Category: 3. Business

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Avocado is a faddy fruit. Before being smashed onto every piece of toast, it inspired an era of buttery-green bathroom suites that a generation of boomers have since tried to forget. The trend fell out of favour in the 1990s as homeowners decisively returned to white, but colour has been creeping back and sinks are proving a popular fixture for a whole range of shades. 

“It’s wonderful to see colour re-emerging,” says Sophie Rowell, director and founder of Côte de Folk, who recently mounted a blue Burlington cloakroom basin onto Robert Kime’s Sunburst Green wallpaper in a London home. “It’s nostalgic, yes, but today’s take feels more intentional and sophisticated, and we’re seeing it used to create personality and warmth without overpowering the space,” she says. This is partly thanks to clever colour pairings. In the powder room of her Varese home, Italian fashion designer Marta Ferri installed a tangerine sink to match the orange handpainted de Gournay wallpaper. Meanwhile at Villa Colucci, a 19th-century palazzo available to rent in Puglia, vibrant contrasts include a custom blue Sbordoni basin set against green and yellow walls.

Basins are never just functional objects

The enthusiasm for colour is being driven by a younger customer base. “We are now experiencing an ever-increasing shift towards much younger clients,” says Sam Powell, founder of The Bold Bathroom Company, which has supplied retro fittings for films including Paddington and Avengers: Age of Ultron. “This is the first time they’ve had the pleasure of seeing anything other than plain white bathrooms, and they love it.” Also meeting this demand is The Water Monopoly, which first introduced pastel tones with its Rockwell range in 2015. “It was a slow start,” says the brand’s director Justin Homewood. “Only brave designers were using the colours at first. But in early 2018 it really took off and we’re now seeing people mixing colours too.” The Water Monopoly’s most popular hue is willow green, followed by powder blue and sherbet yellow – a soft shade used by designer Pernille Lind for a private residence in Copenhagen, and Sara Garza of Punch World Studio for her own timber-clad bathroom in Dallas. 

Poland-based Finch Studio packs a punch with The Water Monopoly’s purple sink, deployed as an unexpected visual anchor. “In my work, basins are never just functional objects – I treat them like sculptures, capable of setting the tone for the entire room,” says founder Magdalena Kwoczka. “Clients are intrigued by the idea of making one striking element the focal point, and a sink is a perfect candidate: it has a small surface area, yet completely transforms the mood – richer colours feel dramatic and immersive, while pastels can bring a whimsical touch.”

Colour is not limited to ceramic. Concrete creates a thoroughly modern look, with manufacturers such as Kast and US maker Concretti Designs producing basins in all shapes and shades. For something glossier, lava stone clads entire counters and sinks for a sleek, streamlined finish. “Customers particularly like it for its technical performance – it won’t fade, delaminate or be affected by chemicals,” says Geoff Leach, a representative of Pyrolave, which produces enamelled Volvic lava stone extracted from quarries in the Auvergne, France. From the thousands of Pyrolave colours to choose from, Studio Duggan picked a golden yellow for a curved custom basin at a London house, while designer Dorothée Meilichzon opted for rich reds and olive for the basins at the Cowley Manor Experimental hotel in the Cotswolds. “When I started to work on hotels in 2012, most were covered in white marble, which I found super-boring,” she says. “Lava is the best way to introduce colour while using a high-quality material.” 

The rainbow of tones on offer means bathrooms no longer need resemble globs of guacamole to be fun. “Enough time has passed that we can embrace colour again,” concludes Rowell. “And not as a fleeting trend, but as a design statement that feels both fresh and enduring.” 

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Tesla is no longer the world’s foremost electric vehicle maker — a decline in last-year’s sales, disclosed on Friday, has left it second fiddle to China’s BYD. But cars aren’t the only territory Elon Musk’s company is attempting to stake out. For big batteries, Tesla may be able to put up a stronger fight.

Chinese battery makers have one major advantage: their products get cheaper every year. That’s helped them lap competitors in supplying power sources for electric vehicles: the country produces 75 per cent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. Then there are the huge rechargeable batteries used by electricity grids. Chinese giants such as CATL have also made inroads there, but their position is not unassailable.

Energy storage systems are becoming a critical part of renewable power rollouts as solar and wind adoption grows. They store electricity when there is excess power on sunny or windy days, and grids increasingly depend on such batteries to stabilise frequency.

These systems used to be a niche business for global battery makers, which derived their fattest margins from making vehicles. But utilities and data centres have been deploying energy storage as core infrastructure. CATL, BYD and Eve Energy have been the biggest beneficiaries of this shift, as have system integrators such as Sungrow and Huawei.

CATL now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the global market. In Europe, Chinese groups grew their share particularly fast in 2024, up two-thirds year over year, according to Wood Mackenzie data. Sungrow is leading the expansion, more than doubling its market share to 21 per cent.

Yet the US, the biggest customer base after China by installed capacity, has been an exception. Tesla dominates there with a 39 per cent share, despite Chinese rivals having a significant pricing advantage.

The reason for this American exceptionalism is that for grids, hardware is not the full package. Tesla sells a product that bundles kit, software, grid integration and long-term service into a single offering. Grid operators can’t take chances: they are providers of critical infrastructure and have lifespans of around 20 years. That makes warranties and accountability more important than incremental differences in battery cell costs.

Europe’s current openness to Chinese batteries may prove temporary for the same reasons. As storage projects grow in scale and batteries become more embedded, prices may become less important than integration capabilities and the provider’s record. Chinese makers will no doubt focus on warranties and integration too, but political risk works against them.

For now, Chinese makers still have a significant chance to gain more ground. They are improving technology rapidly and benefit from scale. But where electric car buyers seem increasingly willing to go Chinese, unhappily for Tesla, the giant battery market may follow a different path.

june.yoon@ft.com

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The gold price is set to extend its historic rally to hit fresh highs in 2026, although analysts expect the metal’s advance to slow after a year of stunning gains, according to a Financial Times survey.

The price of bullion, which soared 64 per cent in 2025, will rise by nearly 7 per cent to reach $4,610 per troy ounce by the end of this year, according to the average forecast of 11 analysts.

Many of the factors behind bullion’s blistering rally in 2025 are expected to remain intact this year, said analysts, including buying by emerging market central banks and investor demand for haven assets.

The most bullish prediction was for $5,400 per troy ounce — implying a gain of 25 per cent — from Nicky Shiels of refinery MKS Pamp, who said other analysts’ estimates had been “persistently too timid” in recent years.

“We are only in the early innings of the debasement cycle,” she said, a reference to how some investors are shifting assets into gold as a hedge against the US dollar, which weakened sharply last year.

Gold hit a record high of just under $4,550 per troy ounce in intraday trading on Dec 26, propelled in part by the US blockade of Venezuela. It has since fallen back slightly, amid a volatile end to year for precious metal prices.

With many analysts’ attributing gold’s rise to investor flows, Lina Thomas of Goldman Sachs said there was “significant upside” to her forecast of $4,900 for the end of the year “in a scenario where there’s additional investor diversification”.

She added that investors’ allocations to gold remained low and estimated that for every 0.01 percentage point by which US investors increase their portfolios’ allocation to bullion, the price would rise by around 1.4 per cent.

Investors and analysts largely failed to foresee the ferocity of last year’s rally, on average predicting a price of $2,795 by the end of 2025, compared with the $4,314 at which it closed the year. The survey reveals a large divergence between the most bearish and most bullish calls, with $1,900 separating the highest and lowest forecasts.

The gold price is becoming “harder to predict”, said Peter Taylor, head of commodity strategy at Macquarie Group, because it has been driven largely by investor sentiment and has become disconnected from supply and demand fundamentals.

Taylor, whose forecast of $4,200 for the fourth quarter of 2026 — implying a small fall over the course of the year — is among the most bearish, added he expects “we will see more macro news stability.”

Other bullish analysts point to central bank buying as a key booster for prices. Natasha Kaneva of JPMorgan expects central bank purchases of around 755 tonnes during 2026. Although slightly lower than previous years, that could still push prices towards $6,000 by 2028, she said.

At the same time, a number of analysts are taking the view that gold could fall this year.

The most bearish forecast comes from Rhona O’Connell at StoneX, who said prices could drop to $3,500 in a market that is becoming “overcrowded”.

“The majority of the tailwinds for the price have already been taken on board,” said O’Connell. “My feeling is that, barring a black swan event, there probably is not another wave of this investment to come.”

She highlighted the upcoming court decision on Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, who is contesting efforts by President Donald Trump to fire her, as a potential driver of the price in the near term. A ruling in favour of Cook, which would be viewed as supportive of the central bank’s independence, could weigh on gold, she said.

Natixis’s Bernard Dahdah pointed to bearish factors such as declining jewellery demand and the eventual end of the Fed’s rate cutting cycle, which is expected next year. He forecasts gold prices will average $4,200 during the fourth quarter of this year.

“At current price levels, we are already seeing signs of demand destruction within the jewellery sector, and central bank demand has also slowed down,” he said. “We think 2026 will be a year of price consolidation.”

Two Scandinavian offshore wind power firms have asked a US court for a preliminary injunction against US President Donald Trump’s order to pause their projects in the United States.

The Trump administration announced late last month a pause on the leases for five offshore wind projects under construction in the United States, citing national security risks.

One of the companies, Danish energy giant Orsted, has been building offshore wind facilities off the US East Coast through a joint venture firm, Revolution Wind.

Revolution Wind argues the lease suspension order violates applicable law and that a continuation of the order would substantially harm the project.

Orsted says the project is about 87 percent complete and ready to supply power to more than 350,000 households this year.

The Trump administration argues the movement of massive turbine blades causes radar interference, but Revolution Wind says it secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following extensive reviews.

Another firm, Norwegian energy giant Equinor, has been implementing the Empire Wind Project through its US subsidiary. It is seeking a preliminary injunction to allow construction to continue while the litigation proceeds.

Trump’s strict regulation of offshore wind projects is a reversal of the previous administration’s energy and climate change policies.

A Maple Ridge, B.C., charity is warning others after it says it was the victim of a common gift card scam.

Recovery Kidz Society is a non-profit that provides gifts to children whose parents are in addiction treatment centres over the holidays.

Alexis Root, founder of the society, told Global News that they were contacted by an excavating company in Vancouver and asked if the society could help a family in need over the holiday season.

She said they agreed to help and bought a $500 gift card at a Shoppers Drug Mart in Pitt Meadows.

“They were located on the floor, they were not behind the till, and I didn’t think anything of it, I just grabbed it, paid for it with a couple of other things and I just gave them, I attached the little receipt on the back and gave it to them.”

Root said that later, the family called her and told her the gift card had nothing on it.

After trying to get answers over the phone, Root said she went back to that Shoppers Drug Mart, but there was no manager available.

“The person working there, she said to me, ‘Oh yeah, we know about that, it’s a huge scam,’” Root said she was told.

She added that she also found out how the scam happened. She said that someone took the gift card home, unwrapped it, then replaced it with a fake card, keeping the real one with the same barcode and numbers, and then they check the gift card numbers to see if they have been activated and loaded.

“Once it was loaded, before I even gave it to this family, it was deposited into an online casino and then immediately withdrawn,” Root said.

She posted about the incident on social media and received more than one million views.

“It’s been a big crazy ride, tons and tons of comments,” Root said.

“We ended up getting the $500 gift card back. That is only because of the following that we have and tagging them over and over again and the video views.”

Loblaws told Global News that their teams in-store are trained to recognize tampering and other fraudulent situations involving gift cards.

Recovery Kidz Society provided gifts to 1,200 this year, which is run by volunteers.

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Root said the replacement card, provided by Shoppers Drug Mart and given to the same family, also turned out to be empty. Loblaws could not be reached for further comment on Friday.

The family ended up getting money raised through a GoFundMe, Root explained.

And the Recovery Kidz Society is not alone in this experience.

Oxygen Yoga and Fitness CEO Jen Hamilton says she bought $2,400 worth of gift cards from a Shoppers Drug Mart in Vancouver and discovered within days that most of the cards had already been drained.

“We had over 500 people at our Christmas party, so I don’t even know who got what card, and that’s why I put something publicly,” she told Global News.

“One, just for people, if they’re going to go and use gift cards, that they’re prepared, that it might be at a zero value.”

Hamilton said she contacted the store, then corporate head offices, but is still waiting for answers.

“The customer service element was it was handled very poorly,” she added.

Experts say this kind of scam is becoming increasingly common, and in some cases, scammers pull gift cards from racks, record the PIN, and then put them back, as Root said she discovered.

“That PIN means that they know how to access the funds on that card, but only once it gets activated,” Claudiu Popa, a financial technology security expert, said.

“They apply tape over the top or simply put back what looks like legitimate cover, and all they have to do is wait for people to buy those cards.”

Root said she is going to do everything she can to make federal changes so there is a bill to protect consumers from fraud.

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