Latest news with #FeverTree
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Fever-Tree bets on U.S. to get growth fizzing again
Fever-Tree's international expansion will be in the spotlight when it updates investors this week. The firm, which makes tonic water and other mixers, has been focused on cracking the US market after a slump in UK sales growth. Shares fizzed when Fever-Tree earlier this year announced that Molson Coors had bought an 8.5 per cent stake in the business for £71m. The tie-up with the US brewer is part of a plan to drive further growth in America – which has become the Aim-listed firm's largest market. But analysts expect Fever-Tree to reiterate its low single digit sales growth guidance for the full year in a trading update on Thursday. The Molson Coors partnership 'is expected to help drive the next leg of growth in North America,' Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Aarin Chiekrie said.
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Rayner's irrational tax raid will suffocate Britain's most promising businesses
Thirty years ago, 10 plucky firms listed on London's new Alternative Investment Market (AIM) with a combined capitalisation of just £82m, opting for the exchange as a less burdensome and expensive means of attracting investor capital than the main market. Since that time the average market cap of a single Aim firm has grown to £101m, more than 4,000 companies have participated in the market and raised over £135bn from investors. Firms such as ASOS, FeverTree and YouGov got their start on the index, while longstanding businesses such as Eddie Stobart, Time Out and Young's Brewery turned to it for further capital. Some have stayed on the junior market, while others made the leap to the main market. In turn, these firms have contributed vast sums to the British economy. In 2023 alone, Aim-listed businesses directly added £35.7bn to UK GDP and employed more than 400,000 people. Factor in the indirect (supply chain) and induced (employee spending) gross value, and these companies contributed £68bn to UK GDP and supported almost 800,000 jobs. Unlike so many other parts of our economic engine, there are more Aim companies headquartered outside of London than in it, and each employee adds £87,100 to our collective wealth, 50pc higher than the national average. Companies grow quickly under the Aim umbrella, boosting revenue by more than 40pc per annum in their first three years and growing headcount by 17pc each year. These businesses added £5.4bn to Treasury coffers in the same year through corporation tax, not to mention VAT, income tax or National Insurance contributions. They also paid out £1.2bn in dividends. And yet, our Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is demanding we gamble its future away for the paltry sum of a 0.01pc increase in annual tax receipts. Despite her claims that abolishing the remaining inheritance tax relief on Aim-listed shares could raise as much as £1bn annually, itself just 0.1pc of total tax take, the Government's own figures show the best case scenario would only add £110m to the public purse. Rather than cobbled together estimates from various interested figures, these numbers come from HMRC as per a Freedom of Information request from TWM Solicitors, and represent the projected income of Rachel Reeves's raid from her inaugural Budget, in which she halved the tax relief available. It stands to reason that culling the remaining 50pc tax relief would raise the same sums again. Except it doesn't. Factor in an incredibly unfriendly market environment for Aim shares, and analysis by tax firm RSM projects the number could dwindle as low as £55m. But even this is missing the wider picture. Slash inheritance tax relief to 0pc on Aim shares and it's very likely you'll never see a penny raised from this tax. The junior market is a risky investment, and one that only makes sense for estate planning on the basis of tax relief. Pop 'Aim portfolio' into your favourite search engine and you'll find every offering advertises the benefits of reducing one's inheritance tax bill. This is because while the market has a wealth of success stories, its history is also littered with hundreds of failed ventures. For every moonshot that compounds tenfold, your portfolio will be weighed down by other 100pc losses. But for British business to succeed and innovate – and generate that mystical growth at the heart of the Chancellor's proposition – we need a supportive environment and steady flow of capital. Moreover, unlike your typical FTSE 100 company which records its revenue in dollars and does little for our own GDP, the tax relief on Aim shares is reserved for certain businesses – those that operate on our shores. To qualify for the relief, the company must carry out the majority of its business in the UK, and it can't be a glorified landlord. Firms trading in land or securities, or receiving a substantial amount of income from letting property or land, are excluded. The relief isn't offered in perpetuity, either. Stray from these requirements and investors will be forced to pick a new stock, or face a tax bill. For a cost of roughly £110m per year, the inheritance tax relief buoys British businesses and offers entrepreneurs the opportunity to fail or succeed – and returns £68bn. If Reeves is serious about her growth agenda, this is the time to prove it.
Telegraph
03-03-2025
- Telegraph
I've become a posh hermit for a fortnight and it's glorious
Have you come across the phrase ' off-grid luxury '? I hadn't until this week, but apparently it's all the rage. What it means, so say various travel agents, is a holiday in a remote, isolated spot without amenities such as TV or Wi-Fi, but still comfortable. Or expensive, I think the travel agents mean (you know what they're like). You're in the Hebrides, but there are Molton Brown miniatures in the bathroom and a minibar stocked with dolly-sized bottles of champagne for £400 a pop. That sort of thing. 'Ten years ago, off-grid was synonymous with roughing it,' says Sarah de-Vere-Drummond, a travel specialist I'm delighted to discover, largely because her name is almost as silly as mine. 'But nowadays off-grid stays are far more luxurious: think solar power and wood burners as a matter of course; perhaps a wood-fired hot tub, even saunas as a gorgeous extra.' In other words, you're being a posh hermit. A hermit, because you're taking yourself away somewhere secluded and quiet; posh because you're still sleeping in a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets. It piqued my interest, this story, because I'm currently enjoying my own 'off-grid stay' in a crofter's cottage with a wood burner, up a long farm track in the wilds of North Wales. I'm here because I have a pressing book deadline to work on, so it's not exactly a holiday, but Dennis the terrier and I are fitting in time for the odd walk, as well as the odd piece of bara brith. We've been here for two weeks, barely interacted with another human being, and couldn't be happier. We wake at dawn, head to the beach for our first walk, come back and write all day (Dennis doesn't do much writing, he's more a thinking man), before another walk, Welsh cake for tea, bed most evenings at 8.30pm. I'm almost rising and going to sleep with the sun, like they did in the olden days. There's not much roughing it as a posh hermit. The crofter's cottage has electricity and Wi-Fi, admittedly (thank heavens, otherwise how else could I bring you this front-line report?). It also has White Company towels and bedding, and a magnificent supply of water so hot I keep scalding myself in the bath. The only possible moment of deprivation was when the Waitrose delivery man called me from the bottom of the farm track on the evening I arrived and said he couldn't get his van to the cottage. There followed a farcical scene for the local sheep, who witnessed a woman in her pyjamas and wellington boots ferrying items including Burford Brown eggs, Greek yogurt, an organic chicken and several bottles of Fever Tree tonic from a Waitrose van into the boot of her own car, before driving them back up to the cottage. Apart from that, this hermit life isn't half bad. During my time at Tatler we ran a piece on follies, decorative little outbuildings that the Georgian aristocracy built in their gardens largely because they didn't have enough to do. From this developed a craze for hermitages, similarly small constructions – think a very grand garden shed – which was either designed to give the impression of a live-in hermit, or in some cases inhabited by a real hermit, paid for by the owner. William Kent designed a hermitage at Stowe; there's another, now listed, at Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire, and a real hermit was said to live in the hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, until he bunked off and was found in the local pub. Professor Gordon Campbell, author of The Hermit In The Garden, has suggested that they were built for their wealthy owners to 'outsource' their melancholy, to make them feel better about their own, wildly indulgent lifestyles. I'm not saying we need to start advertising for beardy men to live in our sheds, but are we perhaps seeking comparable spiritual respite? Normal life means constant demands – emails, meetings, phone calls, messages we need to reply to, childcare, terrier care, social engagements we've agreed to when we didn't really want to, gym classes to make us feel less guilty about the wine last night. Roughly 10 to 15 times a day I remember something that I failed to do the previous day and feel a sharp pang of guilt – I should have called that person back, returned an item in the post, made an appointment, replied to that important email, rung the plumber, paid an invoice, booked another appointment, rung another plumber because inevitably the first one would be busy, and so on and so on. But go away for a spell, not a jolly to the Alps or the Algarve where you'll bump into half the school run, but a proper, enforced break deliberately away from the hordes, and all that vanishes. I haven't felt guilty about forgetting anything while here. I'm on my own, carbohydrate-heavy retreat; everything else can wait. Normal life has been temporarily postponed. It's what the new series of The White Lotus is grasping at, set in a luxury hotel in Thailand where guests are asked to hand in their mobiles when they check in. Horrifying for most of us because we've become so incapable of switching off, scrabbling for our phones at the merest ping or flash of the screen, and yet having a little break from the bleating device, as well as all the other demands on our time, is exactly what we need. The only danger is that life becomes too alluring as a posh hermit. Dennis and I went for an eight-mile romp around the Llŷn Peninsula last Saturday. It was a gloriously sunny day, and I could see the faint outlines of an island in the distance, which looked very inviting. Bardsey Island, I later discovered, has a population of 11 and various cottages for rent. It sounded just the ticket for my next retreat, I decided, until I read that pets weren't allowed. Later, I watched The Outrun, a Bafta-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan who goes to work for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) on one of the most remote Orkney islands, Papa Westray. 'Ooh, that looks nice and peaceful,' I thought, immediately opening Airbnb. There was just one house available on the island, but guess what? It comes with a hot tub. So there's your off-grid luxury. I'm less sure about the White Company situation, though, and there's probably no Waitrose.
