Business News
Retailers line up to occupy Stratford shopping centre
Interest in retail space at Westfield Stratford City continues to hot up with Primark courting a huge store in the £1.5 billion flagship shopping centre. Discount fashion retailer Primark is interested in a 70,000 sq ft store in Westfield Stratford City, which is set to open in September 2011.
Westfield has already signed up three retailers - anchor tenants John Lewis, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer - and interest continues to gather pace. Other retailers interested in signing up include Adidas, Boots, WH Smith, H&M, Next and Topshop; as well as Forever 21, the US fashion brand that could open its first UK store there.
Westfield said: "There is a strong and growing level of interest in our Westfield Stratford City project as retailers get a sense of the strategic nature of the scheme, the outstanding transport connectivity and the lack of new supply coming on to the market."
The centre will be served by two Underground lines, the Docklands Light Railway, overland trains and a high-speed rail link. It will also be one of the few major retail developments to open before 2014, as developers have been forced to put other schemes on hold during the credit crisis.
Companies move production back to the UK
Some good news for the UK's manufacturing industry this month, with the EEF, the manufacturers' organisation, reporting that 14% of companies have moved production back to the UK because cost savings have not been as great as expected.
A report into the state of the manufacturing sector by the EEF and BDO, the accountants, revealed that one in seven companies surveyed had moved production back to the UK from abroad in the past two years.
The EEF reports that nearly 70% of companies agree that the UK is a competitive location for their manufacturing activities. Two years ago only 43% of companies surveyed were positive about the UK's business environment for manufacturing. Two thirds of the 300 businesses surveyed for the report - which include makers of mechanical equipment, plastics manufacturers, food manufacturers and suppliers to the automotive industry - plan to re-evaluate their supply-chain strategies as a result of the global recession.
The report highlights that higher freight, energy and commodity costs have increased the expense of production overseas. Other concerns for overseas production included the quality of goods not being up to standard and the speed of getting products to market was not being fast enough. Three in five companies have also expressed significant or moderate concerns about the health of their overseas suppliers, with insolvencies among overseas suppliers posing a significant threat of disruption to the supply chain.