of longing for what is new. Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture is at Kunstmuseum Basel until August 10
Mint
26-04-2025
- Business
- Mint
Switzerland Inc. Fends Off Activist Cevian With Insurance Merger
(Bloomberg) -- When Cevian Capital boosted its stake in Swiss insurer Baloise Holding AG last year, insurance firms across Europe got ready for the activist investor to go straight for its usual playbook. Companies including Axa SA and Allianz SE began to study whether Cevian's engagement could put the Basel-based company, or some of its divisions, into play as takeover targets. Cevian has a track record of triggering often dramatic strategic change, at times even breaking up longstanding businesses. At Baloise, where it had a stake of about 9%, it pushed management to focus on its core Swiss business and sell other assets, such as a regional lender and a struggling German unit, Bloomberg News has reported. In the end, the Swiss establishment found its own solution to keep foreign buyers at bay, and get Cevian off their backs. First, Basel-based Baloise announced that it had agreed on a rare 'merger of equals' with Helvetia Holding AG, a similarly-sized insurer a 2 1/2-hour drive away in the city of St. Gallen. Bankers and investors speculated that a counter bid could emerge, especially if Cevian was to reject the transaction when it's put to shareholders. Then Patria, a little-known cooperative that is also Helvetia's biggest shareholder, approached Cevian and bought its stake. That sale, announced Friday, lowers the likelihood of any disruption to the deal, even if some question the benefits of a combination. 'I struggle to see the financial logic of this deal,' Kevin Ryan, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, said when the tie-up was first announced. 'It appears to be a defensive move against activist investor Cevian with making as little changes as possible.' The combination of the firms will create Switzerland's second-largest insurance company. Patria will hold roughly 22% in the combined entity, analysts at BNP Paribas SA estimate. The cooperative represents the interests of Helvetia's policy holders and its statutes say it protects the interest of Helvetia's economic independence. Patria 'has made it clear that it supports the transaction,' a spokesperson for Baloise said. 'We are pleased that Helvetia's largest shareholder is convinced of the strategic fit and supports the merger of equals.' Helvetia and Cevian declined to comment. 'We very strongly believe in the merger between Helvetia and Baloise,' Patria said in a statement. 'By seizing the opportunity to acquire the Cevian package in Baloise, we are maintaining our position as a reliable principal shareholder.' While Cevian didn't succeed in getting Baloise to streamline its operations, it still walks away with a gain on its investment, which it didn't disclose. Baloise shares closed at 184.20 francs in Zurich on Friday, compared with around 130 francs when reports surfaced in 2023 that Cevian was considering an investment. The sale to Patria is 'a neat conclusion for Cevian,' said Iain Pearce, an analyst at BNP. Based on an estimated 140 francs ($169) paid on average per Baloise share, the investment firm will make a 'tidy profit,' he said. Cevian's investment in Baloise stretches back to late 2023. Last year, it helped to abolish a rule at the insurer that capped any investor's voting rights at 2%, regardless of the amount of stock they owned. The removal of the curb made it easier to push for changes. 'Cevian's engagement was the catalyst for change at Baloise,' said Jens Tischendorf, an ex-partner at Cevian and co-founder of Active Value Partners. Cevian's relationship with Baloise Chairman Thomas von Planta subsequently soured, according to people familiar with the matter. Von Planta will now oversee the strategy of the combined firm, which will be named Helvetia Baloise. Helvetia Chief Executive Officer Fabian Rupprecht will run the day to day business as CEO. The all-share deal values Baloise at about 8.4 billion Swiss francs based on the firms' latest closing prices. Bloomberg reported earlier that the companies had been exploring a possible combination. Cevian has pushed through far more significant moves elsewhere. At RSA Insurance Group Plc, it took a stake and eventually saw the company's sprawling operations broken up, with Intact Financial Corp. and Tryg A/S buying different pieces. The strategy has made billionaires of Cevian's founders Lars Foerberg, who lives in Switzerland, and Christer Gardell. Their firm also took a stake in UBS Group AG after the government-brokered takeover of Credit Suisse. More stories like this are available on First Published: 26 Apr 2025, 11:51 AM IST
Bloomberg
26-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Switzerland Inc. Fends Off Activist Cevian With Insurance Merger
When Cevian Capital boosted its stake in Swiss insurer Baloise Holding AG last year, insurance firms across Europe got ready for the activist investor to go straight for its usual playbook. Companies including Axa SA and Allianz SE began to study whether Cevian's engagement could put the Basel-based company, or some of its divisions, into play as takeover targets.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Switzerland flexes financial muscle ahead of tariff date in Washington
By Dave Graham ZURICH (Reuters) -Top Swiss officials will this week test whether big commitments to the U.S. can help secure relief from import tariffs, after pharma giant Roche followed its cross-town rival Novartis in announcing major investments in the United States. Roche on Tuesday said it would invest $50 billion in the United States over the next five years, a day before Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter and Economy Minister Guy Parmelin lead a delegation on a three-day visit to Washington. They want to underline how important Swiss business is to the United States as they seek to persuade President Donald Trump not to hit the country with tariffs that were initially set significantly higher than those for the European Union. Switzerland was shocked by the tariffs and there is broad support in parliament for officials to show how many billions Swiss firms invest now and will do in future, said Sibel Arslan, deputy chair of the lower house foreign relations committee. "This is the only way," the Green Party lawmaker told Reuters. "Now we'll have to see whether the strategy comes off." After the U.S. announced its import duties, one prominent Swiss lawmaker said Switzerland, which abolished its own industrial tariffs last year, should tell Trump it would invest $100 billion during his term. Others floated higher numbers. Purely between Basel-based Roche and Novartis, which committed $23 billion earlier in April, the Swiss officials arrive in Washington armed with hefty investment pledges that Trump-friendly media in the U.S. have vigorously celebrated. Roche said its investment was aligned with the government and part of ongoing discussions between Switzerland and the U.S. Chocolate maker Barry Callebaut and engineering group ABB are among other firms to make commitments from Switzerland, the seventh-biggest foreign investor into the United States. Keller-Sutter, who is also Switzerland's rotating one-year president, spoke to Trump by telephone hours before he announced a 90-day pause on his original tariffs, which cut the 31% rate for Switzerland to the 10% now applied to most countries. She is due to meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on her Washington visit, which takes place during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Spring meetings. Her government has not given details of other meetings. GOLDEN EGG For all the U.S. economic commitment demonstrated by the Swiss, Bern has hinted the Trump administration should not take its financial muscle for granted. A day after Trump announced his tariffs, Economy Minister Parmelin warned they could work against the U.S. if they led to firms putting "the brakes on certain investments". Lawmaker Arslan agreed, saying Switzerland, whose export-oriented economy is bigger than that of many much larger countries, should not allow itself to be taken advantage of. At around $100,000, Swiss GDP per capita was in 2023 about 20% higher than the United States, World Bank data show. Switzerland is also home to around three times as many Fortune Global 500 companies per capita as the United States, led by the likes of Nestle, Glencore, Roche and Novartis. Klaus Stoehlker, a Zurich-based public relations consultant, said given the difficulty even allies of Trump have had in steering him away from tariffs, the Swiss delegation was on a "journey of hope" in Washington. But big investment announcements were the most powerful weapon Switzerland could deploy in attempting to remind Trump of the ties binding the U.S. and Swiss economies, he said. Not only are Swiss companies among the top investors in the United States, they are also major sources of revenue for U.S. investors like Blackrock and the Vanguard Group that have big holdings in Swiss corporations, Stoehlker said. "Economically speaking, Switzerland is part of the U.S.," he said. "They're not going to break this Swiss golden egg." Sign in to access your portfolio
