Business and Financial News

Shoe firm Hotter is on track to post record revenues of £50m this year as it opens more shops in the UK and makes its first foray overseas with an entry into the US market, boss Stewart Houlgrave said today.

Hotter has nine shops after opening four so far this year, and expects to have 25 by the end of 2011.

The Skelmersdale, Lancashire-based business, backed by private equity outfit Gresham, will begin selling shoes in the US via catalogues and the internet from the autumn.

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Despite this, many broadband customers are still not achieving anything like their advertised speeds, the watchdog found, clocking the average “up to 20/24 Mbps” DSL package at just 6.5 Mbps.

Discrepancies between advertised and actual speeds are often caused by broadband being delivered over copper lines originally designed for phone calls, it said.

“Ofcom’s research shows that average speeds have increased which is good news, but there is scope for a further step change in the quality of the UK communications infrastructure,” said Ed Richards, Chief Executive of Ofcom.

The regulator has strengthened its Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds, under which providers agree to give a “more accurate and consistent” estimate of maximum speeds.

The UK was recently found by Strategy Analytics to have better broadband coverage than the US, although it still ranked just 22nd in the world’s top 57 countries.

Posted by Martin Ellis. Full Article…

Finding a job is no easy task in this economic climate.  There is a lot of discussion on creating new jobs, but in many cases the preservation of jobs is forgotten until there is a crisis.  Only then, do local communities and state agencies scramble for strategies to keep the business from closing.  This is a reactionary response instead of proactive one.

A proactive approach is selling the business to the employees.  It allows the owner to give something back to the employees and communities that helped build the business, if you are an owner you will work harder to grow the business and keep the business viable, and sharing ownership allows wealth to be accessed by a greater number of people. 

Iowa’s local, regional, and state agencies should be well versed in the different forms of employee ownership as a proactive strategy to preserve jobs.  Let’s hope that the strategies and discussions of employee ownership are alive and well in Iowa!

 Flickr photo by District Weekly

Auriga is out with a research report, where it reiterates its “hold” rating and $12 price target on shares of Intergrated Silicon Solution Inc. (ISSI).

Auriga has a very positive view for ISSI in the short term and predicts to see a continuation of balanced risk/reward for the longer term. For the near term, analysts suggest that demand for ISSI’s products from automotive, telecom/networking and industrial sectors will continue to be strong.

Analysts added, “To reflect the near-term strengths in ISSI’s main businesses, we raise our F3Q10 revenue and pro-forma (excl. share-based comp) EPS estimates to $70mln/$0.42 (vs. consensus $67mln/$0.41) from $67mln/$0.41, FQ410 to $74mln/$0.47 (vs. consensus

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Misconseption 1. Purchase price should at least cover what I spent on the business
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes (I will use this phrase a lot, so get used to it). As a buyer, you’re buying a business for the income. You don’t care much how much the seller spent on it, but rather how much money it puts in the owner’s pocket. If the owner spent one dollar and the business is generating one million dollar in profit, it will be treated as a million dollar business. If the owner spent one million dollars and the business is netting one dollar, it means that the owner wasted one million dollars, regardless how beautiful it is.     Full Article…