Boeing boss Dave Calhoun to step down; EU to investigate Alphabet, Apple and Meta – as it happened

Boeing boss Dave Calhoun will see out 2024 as chief executive, but the judgments on his tenure are already coming in.

Calhoun was shifted from chair to chief executive after the resignation of Dennis Muilenberg, who oversaw the 737 Max crisis. Calhoun had one of the biggest corporate turnaround jobs ever: the reviews so far are mixed.

Michael O’Leary, the combative chief executive of Irish airline Ryanair, has been strongly critical of delays to deliveries under Dave Calhoun. In a video on Ryanair’s website, O’Leary said:

Stan Deal has done a great sales job for Boeing for many years, but he’s not the person to turn around the operation in Seattle, and that’s where most of the problems have been in recent years.

We welcome and look forward to working with Stephanie Pope […] to eliminate Boeing’s delivery delays both for summer 2024 and in the autumn of 2024. So hopefully we’ll have no delivery delays for summer 2025.

Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said Calhoun’s departure was “a long time coming”. He said:

The embattled leader has struggled to rebuild confidence in Boeing’s products following years of design and manufacturing issues. This is an industry that cannot tolerate mistakes. Boeing is in deep need of a change in culture around safety and quality. These changes take time, but can be accelerated by new leadership.

Justin Green, partner at Kreindler & Kreindler, a law firm representing 34 families who lost relatives on Ethiopian Flight 302, said it was positive that Calhoun has stepped down:

The next CEO must know that his or her role will be to prioritize safety, not just profit. While we are pleased to see that serious and immediate personnel changes are being made at Boeing in the wake of recent and troubling safety issues, Boeing must be fully transparent in every change it plans to make with regard to its manufacturing and quality control processes. For too long, Boeing has been avoiding public accountability and these leadership changes open a window for the company to do so.

In other business news:

• Apple, Google’s parent company and Meta are being investigated by the EU for potential breaches of the bloc’s new laws designed to police anti-competitive behaviour by big technology companies.

• The former chief executive of Chelsea, once described as “the most powerful woman in football”, is facing questions about what she knew of secret payments made under the club’s former owner Roman Abramovich, amid an ongoing investigation into alleged breaches of football spending rules.

• Nissan is planning to cut the costs of manufacturing electric vehicles by nearly a third by 2030, as it seeks to compete with Chinese rivals.

• The owner of Legoland, Alton Towers and Madame Tussauds is planning to introduce budget airline-style surge pricing, so families will pay more on peak summer weekends than rainy weekdays, as visitor numbers have fallen since the pandemic.

You can continue to follow our live coverage from around the world:

In our coverage of the Israel-Gaza crisis, the UN security council passes resolution calling for immediate ceasefire, as US abstains

In UK politics, Sunak insists the UK has ‘very strong’ capabilities to resist cyber-attacks after government urged to end China ‘naivety’

In our coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war, Macron tells Russia it would be ‘cynical’ to use Moscow concert hall attack to turn people against Ukraine

In US politics, Donald Trump is in court for hush money hearing as deadline looms to pay $454m fraud trial bond

Thank you for reading today, and please do join us for more live coverage of business, economics and financial markets tomorrow. JJ

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Worrying news in the week before Easter: cocoa prices are soaring.

The price of a ton of cocoa topped $9,000 on futures markets. Bloomberg News points out that that is more than a ton of copper – for the first time since 2003.

Bloomberg reports:

Poor harvests on the back of bad weather and crop disease in West African growers, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown, and little sign of production relief elsewhere have left the industry in a bind.

The price increase is too late to affect this year’s Easter eggs, but it will affect chocolate prices over the course of the year.

But prices are already high. The Guardian’s intrepid money editor, Hillary Osborne, found that Lindt’s gold-wrapped bunny is the priciest Easter treat – with rising cocoa costs an important factor.

Cocoa has become something of a speculative asset: it has outperformed bitcoin in the last 12 months.

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The UAE-backed consortium making a £600mn bid for the Telegraph group has been given extra time to come back to the UK government with solutions to ease concerns about its bid.

Lucy Frazer, culture secretary, had originally given a deadline of Monday morning for RedBird IMI, a partnership backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s vice-president and the US investment firm RedBird Capital Partners, to come back to her with proposals to ease concerns that the Telegraph bid would harm the public interest and restrict press freedom.

If RedBird failed to come back with possible solutions Fraser said she would refer the deal to a detailed so-called phase 2 investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the anti-trust regulator.

On Monday Lucy Frazer said in a letter she would give RedBird a further week until next Tuesday to make representations or she would refer the deal for a competition probe.

The UK government last week published proposed legislation which will block foreign states or state officials from owning newspaper assets in the UK.

The new laws could be on the statute book by next month, effectively scuppering the RedBird IMI bid in its current form and meaning the partnership is now looking at all options including restructuring its existing bid with new capital or a sale of the Telegraph newspapers.

The UK government is also expected to set out this week what stake sovereign wealth funds can hold in newspaper assets as a passive investment.

If RedBird was to sell its interest in the Telegraph then potential bidders could include DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail, and Paul Marshall, the hedge fund founder and backer of GB News. Rupert Murdoch-owned News UK has shown interest in the Spectator magazine.

The planned takeover of the Telegraph, widely seen as the house journal of the Conservative party, has been fiercely opposed by many Tory MPs and peers who have raised concerns about free speech given the UAE, which provides the financial backing for 75 % of RedBird IMI, has been criticised in the past for breaches of media freedom.

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The UK’s energy regulator is considering bringing in a lower price cap for vulnerable people and charging less at less busy times of day, among other possible changes mooted in a newly published paper.

The energy price cap has become a hugely important part of the UK’s energy policy in recent years, after the global energy shock prompted by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The steep increase in prices has meant that almost every household is paying the same rate for their energy, at the maximum allowed by Ofgem, the regulator.

Ofgem on Monday said it would consider a “more dynamic cap” to “encourage consumer flexibility” and reward them for using energy at less busy times. Energy companies are excited about the possibilities for balancing the grid better by shifting the time of some activities – such as putting on the washing machine during the day.

Tim Jarvis, Ofgem’s director general of retail and markets, said:

While the price cap played an important role in protecting consumers from the loyalty penalty that existed before its introduction, the energy market is changing as we move to net zero, and we recognise the systems we have in place may need to change too.

We’re looking in detail at the elements of the price cap that have worked well and the challenges we’ve identified in recent years, while also considering how a wide range of future consumers will use and pay for energy, to make sure we develop the right measures that will protect and benefit consumers across the board.

You can read more here:

Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun also lavished special praise on one of his key lieutenants. Stephanie Pope was recently promoted to chief operating officer, and will now be promoted further to head of the commercial planes division.

Pope is expected to be in the mix to succeed Calhoun. If that does turn out to be the case, she would become the first woman to lead Boeing in its 107-year history.

Calhoun wrote:

Stephanie knows our company inside and out and has a proven track record of superb leadership, including an innate talent for listening and responding to our people. Stephanie is a third-generation Boeing employee.

She is deeply committed to our company, to our employees and to our shared future; and she is the perfect person to take on the leadership of our commercial airplanes business at this moment.

Dave Calhoun’s time at Boeing has been dominated by crisis from the start. As he wrote in a letter to employees on Monday, he switched from chair to chief executive because of “unprecedented circumstances”.

Most of his time in the first few years consisted of dealing with those “circumstances”: two fatal crashes of the company’s bestselling 737 Max model, after a design flaw left the plane vulnerable to a single faulty sensor.

Calhoun did not name the 737 Max in his farewell letter, but he did acknowledge that Boeing is still struggling with the effects of that crisis, which forced the company to ground its key product for 20 months. Calhoun said:

It has been the greatest privilege of my life to serve in both roles and I will only feel the journey has been properly completed when we finish the job that we need to do. We are going to fix what isn’t working, and we are going to get our company back on the track towards recovery and stability.

The 737 Max crisis happened to coincide with the coronavirus pandemic, which wiped out revenues for most of Boeing’s airline customers, forcing it to rely on heavy bond market support from the US Federal Reserve.

More recently, Calhoun has had to contend with yet another safety issue. This time, thankfully, nobody was seriously injured when a door plug blew out in mid-air on an Alaska Airlines flight.

The latest safety scandal has put Boeing on the back foot once more, just as it was hoping to persuade airline customers and passengers that it has improved its culture.

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Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun will step down at the end of 2024 as part of sweeping changes at the troubled US planemaker.

The company is a US manufacturing titan, but its status has suffered after a series of accidents. Calhoun was made chief executive after his predecessor resigned in the wake of two deadly crashes caused by faulty designs.

Board chair Larry Kellner will also not seek re-election, and will be replaced by Steve Mollenkopf.

The head of the commercial planes division, Stan Deal, will also retire, to be replaced by Stephanie Pope, who has long been seen as a serious contender to take on the top job.

After opening the day about flat, European stock markets have taken on a reddish hue at the start of this Easter-shortened week.

The FTSE 100 is down by 0.5%, while France’s Cac 40 is down 0.4%. Only Italy’s FTSE MIB and Germany’s Dax have edged into positive territory.

Margrethe Vestager says the big tech companies may not be meeting their new obligations.

She said:

These are serious cases. Had we been able to solve that with merely a discussion it would have been solved by now.

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Microsoft has managed to avoid scrutiny so far, making it and ByteDance the only “gatekeepers” that do not – so far – face the prospect of an intense year of investigation.

The European Commission has said that the investigation will be concluded within 12 months – a quick turnaround in the usually glacial proceedings of technology policy.

If found to be non-compliant, the big tech companies could face fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover, or 20% if they continue to violate the law.

The commission can also force the companies to sell off parts of their business, or ban acquisitions.

Asked if the Commission was rushing the process, EU industry chief Thierry Breton said the investigations should not be a surprise, according to Reuters. He told a press conference on Monday:

The law is the law. We can’t just sit around and wait.

The big tech “gatekeepers” are not showing any sign of backing down in response to today’s news of a full-scale investigation into their compliance with the EU’s digital markets act.

The companies may well have expected the action. The huge policy teams at the big tech companies will have carefully considered every word of the new law to try to work out where they might be under threat – and where the EU’s European Commission might take action.

A Meta spokesperson said the company was endeavouring to comply with the act’s guidance. Meta was criticised over offering customers the ability to pay upfront to avoid being tracked. A Meta spokesperson said:

Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries, and we designed Subscription for No Ads to address several overlapping regulatory obligations, including the DMA.

Google, which said it has made significant changes to its services, said it “will continue to defend our approach in the coming months”.

Apple said it was “confident” its plan complied with the DMA and that it would work with the Commission.