Jobs in Wales will be cut as part the restructuring

British Gas owner Centrica has announced that it will be cutting around 1,300 jobs including within call centres in Wales. The job cuts come as the company recorded an earnings decrease in its half-year report.

The workforce reduction totals around 14% of the customer operations team as Centrica announced a ‘customer service transformation’ scheme last month. Five hundred call centre roles will be cut including many in Cardiff as well as in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leicester, Stockport and Leeds.

A further 800 roles are being cut from support functions across the business.

A spokesman for Centrica said: “We have been transforming the business for a number of years to ensure we have the right roles in the right places for the future. This means making changes to improve efficiency, drive commercial performance and give our customers the service they want.

“At the same time, we continue to invest in the skills where there is demand, including recruiting more engineers to meet growing demand and hiring 500 apprentices this year alone.”

The GMB union has made accusations that the 500 call centre roles being cut will be replaced by AI technology, however Centrica has called these claims “simply wrong”.

Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, GMB national secretary, said: “It’s an absolute disgrace British Gas is slashing hundreds of human jobs and giving them to chatbots.

“These staff are massively overworked and underpaid, yet do their level best to keep customers happy. Now, instead of being rewarded, they’re being replaced by artificial intelligence.”

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The most successful digital products of the last decade didn’t actually invent anything new. They just looked at something we were already doing, something annoying, messy, and tedious that we’d all collectively agreed to tolerate, and made it take two clicks instead of twenty.

Think about it. We didn’t need a new way to hail a car. We just hated standing in the rain, guessing when a taxi would show up. We didn’t need a new way to buy groceries. We just got tired of losing an hour of our Sundays in the checkout line.

For small and medium businesses looking to build a digital product, this is incredibly liberating news. You don’t need a multi-million-dollar R&D budget to create a breakthrough. You just need to find the “too many tabs” problem in your industry and kill it.

The “Too Many Tabs” Problem

We live in an era of information fragmentation. If you want to buy home insurance, book a flight, or even find a decent local plumber, your screen probably looks like a digital graveyard of open browser tabs. You copy data from one site, paste it into a spreadsheet, flip back to compare, and pray the info hasn’t changed by the time you’re done.

Every extra tab a customer has to open is friction. And friction is a silent conversion killer.

The easiest way to innovate right now isn’t to build a brand-new service from scratch. It’s to build a lens that focuses existing, chaotic data into one clear, real-time view.

Shoveling the Snow: A Real-World Example

Take a look at the sports betting space. It’s a crowded, hyper-competitive industry, but it’s plagued by this exact tab-overload issue.

Bookmakers constantly drop “odds boosts” (promotional spikes in payout for specific games or players). For a casual bettor, finding these is a nightmare. You have to log into five different apps, navigate three sub-menus deep on each, and compare them before the game starts or the offer expires. It’s exhausting, so most people don’t bother.

A site called BookiesBonuses.com saw this frustration and built a tool called Boostfinder.

Instead of forcing users to play digital detective, they pulled all those fleeting, chaotic promos into a single, searchable dashboard. You can filter by sport, search for a specific player, and sort by which offer is expiring first.

They didn’t invent sports betting. They didn’t even invent odds boosts. They just built a better shovel for a task their audience was already doing manually.

The “Good Enough Today” Rule for SMEs

There is a massive trap here that trips up almost every SME founder: waiting for perfection.

When you decide to tackle customer friction, the temptation is to build a flawless, fully automated masterpiece right out of the gate. But that takes time and cash, two things small businesses usually run short on.

Boostfinder’s approach is a masterclass in realistic product development. They launched using a mix of automated data feeds and manual, human updates to fill the gaps. Is it 100% automated? Not yet. But is it useful to their users right now? Absolutely.

If you wait until your data pipeline is a work of art, a competitor who is comfortable with a “good enough” launch will have already captured your audience. Launch the messy version that solves the problem today. Optimize it tomorrow.

The Takeaway

If you’re staring at a blank whiteboard trying to figure out your next product move, close your eyes and think about your customer’s worst day at work.

• Where do they spend thirty minutes doing data entry?
• What questions do they ask your support team over and over again?
• What is the “fifteen open tabs” equivalent in your specific niche?

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to grease the axle. Find the friction, build a tool that deletes it, and your customers will happily pay you for the time you just handed back to them.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, offered fans a rare, personal glimpse into her family’s summer travels Thursday, sharing a carousel of photographs on Instagram documenting a European getaway that took the family from the beaches of Portugal to a poignant visit at Princess Diana’s childhood home in England.

Meghan, 44, posted the images alongside a simple caption, “Summer Holiday ☀️,” featuring her husband, Prince Harry, 41, and their two children, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5. The post marks one of the more extensive public photo collections the couple has shared of their children in recent months.

A Portuguese getaway confirmed

The photos confirmed months of speculation about the Sussexes’ connection to Melides, a coastal town south of Lisbon sometimes referred to as the “Hamptons of Portugal.” One image in the carousel shows a menu from O Melidense, a beachfront restaurant in the town. People magazine had reported in 2024 that the couple purchased a holiday home in the area, a report the couple has neither confirmed nor denied. Harry’s cousin, Princess Eugenie, and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, own a property nearby at the CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club in Comporta, a connection that had fueled earlier speculation about the family’s ties to the region.

The Portugal photos capture a range of relaxed family moments: Meghan and Harry in swimsuits on the beach with Archie and Lilibet splashing in the sea, Harry playfully tossing Lilibet into the air over a swimming pool, and the couple laughing together over a glass of red wine during what appeared to be a date-night dinner. Another image shows Archie seated in the cockpit of a plane alongside the pilots, wearing a captain’s hat as he reaches toward the controls, and a separate photo shows him holding a stick at sunset.

A visit to Princess Diana’s childhood home

Among the more emotionally resonant images in the collection was a photo taken at Althorp, the ancestral estate of the Spencer family and the childhood home of Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, who is buried on the grounds. The photo shows Harry walking across the estate with Archie and Lilibet, with both Harry and his son carrying bouquets of flowers.

The visit echoes a moment Harry described in his 2023 memoir, “Spare,” recounting bringing Meghan to visit his mother’s grave for the first time in 2022. Diana is buried on an island at the center of an ornamental lake known as The Round Oval, within Althorp’s Pleasure Garden. In the memoir, Harry wrote about the experience: “We hesitated, hugging, and then I went first. I placed flowers on the grave. Meg gave me a moment, and I spoke to my mother in my head, told her I missed her, asked her for guidance and clarity.” He recalled finding Meghan afterward “kneeling, eyes shut, palms against the stone,” and asking her what she had prayed for. “Clarity, she said. And guidance,” he wrote.

Part of a broader trip to the U.K.

The Portugal getaway preceded the family’s higher-profile visit to the United Kingdom earlier this month, during which Harry, Meghan and their children traveled to Highgrove House, King Charles’ private country residence in Gloucestershire, for a reunion with the King and Queen Camilla. The gathering marked only the third meeting between Harry and his father since Charles’ 2024 cancer diagnosis, and the first time the King had seen his grandchildren in person in more than four years.

The family’s arrival in the U.K. had been uncertain until the last minute, following a public back-and-forth between Harry and the palace over security arrangements and accommodations. Meghan ultimately did not attend several of Harry’s public engagements during the U.K. trip, including events marking the one-year countdown to the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham, citing security concerns.

Reflecting on the significance of the family reunion at Highgrove, royal author Catherine Mayer offered perspective to PEOPLE in an earlier exclusive cover story. “One of the strangenesses of the monarchy is that we are all encouraged to forget they’re human beings because they’re representatives of the institution,” Mayer said. “But at its heart it is just a family, and this family has gone through extraordinary upheavals. Whatever you think of the monarchy, this is a moment most of us wanted to see happen.”

A pattern of curated family glimpses

Thursday’s post continues a pattern the Sussexes have followed in sharing selective, carefully curated images of their children over the past several years, typically timed around holidays or significant family milestones rather than offered as a running public account of their day-to-day lives. Previous posts have included matching family photos for winter holidays and occasional glimpses of Archie and Lilibet at the family’s Montecito, California home, but full vacation photo collections of this scope have remained relatively rare.

With the family’s European travels now documented publicly, attention is likely to turn to whether Harry and Meghan continue offering similar glimpses into their children’s lives in the months ahead, particularly as royal watchers continue to track the broader state of relations between Harry and the rest of the royal family following this month’s reunion at Highgrove. For now, Thursday’s post offers fans a rare, unfiltered look at a family holiday that took the Sussexes from a quiet Portuguese coastal escape to one of the more emotionally significant stops in the Spencer family’s history.

The initial public offering of technical textile machinery and equipment-maker Lohia Corp continued to see decent investor interest during its second day of public bidding, with the Rs 1,101 crore maiden issue of the company being subscribed 43% so far on Friday.

The public issue received bids for more than 61 lakh shares, as against the offer size of 1.43 crore shares, according to data on NSE at 10.36 am. Retail Individual Investors (RII) lead the numbers, booking 80% of their reserved portion. Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIB) meanwhile have subscribed 43% of the portion kept for them, while that reserved for the Non Institutional Investors (NII) has been booked 18% so far.

Lohia Corp IPO GMP

The decent subscription numbers come despite muted grey market trends. The unlisted shares of Lohia Corp were trading with a grey market premium (GMP) of 3-8.5% over the IPO price, according to sites tracking the unofficial market. This has fallen from the 9-13% GMP the unlisted stock commanded after the price band was announced.

It is important to note the grey market is an unofficial platform. The actual listing premium may significantly differ from the grey market expectations.

Also read: Can Lohia Corp IPO deliver long-term growth for high risk investors?

About Lohia Corp IPO

Lohia Corp launched its IPO on Thursday to raise Rs 1,101 crore entirely through an Offer for Sale (OFS) of shares at a price of Rs 404-425 per share. This means that the IPO proceeds will go to the selling shareholders, while the company itself will not receive any funds from the offering.

The maiden public issue of the company will be open for bidding from July 23 to July 27. The share allotments are expected to be finalised on July 28, while the company’s shares are likely to make their debut on NSE and BSE on July 30.

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The IPO has a lot size of 35 shares. At the upper price band of Rs 425, retail investors will need to invest a minimum of Rs 14,875 for one lot. Equirus Capital Ltd and Motilal Oswal Investment Advisors Ltd are the book-running lead managers to the issue, while MUFG Intime India Pvt. Ltd. is the registrar.
Promoters participating in OFS include Raj Kumar Lohia (up to 167.28 lakh shares), Gaurav Lohia (up to 22.18 lakh shares), Amit Kumar Lohia (up to 9.2 lakh shares) and Ritu Lohia (up to 16.71 lakh shares). Other selling shareholders include Alok Kumar Lohia (up to 21.71 lakh shares), Anurag Lohia (up to 11.38 lakh shares) and Anuja Lohia (up to 10.85 lakh shares).

About Lohia Corp

Incorporated in 2023, Lohia Corp manufactures machinery and equipment used in the production of technical textiles, particularly for manufacturing polypropylene (PP) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) woven fabric and sacks.As of March 31, 2026, the company had an installed annual capacity of 240 tape extrusion lines, 13,800 circular looms, and 108,000 winders. Its product portfolio includes tape extrusion lines, circular looms, coating and lamination lines, printing and conversion machines, multifilament yarn machines, twister winders, monofilament extrusion lines, recycling machines, and related spare parts.

Lohia Corp financials

Lohia Corp reported a net profit of Rs 193 crore for the financial year which ended on March 31, 2026. This marked a 64% year-on-year (YoY) rise from Rs 118 crore net profit reported in FY25. Its revenue from operations, meanwhile, rose around 25% YoY to Rs 1,717 crore in FY26 from Rs 1,377 crore in FY25.

Also Read: Lohia Corp IPO opens on July 23: Here’s all you need to know

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)