Abrdn to bring back vowels after disastrous rebrand

Mr Windsor said: 'Talking about the name was a distraction. The name is there to enhance the reputation and how the group is perceived by customers and shareholders, and make it easier for us to get out and be proud about what we are and why we do it.
'We made a very small change in one respect and a big change in another.
'Now is the right time for us to do that so we can get out with confidence and talk about our business. I've asked our marketing team now to go out and make the most of it.'
The company will change its trademark and registration at Companies House immediately to reflect the shift.
While many rebrands cost millions of pounds, Mr Windsor said the business 'had not spent any more at all on it' and the redesign had been done internally by marketing managers at the company.
It marks a change of tone by senior management at the FTSE 250 fund, who previously accused critics of unfairly attacking its name.
Peter Branner, the company's chief investment officer, said last year the backlash had amounted to 'corporate bullying' and accused the media of being 'childish' for ridiculing the name.
The company was rebranded as abrdn in 2021 from Standard Life Aberdeen, which was created out of a 2017 mega merger between Aberdeen Asset Management and insurer Standard Life. It means the change to Aberdeen Group will be the third renaming in five years.
Mr Windsor downplayed the significance of the multiple brand names, saying that the name had remained the same when spoken.
He said: 'I joined the group that I've always pronounced Aberdeen. Everybody else calls [it] Aberdeen and we're not changing it.
'The name in my mind as a verbal expression is not changing. This is a good name for the company. We are just trying to change the way we spell it out so it's not a distraction.
'The brand has real relevance across various markets. It's been around for 40 years. It actually transmits really well. When you turn up in Singapore, Beijing and New York, actually it works.'
Adjusted profits grew for the first time in three times, rising 2pc to £255m, despite a 6pc fall in revenue of £1.3bn.
Profits were boosted mainly by a reduction in costs, with Aberdeen slashing £100m last year.
Around £35m from its defined benefit pension will also be used to fund its defined contribution scheme – delivering a £35m boost to Aberdeen's capital because it can take the money from the pension scheme instead.

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The Herald Scotland

6 hours ago

• The Herald Scotland

Scottish economy boost as key figures prove worth the wait

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He declared: 'Put simply, Scotland continues to punch above its weight with inward investment.' Scotland in 2024 remained second only to London in the league table of the UK's top locations for FDI, securing 135 such projects last year, EY's overall figures for inward investment wins revealed last week. Although down by 4.9% on Scotland's all-time high annual number of 142 FDI projects won, in 2023, the figure for 2024 was the second-highest on record. Scotland's share of UK FDI projects was 15.8% last year, up from 14.4% in 2023 and significantly higher than the average of 11.5% over the last decade. The UK recorded 853 FDI projects in 2024, a 13% decline from 2023, making it Europe's second-top country for attracting inward investment, behind France. 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Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: 'Given the geopolitical uncertainties clearly affecting investor confidence across the world, this is an incredible endorsement of Scotland's proposition as a destination for global investment. 'A huge amount of work, across both the private and public sectors, goes into securing these projects.' We will now need to wait nearly a year for the next annual FDI figures for Scotland. Hopefully, these will show continuing strong trends. In the meantime, we should celebrate the 2024 success, while not for a second losing sight of the importance of public and private sector players continuing to do their utmost to bang the drum for Scotland and attract more overseas investors.

Times

15 hours ago

• Times

Leaving oil and gas in the ground was always a pipe dream

Just call me Mystic Mac. As I forecast in this space earlier this month, the UK has finally opened the door to the development of the Rosebank oilfield off Shetland and the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen. Ed Miliband, the net zero secretary, famously said that drilling in these two modest reserves would constitute 'climate vandalism'. Well, it looks like he will shortly have to get his spray paint out and daub 'Just Start Oil' on the door of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. To be honest, it didn't take supernatural foresight to predict that these totemic fields would ultimately get the go-ahead. They were given licences by the last government. Production was halted only by a bizarre judgment by the Court of Session in Edinburgh. In January Lord Ericht ruled in favour of the climate activists, Uplift and Greenpeace, who argued that the UK government hadn't carried out a full environmental impact assessment of the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels downstream. 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This whole episode served only to showcase the absurdity of what is being called the managerial 'lanyard class's' thinking about energy. The Treasury is not stupid and was never going to endorse an exercise in performative self-harm. Nor was No 10. 'Keeping it in the ground', as Patrick Harvie used to advocate, was not what Labour meant by a rational and measured transition to renewable energy. The UK depends on oil and gas for 75 per cent of its energy usage. So the UK government has rejigged the approval process to include a statement of the bleedin' obvious — viz, that burning oil and gas produces emissions. Industry sources believe, rightly, that by submitting this new and more politically correct prospectus, they will be able to go ahead. That is, if firms like Equinor haven't given up in disgust. They're already being hit by a 78 per cent profits tax on North Sea oil, which makes you wonder why they bother. 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It isn't refined here because we've closed nearly all our own refineries, such as Grangemouth, because of our perverse belief that it is morally preferable to import hydrocarbons. Abandoning the North Sea won't bring forward net zero by a single day. It will merely increase our dependency on authoritarian governments in the Middle East, make energy bills even more unaffordable, and deprive the UK of billions in oil revenues to spend on the NHS. Predictably, the Scottish government has not responded to the energy U-turn. The SNP is still under the sway of environmental cretinism. No wonder Fergus Ewing, a voice of energy sanity, has decided to walk. Perhaps Ed Miliband may be following him in the not-too-distant future.

Telegraph

a day ago

• Telegraph

Ed Miliband's £8bn pet project is sliding into irrelevance

The chairman of Great British Energy appeared exasperated. Under tough questioning, Juergen Maier was desperately trying to explain the mission of the new taxpayer-owned company he had been hired to oversee. When would it actually start to bring people's bills down, the interviewer from Sky News asked. And how exactly would it do this? Maier, the former boss of Siemens UK, could only offer that 'more renewable energy is bringing people's energy bills down. It's a great thing for British people'. 'I know you're asking me for a date,' he added. '[But] Great British Energy has only just been brought into creation.' 'Can you see why people think this is a bit vague?' the journalist responded. Fast forward four months – almost a year after Labour's election victory – and the question of what Great British Energy (GBE) is for still troubles the energy industry. 'It's what we're all waiting to find out,' says one executive at a top wind farm developer. 'They've got £8bn. But what are they going to actually use it for?' The quango, which it set to be headquartered in Aberdeen, was promised a dowry of £8.3bn to 'drive forward investment in clean, home-grown energy production' in the Labour manifesto. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has since described it as Britain's answer to the European state-owned energy companies such as Orsted (Denmark), EnBW (Germany), Equinor (Norway) and EDF (France) – the likes of which currently own nearly half of the country's offshore wind farms. 'We have a simple proposition: if it is right for the Danes, the French, the Norwegians and the Swedes to own British energy assets, it is right for the British people to do so as well,' he told MPs in September. Great British Energy. Owned by the British people. For the British people. — Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) May 15, 2025 It's an argument that more than two thirds of the public agrees with, according to polling by More in Common. 'The concept resonates with people,' says Luke Tryl, the group's executive director. Yet critics say that for all the soaring rhetoric, GBE is sorely lacking a clear purpose. Even the quango's own staff have appeared unsure about what it should be doing, some claim. One industry source recounts going to a GBE 'engagement' event last month at a French restaurant in central London, hosted by Paul Addison, the head of policy. 'I got the strong impression that they still haven't actually settled on what it should look like,' the source adds. Another person who attended a roundtable in Scotland described a similar experience. However, a person close to GBE disputed this characterisation. 'What we've been saying to people is, if you're unsure about what we're up to, reach out, because there is a team of us now,' the person adds. Ahead of the election, senior Labour figures stressed that the taxpayer-funded entity would not 'crowd out' the private sector and instead only focus on where its cash could help to unlock or 'de-risk' investment by others. This would rule out vast swathes of the conventional energy sector – including investment in solar and wind. Instead, it would focus on potentially more nascent and expensive technologies such as floating offshore wind farms, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen production and long-duration energy storage schemes – all of which experts say will be phenomenally hard to crack. Miliband has said GBE will also invest in community energy schemes. But he has also contradicted Labour's other statements at times, suggesting that GBE will indeed get involved in owning wind farms, for example. 'I often cite the fact that the mayor of Munich owns more of our offshore wind than the British state,' he told the New Statesman. 'We want GB Energy to show that public ownership can work.' The Energy Secretary is expected to set out GBE's strategic objectives formally in a letter in the coming months. This tension became clear last summer when the Government announced a partnership between GBE and the Crown Estate, which owns and leases seabed for wind farms, and appeared to suggest GBE would take stakes in developments. Behind the scenes, wind farm owners 'massively kicked off', says one person involved in talks between industry and the Government. Yet so far, the only projects GBE has committed to are a £180m investment to install solar panels on around 400 schools and hospitals and a £300m pot to invest in factories that will make parts for the country's offshore wind turbines. It's a far cry from the soaring ambitions previously described by Miliband. And hardly the type of work requiring an entirely new quango. Slow progress Dan McGrail, another Siemens veteran who was recently appointed GBE's interim chief executive, has also told trade publication Utility Week that he did not anticipate spending 'significant' sums until next year at the earliest. This slow progress is partly due to the slow grind of Parliament. A bill to formally establish GBE only became law a few weeks ago, with McGrail admitting last month that it did not even have a bank account yet. GBE is also still hunting for a permanent office in Aberdeen, where it expects to house up to 200 staff. Yet eyebrows were raised last week when, after months of speculation, the Treasury appeared to clip the quango's wings by stealth. About £2.5bn of the organisation's £8.3bn budget was handed to Great British Nuclear (GBN), a separate quango running the Government's mini nuclear reactor programme, documents published for the spending review showed. GBN has been renamed to 'Great British Energy – Nuclear', allowing ministers to claim that its budget remains unchanged. But while the organisations will be 'allied', they remain operationally independent – meaning Maier and McGrail have 30pc less money to play with. 'It was a sleight of hand,' one Whitehall insider says. Much of the rest of GBE's cash has also been allocated via loans and guarantees that will require tight oversight by the Treasury. 'Now the dust has settled on the spending review, it's clear the GBE budget has been slashed by Rachel Reeves with billions diverted into nuclear energy – a far cry from the £28bn green pledge that was once promised by the Labour Party,' says Graham Leadbitter, a Scottish National Party MP. Meaningful or 'vanity project'? Still, there remain high hopes for GBE in some quarters. Andy Willis, founder of battery developer Kobo Energy, says he believes the company can make a meaningful contribution to net zero if it successfully breaks down barriers across the green energy sector. 'The big missing link at the moment in the UK is long-duration energy storage,' he says, which is the technology needed to protect the country against 'dunkelflaute' periods of low wind in the winter. Willis also suggests GBE could help to ease bottlenecks such as waiting times for power transformers, which currently take two to three years to arrive due to stretched manufacturing capacity in Europe. He says they could do so by encouraging companies to co-invest in UK factories. It is understood that GBE's bosses are currently focused on three areas: commercial investments, which will see the company take minority stakes in clean power projects; community energy schemes, likely to involve partnering with cooperatives; and supply chains, for example, helping to develop manufacturing of key parts for wind farms. The quango is understood to have around 100 potential projects in its pipeline already, most of them potential investments in floating offshore wind schemes. It is hoped that it will generate its own income in the long run, although there is no timescale for achieving break-even. But Daniel Slater, an analyst at Zeus Capital, says GBE is partly hamstrung by being forced to invest only in renewables. 'Historically, similar companies have been established on traditional energy sources, often using cash flows from oil and gas or power generation to pivot into renewables,' he says. 'GB Energy has to operate with no existing revenues and potentially in markets that are often already subject to government support. It means reaching an independent financial position will be very difficult. 'The option for GB Energy is probably to act as an alternative form of government subsidy programme, while maintaining stakes in projects which could then establish cash flows longer term.' He believes another area that could be worthy of GBE's attention is geothermal heat, potentially for public buildings such as hospitals and universities. But Ashley Kelty, an energy analyst at Panmure Liberum, dismisses GBE as a 'vanity project' that risks duplicating work already being done by other publicly-funded investment agencies. 'It's a waste of time and money – little more than a virtue-signalling gesture,' he says, pointing out that the sums involved are tiny. Its location is, he says, also a mistake. 'Being in Aberdeen is symbolic only. It would be better to be based in London where it is closer to the City and financial institutions. The jobs impact will be negligible.' For now, Miliband's pet project appears to have survived to fight another day after emerging from the spending review with a remaining budget of almost £6bn. But as scrutiny of the quango grows, the question of exactly how he will spend that money will only become more urgent.