NEWS BULLETIN

Tik Tok Erased

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears following on from the UK and US government instructing their staff to delete.

Drilling For Cash

Saudi oil giant Aramco has announced a record profit of $161.1bn (£134bn) for 2022, helped by soaring energy prices and bigger volumes. It represents a 46.5% rise for the state-owned company, compared with last year. It is the latest energy firm to report record profits, after energy prices spiked following Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

America’s ExxonMobil made $55.7bn, and Britain’s Shell reported a $39.9bn profit. Aramco also declared a dividend of $19.5bn for the October to December quarter of 2022, to be paid in the first quarter of this year. Most of that will go to the Saudi government, which owns nearly 95% of the shares in the company.

The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. TikTok has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Countries imposing bans include the US, Canada, New Zealand and Belgium, while the same applies to anyone working at the European Commission. However, it is still permitted on personal devices.

The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing and the Chinese state have automatic access to all data harvested. Many private companies are now looking at what data can be accessed through their employees’ phones.

Partnership Dilution

The retail giant John Lewis may dilute its 100% employee ownership to raise fresh investment. The change to the partnership model would signal a major departure for the company, which runs the department store chain and Waitrose supermarkets. The firm warned of job cuts and told staff it will not hand out a bonus for only the second time since 1953, after posting an annual loss of £234m as costs soared and sales dipped.

Dame Sharon White, its chairwoman, is in the early stages of exploring a plan to change its mutual structure in an attempt to raise up to £2bn of new investment, according to The Sunday Times. The group would consider selling only a minority stake and its priority would be to maintain majority employee ownership, the newspaper said.