label, says that Mr Ashley’s proposal of €38 a share “significantly undervalues” Hugo Boss. Its shares have been trading at €36-37 for most of this year, meaning the premium offered is modest. Mr Ashley, however, may be biding his time. Under German law, he was required to initiate a takeover offer once his stake in Hugo Boss passed 30%, as it now has. If the company continues to flounder, he will be in a strong position to take it over. Mr Ashley joined the shareholder register in 2020 with a stake of 5%. The following year Daniel Grieder, formerly the boss of Tommy Hilfiger, an American fashion label, was brought in as chief executive. He relaunched the dowdy brand by splitting it into two labels: Hugo for Gen-Z shoppers and BOSS aimed at millennials (and older clientele wishing to dress like them). The refresh, coupled with a push into e-commerce, led sales to soar and pushed the company’s share price to a peak of over €75 in July 2023, up from €46 when Mr Grieder took over. Since then, however, the business has struggled. Sales in China and Britain, two of its most important markets, have slumped amid weak consumer spending. In December last year the company issued a profit warning and unveiled a fresh strategy focused on boosting the image of its labels, improving distribution and trimming costs, with up to 50 shops to be closed by 2028. But Mr Grieder’s new plan has yet to bear fruit: operating profit was down by 42%, year on year, in the first quarter of 2026. Mr Ashley made his fortune from Sports Direct, a British sportswear retailer he founded in 1982. Over the years he bought struggling but popular sports brands such as Lonsdale, Dunlop and Slazenger. Then in 2018 he acquired House of Fraser, a 170-year-old chain of British department stores, hours after it declared bankruptcy. The following year he renamed his conglomerate Frasers Group, and in 2022 handed over day-to-day operations to his son-in-law, Michael Murray. Lately Frasers has been on a buying spree. In March it purchased just under 6% of Puma, a German sportswear brand. In June it launched a takeover bid for Accent Group, an Australian group of footwear retailers. And on July 28th it disclosed a 4% stake in Burberry, a British luxury brand. It has
reportedly also joined the bidding for Harvey Nichols, a posh department store. The string of deals form part of the group’s “Elevation” strategy, under which it plans to shift away from budget offerings towards pricier wares. As for Hugo Boss, rumours suggest Frasers is exploring ways to install Mr Murray as its chief executive in place of Mr Grieder, whose contract runs until 2028. Mr Murray already sits on the 12-person supervisory board. If he is appointed to the top job, he would be the first British boss of the German brand, which has its headquarters in the small town of Metzingen, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. It could be in for a culture shock. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/30/the-battle-for-hugo-boss
The delights of deadlines A friend to procrastinators, an enemy to prattlers, a necessity for managers Jul 30th 2026 The connection between deadlines and journalism is obvious: this column would never have been written without one. But deadlines are critical to every organisation. They are an antidote to procrastination. They deal with the problem of diminishing returns. And they set the rhythm of a workplace, co-ordinating the activities of many teams and individuals. First, procrastination. The tendency to put things off for no good reason is a fundamental part of the human condition. Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet, warned that idlers were liable never to fill their barns. A paper written about 2,700 years later, by Brenda Nguyen of the University of Lethbridge and her co-authors, finds that things have not changed much since (besides the
barns). In a survey of some 22,000 individuals, they find that a disposition to procrastination is associated with lower incomes and reduced employment. In another paper, Piers Steel of the University of Calgary and his co-authors examined the behaviour of arbitrators in workplace-grievance procedures in Canada. Arbitrators have a lot of control when it comes to writing their decisions: they can, in effect, set their own timetables. They are also expected to act swiftly to settle cases. Arbitrators who scored one standard deviation above the mean for self-reported procrastination took 83 days to write decisions, compared with 26 days for those one standard deviation below the mean. People have various techniques for rousing themselves to action. A study by Hengchen Dai of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues analysed a website on which people undertake to achieve certain goals. They found that commitments are more likely to be made at the start of a year, month or week, after birthdays, and even after national holidays. Landmarks in the calendar seem to give people a chance to shed their old selves and start afresh. Companies don’t have to wait for the new year to roll around; they can impose their own deadlines. A paper published in 2022 by Steffen Altmann of the University of Würzburg and his co-authors investigated what happened when dental clinics varied the check-up reminders they sent to their patients, promising goodies like a free dental kit for those who arranged appointments within a certain timeframe. People who were not set a deadline were less responsive than those who were given a target date. Even without the lure of a reward, the mere act of specifying a deadline seemed to motivate people to book their next check-up. The second role that deadlines play is drawing work to a close when there is nothing more to be gained from extending it. When Eric Schmidt, a one-time CEO of Google, was asked about his recipe for making good decisions, his response was “discord plus deadline”. Discord ensures that people discuss the issues properly; the deadline stops them gabbling on for ever. Mr Altmann’s study of dental clinics includes a survey in which a majority of respondents said they preferred tighter timeframes to generous ones, apparently aware that they were more liable to forget about a lengthy
deadline. Sure enough, shorter deadlines to book check-up appointments prompted timelier responses from patients. The third job that deadlines do is create shared expectations within and across organisations of when work has to be done. A paper by Natarajan Balasubramanian of Syracuse University and his co-authors looked at the effect of deadlines on patent-filing. They found that patent applications by individual inventors displayed no particular year-round patterns, but that there were bursts of corporate patent-filing activity at the ends of months, quarters and fiscal years. These clusters of applications were tied to deadlines within firms: when companies changed their fiscal years, for example, filing patterns changed, too. Corporate planning and reporting deadlines, as well as the billing cycles at outside law firms, set a rhythm. Patent departments danced to it. Deadlines can have harmful side-effects. They can erode people’s sense of autonomy. They can distract from longer-term goals. Most obviously, they risk work being rushed. Mr Balasubramanian’s study on patents, for example, found that applications filed closer to month-ends were more likely to be considered incomplete by the US Patent and Trademark Office because of missing documentation. But any deadline is better than none. (Unless you really hated this column.)■ Step inside the world of work with our Bartleby newsletter. Each week our white-collar oracle muses on the agonies of office life. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/30/the-delights-of-deadlines
South Korea’s stock-market boom is collapsing spectacularly It may be a harbinger Jul 30th 2026 America’s giant technology companies have gone from printing money to incinerating it. The market reckons Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will collectively report negative free cashflows next year, owing to their extravagant spending on data centres. Yet real fortunes are being made today from Silicon Valley’s gamble on the future. Three companies are expected to surpass an astonishing $200bn of free cashflow apiece next year. One is Nvidia, an American darling that designs the advanced processors needed to run artificial-intelligence models. The other two are Samsung and SK Hynix, a pair of South Korean outfits that dominate the market for the more mundane memory chips in phones, laptops
and, increasingly, data centres. Their windfall represents one of the greatest cross-border transfers of cash in corporate history. Now a nation newly enamoured of stock markets is discovering that shares can go down as well as up. Since peaking in June the stock prices of Samsung and SK Hynix have crashed by 41% and 52% respectively, wiping $1.2trn from South Korea’s highly concentrated stock market. Those of SK Hynix fell by more than a fifth this week as investors digested a mere six- fold increase in its quarterly operating profit, compared with the year before. Samsung’s shares have not been this volatile since the dotcom era. South Korea is a great experiment in mixing the extremes of state capitalism and market speculation. Last year, after a failed coup, the country’s president attempted to cheer his country by talking up the stock market (sound familiar?). The KOSpI, its main index, speedily hit a level the government had set as a target. Ordinary South Koreans withdrew capital from insurers and banks to invest in stocks. Workers threatened industrial action to secure Wall Street-sized bonuses. Those at SK Hynix and Samsung’s chip division settled for an extraordinary 10% of operating profits. At SK Hynix that could amount to $500,000 a person this year, and $800,000 next year. (Goldman Sachs paid a meagre average of $400,000 in total compensation to its employees last year.) Now a government that just weeks ago was embracing markets is being forced to apologise for them. It was only in April that regulators approved leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tied to individual South Korean stocks. These funds use derivatives to give investors a multiple of the daily return of a share. For example, if SK Hynix is up by 1%, an investor might receive 2%; or if it is down by 10%, an investor might jump out of a window. When the selling began in June broker accounts faced margin calls and were shut down by the thousand, causing regulators to suspend new ETF launches. At an emergency meeting on July 29th politicians promised to severely limit the use of these funds. One compared the market to a casino. Shares in the country’s department stores are crashing as fast as those of its