TheChek News Flow

More than 1,000 flights and 16,000 homes affected by ‘significant’ outage at electrical substation

London’s Heathrow airport has been forced to close until midnight after a nearby fire caused a power outage, disrupting scheduled flights and bringing turmoil to global travel.

The UK’s main airport, one of the world’s busiest international flight hubs, said it would shut down operations throughout Friday after a blaze at an electrical substation supplying the airport caused a “significant power outage”.

“To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23h59 on 21 March. Passengers are advised not to travel to the airport and should contact their airline for further information,” Heathrow airport wrote in a post on X.

Nearly 100 flights have been cancelled and about 120 due to arrive at Heathrow were being diverted to nearby airports including London’s Gatwick and Stansted, Birmingham, Paris’s Charles de Gaulle, Helsinki and Shannon in Ireland, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24.

Heathrow handles about 1,300 flight take-offs and landings each day, according to the airport.

Arrivals were “regulated at Zero due to power outage in the airport”, according to an announcement on the operations portal of Eurocontrol, which manages air traffic operations and control across Europe.

Heathrow is the world’s second-busiest international airport behind Dubai, according to travel data group OAG.

The London Fire Brigade said in a statement early on Friday that 10 fire engines and about 70 firefighters had been dispatched to tackle a large fire at an electrical substation in Hayes, near Heathrow, where a transformer caught alight.

The statement did not mention the airport, but it said the fire had “caused a power outage affecting a large number of homes and local businesses”, and crews from Hayes, Heathrow, Hillingdon, Southall and other nearby fire stations were mobilised.

It added that the cause of the fire was not known.

“This is a highly visible and significant incident, and our firefighters are working tirelessly in challenging conditions to bring the fire under control as swiftly as possible,” said assistant commissioner Pat Goulbourne.

“This will be a prolonged incident, with crews remaining on scene throughout the night. As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible.”

A 200-metre cordon has been established around the area and about 150 people have been evacuated, according to the fire service.

Local residents were also advised to keep windows and doors closed “due to the significant amount of smoke”.

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said an unplanned power outage was affecting more than 16,000 homes in west London. The utility said it was aiming to restore power by 3pm on Friday “based on initial investigations”.

Cybersecurity start-up’s fast-moving CEO agrees higher sale price after turning down Alphabet’s $23bn offer last summer

Assaf Rappaport sought to reassure employees at his cyber security start-up Wiz last summer after walking away from a potential $23bn acquisition by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

“We are going to go so big, we are going to make so much money in the future that you won’t regret it.” That was the message from the company’s chief executive during staff town halls at its offices in New York and Tel Aviv, according to a person familiar with his remarks.

This week, Wiz reached a landmark deal to be acquired at a much higher price of $32bn. For insiders who know Rappaport, the record transaction is befitting for an entrepreneur whose good instincts have guided the company’s skyrocketing growth just five years since its founding.

“Assaf always is right and even when he is wrong and it makes no sense for him to be right about something, he is right,” said an executive who has worked with him. “He declined an insane offer and was able to get an offer bigger by 30 per cent eight months later.”

Wiz has emerged as a leader in the field of providing cyber security for the cloud, benefiting from companies moving their operations online while the proliferation of artificial intelligence has further driven demand for its offerings.

The company generates about $700mn of annualised recurring revenue — a common metric used by software start-ups. It was on track for that figure to surpass $1bn this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Wiz declined to comment.

The acquisition, announced on Tuesday, is Alphabet’s largest ever deal, but will pose a key antitrust test for the new Trump administration.

While the deal marks a significant victory for Wiz’s backers, industry insiders said that the deal represented a hefty price that still faces regulatory hurdles.

“Everyone in the industry is watching what they do with this one,” said Okta chief executive Todd McKinnon. “If it goes through, Google is going to have to justify $32bn for this company . . . It’s probably not justified on the financial metrics alone.”

The company’s venture capital backers, which have been starved of significant exits in recent years, hope that the transaction will pass muster with regulators that have killed other recent large takeovers such as Adobe’s $20bn proposed deal for design software group Figma.

Alphabet will pay Wiz a fee of more than $3.2bn if the deal gets blocked but some investors in the company are wary of prematurely celebrating a deal which must still clear a number of hurdles, including getting approval from a largely untested new regime at the US Federal Trade Commission.

Wiz’s leaders made the decision to reject Alphabet’s offer in a late night discussion at the office last summer. Rappaport decided the best way for the company to become the global leader was as a standalone enterprise.

“It’s not the type of offer anybody takes lightly,” one person familiar with the deliberations said.

But Alphabet kept up its relationship with the company and revived its approach within the past fortnight. The companies were in serious deal talks even as hundreds of Wiz staffers celebrated in Tel Aviv earlier this month at the start-up’s party marking the Jewish holiday Purim.

The second approach by Alphabet, both significantly higher and in a changed US regulatory environment, helped reassure Wiz that it would be able to become a global leader inside Google and continue to work with other cloud platforms.

“If you pick a home for Wiz, there is nothing better than Google to be that home,” said Gili Raanan, Wiz’s board chair and a key early investor through his Cyberstarts fund. “Wiz decided to go that [Google] route with many, many alternatives. We felt that was the right thing for us. You can’t live life twice.”

Rappaport is known for wearing golden goose sneakers, designer hoodies, and affection for his pet Mika, dubbed the company’s “chief dog officer”, who died last year.

Wiz is one of several Israeli-founded start-ups to emerge from the country’s elite cyber intelligence unit 8200. Other global leaders such as Palo Alto Networks and Check Point were also founded by veterans of 8200. Rappaport, and the company’s three other co-founders Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik all served in the unit where they met as teenagers.

After he completed his service, he spent a couple years working as a consultant at McKinsey, before Rappaport and his friends founded the cloud security company Adallom in 2012.

After selling Adallom to Microsoft for $320mn in 2015, he took roles overseeing the tech giant’s cloud security and Israel research operations. While at Microsoft, Rappaport made headlines in Israel for hiring support staff including cleaners and security guards as direct employees rather than contractors.

When Rappaport founded Wiz in 2020, the initial plan for the company was to focus on network security. The group was then called Beyond Networks, but within just weeks the team changed course.

Early on, he spoke with more than a dozen corporate chief information security officers each day as the company developed.

“He and his co-founders learned about the real problems of customers and understood that operationalising cloud security was a major pain point,” said Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures, Wiz’s largest shareholder with a 12 per cent stake. “What might take other companies months or even years to appreciate, they resolved in weeks.”

Rappaport and his three co-founders each own about 10 per cent of Wiz, while alongside Index other major shareholders including Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital. Wiz employees, including office cleaners, also have shares in the company.

Investors and colleagues say that the company’s rapid growth is a reflection of Rappaport’s quick decision making.

In one example from the company’s early days, Wiz focused on working with the cloud platforms owned by Amazon and Microsoft. However, another major potential customer was a Google cloud customer. Rather than give up on the deal, Wiz moved to build out capability for Google too. It was a prescient move.

“Across every part of the organisation, he’s able to get lots of stuff done quickly,” said Neil Mehta, co-founder and managing partner of Greenoaks, which had a 6 per cent stake in Wiz. “It’s almost Assaf speed, Assaf velocity, Assaf ambition and Assaf execution.”

Former UK IPO star Nanopore admits it is a takeover target

DNA sequencing specialist’s decision to list in London in 2021 was seen as a victory for the market at the time

The boss of the UK biotech seen as a beacon of hope for the London IPO market only four years ago has admitted the business has become a takeover target.

Oxford Nanopore’s chief executive and co-founder Gordon Sanghera told the Financial Times that the gene sequencing company, whose shares have fallen 85 per cent from their 2021 peak, is “exposed” to acquisition.

For three years after the listing, Sanghera’s Nanopore shares allowed him to veto an acquisition, but this has now expired. “Should [the veto right] have been a bit longer?” he said in an interview. “Right now, from where I’m sitting, we feel rather exposed.”

He added that the business was not afraid of being bought by the “right person”. Bankers have said it could be attractive to one of the big diagnostics specialists, such as Thermo Fisher Scientific or Danaher. Neither company responded to a request for comment.

Nanopore was spun out of Oxford university in 2005 with a pioneering technology for sequencing DNA on handheld devices. These are mainly bought by scientists and large public research projects like the UK Biobank, but sales shot up during the pandemic when they were used to track Covid variants spreading around the world.

The company’s decision to list in London in 2021 was seen as a victory for the market: UK tech and biotech companies have generally chosen the Nasdaq. After the IPO, shares traded at more than £7 at their highest but as demand waned with the pandemic, investors started to worry about growth prospects.

Charles Weston, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said the company had grown at a similar pace as it promised at the IPO, but the “market fell out of love” with it.

Its shares now hover around £1 for a market capitalisation of just over £950mn.

Despite the languishing price, the company still has big-name backers. Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison recently increased his stake, and Novo Holdings, the investment company behind drugmaker Novo Nordisk, invested £50mn last summer. 

It is also starting to have some success in the market for pharmaceutical quality assurance, selling its devices to drugmakers testing the complex new treatments that are coming to market.

One large investor said shareholders should be able to defend the company from any unwanted offer, because together, the top 10 own 58 per cent. Another investor said many shareholders had invested before the IPO, at prices far above the current level, so were unlikely to accept a low ball offer.

Sanghera, who has been CEO from the start, said Nanopore had been at a turning point for the past three or four years, but it has been “a bit like turning” a tanker.

In its most recent results, it reported revenue growth of 8 per cent in 2024, or 23 per cent on an underlying and constant currency basis when Covid sales and a large one-off contract from the UAE were excluded. This year, it forecasts 20 to 23 per cent sales growth. 

It is cutting costs by 9 per cent, about half of this from staff, and is aiming to break even in 2027. To achieve this, Sanghera said Nanopore would have to maintain compound annual growth of 30 per cent in the next three years — the same pace it has managed in the past three — and accelerate its sales into other markets.

Sanghera said he had thought that new clinical products, such as a drug resistant tuberculosis test it is developing with the French company BioMérieux, would be a more immediate source of revenue than supplying its sequencing devices to the pharma manufacturing market.

But the opposite has happened, he said, with demand from manufacturing turning on like a “light switch”.

DNA sequencing has become vital for testing new complex treatments such as cell and gene therapies, with regulators stipulating it as part of the quality control process.

Sanghera added that in the clinical test sector, the “ultimate prize is huge” but it was hard to shift the incumbents. Nanopore noted that these companies could also be partners in developing tests.

Miles Dixon, an analyst at Peel Hunt who has a “reduce” rating on the stock, said the company had often touted new potential markets for its technology, only for them to slip down the priority list. “It is an ever changing story with jam always coming tomorrow,” he said.

Nanopore’s rivals have also come under pressure. The biotechs that buy gene sequencing devices have been struggling for funding since a pandemic boom started to fade in 2022 and government-funded research is being cut, most recently, at global behemoth the US National Institutes of Health.

Growth has also slowed in China as the country tightens import controls, while the invasion of Ukraine caused general supply chain problems. 

Both Illumina, the largest DNA sequencing company, and PacBio, which has the closest technology to Nanopore, forecast lower revenue growth than Nanopore this year. 

“Just when you think it can’t get any worse, there’s just this onslaught,” Sanghera said.

Some market veterans have suggested the company would have done better on the Nasdaq. One M&A lawyer said it was part of a class of companies that listed a few years ago that has had an “enormous erosion of value” because of a lack of liquidity and specialist investors in London.  

But on the Nasdaq, shares in Illumina are down 37 per cent in the past year, while PacBio has fallen 68 per cent. 

“I won’t shy away from accepting the sophistication of the Nasdaq investors to understand the complexity of our story differently,” Sanghera said. “It just doesn’t help in this market.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Citadel's flagship hedge fund Wellington has reduced its losses after a rough start to March, as uncertainties around President Donald Trump's economic policies triggered a selloff in U.S. equities, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The fund ended March 14 down under 1% in the year, roughly halving a 2% loss it had posted through March 6, with most of the recovery coming from U.S. equities.

The recovery comes as Citadel's founder Ken Griffin told senior management to "play offense" earlier this month amid the selloff, increasing capital allocation to roughly a quarter of the firm's U.S. portfolio managers.

Bloomberg reported earlier on Griffin's message.

Hedge funds unwound positions at the largest amount in years earlier in March after U.S. major stock indexes plummeted over fears tariff policies will drive the world's largest economy into a recession.

The forced unwinding took a toll on hedge funds, including multi-strategy firms like Citadel. JPMorgan said in a recent note that on average multi-strategy hedge funds were down 3.2% this month through March 10, but they gave up part of the losses later and were down 0.7% in the month through March 13.

Citadel declined to comment.

- Strong momentum in executing strategic priorities drove high-profile sports events and consumer activations, despite management expressing that results fell short of their higher expectations.

- Reiterated “win now” strategy focused on five priority actions: igniting a winning culture, sharpening brand storytelling, accelerating product innovation, elevating the marketplace, and winning on the ground.

- Strategic investments in marquee events (e.g., Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Weekend) are expected to sustain consumer engagement and enhance Nike’s brand differentiation in future quarters.

- Focused investments in new product innovation and supply chain excellence in Asia are planned to bolster a robust pipeline, aiming to mitigate ongoing headwinds in the Classic franchise.

- Repositioning Nike Digital and refining go-to-market processes for Nike Direct, alongside strengthened wholesale partnerships, set the stage for improved revenue performance in upcoming quarters.

- Sustained weekly product drops and dynamic marketing campaigns underscore Nike’s commitment to consistently engaging consumers and driving incremental sales.

- Active grassroots efforts and localized pop-up retail experiences, exemplified by record-setting flagship store performance, are expected to propel near-term sales and community connection.

- Amid global economic uncertainty, management’s renewed emphasis on internal culture building and strategic partner engagement signals a clear path toward longer-term business improvement.

- Inventories remain elevated across all categories, partly driven by some cancellations

-Guides Q4 Rev down low mid teens, Gross margins -400 to -500bps

- 2H plan is on track- Headwinds from "Win Now" program to gross margin will start to ease after Q4

- Strong momentum in executing strategic priorities drove high-profile sports events and consumer activations, despite management expressing that results fell short of their higher expectations.

- Reiterated “win now” strategy focused on five priority actions: igniting a winning culture, sharpening brand storytelling, accelerating product innovation, elevating the marketplace, and winning on the ground.

- Strategic investments in marquee events (e.g., Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Weekend) are expected to sustain consumer engagement and enhance Nike’s brand differentiation in future quarters.

- Focused investments in new product innovation and supply chain excellence in Asia are planned to bolster a robust pipeline, aiming to mitigate ongoing headwinds in the Classic franchise.

- Repositioning Nike Digital and refining go-to-market processes for Nike Direct, alongside strengthened wholesale partnerships, set the stage for improved revenue performance in upcoming quarters.

- Sustained weekly product drops and dynamic marketing campaigns underscore Nike’s commitment to consistently engaging consumers and driving incremental sales.

- Active grassroots efforts and localized pop-up retail experiences, exemplified by record-setting flagship store performance, are expected to propel near-term sales and community connection.

- Amid global economic uncertainty, management’s renewed emphasis on internal culture building and strategic partner engagement signals a clear path toward longer-term business improvement.

- Inventories remain elevated across all categories, partly driven by some cancellations