Lockdown restrictions have cemented the position of ‘in home’ entertainment as the fastest growing leisure market in the UK, with consumer spending on music, gaming and video growing by 18.3% year-on-year to reach £9.3bn in 2020.
Figures from the Entertainment Retail Association’s (ERA) latest Yearbook showed that while the headline
entertainment spending growth rate for music, video and games is the highest recorded in the UK, the overall
leisure sector – ranging from hobbies, sports and eating out to holidays abroad – shrank by 29.1% thanks to the pandemic restrictions.
The combined music, video and games markets have grown 38% since 2016, according to the ERA, driven primarily by the growth of digital services.
In 2020, Sheffield Hallam University’s Leisure Industries Centre, records that while ‘in home’ leisure spending of all types grew to an overall £77.7bn in 2020, ‘away from home’ expenditure including eating out, events and holidays declined to £154.1bn.
Gaming remains the largest single entertainment sector, accounting for almost half of aggregate sales (48%), followed by video (35%) and music (17%).
However, video was the fastest growing digital sector in 2020, where sales soared by 37.7% to £2.9bn, helped by the growth of subscription services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.
Kim Bayley, chief executive of the ERA, said: “The entertainment market was already growing without coronavirus, but with much of the leisure sector shuttered due to lockdown, music, video and games were in the right place at the right time.”
Online food delivery firm Deliveroo has confirmed plans to list on the London Stock Exchange in a move that could value the company at around £7bn, based on previous fundraisings, making it one of the largest London listings in years, despite recording an underlying loss in 2020.
Founded in the UK in 2013 by chief executive Will Shu, Deliveroo currently has around six million customers globally and works with around 115,000 restaurants, takeaways and grocery stores across 800 locations in 12 markets around the world.
The company revealed it had increased its total transactions by 64.3% in 2020, from £2.5bn in 2019 to £4.1bn a year later. However, it acknowledged that while it also grew its gross profit last year, the company overall produced an underlying loss for the year of £223.7m.
Deliveroo noted that given the significant growth potential in the online food delivery sector, the IPO would help it to deliver its ambitious growth plans.
Irish aircraft leasing firm AerCap Holdings has confirmed it is in talks with General Electric (GE) regarding its GE Capital Aviation Services (GECAS) business, which could create the largest aircraft leasing company in the world.
Aercap stated that the outcome of the talks had “yet to be determined” and that there was no guarantee an agreement would be reached.
However, should the world’s two largest aircraft leasing firms unite, it would create a business estimated to be worth around $30bn, with more than 2,000 jets at its disposal.
In 2020 around 49.6% of the world’s active aircraft were operated under an operating lease, and with air travel particularly hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, this figure could increase should struggling airlines become reliant on leasing rather than buying aircraft for added flexibility during the recovery.
