the times | Monday February 21 2022 45Business
A free app designed to help women feel
safer when they are walking home
alone has received a £300,000 invest-
ment to scale across the UK.
WalkSafe helps its users to avoid
crime hotspots by showing on a map
where recent incidents such as knife
crime, sexual assault and muggings
have taken place, based on official
crime data and updated each month.
It also has a feature that automatical-
ly alerts a next of kin should the user fail
to get home on time, and a function that
shows the user’s last known location if
their phone is deactivated.
The app has been downloaded
500,000 times in the wake of the mur-
ders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa
last year.
Emma Kay, co-founder of WalkSafe,
said: “I call this an app that shouldn’t
have to exist, as no woman should have
to live in fear of violence or the threat ofHannah PrevettWalking home safely app
gets £300,000 to expand
it when they walk from A to B. But, like
countless women, I’ve experienced
being groped, flashed at and harassed
with no provocation.”
Kay, 33, whose father served in the
Metropolitan Police, was inspired to
start the business after giving birth to a
daughter two and a half years ago. “I
couldn’t fathom her growing up and
going through all of the things I did. It
felt relentless from the age of 12 or 13.
Walking to school each day I’d wonder,
‘What’s going to happen today?’ ”
As well as its £300,000 investment,
Fearless Adventures, a venture capital
firm founded last year by David Newns,
Dominic McGregor and Charlie Yates,
will also help Kay to relaunch the app to
raise awareness among potential users.
Kay said she had no plans to charge
for the app “because we believe that
personal safety is a basic human right”.
Instead, she was investigating a “busi-
ness-to-business partnership” route to
generate revenue.VICKI COUCHMANthe advertising agency Jellyfish, says that hybrid working has allowed her to take stock of her expectations and priorities
About TEN
6 See Times Enterprise
Network online for
daily news, insights
and inspiration for
entrepreneurs and
business leaders
6 Sign up for the
weekly TEN newsletter
to receive the inside
track on key issues
facing growing
businesses, delivered to
your inbox every
Wednesday morning
thetimes.co.uk/
enterprise-networkBusiness
Companies must
focus on growth,
not dividends
cent up on its value at the dawn of
the millennium, whereas the S&P
500 is up more than 200 per cent.
There’s also been data to show
that the UK listed sector is
shrinking, as private equity extends
its influence. And the main reason
for that is because UK institutions
are not as growth-orientated — they
are more focused on short-term
profit maximisation and dividends,
which are needed to service pension
obligations. The FTSE 100 is a
concentration of industrial and
financial companies, whereas the
S&P and Nasdaq have a strong
technological focus.
A telling example: now that the
Nvidia deal to buy Arm Holdings
has been nixed, Masayoshi Son at
Softbank has gone back to Plan B,
which is to float it. I had a call from
a journalist who asked if I thought it
would be listed in the UK. The
answer is probably not, because the
attitude of the UK institutions
towards growth companies is still
not right and Arm’s chip
competitors are all listed in the US.
I was recently listening to the CEO
of a major UK tech company, who
took American money when he
started it ten years ago, and he was
asked: would he do the same again?
He said the European venture capital
market was more sophisticated now
but there’s still this institutional
investor resistance to
focusing on growth —
everyone likes their
dividends too much.
When we started S4
Capital in 2016, I did
look at the US market
and Spacs, but the entry
costs then were too
expensive — although
it’s gone the other way
now, given the
oversupply. So it’s
something we’re looking
at again; if we were also
listed in the US we would
probably get a better
valuation there.
We’ve recently set up a
venture capital company in
partnership with Stanhope Capital.
It’s called S4S Ventures and it will
invest exclusively in early-stage
adtech and martech companies,
areas we’ve prohibited at S4 Capital,
as we’re part of the service layer and
don’t deploy risk capital in
technology. We’ll be looking for the
new technological shiny thing. It
could be the metaverse or content
creation and artificial intelligence,
using all the technologies like
virtual and augmented reality that
we know are going to grow, but
applying them to the advertising and
marketing technology areas.
And that’s the message for me:
from 2023, growth in the global
economy will be a lot more difficult.
To achieve top-line growth as a
company, the focus will then need to
be even more on digital
transformation, which in turn will
continue to drive our own top-line
growth at S4 Capital, whose
business is servicing digital
marketing transformation.
6 Sir Martin Sorrell is founder and
executive chairman of the digital
advertising and marketing services
business S4 Capital.B
oris Johnson has claimed
repeatedly this year that
the UK has “the fastest
growth in the G7”, most
recently after the official
statisticians announced that GDP
grew by 7.5 per cent in 2021. But as
many people have pointed out, that
comes the year after the country
had the biggest downturn of any
advanced economy in 2020, when it
shrank by 9.9 per cent.
So the two-year stack for the UK
— aggregate growth over two
successive years — is down by more
than 2 per cent and it looks like just
another example of Boris
“exaggeration”.
Growth matters just as much for
companies as for countries, and
there is ample evidence that part of
the UK’s corporate ecosystem is
failing when it comes to delivering
against that imperative.
In recent weeks we’ve seen
activist investors building stakes in
two of the UK’s biggest companies,
Unilever and Vodafone, in each case
attempting to pressure
the board to adopt a
more aggressive
approach towards top-
line performance.
Much of the UK’s
GDP growth in the past
year has been driven by
heavy fiscal and
monetary stimuli and in
2023 companies will no
longer be able to rely on
an expanding economy
to fuel their own growth.
Unilever has the
activist investor Nelson
Peltz knocking at the
door, and in its case
heavy inflation is going
to make it even more difficult. Alan
Jope, Unilever’s CEO, has warned
that the company will have to raise
prices, which raises the question
whether it will be able to maintain
market share or increase sales.
Peltz, who’s a bit like Marmite, can
lay claim to revitalising Wendy’s, he’s
pushed Mondelez, and he’s
stimulated Procter & Gamble. And
now he’s threatening to do the same
with Unilever. The essential issue for
each of these companies — and it’s
the same with Unilever right now —
was the focus on organic growth.
Today Procter is a more innovative,
change-oriented company.
What’s needed generally, say some,
is more innovation and branding on
the back of that innovation, all of
which stimulates growth. In fact, the
UK stock market has a systemic
problem with growth. In the listed
sector, UK shares look cheap
compared with their US counterparts.
The price/earnings ratio of FTSE 100
companies is about 16, compared
with the S&P 500’s 26 — even after
the recent tech sector price falls.
That divergence in valuation
reflects the sharply different
prospects: the FTSE 100 is 10 perSir Martin
Sorrell“
In 2023
companies
will no longer
be able to
rely on an
expanding
economy