Brompton profits plunge more than 99% amid bike industry turmoil

The boss of Brompton Bicycle has predicted that 2025 will be another year of turmoil for the bike industry after profits at the British folding bicycle maker dived by more than 99% amid a wave of discounting by rivals.Profits fell from £10.7m to £4,602 in the year to the end of March 2024 – less than the cost of Brompton’s top-of-the-range T Line Explore bike – as riders sought cheaper options during a cost of living squeeze.Sales at the Middlesex-based company – whose cheapest model costs almost £1,000 – fell 5.3% to £122

Wholesale gas price hits highest level in 14 months after Russian supplies stop

The wholesale price of gas has risen to its highest level in more than a year after Russian supplies stopped flowing to rest of Europe via Ukraine.Benchmark prices rose on Thursday to the highest level since October 2023, a day after a longstanding transit contract between Russia and Ukraine expired. Russian gas deliveries across Ukraine ended in the early hours of New Year’s Day.Traders had been expecting the loss of Russian gas, with no alternative in place, and were closely monitoring whether it would lead to quicker withdrawals from storage facilities.The price of gas for February delivery in the Netherlands rose as much as 4

‘Preying on investors’: how software firm MicroStrategy’s big bet on bitcoin went stratospheric

In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of “software as a service” was not racy enough.Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets – “stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types”.Less than five years later, that bitcoin side hustle has gone stratospheric. MicroStrategy’s share price has swollen twentyfold, lifting its market capitalisation to almost $75bn and catapulting the stock into the Nasdaq 100 index of top technology shares

The most important tech stories of 2024, and also my favorite ones

Last week, we looked back at how 2024 made Elon Musk the world’s most powerful man. Today, we’re looking at a few other important themes that will influence the online and offline worlds in 2025.Google: Ruled an illegal monopoly in August, Google could be broken up. The results are anybody’s guess, but what seemed impossible for a company worth $2.5tn is at play

The end comes quickly for India’s fading champions ahead of Test series finale | Geoff Lemon

Australian tours have a habit of making or breaking Test careers. VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid destroyed Australia’s world-record winning streak at Kolkata in 2001, overcoming one of the greatest teams and its champion bowlers Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. By 2012, Australia’s home grounds ended Laxman and Dravid, four Tests across the country returning a pair of half-centuries and bringing two fine careers to a deflating close against the more modest threat of Ben Hilfenhaus and Nathan Lyon.Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag were two more declining champions who creaked through that tour and were managed out of the side by the following year. The only player who fell into the make rather than break category was a young Virat Kohli, who scored his first century in Adelaide of a tally that he has now taken on to 30

A quarter of a century on: what we got right and wrong about sport’s future

From VAR to the rise of women’s sport, the media’s finest were hit and miss in predicting how things would developImagine tumbling back in time to 1 January, 2000. You pick up the 70p Saturday Guardian, with its spectacular photograph of Earth from space and a headline that hails the dawn of the new millennium. Soon you are reading a host of predictions for how the 21st century will play out – across science and sport, lifestyle and life itself – many of which oscillate between the fantastical and the terrifying.By 2010, a newborn will have a robot pet, you learn from Andy Beckett’s brilliant essay Born to be Wired. By 2030 they will be “in brain-to-brain contact, via electronic implants, without needing to speak with family members, lovers and friends”