The new embassy would replace a brand new building estimated to have cost about $270 million to construct, which had to be demolished in 1989 after its walls and ceilings were found to be riddled with electronic surveillance devices. “It was very complicated because it had very stringent measures. We had to work in very specialised spaces in my office and then I had to learn all the security protocols on top of [learning] all the basics of how you run a project,” Klumpp Williams, now 68, said.

Her efforts were noticed. Having climbed the ranks at HOK in the intervening years while leading other landmark projects such as the FBI Laboratory headquarters in Virginia, she is now running the company alongside Eli Hoisington, her co-chief executive.

Their appointment, formally announced last April, followed the death of Bill Hellmuth, their long-serving predecessor, aged 69. In her role as managing principal of the Washington DC office, Klumpp Williams had worked alongside Hellmuth for 30 years and still seemed shaken by his death. “We knew each other very well,” she said. “He was the designer in the Washington office [and] we were a team. The whole thing is incredibly sad. Bill was very vibrant and a whirlwind of energy who loved working in design and loved working with our clients.”

It was Hellmuth’s idea to partner Klumpp Williams and Hoisington to lead HOK. “When he got ill, he came to me and he said, ‘I have this idea. I think it might be a good one.’ And that was to team Eli, because he’s a designer, with me on the management side. Mine and Eli’s goal was to then make everything seamless. We want everybody to realise, ‘You’re in good hands because the leadership group that has been leading you is still in place and we are just fine.’ ”

She says having a co-pilot will hopefully make her less likely to burn out. “If you read statistics on how long CEOs last, it’s about five years. The co-CEO role allows us to split the workload and Eli still gets to do what he likes to do, which is design buildings and work with his practice. I still get to do what I like, which is to manage my region. And we split travel, which helps with work-life balance.”

Female chief executives in the architecture world are still something of a rarity. Research from the trade magazine dezeen in 2022 found that only three of the world’s hundred biggest architecture firms were run by women and only two had management teams that were more than 50 per cent female. “It’s great to be a role model for all the women in the company,” Klumpp Williams said. She said she was asked by an employee recently whether she had any female role models when she was rising through the ranks. The answer? A resounding no.

“It was very male dominated. There were women architects but the problem at that time, which I think has changed, was that women had children and then they never came back. If women designers didn’t get the kind of forward movement with their careers that they wanted, they got frustrated and left, either to open their own firm, or to work in much smaller businesses. And sometimes they just changed industries altogether.”

Klumpp Williams, who has two children aged 20 and 22, said she was often asked by more junior women in the firm about how to juggle a career and family life. “You need a supportive spouse, which I was lucky to have, and one of my attributes that helped me a lot through my career is I’m very organised. And I’m very, very good with time management. So I’m careful on how I schedule my days. You won’t find me talking in the kitchen over a cup of tea for an hour: I don’t have time for that or I’m going to be working overtime. I don’t want to still be doing this at eight o’clock at night. I want it done.”

Klumpp Williams was in London for five days and as part of her trip visited the Crick Institute, one of Europe’s largest biomedical and research centres, which was designed by HOK and opened in 2016. She said science and technology spaces were a growing part of the firm’s work in the UK. For companies and organisations operating in this space, having the right building with the right facilities helped them to increase “speed to market” of game-changing breakthroughs such as vaccines. “They’re coming up with solutions to help the world’s challenges.” Many of the firm’s current projects are under wraps but she said she was proud of the Advanced Research Cluster they recently opened at Glasgow University.

One area of the business that continues to struggle is commercial buildings work, which has yet to recover from the pandemic. This is true across their global offices, especially in America, she said. “We have the post-pandemic effect of people who don’t really want to go back to the office and very high vacancy rates, so that industry will come back at some point but I suspect it’s not next year.” She said HOK’s strength was its “diversity of market and diversity of geographies: when one sector’s down another sector is booming”.

One such boom area is music and sport venues: HOK is the architect behind the recent £50 million renovation of the AO Arena in Manchester, which extended its capacity to 23,000. Klumpp Williams has a soft spot for sports stadium projects and said one of her favourite projects was designing and building the Nationals Park baseball stadium, which opened in Washington DC in 2008.

It is particularly memorable because she had pushed for it to be built to a high level of sustainability specifications, despite that not originally being in the plans, or the budget. She had to work with the builder, planners and financiers to get it over the line and they ended up with a stadium built to LEED Silver standards (LEED certification is the world’s most widely used green building rating system). It was America’s first professional sports venue to get the stamp of approval.

The day it opened was a memory that will endure for Klumpp Williams. “On opening day with 40,000 screaming fans it was like, ‘Oh boy. Finally, baseball is back in Washington DC and all these people are so happy.’ ”

Mobico Group, which told shareholders last October that it had appointed advisers to offload the unit, said that the sale was “progressing in line with expectations”.

Ignacio Garat, chief executive, said that addressing the group’s leverage “remains a priority and in addition to commencing the formal sale process for North American School Bus, we have identified new organic debt reduction initiatives that will deliver in the second half”.

Analysts at Bank of America have estimated that the unit, known for its yellow buses, has an enterprise value of £400 million, while Jefferies expects the disposal “to prove a material positive catalyst”.

Analysts at Peel Hunt, however, said that they remained concerned that the value realised from disposal of the business, after fees and provisions, “would allow the group to deliver sufficiently”.

News of the sale, together with what City analysts dubbed a “robust interim performance”, lifted Mobico’s shares 10¼p, or 17.7 per cent, to close at a five-month high of 68¼p.

The reaction suggests that there is light at the end of the tunnel for the FTSE 250 company, whose performance has been marred by a pandemic-induced transport shutdown followed by industrial action, soaring costs, staff shortages, reporting delays and profit warnings that have caused its shares to crash more than 80 per cent over the past five years.

Mobico posted a pre-tax loss of £1.5 million in the six months to the end of June, a marked improvement on the £41.9 million loss it recorded in the same period the year before. This was helped by a 5.4 per cent increase in revenues to £1.65 billion, from £1.57 billion.

The company began in 1972, when the state-owned National Bus Company consolidated its various services under the National brand, which became National Express two years later. It listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1992.

Until last summer, Mobico was known as National Express, the brand it is best known for in Britain. As well as its school bus business in the United States, it also owns Alsa, a Spanish train and bus operator, and a German rail division.

Alsa delivered a record half-year performance as operating profits jumped 57.1 per cent to £79.8 million, which Mobico said “underpinned the overall growth of the group”.

In America, revenues rose 3.8 per cent to £609.3 million, while in the UK, sales improved by 7.7 per cent to £307.3 million due to an 8 per cent increase in passengers and a jump in bus fares. Bus ticket prices in some parts of the UK climbed 12.5 per cent in July 2023, and rose again at the end of June this year.

However, in Germany, where Mobico is the second-largest rail operator in North Rhine-Westphalia, revenues fell 12.5 per cent to £120.2 million in the period. The company blamed the decline on “energy market volatility, industry-wide labour disruption to the train driver market and persistent levels of inflation in Germany.”

The FTSE 100 retailer majority-owned by Mike Ashley, is under offer to buy Fremlin Walk, an outdoor shopping centre, in Maidstone, from M&G Real Estate.

The 350,000 sq ft scheme, which opened in 2005, is home to tenants including H&M, Boots, JD Sports and Pandora and generates an annual gross income of £4.3 million. In the autumn, a multi-brand anchor shop, which will be occupied by Frasers, Flannels and Sports Direct, store is to open.

• Why is Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group snapping up shopping centres?

M&G acquired Fremlin Walk for £110 million from Legal & General Property in November 2014. It was put up for sale with an asking price of £25 million.

Ashley, 59, opened his first shop, Mike Ashley Sports, in Maidenhead in 1982 with the help of a £10,000 family loan. It has since grown to become one of the UK’s leading retail groups, with more than 40 consumer brands and 1,500 stores in the UK around the world.

It has been active in the retail property market over the past couple of years. Last month the company bought Frenchgate shopping centre in Doncaster. It follows the £58 million purchase of The Mall shopping centre in Luton and £30 million purchase of the Overgate shopping centre in Dundee last year, as well as Junction 32, an outlet centre in Castleford, West Yorkshire.

At the time Frasers, in which Ashley owns a 73 per cent stake, said those acquisitions reflected “its confidence in the future of the UK high street”.

More recently, the retail powerhouse has explored a bid for Meadowhall in Sheffield, which ended up being sold to Norway’s oil fund for £360 million, and is in talks with the Crown Estate to take full ownership of the 630,000 sq ft Princesshay shopping centre in Exeter.

Michael Murray, Ashley’s son-in-law who took over as chief executive of Frasers in May 2022, told The Times last month: “Really, the opportunity for Frasers is to create anchor department stores and shopping centres where Frasers can take a floor which is a lot more productive, say 30,000 to 50,000 square feet, and then we can utilise the other floors for other areas of our business such as Flannels, Sports Direct or the gym business, creating a more productive and meaningful destination for our business.”

The buying spree comes at a time when shopping centres are at a low point in the cycle, with values having fallen sharply in recent years amid the rise of online shopping and the subsequent collapse of some of the country’s largest retailers, including BHS, Debenhams and Topshop, all of which were key tenants for landlords. However, there is a feeling that the decade-long slide in retail property values may be over.

Frasers declined to comment.

“It is a fun business,” he says. “When you normally have lunch with people they are often very po-faced and say, ‘I’ll just have water’. At least when you go out with people involved with brewing and pubs they have a pint and then usually another one, and I enjoy that a lot.”

Clarkson added brewing to his portfolio in 2021 when he teamed up with a family-owned brewer called The Cotswold Brewing Company to launch Hawkstone, using barley grown on his 1,000-acre Diddly Squat farm ten miles away and his media profile to market it.

• Explore the full list of companies on this year’s Sunday Times 100 — plus interviews, company profiles and more

The brewery was set up by Richard and Emma Keene in 2004 and in 2021 they sold a significant minority stake to the entrepreneur Johnny Hornby, the founder of the marketing agency The&Partnership, and Clarkson. The pair have since increased their investment, with Emma Keene selling her shares following the transition to the Hawkstone brand.

Clarkson’s fellow directors and shareholders include the chairman Hugh van Cutsem, a family friend of Prince William and Prince Harry who helped Clarkson to hunt deer in the third series of Clarkson’s Farm. Since then sales have rocketed, hitting £7.8 million in the year to March and earning Hawkstone the mantle of Britain’s fastest-growing privately owned brewery.

Contrary to recent reports, Richard Keene remains a significant shareholder and retains a vital role in the business, Hornby says. “He continues to have a role overseeing beer quality and special brews,” he says. “But after 20 years of hard graft Emma is going to move on to other things.”

Unaware that Hawkstone is now served at about 500 pubs across the country, I mention that I saw it on tap at the Swan Inn in the village of Swinbrook, west Oxfordshire. “We want to go a bit further afield than Swinbrook. We are in Oddington, Charlbury. In fact we have carpet-bombed this whole area,” Clarkson says. “I love Cotswold beer; I’ve lived here a long time. But instead of it being available in 20 pubs in this area, it is going to be available in 200,000 pubs, stretching all the way from the Pacific Northwest to Brisbane. That is my plan.” It might sound like hyperbole but last week Elon Musk took a sip on a yacht while in France. “As beer goes, it tastes great,” was the verdict.

Owen Jenkins is Hawkstone’s managing director, of nine months’ standing, and laughs as Clarkson reveals his ambition for global domination. Is 200,000 pubs Jenkins’s official target? “It is. He knows it is,” Clarkson says. Jenkins parries: “My targets change all the time.” Cue more chortling, their mood helped by having tasted a new 4 per cent, flavoured cider that morning. “It’s got blackberries and blackcurrants in it, as well as apples,” Clarkson says. “It is exactly what you would expect to drink if you are fine with a children’s party. You just go, ‘That’s the taste of my childhood, but with a buzz that I didn’t get from the Ribena I was drinking when I was five.’”

His original name for the lager was Lager McLagerface, until he was steered away from that thought. “In my mind we were going to be … high-volume, low-cost beer,” he explains. When he found out more about the costs involved in brewing, the price was such that the lager would have to be set at the premium end of the market. “I thought Lager McLagerface was a great name until somebody pointed out, ‘You do realise it will be priced at the same point as the premium ones.’” Instead it is named after a neolithic standing stone located close to Diddly Squat.

• Jeremy Clarkson sets sights on Cotswolds pub near Diddly Squat

Jenkins was previously national accounts director at FTSE 250 listed C&C Group, home to Magners cider and Tennent’s lager among others. Asked why he made the leap to a small craft brewer, Clarkson interrupts: “We held his children hostage.” “I’m allowed them back in three months,” Jenkins jokes, before trying to be more serious: “It is one of those opportunities that you don’t get often in your career. What we are really thinking about is becoming the premium British lager. I don’t think there is any real premium British lager out there at the moment.”

After a career in TV, Clarkson now has interests in farming, brewing and even horse racing, but he still doesn’t see himself as a good businessman. “Farming and the pub trade … I think I’m going into cinemas next. I don’t think you can find more difficult businesses than those three at the moment,” he quips. “I don’t understand anything about the [brewing] business. I don’t know what ebit means [earnings before interest and taxes] and I don’t want to know. But I do enjoy the simplistic nature of growing the barley and putting it into the beer and then drinking the beer.”

Clarkson is Hawkstone’s chief publicist, and a very effective one at that. “Ultimately it is just a really good lager. That is why it sells. People taste it and go, ‘That’s really nice and we are helping British farming by drinking it.’ Where is the downside, apart from it being a bit more expensive than Carling?” The brewery has launched a range of new lagers, including one with only 0.3 per cent alcohol content, called Spa Lager. Clarkson memorably described it in one post on social media as “a wellness lager”. “I genuinely love Spa. I know Lucky Saint is good, but we are at least as good as they are.”

Clarkson’s co-star in the Amazon series, Kaleb Cooper, lent his name to a Hawkstone Cider that launched in April 2022. It suffered a setback in July last year when a batch that was overfermented and prone to explode had to be recalled. Clarkson handled it well, Hornby says. “There is an old adage that says there is no such thing as bad PR: cider sales have gone up fourfold.”

Clarkson adds: “It was a hell of a thing to go through, but I think our refreshing honesty went down well with customers. I put my hands up and said, ‘We have completely cocked up here’, and sales, as Johnny said, went up. But we won’t be doing it again as a long-term strategy.”

Instead, buying pubs might be a next step. “We are looking,” Clarkson says. “There’s no shortage of options, I can tell you that. There is a worryingly large amount of pubs for sale, and even the ones that aren’t, owners will literally bite your arm off when you walk in and ask if they might be.”

In the third series of Clarkson’s Farm, the harvest is poor, with the barley crop destined for the brewery falling below the quality standard required. But even annoying rain clouds have a silver lining, Clarkson insists. “It is good news for other farmers really: we’re buying barley from them because our barley harvest was shocking,” he says. “The one farm in Britain that doesn’t need any help really is Diddly Squat, as it is obviously funded through other means. So it is lovely to think we can build up a brand that isn’t using Italian barley, or German barley or Spanish barley; where farmers can benefit from selling their stuff to us.”

• Jeremy Clarkson on his farm: ‘Everything has gone wrong’

As Hawkstone expands, it plans to source from UK growers more widely. “We’d love to talk to anyone who is growing hops in this country. If we could get hops that are suitable, it would be absolutely brilliant,” Clarkson says.

Having recently signed up to lead a syndicate of local investors in a grey four-year-old racehorse named Hawkstonian, farmer Clarkson is looking to breed cattle again on Diddly Squat. “I have just bought an Aberdeen Angus bull, which is far more exciting than a horse and has considerably larger testicles,” he says. “He is only a baby at the moment but he will be one and a half tonnes. Bigger than a hippo. I have met his brothers and they are gigantic.”

With trenchant views on how the government should do more to support farmers, Clarkson is less familiar with the levers that could make life a little easier for brewers. Jenkins steps in: “I haven’t seen any responses regarding duty or anything like that [from the political parties]. We want to grow this business quickly. We are in 500 pubs at the moment and we want to have grown that number significantly in the next two to three years, as well as into groceries and also expanding internationally. We’d be hugely enthusiastic about anything that can support the business on its growth journey, whether that’s through relaxing regulations or making it easier to trade.”

It’s always a dilemma. Do you hold on to your assets for a rainy day, or pass them on to the next generation, ideally in a tax-efficient manner?

We are lucky that we can make tax-free unlimited gifts. However, a gift of assets that have increased in value will trigger the dreaded capital gains tax on the gain. So, while you may potentially save on inheritance tax, you lose out on capital gains tax.

That said, at the moment a trading family business qualifies for relief from inheritance tax.

Why pass on the business if it is exempt from inheritance tax?

Relief from inheritance tax is usually claimed only when you die. However, you can gift the business assets without incurring inheritance tax if you live for seven years after gifting, or you can transfer the business assets into a trust, which enables the relief to be claimed while you are alive.

This needs consideration and forward planning, especially if the government decides to abolish the relief or to cap the relief. If this is not done in sufficient time before you die, it will not help the tax bill to have your business in your estate.

The other benefit of a trading business is that it qualifies for what is called business holdover relief, allowing you to pass on your business to your children without incurring capital gains tax.

The downside of this route is the fact that it is a deferral of tax and ultimately the children will have to pay the tax instead in the future. Again, it’s a gamble. Will the government keep business relief from inheritance tax as it is, or will it change?

It’s not just about tax

Gifting your business means losing control. If you want to retain control of the business, it is worth considering the use of a family trust, whereby the business is held on discretionary terms for the children and protected from changes in their position, for example divorce or bankruptcy, and is run by you as the trustees.

Don’t forget there is also an exemption for inheritance tax for your spouse

It means the tax bill doesn’t hit until the second death for a married couple. There is an opportunity to pass on the business after the first death tax-free. This is because any tax liability connected with the increase in value of the deceased’s share of the business disappears when they die. Assets are inherited at a new base value for capital gains tax.

In the morbid way of things, the perfect solution is therefore for the survivor to inherit the business with the benefit of spouse exemption so that there is no inheritance tax and then to gift it on to the children free of capital gains tax. If the survivor lives for seven years from the onward gift, the succession planning has succeeded without any capital gains tax or inheritance tax falling due.

Other non-business assets may have gains and the only way to pass them on is to pay capital gains tax. This is not necessarily unattractive if the present rate of capital gains tax is only going to go up.

It is worth acting now

Any change in capital gains tax is likely to be effective from the day of the autumn statement, which is October 30. Transferring assets can be carried out quickly and it is possible to effect the date of the gift by a simple declaration while following up with the formalities more slowly. For instance, you can declare that you hold a rental property for your children as of today’s date but update the Land Registry in due course.

There is much speculation around the future of inheritance tax generally. It is accepted that the reliefs, bands and rates are unlikely to become more favourable.

With this in mind, reducing your estate to the assets you need to live out your life in the manner you want to without holding on to assets you do not need is the sensible approach.

This must be balanced with the need to consider your children’s position and whether loading their estates with additional assets is wise.

Camilla Bishop is a partner at solicitors’ firm Keystone Law

“I found that I didn’t trust my gut instinct. I went from a 200-person company to a 5,000-person company. I saw the way they were doing things and I just felt, how could that possibly be the way you do things. But this is LinkedIn, a hugely successful company so [I thought] it must be me. As an entrepreneur, I’ve never worked at a company that’s big and I just don’t really know how to do it.”

After a few months of grappling with his self-confidence, Glass attended a workshop run by Andy Puddicombe, a former monk who founded Headspace with Richard Pierson in 2010. He’d been brought in by Jeff Weiner, then the chief executive of LinkedIn, who had become an early convert to mindfulness. Thinking it might help, Glass downloaded the Headspace app while Puddicombe was still mid-flow, and in the weeks that followed started a daily routine of meditating for ten, then 15 minutes.

Its effects, he says, were transformative. “It’s changed my life as a CEO. It’s changed my life as a husband and changed my life as a parent. Because now I feel like I have the ability to note these feelings but I don’t let them consume me,” Glass says. He adds that Headspace employees have a Slack channel full of similar tales of how mindfulness and meditation have helped people to overcome setbacks. I tell him my own story: a hormonal imbalance after giving birth to my daughter seven years ago led the doctor to prescribe antidepressants to deal with crippling anxiety. I decided not to cash it in, instead opting for acupuncture and several Headspace sessions a day until the anxiety passed.

Although it might feel like we have reached “peak mindfulness” in recent years, Glass says there is still “a lot of work to do” to persuade people to invest in their mental health as much as they do their physical health. Headspace is just entering its busiest period of the year. The number of mental health crises peaks around Christmas and early January, Glass says, and there’s also an increasing number of people who start meditating as part of new year’s resolutions to take better care of themselves.

“It’s become far more accepted and, frankly, cool to talk about mental health in the younger population. But we still have quite a bit of stigma and a fear of talking about mental health as you get into the older population and some sub-segments of the population [such as] certain minority populations.”

This is despite the need for better mental health support never being greater, Glass says. “When the pandemic came we saw a doubling overnight of the mental health need … and the acuity went up as well.” The pandemic has waned but “the mental health need really hasn’t”. Glass puts that down to the macroeconomic climate as well as the continuation of home working, despite the lifting of Covid restrictions.

“The world has become far more complicated. We’re in a difficult inflationary environment so people are worried about the state of their finances. The political environment is complicated. And nobody’s getting enough sleep, but particularly younger generations aren’t getting enough sleep. There are way too many screens. And the displacement that took place during the pandemic, the move to remote work, the change in lifestyle, and now the uncertainty whether you’re going to be forced back into the office — all of that has affected mental health,” says Glass, adding that feelings of isolation tend to be more prevalent among younger members of staff.

“For thousands of years throughout human history, we’ve met our friends at work. A lot of who we are and the interactions we have, happen at work. So I do think that there is a loneliness, particularly for those who aren’t in families yet, to not go into an office, to being at home all day,” he says.

He said that it would soon become clear that those who have remained visible in the office get promoted more quickly than their peers who work from home.

“We know that people are more likely to get promoted when they come into an office … I strongly suspect that we’re going to see the longitudinal data that people who spent time in the office early in their career are going to ­advance more quickly,” he said.

“You learn by watching, you learn by interacting. If you’re at home your whole career, it’s going to be tricky ­to learn … and [make] the random ­connections that you have throughout your life.“Those things are important to how our careers develop.”

Questions have been asked about the health of Headspace’s own business this year after it raised $105 million in debt financing, rather than selling more equity, this summer. Glass says he opted for debt because “equity is just very expensive” at the moment, and debt was cheaper. He claims the money is merely a financial buffer for the lossmaking company. “We want to make sure that we can weather any storm,” he says, adding that he doesn’t know “what 2024 is going to bring. One of the complexities of this period is the uncertainty.”

Glass still expects Headspace to become profitable in 2024, helped by his decision this year to trim its workforce by about 10 per cent to 800 employees. “Because of the uncertainty and the climate, because of the slowdown in consumer purchasing, 2023 was a harder year than we thought it was going to be and we decided to make those changes.”

He also said that the cuts were a natural consequence of a merger two years earlier with Ginger, a healthcare company. At the time the merged group was valued at more than $3 billion. “Mergers are complicated because you’re taking two different groups of people, two difficult cultures … and you’re trying to bring it together. It’s why if you look at the statistics most mergers fail,” Glass says. Where Headspace was a scrappy tech start-up, bringing mindfulness and meditation content to consumers’ fingertips, Ginger was “a healthcare company. It’s a medical provider, it’s a hospital. Those are two very different things,” he says.

While the group is best known for the Headspace app, which has had 100 million downloads, 60 per cent of its revenues come from 4,000 business customers, who offer their staff Headspace and other mental health support, including behavioural health coaching, therapy and psychiatry services. Glass expects business-to-business sales to increase to 75 per cent “in the next few years”, which he says means that Headspace is less exposed to consumer spending.

He has not ruled out taking the company public in the coming years, as it would boost brand awareness, but will not be drawn on when. “If we want to be the brand people think about when they think about mental health, being public probably helps,” he says.

The American carmaker said on Wednesday that it would no longer manufacture its planned three-row of seats electric SUV and would instead make a hybrid model.

Ford said the scrapped model would not have been able to turn a profit in the first year after launch, citing EV buyers who are more cost-conscious than early adopters, while scores of new models are due to hit the market over the next 12 months, putting pressure on prices.

Slowing growth in demand for EVs and increased competition has caused carmakers including Ford, General Motors and others to delay or cancel new models. Consumers have shown caution around swapping their petrol-engine vehicles for EVs because of higher prices and unreliable charging infrastructure.

Ford expects its change in strategy will cost up to $1.9 billion, including a $400 million write-down of assets for the previously planned three-row SUVs, and additional costs of up to $1.5 billion.

Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, has said that one of the main solutions to slowing EV sales growth was bringing the production costs around those models down. That is a key goal for the future health of the company, which is expected to lose up to $5.5 billion on EVs this year alone.

John Lawler, Ford vice-chairman and chief financial officer, said: “We’re committed to creating long-term value by building a competitive and profitable business.

“With pricing and margin compression, we’ve made the decision to adjust our product and technology roadmap and industrial footprint to meet our goal of reaching positive earnings before interest and and tax within the first 12 months of launch for all new models.”

The company said it would reduce the percentage of its annual capital expenditure allocated towards purely electric vehicles from 40 per cent to 30 per cent.

Ford is planning to launch a new electric commercial van in 2026, as business customers show stronger appetite for EVs. “For them [commercial customers], vehicles, software and charging solutions are tools, and they want the best tools for the job and their bottom line,” Ford said.

However, the successor to Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric truck has been delayed to the second half of 2027 from an initially planned 2025 launch, as the company hopes to take advantage of lower-cost battery technology.

The Bernstein analyst Daniel Roeska said in a research note: “The criticism Ford will have to face is why its product plan was not more flexible from the beginning, why it has been slow to implement these changes, and why investors will need to wait for a comprehensive update until next year.”

Garrett Nelson, an analyst with CFRA Research, said: “This is just the latest announcement from a traditional automaker to moderate EV growth plans in favour of hybrids. It’s largely a response to consumer demand, as the US hybrid market is both larger and growing faster than the pure-battery EV market.”

Ford’s shares rose $0.17, or 1.6 per cent, to close at $10.85 in New York on Wednesday.

The supermarket chain also announced plans to add an extra 100 convenience stores over the next five years in a £1 billion investment.

It said a quarter of its existing 320 stores would be revamped so that they offered chilled beer and wine cabinets, dedicated charcuterie stations and hot chicken and salad sections.

The chain, which is owned by the John Lewis Partnership, also plans to launch new partnerships with high street food retailers.

The first revamped store, in Finchley Road, north London, opened on Wednesday offering a branded Crosstown Doughnuts pop up and a Hot Wok for customers to take home hot and freshly made Asian cuisine.

The refurbished stores will also have “on demand” grocery hatches that are open longer than the stores themselves so that Uber and Deliveroo drivers can pick up orders for local customers.

Waitrose said the re-working of stores was part of a new plan to focus on its “food-loving customers and what’s important to them”. It added that its new service counters would offer customers “that extra personal touch”.

The partnership said it planned to open 100 new convenience shops and up to four large supermarkets over the next five years, creating about 3,200 jobs.

The first new Little Waitrose store in six years will open in Hampton Hill, southwest London, later this year. A second is expected to open in Greater London early next year. At present only about 45 of its retail premises are convenience stores.

The retailer said that it would also continue to invest in technology to ensure there were no longer gaps on shelves after IT problems and a warehouse fire led to stock issues in 2022 and last year.

Waitrose has begun to win back market share after a difficult period in which it came under pressure from rivals, including a resurgent Marks & Spencer, and shoppers looking for cheaper options amid the cost of living crisis.

The supermarket chain recorded its strongest growth since November 2023 in the three months to August 4, according to market share data from Kantar.

Jason Tarry, the former Tesco boss, will join as chairman of the John Lewis Partnership next month, taking on one of the biggest and most high-pressure jobs in British retail.

• Who is Jason Tarry, the new John Lewis chairman?

He will replace Dame Sharon White, the outgoing chairwoman, and joins at a difficult time. The group has been battling mounting debts and tumbling profits and has struggled to compete against its nimbler, online rivals.

White, who joined in 2020, having never worked in retail before, has recently steered the company back into the black but has been criticised for focusing on non-retail areas such as housing and financial services.

Tarry is expected to oversee a return to prioritising retail after the partnership vowed in March to focus “unashamedly” on investing in its core retail business.

Nish Kankiwala, chief executive of John Lewis, said the partnership’s “retail-driven plan” was beginning to gain traction and its “growing number of shoppers and increasing customer satisfaction scores are clear indicators of its success”.

He added: “This is a result of our unrelenting focus on improving the customer experience of our retail businesses, taking the love that exists for both brands and making sure customers are rewarded with better shops, the highest quality products, and the best service.”

The billionaire angel investor told students in a recorded discussion that the “amount of money being thrown around” in artificial intelligence is “mind-boggling”. “I’m talking to the big companies, and the big companies are telling me that they need $10 billion, $20 billion, $50 billion, $100 billion.”

He said: “If $300 billion is all going to Nvidia, you know what to do in the stock market,” before quickly adding: “That’s not a stock recommendation, I’m not licensed.”

Nvidia’s growth keeps coming. Later this month, analysts expect the company to announce 112 per cent year-on-year sales growth to $28.6 billion for the second quarter, with operating income up 142 per cent to $18.8 billion, according to FactSet data.

The semiconductor specialist, which was briefly the world’s most valuable public company in June with a valuation of $3.35 trillion, has been the undisputed leader in the race to produce chips that power AI growth.

However, stoic holders of its stock have suffered multiple cases of whiplash this month as some investors took profits amid concerns about the risk of an “AI bubble”, fuelled by reports of delays to the release of Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip.

Other investors, who are more bullish about the prospect of an AI revolution, have seen the dips as a buying opportunity. After a sharp fall in shares, Nvidia’s valuation has since recovered to $3.06 trillion, trailing Microsoft’s $3.11 trillion and Apple’s $3.44 trillion.

Wall Street analysts say they are forever fielding questions about Nvidia. So how secure is its market dominance?

Founded in 1993 and based in Santa Clara, California, the company claims to have invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. The hardware features electronic circuits that can perform mathematical calculations on large datasets in parallel and at high speed.

In 2006, Nvidia launched its own programming language for GPUs, called Cuda, which is taught to budding software engineers in universities and can only be used on its chips.

For decades, Nvidia’s GPUs were used to power the creation of high-resolution images used in video games. However, they are now used by more than 40,000 companies, from carmakers and drug discovery businesses to weather forecasters and social media giants chasing superfast computing speeds to make the most of software developments such as generative AI.

In the first quarter of the year, Nvidia won 88 per cent of the GPU market, up from 84 per cent a year ago, according to Jon Peddie Research.

Advanced Micro Devices, its biggest rival, which offers cheaper GPUs, controlled 12 per cent in the first quarter, while Intel, the only other significant competitor, dropped out of the race entirely, according to the research and management consulting firm.

Jon Peddie, a semiconductor expert who has been following Nvidia’s rise since its inception, said: “When you talk about competition, the competition is going to be for the cost-per-compute density.

“That gets translated into, how many processors can you stick in a chip and sell it for? And Nvidia has the enviable position of being able to offer more processors per square millimetre of silicon than any other company.”

SoftBank, the Japanese investor, has held talks with Intel about creating a rival AI chip, the Financial Times reported this week. However, it was reported that the talks fell apart because Intel was incapable of meeting SoftBank’s demand for scale and speed.

Harsh Kumar, semiconductor analyst at Piper Sandler, thinks it is unlikely that a serious rival to Nvidia will emerge in the GPU market. “There’s an incredible amount of software involved,” he said. “And then there’s the share cost. To design a chip like the Blackwell chip that is coming out by Nvidia … you will spend somewhere in that range, $500 million to $1 billion to come up with a chip that may or may not succeed in the market.”

He added: “There’s not a lot of companies that could take that sort of risk. And so you have the capital risk, you have the risk of software and the risk of extremely complex technology, and then you also have to manufacture this stuff, which is also incredibly hard.”

Nvidia offers Cuda data-processing libraries that can be applied to any sector from drug discovery to fraud detection and self-driving, providing a skeleton for what different companies are trying to accomplish. This is topped off with networking services to establish data centres required to run the GPUs.

“You go to Nvidia, it’s like going to Apple,” Kumar said. “You will get the air pods, you will get the phone, you will get the iPad, and you’ll get a watch. And when you walk out you’re decked out in technology, ready to rumble, ready to go. You don’t have to fool around with other people’s networking gear and see if it matches or works well, et cetera. So Nvidia, if you will, provides the total package.”

A group of rival chipmakers including Broadcom and Marvell are offering an alternative to the GPU, known as the application-specific integrated circuit (Asic). Whereas the GPU can be used for a multitude of tasks, from video games to generative AI, an Asic can be simplified so it only provides AI processors.

Google uses Broadcom’s specialised chips to train and run machine-learning models for its services, including Google Search and YouTube.

However, Google is still a big Nvidia customer, relying on its GPUs for Google cloud services, which require a more flexible chip.

Some of Nvidia’s biggest customers, including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google, have started investing in their own chip designs, to reduce their reliance on the company. However, Nvidia does not appear to be at risk of losing their business because of its unrivalled scale, which means it can produce more chips at a lower cost.

Nvidia’s own annual report dedicates 17 pages to detailing all of the risks faced to the company’s results. They range from “failure to meet the evolving needs of our industry” and “dependency on third-party suppliers and their technology to manufacture, assemble, test of package our products”, to competition which could eat into its market share and the fact that “a significant amount of our revenue stems from a limited number of partners”.

Production of Nvidia’s chips is handled by manufacturers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The company is also drawing more attention from regulators who may be concerned about its market dominance.

A spokesman for Nvidia said: “Nvidia wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers.

“We compete based on decades of investment and innovation, scrupulously adhering to all laws, making Nvidia openly available in every cloud and on-premises for every enterprise, and ensuring that customers can choose whatever solution is best for them. We’ll continue to support aspiring innovators in every industry and market and are happy to provide any information regulators need.”

Despite all of the possible headwinds facing the company, its results on August 28 are expected to demonstrate the huge demand for its products.

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said investors would be listening to Nvidia’s earnings call to get a steer from Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive, about future demand for AI chips in 2025.

He said: “[At the] Nvidia earnings on August 28 you will be able to hear a pin drop on trading desks around the street/globe as investors hear from the Godfather of AI Jensen on the massive demand trajectory for AI chips into 2025 which we believe will be another drop the mic moment for tech.”