Business dynamics always throw winners and losers. Companies enjoying their moment of glory and others forced to transform seek solutions to cap their losses. Vodafone is in this last situation, which seeks to redirect its image, marked by commercial calls, and to escape the burden of some of its past decisions such as the purchase of ONO and the failure to close an operation with MásMóvil.

The operator has lost 400,000 customers in the first half of the year, more than in all of 2022. To correct it, it has renewed its management team with the aim of correcting the commercial course that has been in decline for several years. In fact, the firm has lost customers in fixed broadband for three years, while in the mobile business it has shown itself to be more resistant, influenced by the rise of Internet of Things lines. However, until MásMóvil and Orange complete their operation, the rest of the pieces on the Spanish board are not expected to move.

FROM ONO TO TODAY

Precisely, several market sources point to another operation to find the origin of the firm's ills: the purchase of Ono in 2014, a cable company, a key technology in times of ADSL, but which has lost its validity in favor of fiber optics to connect homes.

This decision has left Vodafone with just three million homes covered by fiber and seven million by cable, compared to 17 million for Orange and 28 million for Telefónica. In addition, the acquisition of Ono meant a notable increase in the group's workforce, which resulted in several EREs to reduce costs and adapt the structure to the business that have limited Vodafone's investment capacity in other areas.

Precisely, the decision to bet on the cable, attributed to London, connects with another of the problems that the company has experienced: an excessive dependence on its parent company in management that has caused a high turnover in the management positions of the Spanish subsidiary.

The other decision questioned in the market was his resignation from football in 2018 due to its high price. The decision seemed to pay off in the early years, where the operator managed to differentiate itself on television by being the first to close agreements to distribute the streaming platforms, however it has finally left the operator in no man's land between operators with soccer and low-cost.

COURSE CHANGE

Among the first movements since the arrival of Mário Vaz, the new CEO, is the return to subsidizing mobile terminals, a measure aimed at winning back the highest value customer in a market where low cost reduces the customer base of the big brands.

At a discursive level, the new management has highlighted the need to improve the brand image -a recent study by the OCU placed Vodafone's fixed broadband customers as the second most dissatisfied- with a simplified digital experience.

To do this, they have come to cut relations with some subcontractors that were not respecting the protocols established by the company, which, for example, is attached to the commercial code of ethics between operators that prohibits, among other things, calls at siesta time.. Company sources point out that the new management is “radically” halting the loss of customers with these measures and they trust that they will move to positive figures in the coming months.

In the positive news section for the group, the company continues to maintain a strong position in the business market, where it ranks second in the market and continues to grow in multiple fields, from services for SMEs to IoT.

In parallel, Vodafone has doubled its commitment to Spain as a key technology hub for the group with major investments such as 225 million euros for an innovation center in Malaga, which add to the 700 million euros invested in the infrastructure of its traditional business each year.. In this way, Spain has become a key point for the entire Vodafone group to develop new services and host high-tech projects, a niche with increasing weight in the company's business.. Thus, the company has been selected to receive European funds with which it will design new Open RAN chips in the Andalusian city.

Salaries rose in Spain last year by an average of 4.6%, practically half of what prices did, since average inflation last year was 8.4% year-on-year. In this way, the average salary of Spaniards was 25,353.22 euros gross per year in 2022, but the increase they received in their payrolls did not serve to maintain their purchasing power.

Given that prices doubled, in practice the workers became poorer, since despite their salary increase they could not even maintain the same level of consumption of the previous year, according to data published this Friday by the INE. In addition, this is the average gross salary, from which the payment of taxes must be deducted. Given that the Government did not deflate personal income tax last year, workers whose salaries were raised below inflation will have paid more to the Treasury without this translating into a gain in purchasing power.

Salaries accounted for 74% of the total cost faced by companies for having workers on their payroll, while of the remaining 26% the most important item was mandatory social security contributions, which accounted for 8,055.63 euros per worker on average and represented 23.5% of the total cost.. Social Security contributions were raised last year precisely as part of the reform of the pension system and represented 4.2% more than in 2021.

Of the rest of the items that make up the cost, 491.74 euros per year per worker were allocated to social benefits, 172.81 to work-related expenses, 144.33 corresponded to severance pay and 68.32 to professional training.

In total, the total cost per worker for companies was 34,286.05 euros gross during 2022, 4.2% more than in the previous year. If the subsidies and deductions received from the Public Administrations to promote employment and professional training are deducted, the companies assumed a net cost of 34,058.83 euros per worker.

Gardeners and hoteliers earn less than the SMI

By branches of activity, the highest average wages were registered in the coking plant and oil refining, where workers earned an average gross annual average of 73,541 euros; followed by the supply of electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning, with average salaries of 63,074 euros gross per year; financial services, with average payrolls of 58,916 euros gross; and the tobacco industry, with 51,737 euros.

On the contrary, building services and gardening activities were the worst paid, with an average salary of 12,788 euros gross; along with food and beverage services (hotels), with 13,386 euros gross per year; other personal services, with 14,724 euros; and social service activities without accommodation, with 15,118 euros. The first two professions are the only ones in which the average gross salary last year was below the Minimum Interprofessional Salary (SMI), which was then set at 14,000 euros gross per year.

Despite the fact that the hospitality industry is among the lowest-paid jobs, it is one of those that has registered the highest salary increase in the last year, reaching its highest level in the series that began in 2008, mainly due to the difficulties that the sector has had in finding staff, which has pushed salaries upward from their already very low position.

The average severance pay was 144.33 euros, 30% lower than in 2021, logically the sectors with the highest compensation being those in which the salaries are higher: in financial services, an average of 1,203 euros was paid to those laid off; in coke ovens and oil refining, 1,201 euros; and in real estate activities, 761 euros.

On the contrary, layoffs in air transport had an average cost of 2.28 euros; in education, 9.8 euros; in the Public Administration and Social Security, 14.7 euros, and in health activities, 16.4 euros.

“Where before we used to load five trucks of watermelon bound for supermarkets, now we have enough to fill half a truck”. In this very graphic way, Plácido Pérez-Chuecos, a farmer from Lorca (Murcia), a territory where the largest outdoor watermelon plantation in all of Spain is produced, summarizes the historical production deficit that the considered summer star fruit is going through this campaign. The huge drop in supply is causing serious supply problems on the shelves, a problem that consumers have begun to detect and that has even led Mercadona, questioned by users due to the lack of the product in its stores, to justify the reason from its official account on social networks: “Due to the adverse weather suffered in the watermelon and melon-producing areas, we currently do not have to offer the product normally. For this reason, there may be lack of service in some of our stores, we are sorry for the inconvenience”.

A member of the Alimer cooperative -which integrates 200 watermelon producers and which last year planted more than 60 million units-, Plácido recalls how up to four hail storms in a few days, the first on May 13, devastated the crops in Lorca. They took away more than 500,000 kilos of watermelon just two weeks after harvesting, affecting the complete cycle of the plants and also the thermal meshes that cover the farms: “I know that people from outside the fields don't understand it and think that we are crying all day, but the truth is that we have never seen anything like it, it was a disaster, 50 liters fell in 15 minutes and the hail devastated everything,” he laments.. Losses in this area alone amounted to 8 million euros. So the problem is simple: “We don't have watermelons, we haven't been able to produce them and the few we have we have had to go to buy those areas where the storm didn't affect us, even Valencia.. In this way, they went “from not having water due to the drought to having the fields flooded, that has been the reality, although it is difficult to explain it, that people understand it and do not believe that we are crying all day,” he explains.. Along the way, temporary jobs have also been lost in this month of July. Without collection there is no labor.

EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCE

The problem of this campaign is unprecedented in the Spanish market and is motivated by various causes. The first is that, beforehand, fewer watermelon and melon crops had been planted due to the drop in irrigation allocations due to the drought and the high production costs that have been dragging on since the previous season.. The official figures of the Ministry of Agriculture advanced in May that 20% less area had been sown.

In total, last year closed for both crops with a plantation of 16,211 hectares (-15.8% compared to 2021) and 16.1% less than the average of the last five years, even reaching double digits in Andalusia, one of the largest producers in the country (especially Almería), with a reduction of 25.1% of hectares.

For the first time in history, Spain was below 600,000 tons of melon planted, a product in clear decline in sales. All this decrease caused the consumer to pay up to 12 euros last summer for a kilo of these fruits, as if it were a luxury product, taking into account that 20% of the total production of watermelons in Spain is dedicated to export. Another worrying fact: the 'Unió Llauradora' association calculates that direct losses for melon and watermelon producers in the Valencian Community will be around 44 million euros this season, with a drop in production of around 52% compared to last year.

The first watermelons of the year – apart from those that arrive from Morocco – are produced in the greenhouses of Almería and then the plantations begin in the Levant and, at the end of July, those of Ciudad Real begin. It is the main producing triangle. Production from Latvia and Macedonia has also arrived in this campaign, explains Plácido: “Our watermelon, due to the climate we have, is very sweet, very good, and although the first of the year to be put on the market are those from Morocco, in the end our product is much better and they buy it from us”, highlights the Murcian farmer, who points out that melons are becoming increasingly less popular “because it is not profitable and people choose to eat more and more watermelon for its flavor”.

As for prices, at this time, and given the scarcity of supply, the products that have them as a treasure, which are very few, are being paid an average of 0.70 euros for each kilo of watermelon, a very high price in any season.. On the shelves they are being sold for almost two euros. “These prices will not last long if we manage to recover production in August,” predicts Plácido in the middle of his plantation, with the only two workers he has been able to hire to extract the few units of watermelon he has saved this July.

CUTTING THE TAJO-SEGURO TRANSFER

As if that were not enough, from Alicante the shortage of watermelons is attributed to the cut in the Tajo-Segura transfer. Specifically, the Asaja organization of this territory criticizes that “producers cannot plant if they are not sure that they will be able to irrigate their crops, nor what will be the quality of the water they will have after the increase in ecological flows without technical justification” and “the continuous decisions of the Ministry for Ecological Transition (Miteco) to send fewer cubic hectometres than the allowed monthly limit, as happened in June.”

In this sense, they warn that “the lack of stable water management by the administrations has led many farmers to abandon the harvest for fear of not having the most necessary resource, water, and the few watermelons that have been planted have been lost due to the alteration of flowering due to the extreme heat in April and the heavy rains in May in the province of Alicante”.

Precariousness is the word that usually accompanies the intern in Spain. That young man (usually) who has not yet finished his degree or his Vocational Training module or who has already graduated but has not yet found a solid job and who takes his first steps in a company, very often without having an assigned salary. They should be in training, but in practice many times they carry out the same tasks as any other worker, without being recognized as such.

Putting an end to this bleak start to working life is something that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, had proposed, who already promised in 2018, specifically on July 17, a month and a half after being sworn in as president after the success of the motion of no confidence in Mariano Rajoy, that he would approve a Statute for the Scholar to dignify them. Six years ago then, the 2012 labor reform had been approved, which gave wings to the flexibility (and precariousness) of many of these labor relations.

“We have lost hundreds of thousands [of young people] who today develop their careers outside our country and many others who, when they have rejoined the labor market in our country, have done so in undignified conditions that have nothing to do with the training they had completed.. In the coming months, the Government will implement a shock plan to create youth employment, in which relief and internship contracts will be reviewed and promoted, new instruments of active employment policies for young people will be put in place, a new regulation of labor internships and scholarship programs will be developed, the Scholarship Statute will be created and extracurricular internships will be eliminated,” Sánchez promised in Congress, unleashing applause from his bench.

The promise was not fulfilled in that first year, so when he was sworn in as president of the Coalition Government with Unidas Podemos on January 4, 2020, he revalidated it during his inauguration speech: “We have to move forward, together with the social agents, in the elaboration of a new Workers' Statute that takes into account the new labor realities and faces the challenges of employment in the 21st century.. And, together with this, the social dialogue must address many tasks, and as an example I will give some: the simplification and rearrangement of the menu of work contracts, reinforcing the causality in dismissals, the elimination of changes that facilitate, for example, dismissal due to justified absenteeism -as the unions are asking us-, the recovery of labor rights in the processes of substantial modification of working conditions, as well as the review of training contracts, including the approval and development of the Statute of the Scholarship Holder. “.

The Workers' Statute of the 21st century never saw the light of day, neither has the causality of the dismissals been reinforced nor has the Scholarship Statute gone ahead, despite the fact that the Ministry of Labor of Yolanda Díaz has negotiated it in the social dialogue during the last year, reaching an agreement in extremis last month with the union, but with the opposition of the CEOE and, most decisively, the university community.

The Crue Spanish Universities Association, made up of 76 universities -50 public and 26 private-, has been against it throughout the negotiation process, considering the Statute “a threat to the current internship model” and considering that academic internships must be regulated by the academic world (the Ministry of University and the universities themselves) and not by the social agents or the Ministry of Labor.

deferred rights

Even so, Yolanda Díaz, Pepe Álvarez, general secretary of the UGT, and Unai Sordo, his CCOO counterpart, summoned all the press to present the agreement they had reached at the ministerial headquarters: curricular practices could not exceed more than 25% of the training hours; the extracurricular ones -those that are carried out without computing in credits- would be limited to 15% of the training hours with a maximum of 480 hours per course-; the companies would be obliged to compensate the expenses for doing the internships (transport, accommodation or maintenance, for example, unless they are covered by other aid); the interns could not work shifts or work at night -unless it is essential due to the nature of the work-; companies could not have a number of scholarship holders greater than 20% of the total workforce, but all could have up to two scholarship holders; and each tutor could not be in charge of more than five fellows.

These measures, even though they were agreed between the Ministry of Labor and the unions, have not seen the light of day, since the socialist part of the Government has not supported them in the face of opposition from the university community.. In the event that the Executive had approved the rule in one of the last Councils of Ministers, it was not guaranteed the parliamentary support of the Permanent Commission of Congress either..

In addition to keeping this rule in the drawer, until there is “a broad agreement” with the social agents, as the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños admitted, the Government has also reversed a measure that was already approved and that will now be postponed: the contribution to the Social Security of the scholarship holders. Last year, as part of the pension reform, the Executive approved that the scholarship holders would begin to contribute to Social Security -with a state bonus for companies of 95% of the quota- as of this month of October, but finally this obligation will not apply until January 1, 2024.

The number of mortgages constituted on homes plummeted 24% last May with the signing of 33,398 loans in what is the largest in a month since January 2021, in a comparison in that precise month highly affected by the comparison of a pandemic environment to a pre-pandemic one.

With the year-on-year decline in May, the home mortgage firm chains four months of negative rates after the 2% drop recorded in February, the 15.7% drop in March and the 18.3% drop in April, according to data regularly published by the National Statistics Institute (INE) and collected by Europa Press.

The average amount of the mortgages constituted on homes fell by 4.6% year-on-year in the fifth month of the year, to 141,798 euros, while the capital lent decreased by 27.5%, to 4,735.8 million euros.

By autonomous communities, those that registered the highest number of mortgages constituted on homes in May were Andalucía (7,111), Cataluña (5,759) and Madrid (5,078).

Likewise, the regions in which more capital was lent for the constitution of home mortgages were Madrid (1,080.8 million euros), Catalonia (922.8 million) and Andalusia (840.5 million).

Only in one community, Cantabria, more mortgages on homes were signed last May than in the same month of 2022, with an advance of 6.5%, while in Asturias there was no variation. In the rest of the regions there were interannual decreases, especially in the Canary Islands (-42.4%), Galicia (-36.4%) and the Balearic Islands (-34.3%).

On a month-on-month basis (May over April), home mortgages jumped 23.5%, while borrowed capital increased 27.8%.

In the first five months of 2023, home mortgage loans have fallen by 11.9%, with a 13.3% decrease in borrowed capital and a 1.6% decrease in average capital.

THE INTEREST RATE SOARS

After the rise in interest rates agreed by the central banks to try to contain inflation, the average interest rate for all mortgage loans stood at 3.5% in May, with an average term of 23 years.

In the case of homes, the average interest was 3.15%, with a rise of 1.34 points compared to the same month of 2022 and with an average term of 25 years.

38% of mortgages on homes were established last May at a variable rate, while 62% were signed at a fixed rate. The average interest rate at the beginning was 2.79% for variable-rate home mortgages and 3.40% in the case of fixed-rate ones.

The INE reviewed the statistical series of interest rates since January 2020 a few months ago after launching a new procedure to validate the results of the initial average interest rate in the mortgages constituted.

According to data from the statistical agency, the number of mortgages on rural and urban properties (within the latter include homes) fell 22.4% in May compared to the same month in 2022, to a total of 44,297 loans.

The capital of the mortgage loans granted decreased by 19.7% in the fifth month of the year, to 7,283.7 million euros, while the average amount of the mortgages constituted on the total number of properties increased by 3.4% and totaled 164,430 euros.

Last May, a total of 12,414 mortgages changed their conditions, a figure 9% lower than that of the same month of 2022. Considering the type of change in the conditions, there were 9,796 novations (or modifications produced with the same financial entity), with an annual decrease of 13.3%.

The number of operations that changed entities (subrogations to the creditor) was 2,096, 10.4% more than in May 2022. For its part, in 522 mortgages the owner of the mortgaged asset changed (subrogations to the debtor), 19.5% more than a year earlier.

Of the 12,414 mortgages with changes in their conditions, 36.4% are due to changes in interest rates. After the change in conditions, the percentage of fixed interest mortgages increased from 13.4% to 37.4%, while that of variable interest mortgages decreased from 85.6% to 61.3%.

The Euribor is the rate to which the highest percentage of variable-rate mortgages refer, both before the change (80.9%) and after (58.8%). After the modification of conditions, the average interest on loans on variable-rate mortgages rose 0.3 points, while that on fixed-rate mortgages also increased 0.3 points.

The chip industry in Spain continues to grow with the US giant Intel as one of the agitators. On this occasion, the company has made a new investment in the Canarian company Wooptix, which has raised 10 million euros in a round led by the Spanish venture capital firm Bullnet Capital and the Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) and signed on Thursday, as EL MUNDO has been able to confirm.

Wooptix is a company born as a spin-off of the University of La Laguna in 2016 and that occupies an exceptional place in the Spanish ecosystem: it is the only national company dedicated to manufacturing equipment for chip manufacturers, a market segment that will move 87,000 million dollars in 2023.

Intel, through Intel Capital, has already been a shareholder in the company, but has decided to accompany it in its growth, as is also the case with Bullnet Capital, another of the initial investors.. It should be remembered that Intel will build an R&D laboratory in Barcelona within the framework of the Perte Chip with 400 million euros of public-private investment.

In addition, Wooptix has added to its shareholding Tokyo Electron, one of the leading Japanese manufacturers of semiconductor equipment, the European Innovation Fund and various players in the Basque industry such as Danobatgroup, Fagor Automation and Mondragón Promotion Fund.

Wooptix Metrology Equipment

The startup has developed a tool to measure the wafers in which the chips are placed in three dimensions. This metrology equipment has two virtues: it reduces the time it takes to measure from one minute to one second and it significantly increases the resolution of the images that are captured.

Thus, this solution, whose equipment is currently manufactured in Tenerife, makes it possible to review 60 wafers in the time that traditional teams supervise one, which would enable manufacturers to review all the wafers they produce or use and not just a selection, as is currently the case, with the corresponding million-dollar savings that would be produced by detecting defective products earlier.

USE OF FUNDS

Wooptix, founded by José Manuel Rodríguez and Javier Elizalde, will use the funds to robotize the system and take it to the manufacturing and standardization phase with the aim that it will be present in the large semiconductor factories soon.

The company highlights the flexibility of its technology, which it trusts will allow it to progressively reduce the number of nanometers to be measured to meet the requirements of major manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung, who are huge in a race to make smaller chips.

As a first step, the company is manufacturing and installing three semiconductor metrology kits, each weighing one metric ton, in Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands.. Company sources acknowledge that all of its clients are international, but have expressed hope that installations attracted by the Perte Chip, such as the one recently announced by Broadcom, will attract a new national flow of clients to the company's offices.