This is lot of Flux.
I'm Brett and I'm justin. As Friday, the seventh of March.
Boy, the latest gender pay gap figures in Australia have been released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and the research shows that only twenty one percent of employers have no gender pay gap between men and women and Juzy Boy. While these numbers are slightly better than last year, this agency says we still have a long way to go.
Very true, Block Sam. If you want to kick off the weekend on a high, there is one place to be. It's winning fifty bucks in the Flux app this Friday. All you've got to do is download the app the the quickest person to get the three quick six questions correct, and the fifty bucks is all yours to make sure to download their Flux.
Apps to get involved three marketable stories today, Juzzy Boy, Let's do it for our first freedom. Furniture is officially up for sale after its parent company looks to find a new owner after its big turnaround.
And nothing says Cozy Home vibes like a new furniture auction be Man, so tell me more.
And Furniture was founded in nineteen eighty one in Sydney and has spread its stylish She had Affordable Empire to sixty stores across Australia and New Zealand.
Think plush couches, trendy rugs, flower pots, outdoor furniture and Jusie boy.
It's been through more owners than a well loved vintage arm chair.
Yeah, it was owned by the founding family, then acquired by a private equity company.
Then it actually listed on the ASX, and then it was taken private by Steinhoff International, which also owned.
Best and Less, Harraska, Fantastic Furniture and.
Plush, and then spun out into a rebranded company called Greenlit Brands. Now get this, jazzy boy. Freedom struggled in the late twenty tens but went through an extensive turnaround.
And now it generates more than four hundred million revenue per annum and twenty bill in ebitdak.
But with this positive turnaround, Greenlit Brands reckons their work is done and it is now time to sell Freedom.
And who might the buyer?
Bab Man Well, private equity firms that specialize in retail turnarounds are pretty much expected to show the most in here, Judy Boy. So what is the key learning here to private equity firms, struggling retailers are just untapped gold mines. Sometime.
Private equity firms have a history of snapping up struggling retail brands and giving them a strategic makeover. Remember private equity firm Anchorage Capital.
Snapped up David Jones for just ninety two and a half million bucks, which.
Was a steal considering Woolworth South Africa plaid two point one billion dollars for David Jones just nine years earlier.
Anchorage Capital Partners has already raided greenlit brands.
Yep, It's acquired a bundle of retailers like Best and Less, Harris scaff and Debenham's Australian are.
The goal of private equity is to strip out costs from the retailer, refine the strategy, and ultimately make the company more profitable.
And eventually sell it for a juicy return on its investment.
But Freedom Furniture is already quite profitable, so unlike.
The usual private equity rescue missions, this one might just be about sprucing things up For our second story.
Donald J. Trump has announced plans to build a strategic reserve of five cryptocurrencies and no prizes here. Crypto saw a three hundred billion US dollar rally.
Sometimes you just feel that Trump's treating the economy like one big reality TV show, don't you. Yeah, what is happening here?
So in July last year, Donald Trump strutted onto the stage at a major bitcoin conference.
Yeah, it was at the time he was campaigning to become the forty seven Prayers of the United States, and he outlined a plan for the US to have a national bitcoin stockpile.
And the price of bitcoin skyrocketed.
Then Trump announced an executive order in January this year calling for the formation of a group to make recommendations around crypto, and the price of bitcoin jumped again. But since then, being man, Trump's been a little quiet on this concept of a plan.
In fact, the price of bitcoin actually dropped around twenty percent from its previous peak because crypto had started to doubt whether this reserve was actually legitimate.
And then in comes Trump to save the day for bitcoin and other currencies.
He's just announced plans to implement a strategic reserve of not only bitcoin.
And not just one other digital currency.
We're talking five cryptocurrencies in the supposed strategic reserve.
We're talking Ripple, Solana, Cardano, etherorem and Bitcoin.
And while there are no clear details on how much or when this is all happening, the market didn't care.
The prices of some of these coins jump more than twenty percent.
So what is the key learning here?
A strategic reserve is essentially a country's emergency piggy bang, and it's usually filled with things like oil and gold, cash, and even food supplies.
The idea is to have a backup in case of major world crises.
It might be a major supply chain disruption or even geopolitical risks, and given US strategic reserves a kind of end of world type staff, adding digital currencies is a big move.
Okay, Why is that?
Well, it could change the way that digital assets are viewed globally.
It kind of moves crypto from a speculative investment to much more legitimate financial safeguard, and if.
The US actually follows through, it could set a precedent for other nations to do the same.
And further legitimize crypto as an asset class with real world economic influence. For our third and final story, Anthropic, the AI competitor to chat GPT, has raised a new of capital that values the company had more than sixty one billion US dollary dues.
The race to consumer and business wallows is heating up in the iras b Man, so tell me what's going on here.
So Anthropic is an AI startup that was founded in twenty twenty one by former open Ai employees and b Man.
Anthropics developed a family of large language models also known as llm's and this one's named Claude. It's a competitor to chatchbt Grock three, Deep Seek, and Google's Gemini. Last November, Amazon through casual four billion US dollars to Anthropic.
And while open Ai is growing, Claude is also rapidly expanding.
In fact, Beman Anthropics and Your revenue run rate from Claude was reportedly around one billion US dollars last year.
And does boy that number has increased by thirty percent so far in twenty twenty five.
So now Anthropics rates another three and a half billion US dollars at a post money valuation of nearly sixty two billion US dollars.
Its plan is to use this cash to expand its compute capacity and deepen its research capabilities, and.
Ultimately accelerate its international expansion in the AI race.
Fascinating, So what is the key learning here?
AAR companies need two things to be sustainable, cutting edge technology and a way to scale it profitably.
You see, training AI models cost billions, but so does getting them in front of users.
In fact, be Man Andthropy expects to burn three billion US dollars this year.
OpenAI lost about five billion US dollars last year and is expecting to lose up to fourteen billion by twenty twenty six.
That's why these companies are basically in never ending funding rounds.
But this is where strategic partnerships come in.
Yeah. These partnerships hopefully allow AI companies to get distribution without the exorbitant acquisition costs. Open Ai has Microsoft, Google has Gemini, and of course Anthropic has Amazon.
Right now, AI is a game of who can outlast the competition without bleeding out financially.
Flat Sam. If you've been listening to the pod this week, then you are in the pole position to win quick six today. To make sure to download the Flux app your chance to win.
Thanks for listening and we'll see you on Monday