Finance Extra for the UK and Spain

Mind the gap Tesco’s chief executive Ken Murphy earned £10 million (€11.8 million) in 2023, 431 times the wages of a typical Tesco employee, making more in one day than UK staff averaged in a year.  The size of the UK’s biggest grocery chain pay gap was bigger than that of any other FTSE 100 company, Mail on Sunday found.

Best-loved Estrella Galicia’s president Ignacio Rivera has always said he wants the company’s beer to be the best-loved, not necessarily the most-sold.  Nevertheless, the brewer now produces an annual 503 million litres of beer and although it hopes eventually to see revenues of €1 billion, sales already reach €829 million.

Seal of success Engineering firm AES, which makes seals for pumps, including those installed in the Thames Barrier, announced record pre-tax profits of £56 million (€66.4 million) in 2023, compared with £48 million (€56.9 million) the previous year. Founded in 1979 by Chris Rea, AES now employs 2,000 staff in 43 countries.

Testing, testing Ikea has chosen Madrid and Oslo to trial its pre-owned furniture marketplace. “The trial will continue until December to understand customers’ reactions and what it would mean for us from a business perspective,” said Jesper Brodin, chief executive of Ingka Group which operates Ikea stores in Spain.

Going under Thames Water said it needed to raise customers’ bills by more than £260 (€308.43), predicting that the company would otherwise struggle to fund itself.  The Ofwat-approved increase would leave Thames Water in a situation that left its activities neither “financeable nor investible” the company warned.