Wow Air, Majestic Wine, McDonald’s AI, gender pay gap reporting: your commercial news round-up

In a week where nobody really knows what’s going on, calm your bemused Brexit brain by taking a look at our summary of some relevant commercial news stories from this week.

• Icelandic airline Wow Air has ceased operations and cancelled all flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded across the world. The budget carrier had been in funding talks with investors but now advises passengers to book travel with other airlines. Founded in 2011, Wow Air last year carried 3.5 million passengers to several locations in Europe and the US.
• Majestic Wine – the UK’s largest specialist wine store – announced this week that the Majestic name will disappear as the retailer plans to focus on its Naked Wines brand and cut a number of its 200 stores. Although expectations for shares and profits were on track this year, shares fell 12% on Monday after the news was released. Majestic bought the Naked brand in 2015.
• McDonald’s is set to buy an artificial intelligence start-up that will allow customers at drive-throughs to experience personalised service based on their previous orders, the weather, and current popular items on the menu. Israeli start-up Dynamic Yield’s technology will use number-plate recognition to remember customers’ usual food orders and will automatically change the menu depending on the weather, time of day and traffic. The technology will first be rolled out at drive-throughs in the US.
• In its latest investment in the podcast industry, Swedish streaming giant Spotify has acquired its third podcast company of the year. Parcast is a podcast studio based in LA which specialises in true crime series, an extremely popular podcast genre. “The addition of Parcast to our growing roster of podcast content will advance our goal of becoming the world’s leading audio platform,” said Dawn Ostroff, chief content officer at Spotify. The firm earlier this year bought podcasting giants Gimlet and Anchor as it aims to focus on the podcasting side of audio entertainment.
• It’s one week until the deadline when companies with 250 or more employees must report their gender pay gap data, and so far nearly two-thirds of companies have not yet disclosed their data. Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender pay equality, said: "Most employers are leaving it until the last minute to report and it is disappointing that a significant proportion of those who have reported have got larger pay gaps.” The results of the UK’s gender pay gap data are sure to feature in next week’s round-up, so keep an eye out for that.

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