14. LIFE BELOW WATER

Further reading – Financial Times

Written by Amanda

“Deliveroo driver fired for mocking woman over thrush cream,” says the BBC headline. Except he wasn’t fired, because he was an independent contractor not an employee.

You’ll probably remember a year ago when the UK Court of Appeal ruled that Deliveroo riders are self employed, which has meant (unlike Uber) it can continue dodging stuff like minimum wage and holiday pay. The Deliveroo spox was careful to make the distinction, saying of its thrush-cream courier: “This behaviour is completely unacceptable and we will no longer work with this rider.”

A downside of relying on freelancers in this way is that when they misbehave, the most a company can do is delist them. Deliveroo can’t even confiscate their bag and jacket, rogue cop style, since there’s a very high probability they were bought privately.

Worker’s rights might get another airing when Deliveroo delivers first-half results on August 10, though there are bigger immediate worries, namely weakening consumer confidence, rising inflation and a year-on-year comparison that had a lockdown boost. Jefferies forecasts the Q2 gross transaction value to slow sequentially to just 7.9 per cent (Deliveroo guidance aims for 15-25 per cent) and for the half-year Ebitda loss to more than double to £63.5m.

But bear in mind Deliveroo shares are down 77 per cent since IPO. Its market cap of £1.6bn compares with 2021 year-end cash of £1.3bn. We’re not too far from where it would make most sense to shut the thing down and return cash. After all, the redundancy costs should be manageable.

Elsewhere on Wednesday . . .

— Goldman Sachs sees losses from consumer push exceeding $1.2bn this year (Bloomberg $)

— Bad things will happen when the AI sentience debate goes mainstream (TheNextWeb)

— How the crypto crash has impacted each Premier League club (The Athletic $)

— Why bitcoin’s anonymity could soon collapse like a house of cards (Discover)

— Legitimate corruption controls the Swedish economy (Aftonbladet via Google Translate)

RNS watch: B&M sticks with guidance in spite of soft UK non-food; Lookers is ahead; and Moonpig is in line

— Bacteria species found in glacial ice could pose disease risk as glaciers melt from global warming (Phys.org)

— Unusually, something interesting happened at an Aim oil stock AGM (Twitter thread)

Source: ft.com

About the author

Amanda

Hi there, I am Amanda and I work as an editor at impactinvesting.ai;  if you are interested in my services, please reach me at amanda.impactinvesting.ai