Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

Image of the week:

Riot police raise their shields as they prepare tear gas grenades during clashes with protesters in Syntagma Square in Athens during a 24-hour strike on Wednesday.

The Greek police fired tear gas at young Greeks armed with petrol bombs, after tens of thousands took to the streets in a demonstration against planned spending cuts of some €11.5 billion.

Meanwhile, police in Spain fired rubber bullets outside the parliament building in Madrid as the country awaited the announcement of further austerity measures. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/ Reuters

The Lexicon: Dark Stores

In a quickfire mind association game, the phrase “dark stores” is statistically most likely to be followed by the words “Abercrombie Fitch”, “Hollister” and “is there a power outage in here?”

In fact, this is a retail industry term for supermarkets that are not open to the public and their pesky “where are the eggs being shelved this week?” questions, but are used purely to service internet grocery orders from the vicinity.

Tesco already has four dark stores in London, and indicated this week that it was opening two more in England and was scouting for other locations in highly populated areas where online shopping has displaced trolley pushing.

The List: Eggs in one basket

Rovio Entertainment, developer of the gaming hit Angry Birds and its associated merchandise, has launched a new spin-off game called Bad Piggies. Will it bring home the bacon or will Rovio join the list of companies that tend to rely on one big smash hit – with mixed results?

1 Bloomsbury Publishing:The publisher's pre-tax profits dropped almost 40 per cent in 2009, the first year in which it was forced to adjust to a Harry Potter-less existence.

2 WD-40:The DIY lubricant spray is made by a company called, er, the WD-40 company, which trades happily enough on the Nasdaq.

3 Spanx:The control underwear firm has lots of products – including lines aimed at men who want to "firm and flatten". But most slink into the basic category of "shapewear".

4 Kodak:The digital pioneer chose to ignore its own advances and focus on the one thing it was certain it was good at: photographic film. It turns out everyone else had started to ignore that.

5 RTÉ 2FM:The radio station saw its listenership plummet after the death of its star performer, Gerry Ryan, in 2010, with the slot losing a third of its listeners in a year.

In numbers:Hello Hailo

1,600

More than this number of Dublin taxi drivers have signed up with Hailo, the smartphone app for hiring taxis, which is advertising at billboards and bus stops around the city.

300,000

Number of times the app has been downloaded in London, where Hailo has been operating since last year. Rothco, the agency running the advertising campaign in Dublin, says it expects a “rapid rise” in downloads here between now and Christmas.

$17 million

Finance raised by Hailo in March, with investment sources including Silicon Valley venture capitalists Accel Partners and the London-headquartered Atomico. The funds are being used to finance its expansion in a number of North American cities.

Getting to know: Tom Enders

German national Tom Enders, the chief executive of EADS, was busy in the Bundestag on Wednesday trying to persuade German politicians that the defence firm’s proposed merger with BAE Systems won’t be bad for Germany, which controls 22 per cent of EADS and must approve the deal.

The proposed 60:40 ratio of EADS to BAE shareholders in the merged entity was not a split that was “simply hatched over a beer”, but had been “prepared in a very professional way”, said Enders, who is known for being direct and uncompromising.

But his bid to convince the Bundestag committee that Germany would retain some influence in the company were not entirely successful, with Germany’s deputy economy minister, Hans-Joachim Otto, concluding it was “not just a question of how but whether” the deal should go ahead.