Latest news with #Mercedes-Benzes
The South African
5 days ago
- Automotive
- The South African
Divorce drama? Siya catches strays over Rachel Kolisi's 'used' car
Springbok captain Siya Kolisi has found himself trending on social media after his former wife, Rachel Kolisi, revealed her 'downgrade' from a luxury to a modest car. The ex-rugby WAG surprised everyone on Instagram by announcing that she had traded her modern Mercedes-Benz for an older Toyota Yaris. Rachel – who announced her split from Siya last October – has since deleted the post. On Friday, Rachel posted – and swiftly deleted – a post teasing that latest car, a Toyota Yaris. The modest vehicle is a far cry from her state-of-the-art Mercedes-Benzes and Land Rovers, which she is likely accustomed to. 'Life has a funny way of humbling you just when you think you've got it all figured out. One day you're riding high, the next you're asking a friend to borrow their spare car and googling 'how to parallel park a Yaris with dignity'', she captioned the post. The mother-of-two added: 'It's not forever. It's just a chapter. But honestly? Betsy (the car) and I are kind of vibing, and I still nail clutch control.' Rachel Kolisi deleted an IG post about her modest car. Images via Instagram: @rachelkolisi On the X platform, Rachel Kolisi's car reveal had many South Africans slagging off her former husband, Siya Kolisi. Many believed that the Springbok captain 'owed' his ex a luxury car over their eight years of marriage and two children together. @coriekingsley: 'They have kids. The least he could do is leave her comfortably. She also took care of his siblings.' @yoyoyodity: 'Men will leave you in the desert with no water'. Others believed Rachel Kolisi was trying to garner public sympathy. @josnowwy: 'I feel like she is being a bit unfair. She wants people to hate Siya, and we do not know about what is happening or what happened in their marriage.' @KatlegoYaBadimo: 'Rachel knows what she's doing, shame!' Since announcing their split, Siya and Rachel Kolisi have kept news of their divorce and subsequent settlement under wraps. It remains unconfirmed if the couple will be splitting their assets or walking away with their own. What is confirmed is that Rachel has claimed that she was pressured to leave her post as CEO of the couple's joint charity, the Kolisi Foundation. In a complaint filed with the CCMA, Rachel claimed 'constructive dismissal', alleging that her working conditions became 'intolerable', 'forcing' her to resign. She is seeking reinstatement or compensation for the distress caused by her resignation. Although Rachel's source of income is unclear, she and her two children, as well as Siya's two siblings, continue to live in their Cape Town home. Siya lives in a Ballito mansion in KwaZulu-Natal, where he plays for the Sharks. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 . Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp , Facebook , X, and Bluesky for the latest news.
Observer
05-05-2025
- Business
- Observer
China's garment factories face a tipping point
GUANGZHOU, China—For the past five years, Liu Miao has sold clothing on Amazon to wholesale buyers in the United States. That trade has come to an abrupt stop. Liu owns a small factory in Guangzhou, long the center of China's highly competitive garment industry. He and other factory managers, already dealing with tight profit margins, said last week that the combination of tariffs and President Donald Trump's new tax on cheap imports had cut deeply into their businesses. Costs along the supply chain are also higher. The tariffs have made it impossible for Liu to continue selling on Amazon, where he previously made about $1 on every garment but now just 50 cents. And he felt he could not cut his employees' pay, Liu said, as workers at a labor market crowded past his motorbike, which he had parked on the sidewalk with a dress sample draped over the handlebars. 'You can't sell anything to the United States right now,' Liu said. 'The tariffs are too high.' Platforms such as Amazon, Shein, and Temu brought China's vast manufacturing supply chain to the world's doorstep. These online marketplaces made it possible for thousands of Guangzhou's small factories to reach shoppers in the United States. And since packages worth less than $800 could enter the United States tax-free, the factories and, in turn, the platforms were able to charge very low prices. Exports have been a major driver of China's economic growth in the past few years. Business has been particularly good in e-commerce. In one Guangzhou neighborhood, foreign luxury cars — Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and Cadillacs — were parked outside factories that pay workers about $60 a day to churn out clothing sold on apps such as Shein and Amazon. But now, as trade tensions force the world's two largest economies apart, many businesses in Guangzhou are facing a tipping point. The tariffs compound multiple challenges facing the garment makers. It is getting harder to make a profit as the Chinese government has struggled to get consumers to spend more after the collapse of the country's property market. Without rising home values, many Chinese people are curbing their spending. That hurt business for Zhang Chen, who used to own six clothing stores in the central province of Hubei. But when shoppers didn't return after the COVID-19 pandemic and rent stayed high, he decided to close them all. 'In 2020, business wasn't coming back, and in 2021, it still wasn't coming back. By 2022, when it was still like that, it looked like it was never coming back,' Zhang said. Now, he makes about $100 a day delivering freshly sewn garments to Shein collection points near the airport. The factories in Guangzhou are not the automated ones churning out electric vehicles or the manufacturing campuses making semiconductors that are key to China's yearslong drive to secure geopolitical resilience through advanced technology. Yet China's garment factories employ millions of workers hustling to make a living. In interviews, nine factory owners and managers in Guangzhou said they were considering relocating their operations, some to provinces such as Hubei, 600 miles away, where they could pay workers lower wages. A few owners said they could move to countries such as Vietnam, where many Chinese factories have set up to avoid potential new tariffs as high as those already set on China's exports. Many reported declining orders. Others said they had suspended some production lines. All described watching neighboring businesses shut their doors in the past few months. On Friday, as the U.S. policy to end tax-free imports from China took effect, Liu Bin packed up his sprawling garment factory where piles of Shein packages pressed against the windows. Liu's factory specializes in dresses and tops meant to be worn to a beach party or a date night, and Shein typically purchases about 100,000 pieces from him a month. But in April, after the company ordered about half that much, he started moving his production line to the neighboring province of Jiangxi. He could no longer afford rent in Guangzhou. Liu said Shein was offering incentives to help cover the cost of moving operations to Vietnam, and he had considered it, 'but then the tariffs on Vietnam got even higher, too.' He said he had also tried to find buyers on TikTok and Temu, but orders were down on every platform. 'They're all falling, and we are only waiting and watching,' Liu said. Shein did not respond to a request for comment. Temu said Friday that it had stopped shipping products from China directly to buyers in the United States. The Chinese government has been encouraging domestic e-commerce platforms to help small businesses sell to their home market. But with China's consumers being careful about spending, it will be hard for factories to sell as much domestically as they were exporting. Han Junxiu, who sells novelty socks on Shein and Temu, said she doubted that the U.S. government would be able to suddenly start collecting tariffs on low-priced packages, which had been coming into the United States at the rate of 4 million a day. 'I just don't think it's that realistic,' Han said after closing her booth for the night at the Canton Fair, Guangzhou's annual export trade show. Fluffy socks for pajama parties are some of her most popular products. This is exactly the kind of thing Americans will still need to buy from Chinese businesses, Han said. 'Where else are they going to buy all this?' she asked. This article originally appeared in
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
China's Garment Factories Face a Tipping Point After New Tariffs
Liu Miao has sold clothing on Amazon to wholesale buyers in the United States for the past five years. That trade has come to an abrupt stop. Mr. Liu owns a small factory in Guangzhou, long the center of China's highly competitive garment industry. He and other factory managers, already dealing with tight profit margins, said last week that the combination of tariffs and President Trump's new tax on cheap imports had cut deeply into their businesses. Costs along the supply chain are also higher. The tariffs have made it impossible for Mr. Liu to continue selling on Amazon, where he previously made about $1 on every garment but now just 50 cents. And he felt he could not cut his employees' pay, Mr. Liu said, as workers at a labor market crowded past his motorbike, which he had parked on the sidewalk with a dress sample draped over the handlebars. 'You can't sell anything to the United States right now,' Mr. Liu said. 'The tariffs are too high.' Platforms like Amazon, Shein and Temu brought China's vast manufacturing supply chain to the world's doorstep. These online marketplaces made it possible for thousands of Guangzhou's small factories to reach shoppers in the United States. And since packages worth less than $800 could enter the United States tax-free, the factories and, in turn, the platforms were able to charge very low prices. Exports have been a major driver of China's economic growth in the past few years. Business has been particularly good in e-commerce. In one Guangzhou neighborhood, foreign luxury cars — Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Cadillacs — were parked outside factories that pay workers about $60 a day to churn out clothing sold on apps like Shein and Amazon. But now as trade tensions force the world's two largest economies apart, many businesses in Guangzhou are facing a tipping point. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
The Man Who Will Make Nick Saban A Billionaire
Joe Agresti was on a conference call in his Baton Rouge office when an unknown number left a message. Nick Saban, the legendary University of Alabama football coach, was calling. He wanted to open a car dealership. 'I thought it was a prank call,' Agresti, now 52, recalls. 'I thought one of my buddies left me a bullshit prank Saban thing.' Within a few weeks, Saban and Agresti—whose Mercedes-Benz of Baton Rouge was considered one of the nation's best-run dealers—met for a 30-minute sitdown that lasted four hours. The next day, they agreed to go into business together. Now their Dream Motor Group sells 20,000 Mercedes-Benzes a year, plus a couple hundred Infinitis and Ferraris, across nine dealerships in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and Florida, where the pair bought two Miami-area stores in a $730 million deal in 2023. Annual revenues are nearing $2 billion. 'It's one of the best decisions I ever made,' Saban says of the partnership. 'It's been really good for both of us.' So good, in fact, that Agresti—who runs the day-to-day and owns majority stakes in the dealerships—is now a billionaire, worth $1.1 billion. Saban, a minority partner in many of the ventures, likely isn't far behind, meaning he's set to become the first billionaire college football coach, thanks in no small part to a little-known car salesman with big ambition. A huge personality who races through his story at a mile a minute, but doesn't spare any detail, Agresti pulled himself onto the World's Billionaires list by fixating on operations, obsessing over corporate culture—and leveraging connections, from his early days as an accountant at Arthur Andersen to teaming up with Saban. Over the course of a three-hour call, Agresti mentions 14 'buddies,' a half-dozen 'friends,' three 'good dudes,' one 'excellent dude,' and names four people his 'best friend.' 'Coach and I get deals left and right because of our connections,' says Agresti, phoning from Miami in late March, after spending the morning negotiating a deal to expand into a sixth state. 'Right now we're at our all-time biggest—all our chips are on the table.' Agresti wasn't always going for broke. He grew up in working-class North Bergen, New Jersey, just outside Manhattan, the son of an architectural woodworker father and a nurse mother, who also manned the family's small apple orchard when they moved 60 miles west, near the Pennsylvania border. A wrestler, he chose Rutgers over Bucknell because he got a partial scholarship and his parents were willing to chip in more for the cheaper school. He studied accounting, deeming it a safe choice, and took a CPA gig in the metro New York office of Big Six firm Arthur Andersen. 'It was conservative, it was a guaranteed job, it was pretty good money coming out of college,' he says. He quickly got ambitious, handling due diligence for mergers and acquisitions, including auto deals, then parlaying his skills into a high-level operations job with dealership giant (and Andersen client) Asbury Automotive, eventually managing Asbury's Mississippi business. Then, in 2004, an Asbury exec gave him a chance to branch out on his own by investing in, and running, a Mercedes dealership in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. To buy a 20% stake, a 31-year-old Agresti chipped in his $200,000 life savings, convinced his parents to take out a $300,000 mortgage on their house and borrowed the remaining $500,000 from the exec. He waited out most of a yearlong noncompete agreement with Asbury by learning how to run everything from the wash rack to the financing department at a 'buddy's' Subaru dealership in Maine, driving back and forth from his home in New Jersey every week. Within a few years, he had quadrupled the Baton Rouge car lot's sales, bought out his partner for a highly-leveraged $32 million and caught the eye of higher-ups at Mercedes, who eventually awarded him the right to open a new dealership near Houston in 2013. Around then, Saban, whose father had owned a small service station in West Virginia, was mulling going into the car business himself. The coach—who had already won a national title with LSU, three with Alabama and was on the way to winning three more with the Crimson Tide—had done several events with Mercedes, which built its first major plant outside Germany near Tuscaloosa, not far from Alabama's campus. Execs gave Saban a couple of star dealership operators to talk with about partnering. He called Agresti, who won him over with his focus on customer service and creating the right culture, something that resonated with Saban, who's famously known for emphasizing process over results. 'I interviewed Joe and didn't interview anybody else,' Saban tells Forbes. 'It's like interviewing a good offensive coordinator—you just know it's the right guy.' The duo took over a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Birmingham in 2014, expanded to Nashville with Mercedes-Benz of Music City in 2017, and built a palatial dealership with an in-store bakery on the other side of Birmingham in 2018. They added a Ferrari dealership, Prancing Horse of Nashville, to their stable in 2022, complete with three guest libraries and a cocktail room. Then, in 2023, they made waves with the $730 million agreement to buy two Miami-area Mercedes megastores. Saban, who collected nearly $150 million in (pretax) earnings over his 51 years in football before his 2024 retirement, is a full partner, but Agresti—who splits his year traveling between homes he keeps near all his dealerships—runs the daily operations. He and Saban speak upwards of three times a day about ideas as big as expansion plans or as small as how a specific manager is performing. A third partner in Dream Motor Group, former Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Steve Cannon, has joined them on recent deals. 'Joe operates at a different cadence than most people,' Cannon says. 'He's pure entrepreneurial energy.' Agresti is obsessed with company culture, personally interviewing as many potential new hires as possible and asking them questions like, 'What's one thing you've done in your life that has changed somebody else's life?' If employees spot a Mercedes on the side of the road, he expects them to stop and help, customer or not. He's even more obsessed with the financial details. The former accountant compiles his own monthly statement for every store. 'If you say to me, 'How's March going?' I can look and say Cutler Bay sold 13 cars last night—eight new, five pre-owned. I can tell you who the salespeople were and I can tell you that Evelyn bought one. I know every name, what car we sold, how much money we made, and then I track them on parabolic curves to make sure that we're not overcharging anybody or undercharging anybody.' Besides the dealerships, Agresti has a fledgling bourbon company in Kentucky (Saban and Cannon are partners) and created a medical supplies business, Dream Medical Group, that sold nine figures worth of PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic. Next up: Agresti, decrying big government and the 'nanny state' of the Covid-era, says he's considering running for federal office in Alabama. 'The way it happened was such a turnoff to me as an American,' he says. 'That's when I started to seriously think about politics.' He has close ties to senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who he says asked him to put together a weekly meeting with auto industry leaders to help shape automotive policy, including Moreno's proposed Transportation Freedom Act. President Trump's tariffs might raise car prices, and Mercedes has reportedly considered pulling its entry-level vehicles from the U.S. market in response, but Agresti seems unconcerned, telling Forbes that sales at his dealerships spiked 30% after the tariffs were announced as buyers rushed to pick up cars before any price increases. In the long-run, he expects Trump to offer a credit for cars manufactured in the U.S. and exported elsewhere, softening the blow to automakers. 'I trust him,' Agresti says. 'Is he doing it perfectly? No one will ever know. Let's see how it ends.' In the meantime, Agresti says he, Saban and Cannon are eyeing investments in 'three or four' professional sports teams in Tennessee (he won't say which) and an 'automotive-related' business in South America. Then there's the agreement to expand his dealership empire into a sixth state and 'a whole myriad of different brands' besides Mercedes, Infiniti and Ferrari, which the hyperactive Agresti signed 'two minutes' before his call with Forbes—and continued to negotiate during our interview. 'Sorry pal, this is rude,' he says at one point, going uncharacteristically silent while he answers a text, 'but I don't want to miss this deal.'
