International consultancy and construction company Mace Group won pitches for contracts to the value of £175 million with the help of the highly-regarded UK Training specialist Kissing With Confidence. This success is an endorsement of the specialist’s outstanding Pitchmaker programme, an intensive and immersive challenge designed to help business winners
Construction work on the 155,000 sq ft Etele Plaza in Budapest has begun. The mall, combining unique architectural solutions and digital services, will feature more fashion brands in one place than any other shopping centre in Hungary. The shopping and entertainment centre is expected to open in 2020. The area
China Hongqiao Group, the world’s largest aluminium producer has decided to expand its operations and improve overall capacities; a move in stark contrast to the reduced usage rate of aluminium and the weighed on prices for the light metal. As to why, we can only assume that the group maintains
International consultancy and construction company Mace Group won pitches for contracts to the value of £175 million with the help of the highly-regarded UK Training specialist Kissing With Confidence. This success is an endorsement of the specialist’s outstanding Pitchmaker programme, an intensive and immersive challenge designed to help business winners make the right emotional connection with the toughest of audiences. Mace Group’s business wins is the latest accomplishment in a period of rapid expansion for Kissing With Confidence, which has built a client portfolio that includes major banks, household name companies, Big Four firms and government departments. “Quantifying effect is a classic issue in training and the fact that Mace Group can identify £175 million of business which it has gained through our programmes is a major accolade,” said Russell Wardrop, co-founder and chief executive of Kissing With Confidence. “Nobody can guarantee that a client will win every pitch but Kissing With Confidence’s Pitchmaker programme has helped to gain business amounting to billions of pounds over the years.” Mace Group is currently a £1.97 billion company, operating in 21 sectors, such as higher education, from five global hubs. It has a concentrated focus on championing its people, whether as individuals or in teams. “There is no question we would not be where we are today as a business without the work Kissing With Confidence has done on our pitches. The results speak volumes,” said Terry Spraggett, business unit director at Mace Group. “There is a process, but it’s more than that. By the end of the session there is clarity, confidence and creativity.” “The hardest thing in the biggest pitches is deciding how robust to be, agreeing the line, then holding that line consistently from beginning to end. Kissing With Confidence facilitates that effortlessly, dealing assertively with the biggest of egos,” Terry added. “Then there is the skill in putting it all together, with an arm round the shoulder for some and a kick up the backside for others. Kissing With Confidence reaches out to everyone and makes them believe, especially those tasked with opening and closing.” Kissing With Confidence employs 12 people and it specialises in inspiring future leaders and developing effective and committed teams. It recently has embarked on a major sales growth campaign with the aim of taking turnover to £1.5 million.
Construction work on the 155,000 sq ft Etele Plaza in Budapest has begun. The mall, combining unique architectural solutions and digital services, will feature more fashion brands in one place than any other shopping centre in Hungary. The shopping and entertainment centre is expected to open in 2020. The area can be accessed in only 10 minutes from downtown Budapest via direct links as it is being constructed in the meeting point of a national/international railway station, underground line 4 that connects the area with the inner parts of the city and the entrance section of the M1 and M7 highways that lead towards Austria and Croatia. Estimated to attract around 40,000 customers every day from the capital, the suburbs and the further towns, Etele Plaza will have a modern design with 200 store units, a supermarket, restaurants, cafés, a multiplex cinema, a gym, a children’s play centre and a range of other services with nearly 1,300 parking lots. The exterior design of the shopping centre will be dominated by the largest curtain wall structure of Hungary – with a height and width of 30 meters – above the main entrance and the retracted metal boxes that jump out from the facades. In the internal area, along with the soft tracing, a nearly 200 square meter interactive LED display interface will bring the latest generation of the shopping centre design to Hungary. In the immediate vicinity of the eco-friendly shopping and entertainment centre, Futureal Group’s largest and iconic office development project, Budapest ONE Business Park is being built in Őrmező. Budapest ONE was one of the firsts in Hungary to obtain the international WELL Building Platinum Precertification, which focuses on the aspects having beneficial impacts on employees’ health and well-being while designing the buildings. “The construction of Budapest ONE and Etele Plaza will give a new momentum to the most important centre of South West Budapest,” said Tibor Tatár, CEO of Futureal.
China Hongqiao Group, the world’s largest aluminium producer has decided to expand its operations and improve overall capacities; a move in stark contrast to the reduced usage rate of aluminium and the weighed on prices for the light metal. As to why, we can only assume that the group maintains a positive outlook on the sector despite the bleak picture painted for many of its rivals, and with the group seeing a 39% annual increase up to 2015 despite production cuts, this would be of no real surprise. The expansion plans include an overall increase in capacity to 6m tonnes this year, building upon the already-considerable capacity of 5.19m achieved last year – this figure may vary depending on market conditions, of course, as the company’s Chief Executive illustrates: “If demand is good, we will stick with the plan. If not, we can slow down new capacity expansion or even suspend it.” It is predicted that some $2.3bn will be spent on the capacity improvements, which will see the refurbishment and retrofitting of some of the company’s coal-fired power plants in line with China’s new regulation for carbon emissions. Of course, with one of the primary reasons for the success of Chinese aluminium smelting revolving around the provision of cheap power and production costs, how these changes will affect China Honquiao is uncertain at this point. Hongquiao is also one of the few smelters in China to have set up the capacity to purchase excess inventory, a move which has been noted to support aluminium prices. Critics, however have cited that this has been unable to resolve the growing supply and demand imbalance of aluminium however, and with the group increasing overall production capacity, this imbalance is only expected to increase in severity. Only time will tell how this move will pay off for China Hongqiao, yet, it is still great to see some organisations maintaining an optimistic view of the market and determinedly pushing for growth.