☕ Good Morning! 

Yesterday, Choola — a Nepalese street nosh shop run by a husband-wife duo from Scotland — was crowned UK's street food of the year. Time to roll out that food list of yours and update it.

Today’s reading time: 6 minutes.

M&A

Microsoft's new job: Win friends and influence regulators

ICYMI: Back in April, the FTC, EU, and UK regulators blocked Microsoft’s £54B proposal to take over Activision Blizzard as they worried the merger would hurt competition. Since then, the co has managed to schmooze international regulators. The FTC and EU have green-lit the deal, but the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) isn’t on board.

What's happening now: Microsoft's trying to soften up CMA’s concern for nixing the deal by restructuring it + roping in Ubisoft and handing streaming rights (think: cloud gaming) to their games for 15 years.

• Stiff odds: The CMA said yesterday it would now open a new inquiry based on the proposal involving the French gaming giant Ubisoft and is set to make a formal decision before October.

• High stakes: If the deal fails (or if other regulators veto it) — Microsoft will owe Activision £2.3B in break-up fees.

Why it matters: By some estimates, Microsoft already controls 60%+ of global cloud-gaming services, and its Xbox Game Pass has 25M+ subscribers. For reference: Sony's PSNow cloud-gaming service had just 3M subs before it was replaced last year.

WORLD

Tour de headlines

🌊 Fish-y: Later today, Japan's about to start dumping Fukushima's nuclear wastewater into the Pacific, kicking off a 30-40 year process that's got the neighboring countries feeling radioactive. Neighboring countries are fishy about the impact since the wastewater still contains tritium. South Korea and China already banned Japanese seafood imports.

💻 Unmute: Companies haven’t shut the laptop on Zoom yet… the video-conference icon beat quarterly expectations and lifted its annual guidance, but its growth is much slower than in the pandemic boom times.

🚢 Stuck: There’s a traffic jam in the Panama Canal. 200+ ships are stalled on both sides of the critical trade route, backed up for more than 20 days as a major drought delays crossings.

BIZ

Wilko says it's on the brink of going stale...

What happened: Wilko's leaking profits... Following Woolworths’ fate, the 93-year-old high-street retail chain has gone into administration in a bid to seal its survival as sales slump.

Majority of its 400+ stores are expected to shut down in the next few weeks after a purchase of the co fell through and the 12K+ person company warned it may have to finally say ✌️.

• Seeing red... Last year, the biz lost nearly £36M before the owners borrowed £40M to stay afloat.

• The budget retail chain rose to fame in the 2010s. But like the food-storage icon Tupperware — it has also struggled to catch on with changes in market trends and younger generations.

Bottom line: Genericized products have generic competition… The co has too many big stores in pricey high-street locations. Low-margin generic products + high rent + fierce competition (from: B&M, Home Bargains, and Poundland) = tough math.

#ForYou: Now that Wilko is going bust... their sale has begun across the country. Thousands of items (think: home, kitchen and Christmas goods) are available at cheaper prices than before. If you’re on the hunt for a serious bargain, head down to your nearest store ASAP.

SPACE

India has landed on the moon...

...and has done so with less money than Warner Bros. spent making Gravity.

What happened: India's Chandrayaan-3 lander successfully touched down on the surface of the Moon yesterday, taking the crown for the first country to ever reach the southern region of the moon (in one piece) and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.

• This year has already seen two failed missions, one by private Japanese company ispace and the other by Russia’s space agency: Roscosmos.

• The country now has a huge leg-up in the global rush to harvest lunar resources + establish lunar bases.

Why it matters: Its rover will rove in hopes of locating frozen water that is easily accessible — a necessity for more advanced and long-term missions to space.

The big picture: The Moon is becoming an increasingly popular place among space agencies and companies catering to them.

• Both the US and China are planning human missions to that region of the Moon in the coming years.

• The US is trying to establish a set of ground rules for the use of lunar resources, but China and Russia, which plan to build a moon base together, are holding out their signatures.

PULSE OF THE DAY

1/ Nation-wide small biz sales tank by 20%: Struggling economy is making it hard for small cos to invest and grow, which is not a great news because they're responsible for 60%+ of UK jobs. Small biz mayhem + how it could hurt growth →

2/ Google’s in purge mode and most people missed the memo: The tech giant will delete inactive accounts starting in December. Haven’t signed into that Gmail account you set up a decade ago? Might be time to check your emails. Here’s how to keep your account →

3/ ChatGPT just got more helpful for UK and EU users. Open AI, the co behind ChatGPT is finally rolling out its new custom instructions feature in the UK and EU, letting users add any custom requests to every conversation + type a little less. Here's how it works →

4/ UK's first womb transplant: A UK woman received the country's first womb transplant from her sister yesterday, allowing her to get pregnant through IVF after being born without a uterus. It's interesting how this process can help more women have babies →

DIGIT OF THE DAY

Last year, UK CEOs made 118x more than the workers

The gap between the haves and have-nots is getting wider... The median pay for CEOs of FTSE 100 companies spiked 16% (to ~£4M) last year. That's 118 times more than the median UK worker's salary.

• This fat-cat payday happened while average Brits suffered real wage cuts from high inflation.

• With inequality under a spotlight, these mega-CEO paydays could spur a backlash from gov't and workers. But judging by the widening gap, fat-cat salaries show no signs of slimming down.

EXTRA CROWN

Pairwise matrix of what to do in an emergency

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