Here’s what you need to know today

• Woolworths continues to manage industrial action going on at its Distribution Centres. After the supermarket giant said on Sunday it was planning to reopen its Dandenong South DC, union workers picketed the DC on Monday and attempted to block the entrance. (ABC News)
  
  

• Australian retail sales hit a 17-month high, as spending increased 0.6% in October. Over the past 12 months, retails sales have grown 3.4% ahead of the growth of the working age population, up 2.8%. Another sign the consumer continues to hold up okay. (AFR)
  
  

• It was a big day of transactions for Australian businesses: Sydney’s Luna Park was sold by Brookfield for $50 million (AFR), De Grey Mining will be bought by Australia’s largest gold miner Northern Star for $5 billion (AFR) and Telstra buys Boost Mobile for $140 million (AFR).
  
  

• A surprising winner from the Boost Mobile deal? Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who owned 29% of the business and walks away with at least $40 million. (AFR)
  
  

• The Australian government’s war on Big Tech continues. Last week, they announced a ban on users under 16, yesterday it was announced platforms could face fines of up to $50m for anti-competitive behaviour on App Stores or with ad tech (Capital Brief). It doesn’t stop there, with the government expected to announce a digital platforms levy in response to Meta pulling out of the News Media Bargaining code.
  
  

• OpenAI tried to launch its new text-to-video tool Sora by making it available to artists to test. Instead, the artists protested, with more than 630 signing an open letter stating, “We are not your: free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens.” OpenAI quickly removed access to Sora for all artists. (Quartz)

  
  

• Investors fled from Florida-based but ASX-listed fund manager GQG Partners after it was revealed that GQG had invested $10 billion in Indian conglomerate Adani, led by billionaire Gautam Adani, who was recently charged by US authorities over an alleged $US265 million bribery scheme. (AFR)
  
  

• Volkswagen is in a world of hurt. 120,000 workers across six plants in Germany (40% of VW’s German workforce) are walking off the job after VW proposed a plan to cut wages by 10%, close at least 3 factories and cut a large number of jobs. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  

• Its not just VW, all European carmakers are struggling. Demand has shrunk just as competition from Chinese carmakers has ramped up. The combined market value of the Big 5 European carmakers (Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Stellantis and Renault) is down more than 25% this year. (The Economist)
  
  

• The UN’s negotiations on the world’s first treaty to address plastic pollution have failed. Oil-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, opposed any language around limiting the amount of plastic produced and instead advocated for a focus on recycling. Countries that wanted production limits were then prepared to let the talks fail, as Ghana’s negotiator explained, “No treaty is better than a weak one.” (New York Times)

What the…?

Anyone else finding LinkedIn more and more cringe? An analysis of long-form posts (“Here’s what getting divorced taught be about B2B SaaS sales”) found that 54% of these long-form posts were generated with AI. (Wired)

Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

This is an excerpt from our conversation with Julian McCormack, who at the time was an Investment Specialist at Platinum Asset Management (Apple | Spotify)

Question: What company stands out as the best you've ever seen and why?

Wrigley's chewing gum - it was just a phenomenal business.

It never had any barriers ethnically or culturally, no one really cares about chewing gum apart from Singapore, so it could open new markets. When the Berlin Wall fell in '89 and Russia opened up from '91, they were one of the first American businesses in. They had to form armed convoys to deliver the gum and take cash payments.

They had a 20% return on capital profile over 100 years, and never had a dollar of debt. In the war, for example. It began to run into shortages and it just said, sorry, we're not going to sell to anyone in the public. We're going to send all our chewing gum to the troops. Just a brilliant understanding of their own business and the societies they operate in and an incredible return profile.

Then they're constantly innovating around that as well. You know, the stuff that cleans the teeth or the the packaging formats change, but the underlying single thing never changes in price. Just a stick of gum, an incredible business.

Want to hear more from Julian? Check out the full interview here:

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