Latest news with #Babcock
Daily Mail
14-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Silver miner Fresnillo takes gains to 150% as price of the precious metal hits a 14-year high
Fresnillo cemented its status as the best- performing FTSE 100 stock so far this year as the price of silver hit a 14-year high. Shares in the Mexican gold and silver miner rose 1.7 per cent, or 26p, to 1542p in London – taking gains for 2025 to 149 per cent. That puts it ahead of Britain's leading defence and aerospace groups on the Footsie leaderboard for the year with Babcock up 119 per cent, Rolls-Royce 76 per cent and BAE Systems 66 per cent. Fresnillo has benefited from rising gold and silver prices as concerns about international trade, military conflict and the global economy send investors to the apparent safety of assets such as precious metals. Silver rose above $39 an ounce yesterday, to its highest level since September 2011, while gold topped $3,370 per ounce having hit an all-time high of $3,500 earlier in the year. The latest moves came after Donald Trump threatened to impose a 30 per cent tariff on imports from the European Union and Mexico from August 1.
Telegraph
13-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The crisis leaving the Royal Navy more exposed than ever
As the Royal Navy's newest warship slid into the River Forth last month, there will have been more than a few sighs of relief. Workers have been carefully constructing HMS Venturer, the first of the new Type 31 frigates, at Babcock's Rosyth shipyard in Scotland since 2021. The floating in June was a key milestone – but now the company must finish the rest of the vessel and repeat the entire trick another four times. There is little room for error. The warship is just one of 13 new frigates due to enter service between 2027 and 2035, which are desperately needed to replace the ageing Duke class vessels commissioned for the Navy in the late 1980s. Five of the new frigates will be general-purpose Type 31s – known as the Inspiration class – while the rest will be submarine-hunting frigates known as Type 26 vessels built by BAE Systems in Glasgow. Babcock is sprinting to deliver all of the Type 31s by 2029, a decade after it first signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD). But even at that pace, the ships cannot come fast enough. Shrinking fleet, dangerous times The Navy is grappling with a historically low number of frigates, stretching its operational capacity to the limit at a time when the risk of military conflict is on the rise. Next year, the Navy is only expected to have seven frigates – compared to the official requirement of 13. 'You've got this crunch period between planning to fix the frigate gap and it actually being fixed, because of the timelines for ship construction,' explains Emma Salisbury, a naval expert at the Council on Geostrategy. 'It's a really difficult problem, because there isn't really much you can do. Ships take as long as they take to build and, although there are some things you can do to speed things up a bit, you can't just turn them out in a couple of weeks. 'There is going to be a period where we'll have to do what we can with the fleet we have, while we wait for these new ships to come into service.' The Navy fleet currently includes eight operational Duke-class frigates. Most are capable of being used for anti-submarine warfare, but they are also used for an array of other duties such as shadowing Russian ships through the English Channel and North Sea. By the end of 2025, however, their number will dwindle to just seven following the expected retirement of HMS Lancaster, which was previously stationed in the Gulf. In practice, this will mean very few ships are available at any one time. According to a naval rule of thumb, one in every three or four ships in a fleet will typically be kept at readiness to deploy. 'You can juggle things around, but with 13 frigates you would expect to have four or five available at any one time,' says Sidharth Kaushal, a naval power expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). The dip in fleet numbers means the Navy may only be able to muster two to three frigates at a time for the next two years. 'It's pretty consequential. And it certainly poses a challenge to the Nato-first approach laid out in the strategic defence review,' Kaushal adds. This makes the delivery of new ships to the Navy even more important. But even assuming there are no unexpected setbacks, HMS Venturer is not set to enter service for another two years, while the first Type 26 – the HMS Glasgow – is not expected until late 2028. It means naval chiefs will be grappling with a shortfall for the rest of this decade at least – and through a period when military leaders and experts fear the risk of a major conflict is highest. Last year, Gen Sir Roland Walker, head of the Army, warned that Britain needed to be war-ready as soon as 2027 amid rising tensions with Russia and China. Ministers have pledged to increase defence spending to 2.7pc of GDP by then, rising to 3.5pc by 2035 under a pledge made by the Nato alliance. But money remains tight. 'With older ships, there's going to be some that can be extended,' adds Salisbury. 'But you have to look at the cost-benefit analysis, because it's not like we're in the business of restoring classic cars – it has to be worth it for military capability, especially at a time of constrained resources.' That makes it imperative that the BAE and Babcock programmes suffer no further slippages. But with the shipbuilding industry facing a shortage of skilled workers after years of low demand, the companies and their suppliers face an uphill battle. 'Peace dividend' Britain is not alone in suffering from this ailment. In the US, shipbuilding has also slowed to around six ships per year, compared to as many as 20 per year during the 1980s, according to the Congressional Research Service. By comparison, China – which now boasts the world's biggest navy – brought at least 28 ships into service, compared to the US Navy's four. The decline is a consequence of the 'peace dividend' reaped by many Western governments following the end of the Cold War, when spending was diverted from defence budgets to more vote-winning concerns such as healthcare. Few orders for new ships were placed. 'The current paucity of the Navy's surface fleet is a reflection of the peace dividend,' Salisbury says. 'It's going to take time, given the timescales involved, to get back up to strength.' Despite this pressing backdrop, construction of the Type 26 and Type 31 frigates is running late – although it is hard to scrutinise how late because the Ministry of Defence does not specify when each ship is due to enter service. Still, both programmes are rated 'amber' by the Government's Infrastructure Projects Authority, meaning there are 'significant issues' that risk further setbacks without 'focused management attention', according to transparency documents. Delays after delays Many of the problems can be traced back to historical government flip-flopping, the industry's starved condition and the pandemic. The genesis of the Type 26, for example, stretches back to the late 1990s. Military chiefs changed the specifications repeatedly before settling on a final design in 2017 that envisaged the ships being used mainly for anti-submarine warfare. HMS Glasgow – the first Type 26 – was originally meant to enter service in 2023 under the programme's original plans. But this first slipped to 2027 and then 2028 as work was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic and various other supply chain issues, including the late delivery of a gearbox. Similarly, the Government originally envisaged the first Type 31 debuting in 2023 – four years earlier than the current expectation. Babcock has committed to delivering five warships in 10 years but work at Rosyth was also slightly delayed by Covid. The company insists it remains on schedule and will deliver the frigates by 2029. Sir Nick Hine, chief executive of Babcock's marine division and the Navy's former Second Sea Lord, says the speed the company is working at is 'unheard of'. 'The answer is, it's going much faster than any other shipbuilding programme in the UK or anywhere in the world actually, in terms of complex warships,' he told the UK Defence Journal last month. 'Would I like to go faster? Yes, of course, because the Navy needs the ships.' Building for the future Both BAE and Babcock are attempting to tackle skills shortages by taking on hundreds of apprentices, with BAE launching a shipbuilding training academy of its own in Glasgow as well. BAE has also brought in robot welding machines at Govan to help speed up the production of panels for the Type 26 ships. But ultimately, to ramp up capacity further the companies need certainty about the future shipbuilding pipeline. The MoD's shipbuilding plans are firmer than they have been for some time but officials are still yet to clarify timelines for a number of other projects. 'There's no reason why companies would invest in their facilities if they don't know that they're going to get work,' says Salisbury, of the Council on Geostrategy. 'So having that list of things that are coming means that those companies have the confidence to make those investments in their manufacturing processes, in their personnel training, all of that, and keep those ships kind of churning out.' One bright spot is that from the late 2020s onwards, Britain's shipyards will be producing two to three frigates per year – more than they have done in decades. There is also export work for the industry in Australia, Canada, Poland and potentially Norway – should the Type 26 win a competition there. 'Through the Strategic Defence Review we are creating a new hybrid navy by building world-class submarines and cutting-edge warships, alongside transforming our aircraft carriers and introducing new autonomous vessels to patrol the North Atlantic and beyond,' says a Ministry of Defence spokesman. 'There will be no capability gap as we introduce 13 new frigates into the Royal Navy's fleet, which will provide a global warship presence for decades to come, helping deter aggression and maintain UK security.' But before ministers can boast about Britain's impressive future fleet, the Navy will have to reckon with a few more years of pain.
Technical.ly
07-07-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
AI jobs are not the tech jobs you know
This is a guest post by Stephen Babcock, the founder of Intake Media, where he embeds with early-stage entrepreneurs to create messaging and content that supports sales and fundraising. Babcock previously served as a journalist at a range of print and digital publications, including It's not just you. The messages that we're being delivered these days about AI are conflicted. The real impact is taking longer than expected. It's already here. It's hype. You can't ignore it. It's going to take jobs away. It's going to create more jobs than we've ever seen. When history is written, this may all work itself out into one cohesive narrative. But right now, those of us trying to make sense of the change are left turning over every stone for signs of the truth. As a longtime media obsessive and even-longer-time word lover, I believe that subtle shifts in headlines can say a lot. Two recent ones particularly stood out to me. Both were about Amazon, but to this observer, they carry a global point. 'Amazon to make massive $20B+ investment in Pennsylvania AI jobs — with data centers in tow,' wrote on June 9. Big dollars! But for me, it was the phrase 'AI jobs' that jumped out. As a former editor, I have plenty of firsthand evidence that a article typically talks about tech jobs, so the use of 'AI jobs' is a significant shift. But more to the point, what is an AI job? Read the article — you should always read the article — and it's clear that the word choice in the headline was prescient. These AI jobs are much different than 'tech jobs' as we've conceived them over the last decade. In Amazon's Pennsylvania investment, AI jobs will be tasked with operating nuclear power plants and building data centers. This is 'the backbone for America's AI infrastructure,' according to an AWS executive, and it's kickstarting a massive investment in workforce development. That spine will need innovation to power its brain, but this is clearly a departure from the last two decades of tech. Instead of focusing on software and connected devices that promised to vault us into a new generation of boundaryless knowledge work, AI is harkening back to a more broad-shouldered category of industry that was once synonymous with Pennsylvania. Complex models require massive computational capacity to process data, which in turn requires lots and lots of energy. So we have to build more physical infrastructure to deliver it, operate those plants and figure out how to make them more productive. The former steel mill site in Bucks County that will house one data center may have simply been chosen because the space was available, but it's dripping with symbolism nonetheless. Coal delivered the massive energy gains we needed for the industrial revolution, just as nuclear power promises to do in the age of AI. Plentiful steel helped us create marvels of engineering that reshaped how we moved and organized ourselves, just as data pledges to do for AI today. There was good-paying work in all of it during the 20th century, just as Amazon's announcement promises for the 21st. The 100-year arcs may write themselves. But in the more immediate timeline of years and decades, it's worth thinking about the shift that this is bringing to the landscape of technology and careers today. That brings us to a second headline about jobs and Amazon in recent weeks, where the New York Times wrote that 'Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work.' It was doubtless lost on the editor that Amazon redefined warehouse work for the Internet generation with its fulfillment centers, where humans and robots worked side-by-side to collapse the time between click and delivery. Over the last decade, we also saw how Amazon shaped local economies. Throughout post-industrial cities, the appearance of a fulfillment center provided both a brand name and an instant job creator, checking off a couple of boxes on the wishlist of an economic development professional. Now it is the coders who hold tech jobs that are doing something like warehouse work, but they won't be in next-generation warehouses. After all, the coders were never in fulfillment centers. They were largely in Seattle, and then more came to DC metro, and then we learned they were distributed in a few other locales, as well. As Amazon's pre-pandemic HQ2 competition showed, attracting tech jobs required a vastly different playbook that was very much of its time. HQ2 became a litmus test for how the leaders of midsize cities from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt to the South assembled the pieces of an innovation ecosystem that would attract and retain software developers for years into the future — and the land to accommodate a massive new mixed-use property. Most had some combination of university and corporate anchors to grow tech talent, investors and incubators to seed startups, and tax and quality-of-living policy changes to improve the city's brand among millennials in the sought-after developer cohort. The tech push produced new companies and reinvigorated urban life, but we'll not soon forget how the era was equally characterized by a supernova of a software engineering job market that eventually crashed into some balance of inflation and automation. Last month's announcement in Pennsylvania has a flavor of 'America's Next Top Model'-style competition, as Amazon held out the promise that it may bring data centers to additional communities. But HQ2 it is not. In fact, if Amazon were to launch a bid for HQ3 today, the ingredients would likely be different. The company's announcement in Pennsylvania still states universities and innovation hubs are needed, but in quotations supporting the initiative, politicians also cite water and construction, working families and clean energy. Success may yet again be measured in wattage and square footage, not app downloads. Tech is about where we're heading, and the shift to AI jobs is underway. It will reshape where engineers and construction workers seek work, how they build careers, where they move their families, and what motivates them. They will work on AI and use AI to get the job done. This all may or may not be inevitable. But somewhere between tech giants and local leaders, steel mills and headlines, the signs of change are there. How will you read them?
Daily Mail
30-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Footsie clocks up best start to year since 2021 with gold miners and defence giants leading the charge
Gold miners and defence giants were the best performing UK stocks in the first half of the year as the FTSE 100 delivered its strongest run in four years. The London market was buoyed by several factors including shift away from Wall Street amid tariff fears, a military spending boost and the UK's trade deal with the US, analysts said. The FTSE 100 rose 7.7 per cent in first six months of 2025, its best first-half performance since 2021 when it soared 8.9 per cent. Fresnillo was the top performer in the blue-chip index in the first six months of the year. The precious metal miner's stock soared 138 per cent thanks to rocketing gold and silver prices as investors sought safe haven assets. British defence giants Babcock, Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems were also among the top FTSE 100 risers, with their shares climbing 127 per cent, 68 per cent and 62 per cent respectively. They were boosted by government plans to increase military spending amid conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at investment platform AJ Bell, said: 'The FTSE 100 is full of the type of stocks that appeal to investors when there is uncertainty in the world. 'Investors seek companies with defensive qualities and the UK market has them in spades.' The biggest FTSE 100 fallers in the first half were advertising giant WPP, food packaging supplier Bunzl, drinks group Diageo and miner Glencore. Meanwhile, in Germany, the DAX has soared nearly 20 per cent in the first half. And in the US, the S&P 500 and tech-focused Nasdaq hit fresh highs yesterday, taking gains so far this year to 5.5 per cent each. Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average remains below an all-time high, it has risen 3.9 per cent in the last six months as markets bounced back from the turmoil sparked by Donald Trump's tariff war. Artificial intelligence firms have driven the latest gains in the US, with Nasdaq-listed Nvidia regaining the top spot as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
BBC News
30-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Plymouth-based Babcock to move staff amid regional regeneration
Defence company Babcock have announced plans to locate more than 2,000 of their workforce from the Devonport Royal Dockyard facility to a city centre base. Employees from some of the Devonport support functions will be moved into a new central-based capability centre in Plymouth, to "help boost collaboration, foster wider prosperity and support defence delivery".The plans are part of an approach to support regional regeneration across the is no specific date or timeline for the move to take place, however the company is set to transform a disused building into the new space. Babcock's CEO David Lockwood said: "The defence dividend is far-reaching, strengthening the UK's defence industrial base and fostering prosperity, collaboration and innovation in the communities we work in. "Our ambitious blueprint for Plymouth is a model for regional regeneration and one we are committed to delivering."As a strategic partner to government, for every pound spent on defence, our community of passionate people are delivering back, and we value the things that matter to our customers, colleagues and communities." 'Important first step' Commenting on Babcock's announcement, Luke Pollard MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, said: "This is good news for the city centre and Devonport. Plymouth City Council and I have been working with Babcock for many months on their plan to create more jobs and invest in skills in our city."The plans announced today are an important first step towards the multi-million pound investment in the city centre. "Thousands of new homes, an updated public realm, like Armada Way, and hundreds of new jobs created - this is how we'll make our city centre vibrant again."
