According to our IT guys, over the last 3 months 24% of you that visited our website used the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The other main browsers used were Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Personally I use the Firefox browser and am very happy with it (well, to be honest as happy with [...]

Sometimes it’s the simple ideas in business that work. 21 years ago in April 1990, the retailer Poundland was set up. On the face of it their approach was pretty simple – all the items in their shops would retail at £1 (hence the name “Poundland”). They now have over 250 stores and sell 3,000 [...]

It’s Valentine’s Day next Monday and love appears to be in the air as far as stock exchanges are concerned. Last year, the Australian and Singaporean stock exchanges announced plans to merge. Earlier today the London Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange announced that they had formally agreed to merge and Deutsche Borse and NYSE [...]

I used to have a Nokia phone. It had a good battery and made great calls. Then smartphones came along and I progressed onto an Apple iPhone. It looked super slick and did a lot of things. Alas, problems with the battery and a slow processor meant that I fell out of love with it [...]

Paul Bowtell, the CFO of Europe’s largest travel company TUI Travel will soon be able to go on a very long holiday. TUI recently announced that Mr Bowtell will leave the company at the end of the year. Why is this I hear you ask? Put bluntly, the reason is that he messed things up [...]

Reckitt Benckiser, the Anglo – Dutch consumer products group, has agreed to buy the maker of Durex condoms for £2.5bn. Last week the board of SSL recommended that the shareholders accept the offer from Reckitt which was at an effective 33% premium on the share price. In addition to Durex condoms SSL also make Scholl [...]

In last week’s P3 ExPand video I talked about the recent announcement of the British Airways (BA) merger with the Spanish airline Iberia. Some form of merger had been discussed on and off since they held talks in the summer of 2008 but now it’s looking like there could be some movement on this. Students of [...]

British Airways is a big airline and so is Iberia; the flag carrier airline of Spain.  Both have experienced considerable difficulties in recent years with the global recession greatly reducing revenues and causing operating losses. For nearly two years, the two airlines were in discussions about merger, in order to share routes and operating fixed [...]

Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) are an important part of the ACCA P4 syllabus and are also featured in CIMA F3. Those of you that have read our free ExPress notes (http://www.theexpgroup.com/expand/17-p4_advanced_financial_management.html) will be aware that to minimize the risk of failure in the M&A process, acquiring companies should follow a systematic series of steps prior [...]

Everybody is calling it a merger, but do mergers really exist? And from what date does the combination happen? Key aspect 1: Determining if IFRS 3 applies and identifying the acquirer. IFRS 3 applies only to combinations as a result of which an entity (identified as “the acquirer”) obtains “control” of “the acquiree”. Is that [...]