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Copper Thieves Are Wreaking Havoc Across America

Rising prices are spurring criminals to cut and raid cables. Companies and law enforcement are fighting back.

Copper thefts have nearly doubled in recent months, with 9,770 incidents reported from January to June this year, disrupting critical services.

AT&T incurred $76 million in costs in the first 10 months of this year because of copper thefts, driven by high prices for the metal.

Law-enforcement agencies and telecom companies are fighting thefts with tracking devices, rewards and calls for stricter penalties.

LOS ANGELES—Rahdeese Alcutt, an AT&T investigator, once managed line repairs for the telecommunications company in this sprawling city. Now, he is the copper police.

Thieves have wreaked havoc in the area, prying open manholes, chipping away at asphalt and climbing trees and poles to cut and steal—and then resell—copper wires that transmit electrical signals for phone and internet lines.

Alcutt patrols the streets and relies on sensors and geotrackers to get alerts when the lines are being tampered with or removed. Information about some thefts is reported to an AT&T security hotline. He has even received tips from local gang members who are tired of their internet going out.

“We’ve become a little bit of a detective agency,” said Andrea Moore, a director of access construction and engineering at AT&T.

Los Angeles is a hot spot in a nationwide wave of copper thefts as prices for the metal sit near record highs, leaving telecommunications companies under siege. The cut lines have disrupted 911 emergency calls and internet and landline services, shut down at least one school and left whole city blocks in the dark.

Federal regulators call it a growing epidemic, and stopping the thieves has become a game of cat and mouse for law enforcement.

From January to June of this year, 9,770 incidents of intentional theft or sabotage on communications networks were reported, according to the Internet & Television Association, a trade group known as NCTA. That is nearly double the number reported in the prior six-month period. The attacks disrupted service for more than eight million customers.

“These are deliberate acts of destruction that cut off communities, put lives at risk and cost millions of dollars to repair,” said Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty. “This is an issue that jeopardizes the reliability, resilience and public safety of our communications infrastructure.”

AT&T says the thefts have cost the company $76 million in just the first 10 months of this year, as it needs to repair and replace lines. The company has been lobbying federal, state and local governments to make it easier to replace its copper networks with more modern technologies, in part because of the cost of upkeep.

Demand for copper, a conducting metal used in electrical wiring, has risen in recent years alongside the boom for wind turbines, electric vehicles and data centers for artificial intelligence. Copper prices hit a record high of $11,146 a ton on the London Metal Exchange last month.

Local scrapyards buy copper and resell it to larger metal recyclers, which process and refine it so it can be recycled into new products.

The copper pirates have pried heavy metal plates from sidewalks to access underground lines. They use hard hats and vests to disguise themselves. They watch crews repair the lines they had cut only hours or days earlier, waiting to strike again.

“It really hurts to see what the city’s become,” Alcutt said of Los Angeles.

Outside a closed church in the area, a cut cable recently hung on a pole, with fiber-optic wires dangling on a tree. Piles of casings, stripped of their copper, had been crammed outside a basement window.

Members of the Four Tray Gangster Crips gang nearby got tired of their internet going out—and of the added police presence the copper thieves had invited—and notified AT&T security when they saw suspected copper thefts in action, Alcutt said.

Across the country, thieves have struck home air-conditioning units, public streetlights and private businesses. In Missouri, copper wires were stolen from a wind-turbine site. In Louisville, Ky., law enforcement arrested seven people in an alleged copper-theft scheme based on a tip from a scrapyard.

More and more copper thefts look like the work of organized groups of thieves, said Amir Ehsaei, a special agent in charge of the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Los Angeles field office. The FBI has been working with local law enforcement to identify and arrest the perpetrators.

Alcutt recently encountered a woman who was part of a suspected thieving group processing stolen copper in an encampment. She used an aerosol can and lighter to shoot fire at him, then grabbed a machete, he said. The woman was arrested and faces charges including assault with a deadly weapon, according to Los Angeles County court records.

Verizon Communications and some other telecom companies are installing location-tracking devices in copper wiring so they can follow the trail of stolen material.

They also put up perimeter fencing to make it harder for people to climb the poles, said Verizon deputy general counsel Rudy Reyes.

Some companies have posted rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions in high-theft areas. In Los Angeles, one thief nicknamed “Bubbles” defected from a copper-stealing group and turned in his associates to AT&T. Bubbles walked away with $10,000.

Telecom companies and regulators are calling for tougher penalties and stricter enforcement. Vandalizing private communications infrastructure isn’t a felony in every state.

The Charter Communications network is made of fiber-optic cables, created from fiberglass and plastic, which deliver faster internet speeds, require less maintenance and don’t have resale value. But sometimes copper thieves cut them by mistake, causing outages. Broadband provider Optimum labels some of its cables in high-theft areas “Fiber Only” to deter thieves. AT&T is upgrading its network to fiber in many places.

In June, cuts to Charter fiber-optic lines in Van Nuys, Calif., disrupted connectivity to more than 50,000 residential and 500 business customers including a military base, emergency 911 services and hospitals for as long as 30 hours. The culprits didn’t score any copper. No one was arrested, according to a Charter spokeswoman.

“We call that domestic terrorism because we really believe it is,” said Tom Monaghan, executive vice president of field operations at Charter.

This year, 14 states enacted new laws to crack down on copper theft. Some, like California and Texas, target scrapyards in an attempt to weed out bad actors and require them to collect data on copper sellers.

Company investigators and local law enforcement drive by recycling yards piled with junk metal, looking for signs of stolen copper. Sometimes it is obvious: large tubular casings left behind on a nearby sidewalk. Other signs are subtle: ground covered with powdery insulation from the lines.

After a theft, companies post information to an online database detailing what was stolen, how much and from where. Scrap dealers can then raise an alarm if they are offered copper that matches the description of stolen material.

Between 10 and 15 thefts are reported to the database every day, said Todd Foreman, senior director of law-enforcement outreach at the Recycled Materials Association, the trade group behind the database. In July, law enforcement in Indiana recovered $18,000 of telecom wire because a scrap dealer used the database, he said.

Alcutt said he doesn’t feel a lot of progress, despite the rise in arrests. “A lot of these guys,” he said, are “just going back out and doing the same thing.”

The athleisure brand’s estranged founder, Chip Wilson, is telling anyone who will listen how the current leadership is messing up

Under Chip Wilson, Lululemon LULU 1.23%increase; green up pointing triangle Athletica rose to fame on leggings so functional and flattering that women wore them not just to the gym but to brunch, the supermarket and practically everywhere else.

Now, trendsetters are wearing Alo Yoga matching workout sets or Vuori joggers. And Wilson, the estranged founder of the 27-year-old brand, isn’t happy about it.

He has been publicly trolling the board and Chief Executive Calvin McDonald, likening their mistakes to a plane crash. He has blamed the “loss of cool” on the kind of CEO who can “speak Wall Street” but is killing innovation. While Wilson hasn’t held an official role at Lululemon in over a decade, he lives near the company’s headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia—and stays in touch with employees.

On some counts, Wilson isn’t wrong: Lululemon’s U.S. sales are declining as the athleisure “it” label loses its sheen. The stock price has fallen more than 50% this year, wiping out over $25 billion in market value—including roughly $2 billion of Wilson’s holdings. Some shoppers say the brand is having an identity crisis.

McDonald, who has been CEO since 2018, is running a very different company than the small retailer that Wilson started. Annual profit has grown sevenfold since Wilson was last on the board in 2015, and there are now more than twice as many stores. McDonald is focused on maintaining that growth across the more than 780 stores, upping the quotient of new styles and bringing products to market faster.

In some ways, the unfiltered, 70-year-old Wilson is the polar opposite of McDonald, a 54-year-old, buttoned-up former beauty executive.

Wilson has been railing against Lululemon’s leadership on LinkedIn for much of the past year and took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal last month to complain. He’s an extreme case of a phenomenon that has an official name: post-founder syndrome. The founders of Nike and Starbucks publicly criticized their creations’ perceived stumbles, enough so that new executives were hired.

In the ad bashing Lululemon, Wilson wrote that “finance focused CEOs don’t know how to attract or motivate creative talent, and even worse, they think they understand great product when they don’t.” What Lululemon is missing, he suggested, is someone like himself: “A company bereft of a visionary loses its singular voice for product and long-term strategy.”

Wilson remains the company’s largest individual shareholder with a roughly 8% stake, now worth about $1.8 billion.

He has crossed swords over Lululemon’s ill-fated acquisition of at-home fitness startup Mirror, which it purchased for $500 million in 2020, and stopped selling three years later. He has taken issue with partnerships Lululemon formed to sell products emblazoned with Mickey Mouse or the Kansas City Chiefs logo. (McDonald sits on Disney’s board and said the collaboration was a one-time event, while the sports league partnerships help reach new customers.)

Wilson also voiced his displeasure at Lululemon’s expansion into new non-workout categories, posting about his “sadness for lululemon’s slow march to becoming The Gap with cheap acrylic sweaters.”

McDonald didn’t know the Oct. 7 ad in the Journal was coming.

In an interview, he said he agrees with some of Wilson’s points. “Parts of our product [offering] have become predictable, and we need to focus on innovation and creativity at an accelerated rate,” McDonald said.

But he said he had already started to address issues, such as softening U.S. sales, by adding new products and slashing production cycles, before Wilson went public with his criticisms. He wants Lululemon to stay focused on activities like running, yoga, tennis and golf but sees opportunities to expand selectively into lifestyle and casual items.

“He hasn’t been involved with the business in any real capacity for over 10 years,” McDonald said. McDonald and Wilson have met in person and speak by phone, much the way McDonald communicates with other large shareholders, according to a Lululemon spokesman.

McDonald “is misguided if he believes I have not been involved in the company in the last 10 years,” Wilson wrote on LinkedIn last year. His spokeswoman, Andrea Mestrovic, says he stays attuned to what’s happening at the company.

Wilson and McDonald also disagree on who the Lululemon muse should be. Wilson wants the company to go back to its roots and design for the Super Girl, a young, educated, working woman. McDonald wants his team to focus on the Mindful Athlete: goal-oriented, active people who mix and match athletic and lifestyle apparel.

Wilson declined to be interviewed. Mestrovic wouldn’t say whether he planned to launch a proxy fight to unseat directors.

“He hopes for a reformed board that is infused with people who are entrepreneurial, creative, have technical apparel experience, lead with innovation, and have a founder mentality,” said Mestrovic.

After creating the $100 leggings that earned a cultlike following, Wilson stepped aside as CEO in 2005 when he sold 48% of the company to private-equity firm Advent International. Lululemon went public two years later.

Wilson remained chairman and held other roles including chief product designer. His meddling created friction with Christine Day, who became CEO in 2008. Wilson was given guidelines by the board that included, “Don’t give people advice unless they ask for it,” and, “Work through the CEO, not around the CEO,” the Journal reported at the time.

In 2013, he suggested in a TV interview that sheerness and pilling problems with Lululemon pants were the fault of its customers. “Quite frankly some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it,” he said. Later that year, he apologized and stepped down as chairman.

He left the board entirely in 2015 and said he thought the company was on the right track.

In the ensuing years, however, Wilson watched the company make what he considered misguided decisions. Last year, he wrote that he chose to leave the board because he didn’t feel that he could speak up against directors and the CEO.

Wilson “is telling the story not just of Lululemon, but of many companies who lose their visionary founder,” said Mickey Drexler, who as CEO steered Gap and J.Crew through many successful years but left after sales slumped. He has experience with the tensions between prioritizing creative talent and pleasing Wall Street, and is now chairman of the Alex Mill clothing brand his son founded.

“Bigger is not always better and becoming preoccupied with quarterly profits and the stock price over creativity speaks to problems at most big corporations in America,” Drexler said.

Wilson’s comments have resulted in an outpouring of support from some current and former employees. But the fight is also creating two camps with different loyalties.

Josh Nash, who worked in roles including as a Lululemon brand ambassador, store employee and most recently a project manager in marketing technology before leaving in 2023, said Lululemon needs to refocus on quality and technical expertise and stop expanding into new categories like sweaters.

“They’ve lost the plot,” he said.

But Dan Stevens, who led Lululemon’s store development for nearly a decade until he left in 2018, posted on LinkedIn that Wilson should cut the current team “a little slack.” In an interview, he said: “It’s easy to romanticize the golden days.”

Since leaving Lululemon, Wilson manages the family’s holding company, which has a large stake in Amer Sports, owner of outdoor clothing maker Arc’teryx and other brands.

Wilson has raised more than $500 million over the past 18 months by borrowing against his Lululemon stock, according to regulatory filings.

Much of Lululemon’s growth has happened on McDonald’s watch, and the brand still dominates the athleisure market it helped create. Since McDonald left Sephora to become Lululemon’s CEO in 2018, annual sales have more than tripled to $10.6 billion.

Part of that growth came from opening new stores, including in international markets. Lululemon also grew its men’s business and expanded further into new categories, such as tennis and golf.

Recently, sales have stalled in the Americas, its biggest market, accounting for two-thirds of net revenue. Comparable-store sales haven’t grown in the region since the quarter that ended in January 2024. In September, Lululemon cut its 2025 sales outlook.

As new competitors such as Alo and Vuori started siphoning Lululemon’s customers, it played catch up. It was late to trends such as color-coordinated bras and leggings and looser-fitting workout clothes. McDonald acknowledged that certain collections such as its Scuba and Softstreme lines had grown stale.

Shoppers noticed.

When you walk around Vancouver today, every girl is wearing Alo,” said Arezo Zarrabian, a 41-year-old Vancouver resident who once counted herself as a loyal Lululemon customer. In the past few years, she started buying her leggings at Alo.

Lululemon items like the crossbody bags and men’s ABC (anti-ball-crushing) pants—named so because of a stretchy gusset panel in the crotch—have become wildly popular outside the gym.

But some shoppers are puzzled over garments more appropriate for the office.

“I don’t want to buy skirts and sweaters from Lululemon,” said Zarrabian, who works as a crime analyst.

At one point this month, more than 1,200 items were discounted on Lululemon’s app, according to Jefferies analyst Randal Konik. Three to four years ago, 90% of its products sold at full price, he said.

Quality issues have also cropped up. Lululemon’s Breezethrough leggings were so poorly received by customers, who said the fabric was too thin and the V-shaped seam lines were asymmetrical and unflattering, that it stopped selling them weeks after their July 2024 introduction.

Lululemon says that markdowns are similar to those in 2023 and 2024 and that only 1 out of 200 items are returned for quality issues.

Last year, McDonald reorganized his leadership team as part of a push to cut the two-year product-development cycle roughly in half. He has also vowed to boost new styles to 35% of the assortment by the spring, up from 23% currently.

That’s when the real test will come—when the first products designed by new creative director Jonathan Cheung hit shelves.

“We know why we’re here and what we’re focused on,” McDonald said. “People inside the company see the areas of opportunity.”

The stock is cheap after years of negative returns, providing a buying opportunity.

Utility provider Dominion Energy is about to benefit from several long-term initiatives in the states it serves. The stock is cheap after years of negative returns, providing a buying opportunity.

The electricity provider, which operates in the Carolinas and Virginia, is poised to benefit from two major investment projects. It’s building more plants to power data centers—essential for artificial intelligence—and management says its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, or CVOW, is now 66% finished. It will provide clean energy to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Yet the stock’s performance shows no trace of this promise. It’s down 23% in the past five years, underperforming the 41% gain for the Utilities Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund. The most recent challenge: The Trump administration has threatened to end as many offshore wind projects as it can.

The reality, which favors Dominion bulls, is that CVOW looks positioned to prevail. Trump hasn’t articulated a reason to terminate construction, which makes ending the project difficult. A U.S. judge ruled in September that Orsted A/S, a Danish renewable energy company, could resume its offshore wind project in Rhode Island and Connecticut after the Trump administration’s stop order. The judge said the administration didn’t have sufficient rationale for the order.

In October, a federal judge ruled that Norwegian energy company Equinor could continue its Empire Wind project, just south of Long Island. Now the administration is even endorsing it.

Today, “you do have a much better fact pattern,” says Jefferies analyst Paul Zimbardo. “We assume the [CVOW] project gets completed successfully.”

Dominion is charging ahead with construction. Management expects completion by the end of 2026. Also to Dominion’s benefit, offshore wind is usually energy independent and beneficial to national security. It doesn’t require imports of batteries and fossil fuels. It also will upgrade the power grid for the Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach.

“We do think it will get built,” says Evercore ISI analyst Nick Amicucci, who emphasizes the national security benefit.

If Dominion builds it, they will come. Revenue and earnings from customers will arrive. The “rate base,” or the company’s assets on which it is allowed to earn a regulated rate of return—mostly comprised of plants—will increase. States allow utilities to earn a stated return on the equity of their assets. As rate bases increase, so do earnings.

Right now, Dominion expects to invest an additional $1.5 billion into CVOW, with about $8.2 billion—split between itself and 50% equity partner Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners—already invested. That should add a mild boost to Dominion’s total $65 billion rate base this year to $71 billion next year, according to FactSet, with the Virginia rate base driving the increase.

Given that Dominion earns just under 10% on the equity of these assets, earnings should rise 6.5% year over year to $3.15 billion in 2026. That lines up with management’s long-term forecast of 6% annual earnings growth at the midpoint of the range.

The best part is that earnings estimates won’t take a large hit in the unlikely event that the administration successfully scraps CVOW. Dominion’s equity in the entire project should hit roughly $2.9 billion, Zimbardo says. Assuming the same return on that equity, its annual CVOW earnings are about $283 million. The amount of the initiative that’s complete will turn into earnings, but even if the remaining 33% never materializes, Dominion will miss out on about $94 million of earnings, only about 3% of total profit.

With the shares already reflecting the risk to the project, “I would argue limited downside,” Zimbardo says.

The data-center opportunity could spark additional profit growth. That’s why analysts’ forecast of 6% annual earnings-per-share growth through 2030, according to FactSet, should rise. Dominion has begun building plants for data centers, as Virginia has the most in the U.S., according to datacentermaps.com. Aggregate EPS for the Utilities SPDR ETF are expected to grow at just over 9% annually—and Dominion’s states are far more data-center-heavy than other states.

The boost to estimates could start after the fourth-quarter earnings call, which should be in early February. Chief Financial Officer Steven Ridge said on the third-quarter call that management plans to articulate a capital investment plan through 2030 on the February call. He expects “incremental opportunities,” much of which the company would deploy closer to 2030. While he didn’t call out the data-center opportunity explicitly, the statement implies management is eyeing it.

“Once they hit milestones on CVOW, then I think they start to get more confident in themselves to either put a plus sign at the end of their EPS CAGR [compound annual growth rate] or actually increase the CAGR,” Amicucci says.

A higher growth forecast would do wonders for the stock, which currently trades at about 17 times expected EPS for the coming 12 months, below the Utilities SPDR ETF’s just under 19 times. Our calculations of FactSet data and Amicucci’s estimates show that higher earnings growth for utilities equates to an over 20 times price/earnings multiple, so there’s loads of upside for Dominion’s stock.

That could push the stock up to over $70—or higher—by next year, from a recent $61. If the stock trades at 20 times analysts’ expected 2027 EPS of $3.85, it would hit $77 by the end of 2026.

The risks: Trump’s anti-clean-energy campaign, which we think won’t have success, or CVOW cost overruns. The latter could create a setback for earnings and the stock, but not a long-term impediment to growth, as long as clean energy and data centers remain sources of high electricity demand.

Prepare for electric returns.

Google is suddenly at the center of the artificial-intelligence trade. It started with the celebrated release of the company’s new Gemini 3 AI model, which was trained on Google’s own AI chips. The rally picked up steam on a report from The Information that Meta Platforms was in talks with Google to buy those chips, known as Tensor Processing Units, to fill an artificial-intelligence data center—the domain of Nvidia’s red-hot graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Alphabet’s shares are up 12% since the debut of Gemini 3 on Nov. 18 while Nvidia’s are down 3.4%. Google-parent Alphabet is now worth $3.86 trillion, making it the third largest company in the world. It’s hot on the heels of No 1 Nvidia ($4.38 trillion) and No. 2 Apple ($4.1 trillion). Google’s success has also brushed off on Broadcom, which helps design the TPUs. Its stock is up 16% since the latest Gemini launch.

As Google was ramping its own AI efforts in the 2010s, it had the same problem that other Nvidia customers have since run into: Traditional servers weren’t up to the task, and Nvidia’s hardware was expensive, and hard to get in the large quantities Google needed. At the scale Google operates, it needed an in-house solution.

Google’s TPU made its debut in 2015. Before anyone outside the company even knew about the new hardware, it was starting to power the back end of many Google products like Maps, Photos, and Translate.

Fast forward to 2025, and Google is on its seventh generation of TPUs. The company continues to use them internally for its own products. More recently, Google has been able to find a few outside customers who otherwise would probably have been doing the same AI work on Nvidia hardware. Apple trained its Apple Intelligence models on TPUs, and AI start-up Anthropic, which has a $350 billion valuation, has a TPU deal as part of its multicloud strategy.

Gemini 3 has impressed users, and refocused attention on TPU as an alternative to Nvidia for running AI workloads. Just as Google discovered in the 2010s, Nvidia GPUs remain expensive and in short supply compared with ravenous demand, and no one wants to be reliant on one vendor for AI’s most important infrastructure.

Since 2021, Nvidia’s data-center revenue has risen by 2,400%. Nvidia hardware became the standard for AI research in 2012. When the current AI boom began in late 2022, all those years of hard work placed Nvidia right in the middle of the action.

Nvidia’s chips are still called graphics processing units though their use has gone well beyond driving personal computer monitors. GPUs are very good at splitting tasks into many pieces and running them side-by-side, which is how gamers can play at 120 frames per second. This is also what makes them so useful for AI calculation, as well as other high-performance domains.

TPUs, on the other hand, do one thing—matrix math for deep learning—but they do it very well. Under the right circumstances they can provide a much better cost structure than Nvidia GPUs. Deep learning has been the main thrust of AI research for over a decade now, leading us to the large language models that are powering new AI applications like chatbots and coding assistants. GPUs can do a lot more, but for many current AI loads, TPU is like a bullet train. It only goes from one place to another, but if that’s all you want to do, it’s very fast.

There is no question that customers would prefer to not be so dependent on Nvidia, but, for now, they are. That’s how Nvidia achieved an astounding gross profit margin of 73% in the third quarter, nearly a 300% markup. Customers are paying up for Nvidia products because alternatives like TPUs still don’t meet their full needs.

But nothing lasts forever. Intel long dominated the data-center chip market. In a three-way race with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, Intel earned 65% of data-center chip revenue in the first quarter of 2021. By 2024, Nvidia had over 80% of the market, and Intel’s share had dwindled to single digits.

The other major cloud players have AI chips of their own, and there is a rush into this space from other parties. The strategy employed by Anthropic may be a glimpse into the future. It has large contracts with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google that employ Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and Amazon.com’s custom hardware called Trainium. Anthropic is spreading out its vendors and chip use, lowering its counterparty risk.

At some point, Nvidia’s market share and gross margin will come under attack. Google’s Gemini success is causing some investors to wonder if that time is now. But I’m betting it’s still a ways off, because Nvidia’s market share is protected by the company’s software, not its hardware.

Starting in 2004, Nvidia began building software known as CUDA. The idea was that GPUs could be powerful for tasks beyond graphics, but they were difficult to program. CUDA allowed developers to use common programming languages like C, which then got compiled into something a GPU can understand.

Today, just about all AI researchers know how to use CUDA; far fewer understand Google’s software, which is much less mature.

We will know when, and if, the competition becomes material to Nvidia when the company’s prized gross margins begin to slide, indicating that Nvidia is lowering prices to protect sales.

But for now, CUDA is a high wall that will take some time for competitors to breach.

Carrier hits medium-term pre-tax profit target of £250mn two years ahead of schedule

Booking your Four Seasons resort with easyJet? Packing a wardrobe worthy of fancy lodgings could well make the low-cost carrier’s checked-in luggage charges seem reasonable. Luxury options were recently added to easyJet’s package holidays business, which like others, is booming.

EasyJet Holidays this week said it had hit its medium-term pre-tax profit target of £250mn two years ahead of schedule and claimed a 10 per cent share of the UK market, albeit still well behind leaders Tui and Jet2, with 40 per cent between them.

Investors though have been experiencing something more like this year’s viral Jet2 meme, where that company’s jazzy tagline plays over a scene of holiday snafus. Shares in easyJet, Jet2, and smaller online rival On The Beach, after optimism earlier in the year, have all fallen. Profit warnings in September from Jet2 and OTB pointed to weak winter seasons with holidaymakers worried about the state of the British economy, while a trend towards late bookings makes year-on-year comparisons look poor.

Yet the underlying trends are in their favour. All three are targeting a holiday market hotspot. Some 61 per cent of British holidaymakers have booked a package trip overseas in the last year, says Abta, the UK travel industry body, compared with 51 per cent in 2019. 

This new interest in bundled tours has arisen out of the chaos of pandemic-era travel. Holidaymakers are also wary of the risk that the best-laid plans may be upended by geopolitics, strikes or extreme weather. Having a single point of contact is a comfort and protection against the hassles of booking transfers, rerouting or cancelling flights, sorting refunds or even arranging repatriations.

EasyJet only launched its holidays offering in late 2019 — just months after the collapse of package tour originator Thomas Cook and several low-cost airlines. It arguably benefited from the pandemic disruption that hit very quickly afterwards, which gave managers time to build relationships and encouraged struggling hoteliers to be more receptive to new players.

The attraction for its top brass is fairly straightforward: the airline’s extensive flight network, carrying roughly 100mn passengers a year, offers more destinations and travel flexibility than any tour operator rival can muster. Pitching to its existing customers works in effect like a form of upselling, alongside speedy boarding and those much-despised luggage charges.

EasyJet boss Kenton Jarvis this week struck a bullish note, as did Jet2’s Steve Heapy when he updated investors earlier this month. Poolside cocktails all round? Investors aren’t yet convinced, but evidence of a steadier economy could soon have them digging out their resort wear.

‘We need to step up our game’: H&M caught in the middle of a fast-fashion battle

The Swedish retailer is being squeezed from above by the likes of Zara and below by rivals such as Shein and Temu

H&M’s chief executive has urged European politicians to create a level playing field for fashion retailers in areas such as tax, chemical regulations, purchasing practices and workers’ rights to combat unfair competition from Chinese rivals such as Shein and Temu.

Daniel Ervér told the Financial Times that the Swedish fast-fashion retailer was on “a very long journey” towards increased profitability after ceding its crown as the world’s largest fashion chain to Zara’s Spanish owner in “an industry that is changing at a furious pace”.

He added: “I don’t think we have seen a level playing field. If you don’t pay taxes, if you don’t comply with chemical regulations, don’t adhere to purchasing practices, protect the social rights of workers, that’s not a responsible way of conducting business. There’s a responsibility for lawmakers to ensure there is a fair playing field, [otherwise] it will weaken our competitive strength as European companies.”

H&M has been increasingly squeezed from above by the likes of rivals Zara, and from below by cheaper rivals including Shein, Temu and Primark.

Zara has been pushing upmarket with tactics such as displaying limited-edition collections at high-profile events such as Paris Fashion Week and revamping stores designed by leading architects. H&M has followed its lead to some degree in a bid to set itself apart from cut-price online rivals such as Shein and Temu, which benefited from sales surges during the pandemic.

Ervér’s plan to turn around family-controlled H&M has focused on boosting profitability and putting the customer at the heart of its focus — both on display at the refitting of a central Stockholm store around the corner from its head office.

The store is airy for an H&M location, with more space between displays and fewer clothes on show, while items from its upmarket Studio and Atelier ranges as well as beauty products greet customers at the entrance. Shoppers can scan a code in the fitting room to ask an employee to bring them a different size or order anything out of stock for home delivery.

“Previously it was high-density but we wanted to break that. With the right product, we sell more with less. It becomes a more effective way of running the business,” said Johanna Klingspor, H&M’s head of creative development.

The revamp is already bearing some fruit as Ervér also targets cost control. Operating margins fell from more than 20 per cent in 2010 to just 3 per cent in 2022. They reached 8.6 per cent in the third quarter this year, up from 5.9 per cent a year earlier.

“What I recognised when stepping in is that this company has so much untapped potential . . . given how the competitive landscape has changed, we need to step up our game. We need to stop doing what doesn’t make a difference for the customer and really shift resources and money to what makes the difference,” said Ervér, who took over running H&M in February 2024.

Shareholders have given his plans a cautious welcome. Shares are up about 16 per cent this year, but were higher just before he took over as well as before the pandemic.

One top-10 shareholder said: “H&M were caught in between — not in Zara’s price point, and definitely not in Shein’s. They let the margins slide for too long.”

A fashion analyst added: “Ervér’s elevation strategy is taking the company in the right direction as it helps to reduce the H&M brand’s exposure to value fashion — the most competitive segment of the market and the most exposed to competition from not only the likes of Shein, but also second-hand platforms.”

But questions remain. H&M has historically sourced more of its clothes from Asia leaving it less nimble than Zara, which has more production closer to its biggest markets in Europe and the US. H&M’s need to discount some stock has led to volatility in both sales and gross margins.

“We need to continue to become quicker. Nearshoring is one piece of the puzzle, but there are many others,” Ervér said. His aim is to have some items on sale between six and 10 weeks after the initial idea.

The 44-year-old pointed to H&M presenting its latest collection at London Fashion Week for the first time in two decades. “That puts a lot of pressure on us to step up because you have the whole world, journalists, influencers, looking at you and assessing you.”

H&M is controlled by the family of Stefan Persson, son of the company’s founder, who owns shares carrying 83 per cent of voting rights. He has gradually increased his ownership in recent years and many observers in Stockholm expect him eventually to take the company private.

Ervér said he did not think it was “so provocative” to put customers ahead of investors. H&M had been “fortunate to have one large shareholder” and that satisfying all investors meant “being focused on the customer,” he added.

The retailer is also making a push into second-hand through its Sellpy platform. Some of its stores, such as the one in central Stockholm, have curated second-hand sections that attract younger shoppers. Ervér said: “We see it becoming an important part of the way that you express yourself and the way you shop second-hand becomes a complement to the existing business.”

Ervér disagrees with critics who say sustainability is incompatible with fast fashion: “To do fully sustainable collections for the richest people is not so difficult. The big challenge is to do it at scale.”

He is happy that H&M has broken the link between growth and emissions, going up in sales and down in greenhouse gases although he concedes “we are far from done”.

The Swedish group has a partnership with start-up Syre, a sister company to bankrupt battery maker Northvolt, to recycle polyester that recently expanded to include products from sporting goods group Nike.

Ervér said that few customers “want to pay more” for green products but that entrepreneurship, creativity and policy should drive the change because it “won’t happen organically”.

On competition, the H&M chief executive argued that the big disruption came a decade ago when digitalisation changed how people shop, as well lowering the barriers to entry in fashion. That opened up the market for a “completely new set of competitors” without physical stores.

“We need to make sure we leverage the strengths of having 500 in-house designers, the strength of curating the experience, and really facilitating the shopping experience,” Ervér added.

With take-up of battery electric vehicles slowing in the US and Europe, catalytic converters will remain in demand

Shiny metals are all the rage this year, with gold and silver on a tear. So it might be tempting to see platinum’s revival — the metal is up almost 80 per cent since January — as the result of spillover demand from investors seeking a hedge against currency debasement. But while platinum has in the past been viewed as a store of value, it is now best understood as a hedge against the slowing energy transition. 

That’s because the automotive sector currently accounts for almost 40 per cent of platinum consumption. The metal is used in catalytic converters, which turn noxious exhaust fumes into less noxious substances. That huge source of demand was pencilled to decline to roughly zero over time, as fumeless electric vehicles took over from traditional internal combustion engines. Now, forecasters are busily revising their estimates up.

For one thing, the take-up of battery electric vehicles — those that have no traditional ICE engine or catalytic converter at all — has hit potholes in the US and Europe. Policy flip-flops are partly to blame. The expiry of federal consumer incentives in the US cut October BEV sales by almost a quarter year on year, according to preliminary figures. RBC analysts have reduced their estimates for US BEV penetration in 2030 from 35 per cent to 17 per cent.

Secondly, hybrid cars are selling more than expected, and may well sell for longer than expected. The category, which includes both plug-in hybrids and cars which charge batteries internally, sports both electric drivetrains and combustion engines with catalytic converters. In China, hybrids will account for almost 40 per cent of total “new energy” car sales this year, according to Citigroup analysis. Demand beyond the main coastal cities is particularly strong given longer driving distances.

In Europe, too, hybrids are doing a roaring trade, accounting for some 45 per cent of new car registrations between January and September and knocking both fully electric vehicles and petrol cars into a cocked hat. Chinese carmakers such as BYD are winning over consumers with cheap and longer-range vehicles. While upcoming legislation in Europe still strongly favours battery electric vehicles, there is clearly a lot of demand for cars that are both ‘greener’ and don’t require consumers to modify their habits in any way.

The upshot is that the platinum market may well find its current deficit — of over 10 per cent of consumption last year — continuing. Better still, rising prices are unlikely to result in lots of new supply coming on stream. Platinum miners such as Valterra, Impala and Sibanye-Stillwater may be riding high, with prices for the platinum metals group — which also includes palladium and rhodium — about 10 per cent above the marginal cost of production according to RBC. But, while lengthened, the demand runway is still too short for mining’s long-term investments. Platinum’s value is set to motor ahead.