Pickle

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Chicken chain Popeyes has secured a loan of £43m to open 45 more UK stores - including a push into airports starting with Birmingham.

They've already opened 80 at a rate of roughly once per fortnight. Which is a damning indictment of our collective willpower.

You'd suppose that owners TDR Capital will put the capital to good use, having already run the playbook with Pizza Express.

AUTO
BYD moves to crown itself king with budget (fancy) EV

Build Your Dreams (BYD) has launched one of the most affordable electric vehicles available in the UK. It’s called Dolphin Surf. And yes, it was probably built by slaves. But that troublesome fact aside…

What’s going on? 

The Surf is basically a premium EV model priced like a low-end one.

It’s got the usual pitiful range (137-miles) and costs of £18,650.

Which isn’t impressive, on the face of it: the Dacia Spring is £14,995 and covers 140 miles. 

But the Dacia doesn’t have fancy things like a rotating touch screen, intelligent cruise control, or automatic emergency breaking.

The Surf does, which makes it a viable Tesla challenger.

The game is afoot

This is the automaker’s equivalent of challenging one’s mortal enemy to a fight to the death. 

BYD’s dominance of the UK market is growing - accounting for 30% of all Chinese EVs sold across Europe in March. 

Behold sad, sad Tesla, with its declining sales, plummeting shares, and its CEO, who has well and truly finally cracked. 

BYD wants to finish Tesla once and for all. 

They’re waging a price war

Which started in China, where some BYD EV models are getting sold for as little as $9,555, prompting Tesla to slash their prices further.

But they’ve backed Western EV-makers into a corner because: 

BYD uses cheaper, lower-quality batteries

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, to be precise. 

These are cheaper to make but have less range than the nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC) batteries most western carmakers use. 

Plus:

They’re driving down costs

China is witnessing an EV boom. 

Cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors are 40% cheaper in China, while lidar sensors are 20% cheaper. 

All because EV companies bulk-buy sensors and software. By buying more of them - to integrate all this cool smart tech in its low-end range - BYD can lower overall costs via economies of scale.

It’s a tad unfair

Western EV manufacturers get penalised for the carbon-intensive production processes required to build EVs.

While Chinese EV makers get subsidies instead, the lucky fellows. Hence why the EU taxes Chinese EVs.

The UK doesn’t, though.

Which means Build Your Dreams is about to have their wicked way with us.

BUSINESS
David Lloyd gets out of a pickle

Health club chain David Lloyd recorded its first profit in over a decade - all because of pickleball. 

They made £32.2 million in 2024, which is dandy. 

Because they made a loss of £25.7 million the previous year. 

In fact, before the private equity firm TDR Capital took it over in 2023, the fitness chain had racked up £600 million in losses. 

Enter padel and pickleball

Two increasingly popular pastimes. 

Only 7,000 people played pickleball in 2023. Today, that number is roughly 15,000.

And it’s only getting bigger. 

David Lloyd dominates the supply chain

Because the fitness chain owns the most padel and pickleball courts in the UK. 

Out of a total 800 padel courts, they own 130 padel courts. 

Which might be why David Lloyd saw a 3.9% increase in membership last year. 

So they’re planning to expand

That means more paddle and pickleball courts across all their UK sites. 

No wonder. These two sports are here to stay.

Sales of padel boards are up 190% year on year, according to the commercial director of Decathlon. 

David Lloyd is about to make some private equity bros very, very happy indeed.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BT axes in the name of AI

BT are in slashing season, with plans to axe more than 40,000 jobs by 2030 and save an extra £3 billion in overall costs by leveraging AI. 

They want to remain competitive

The telecoms market in the UK is more competitive than ever before after the merger of Vodafone and Three this month. 

That’s why the new BT chief sold off its divisions in Italy and Ireland - to focus entirely on dominating the British scene.

In fact, she’s willing to eschew the entire international division to keep up.

With BT even considering a TalkTalk takeover, is VodafoneThree about to get a BT-ing?

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🧑‍🎓 🤖 Thousands of UK students have been caught cheating with AI, the naughty runts. There were almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating in 2024 - one 5 in every 1,000 students, up from 1.6 in every 1,000 the year before. The good news? Traditional plagiarism is declining. Whoopee…

• 🏦 🤑 London-listed Metro Bank got approached with a takeover bid from private equity firm Pollen Street Capital. If the deal goes through, it’ll be yet another blow to the London Stock Exchange. R.I.P., and all that.

• 🚹️ 🚺️ Sexism in the City is back, folks. City businesses are no longer excluding men when hiring for top roles. This is a big U-turn from the corporate world, considering it wasn’t long ago that senior white male recruits had to be personally approved by Aviva’s CEO aptly-named Amanda Blanc (a caucasian if ever I saw one). One recruiter said: “In the current, jumpy environment, all-female shortlists will be seen as too risky.”

• ⚱️ 🐟️ A company wants to turn your dead relatives’ ashes into seabeds. Lovely stuff. The British startup Resting Reef builds memorial reefs from the ashes of dead people mixed with concrete and oyster shells, placing them on the seafloor to mimic natural reefs. The pilot scheme in Bali attracted 84 fish species and a fish diversity 14 times greater than nearby areas. 

• 🧑‍🌾 🥵 British farmers lost £1.19 billion in arable farming income due to extremely wet weather, according to Defra. This comes after last year’s harvest, the third-worst since records began. Things will only get worse, considering the hot, dry weather we’re having.

• 🔏 😅 Meta’s chatbot is releasing Boomer user questions to the public. These include someone asking for a character reference for a court hearing. Another wanted to know whether he should leave his wife for another woman. It appears most of the queries were made by boomers who didn’t know the chatbot was used to publicly share cool prompts.