Thursday newspaper round-up: Car production, UK retailers, water bills, KPMG

(Sharecast News) - The architect of a ban on newspaper takeovers by foreign states has demanded that an Abu Dhabi fund be forced to sell The Telegraph by Easter. Baroness Stowell, the Conservative chairman of the Lords communications and digital committee, said the Government should impose an ultimatum on RedBird IMI. It should be backed by the threat of regulatory action, she said, to strip the fund of control of what has been dubbed "the newspaper auction from hell". - Telegraph

Car production has slumped to levels not seen since the 1950s as the sector struggles with the shift to electric vehicles. The number of cars made in Britain fell to 779,584 last year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), which was the lowest level since 1954, aside from the Covid pandemic. - Telegraph

UK retailers are warning that crime in their stores is "spiralling out of control" with 55,000 thefts a day and violent and abusive incidents rising by 50% last year. More than 70 incidents a day involved a weapon, according to the annual crime survey from the British Retail Consortium (BRC). - Guardian

Water bills will rise by an average of �123 this year in the biggest hit to customer pockets since the industry was privatised 36 years ago, as the public pays to replace ageing infrastructure and cut record sewage pollution. The price hike for millions of customers in England and Wales from 1 April will take the annual average bill from �480 to �603, and is higher than the �86 rise predicted by the regulator Ofwat in December, because water companies are adding inflation on top. - Guardian

Microsoft's Azure cloud computing business posted a slowdown in quarterly growth, compounding investor �worries about its huge investment in artificial intelligence products after China's DeepSeek released a low-cost AI chatbot. Revenue from Azure, the group's main profit engine in recent years, rose 31 per cent in the second quarter, compared with a 34 per cent increase in the prior quarter. The sales growth missed analysts' estimates and came in at the lower end of Microsoft's forecast of between 31 per cent and 32 per cent. - The Times

The UK partners of KPMG enjoyed their biggest payday on record last year, as the Big Four firm's profitability was boosted by job cuts amid a "challenging market". The accountancy group's army of auditors and advisers pulled in fees of �2.99 billion in its most recent financial year, which ran until the end of September, up 1 per cent on the �2.96 billion of revenue it achieved in 2023. However, despite the relatively stagnant top line, KPMG's annual profits rose by 11 per cent to �404 million. - The Times