Britain’s top smartphone maker, which has made JCB and Land Rover-branded handsets, is on the brink of insolvency as it struggles to compete with Apple and Samsung, The Telegraph reported. Bullitt, which specialises in toughened smartphones and had peak sales of more than £140m, has told the High Court it intends to appoint administrators, filings said. The company said that its satellite connectivity business and all its 100 employees would be transferred to a new company owned by its creditors.

German industrial production unexpectedly fell in November, the federal statistics office said on Tuesday, marking the sixth monthly decline in a row, Reuters reported. Industrial production decreased in November by 0.7% compared to the previous month. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted a 0.2% rise. "The unexpected fall in German industrial production in November shows that companies are increasingly reacting to falling order books," Commerzbank's chief economist Joerg Kraemer said.

Company insolvencies soared last year as businesses struggled with the inflation crisis and the long-term impact of the Covid pandemic, new figures show, The Guardian reported. A total of 30,199 UK businesses were involved in some kind of insolvency action in 2023 – 52% higher than in 2021, according to Creditsafe, a credit checking agency which tracks 430m businesses around the world.

German department store giant Galeria could file for insolvency again as early as this week, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday, joining the list of companies affected by the collapse of Signa founder Rene Benko's real estate empire, Reuters reported. The insolvency application could come as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday, according to one source. "The probability is high," said another person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Galeria, which has already survived two insolvency proceedings, declined to comment.

A Glasgow rage and escape room has 'closed' as confused customers have fumed they lost money booking vouchers just days before it went under, GlasgowLive.com reported. Rage Room Glasgow, which was the first of its kind in Scotland, is believed to have closed after its parent company Escape Rooms Scotland LTD quietly entered administration on August 25 last year with the company applying for insolvency days later. Accountancy firm Wylie & Bisset have been appointed to wind the Hydepark Street business up.

The volume of commercial property transactions in the Nordic region fell to the lowest level in a decade last year, in an ominous sign for landlords needing to offload assets to bolster their finances, Bloomberg News reported. In 2023, only €20 billion ($21.9 billion) of properties traded hands in the region, property adviser Colliers International Group Inc said in an emailed statement. Activity tumbled by 64% in Finland compared with a year earlier, while volumes in Norway, Sweden and Denmark slumped by slightly more than half.

A UK Treasury minister cautioned councils against selling assets even as the government proposes to loosen budget rules to help boost the finances of struggling town halls, Bloomberg News reported. “I wouldn’t support any selling off of community assets,” Laura Trott, chief secretary to the Treasury, said in an interview with Times Radio on Sunday. Her remarks contrast with government proposals that would give councils more flexibility to sell assets to help fund front-line services and ward off a wave of bankruptcies, as revealed by Bloomberg on Saturday.

WeWork’s top UK subsidiary posted a loss of £110 million in 2022 and said it owed nearly three quarters of a billion pounds to its US parent in signs the London office market’s sluggish recovery from the coronavirus pandemic has crippled its finances, the Evening Standard reported.

Swedish landlord Oscar Properties should enter bankruptcy proceedings after failing to uphold a settlement agreement with a creditor, according to a statement, Bloomberg News reported. The creditor in question is Brf Innovationen, a housing cooperative that owns one of the two flagship residential towers in Stockholm built by Oscar Properties. Oscar Properties plans to refute the claim. “The board is continuously evaluating the options to ensure the continued operations of the company, and is in discussions with Brf Innovationen and other creditors,” it said.

The glitzy Victoria Square development, boasting two skyscrapers and a new Hilton Hotel, was to be a new landmark for the London commuter town of Woking. Instead, it stands as a monument to how financial bets by local councils can go badly wrong, Bloomberg News reported. The hotel is yet to open its doors. Work to replace unsafe cladding on the outside of the building, which dominates the skyline of the town of 100,000 people, will only be completed this summer, almost four years after the complex’s scheduled opening was blown off track by the Covid-19 pandemic.