The business leaders to watch in 2025

The undertakings were described by the City brokerage Panmure Liberum as “the last major regulatory obstacle to the deal” and were followed soon after by the green light under a separate government National Security and Investment Act review.

Shareholders are now expected to tender in favour of the 370p-a-share takeover offer, recommended by the International Distribution Services (IDS) board in May.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, in November had told MPs that Kretinsky, already the largest shareholder in International Distribution Services, Royal Mail’s parent company, was a “legitimate business figure”.

Kretinsky, 49, dubbed the Czech Sphinx, has bought large equity holdings in leading European retail and distribution companies, such as J Sainsbury, as well as a stake in West Ham Football Club, through the profits of a large European gas business.

Westminster and union bosses will be closely watching how Kretinsky lives up to the undertakings, as well as the outcome of Ofcom’s consultation early this year on reforming the USO.

The signs so far have been that the regulator’s proposals are in line with Royal Mail’s long-term lobbying attempts to loosen the requirements, which the postal operator argues are unsustainable. They cover proposals including scrapping second-class deliveries on Saturdays. A decision from Ofcom is expected in the summer.

Royal Mail would become a private company no longer subject to the glare of the public markets, although stamp prices, performance against regulatory delivery targets and the financing of the debt-fuelled takeover will all be watched.

In focus will also be Royal Mail’s strategy, under Kretinsky’s ownership, to tackle a sharp decline in letter volumes at the loss-making business by expanding in the fast-growing European parcels market and replicating the success of GLS, IDS’s European business.

Alex Kendall

This year Wayve, the autonomous driving startup co-founded and led by Alex Kendall, raised more than $1 billion from companies including Softbank, Nvidia and Microsoft (Tom Saunders writes).

The mammoth funding round, at the time the largest ever in Europe, has elevated the company to among the most promising artificial intelligence start-ups outside the United States.

Kendall, 32, grew up on the South Island of New Zealand. After winning a scholarship to study engineering at Auckland University, he started several unsuccessful companies before winning another scholarship to Cambridge to complete a PhD in deep learning for computer vision and robotics.

Convinced that end-to-end machine learning would become the future of robotics, then something of a controversial idea, he co-founded Wayve in 2017 with Amar Shah, another PhD student at the university. Inspiration for the company’s name came from Kendall’s time learning to surf on Auckland’s beaches while at university.

Only a year later the company was conducting trials on public roads in the UK and it has since partnered with UK delivery fleets from Asda and Ocado Group.

The company has a number of prominent backers including Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, and Sir Richard Branson. Shah left the business in 2019.

Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate that acquired Arm, then one of the UK’s most promising technology companies, in 2016 is also a prominent investor. Not only did it lead the company’s latest funding round but Kentaro Matsui, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, has a seat on Wayve’s board.

Challenges lie ahead, though. Wayve faces a number of deep-pocketed competitors, none more than Tesla, which unveiled a prototype of a robotaxi last year. Its billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said he expected his company to produce a fully autonomous car “before 2027”.

In addition, the sector as a whole is littered with failures backed by household names such as General Motors and Apple. Regulatory scrutiny is one particularly prominent hurdle for companies in the sector although under Kendall’s leadership Wayve has already found some success.

The Automated Vehicles Act, which passed last year and provides a route to market for autonomous vehicle technology, was one of the few new pieces of legislation to make Sunak’s King’s Speech last November, thanks in part to lobbying by Wayve and Kendall.

Margherita Della Valle, chief executive of Vodafone

MATTHEW CHATTLE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

Margherita Della Valle

Since the Vodafone lifer Margherita Della Valle took over as chief executive of the embattled telecoms group last year, she has executed the restructuring of the FTSE 100 group’s sprawling operations that investors have long been crying out for (Emma Powell writes).

The disposal of its underperforming Spanish and Italian businesses and the £15 billion merger of its UK operations with Three represents one of the most dramatic overhauls of Vodafone in its 40-year history. The deal will make Vodafone the leading player in the UK.

The hope is that the former finance chief can maintain a better balance between the multiple demands on its capital, from keeping leverage in check to ploughing enough investment into its network.

Part of the €12.1 billion cash proceeds from offloading two of its European businesses will be put towards paying down debt. In a move that might give the market more confidence, the target leverage range has been lowered to between 2.25 and 2.75 times adjusted earnings, down from a multiple of 2.5 to 3. Share buybacks worth €2 billion are under way and another €2 billion is planned once the Italian sale clears.

A cut in the dividend to reflect the shrinkage in the business means, however, that there is more pressure on Della Valle, 59, to reinvigorate the share price to drive shareholder returns. The question is whether the retrenchment, primarily to the UK and Germany, can kickstart the sustained recovery needed.

Growing its business-to-business services and returning Germany to organic revenue growth are two big priorities. In the latter market, where Vodafone is the No 1 player, a change in the law to unbundle cable services that had been offered by landlords to their tenants has pushed up churn as more tenants switch providers. The impact of that should wash through by the end of this calendar year. The test for Della Valle will then be whether she can break through the competitive pressures that have plagued telecoms companies.

Jason Tarry

Hopes are pinned on the Tesco veteran Jason Tarry to reclaim John Lewis Partnership’s crown as middle England’s favourite retailer (Isabella Fish writes).

Tarry joined the mutual as chairman in September after a difficult period under his predecessor, Dame Sharon White, whose tenure was defined by contentious cost-cutting, shop closures and the slashing of employee bonuses.

White faced criticism for her strategic pivot away from retail, focusing instead on ventures such as build-to-rent housing. Many argued that this shift distracted from the company’s retail heritage and alienated its loyal customer base.

The resulting financial struggles left the partnership’s reputation diminished and morale among its employee-owners shaken. During this time competitors including Marks & Spencer capitalised on John Lewis’s struggles.

With more than three decades of experience at Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket, the industry is placing its bets on Tarry’s retail expertise and customer-first approach to reverse the partnership’s fortunes.

Since his arrival, Tarry has wasted no time signalling a return to basics, shifting focus firmly back to retail. The company recently reinstated its “never knowingly undersold” price-match pledge, two years after it was abandoned, in an attempt to win back customers. White ditched the guarantee in 2022 after almost a century in part because it was too expensive to run.

The owner of John Lewis and Waitrose is also prioritising investment in its shops. The John Lewis department store on Oxford Street in the West End of London has been revamped to offer a new beauty hall and Jamie Oliver cookery school. The company expanded its partnership with Caffè Nero last month to open coffee shops within its shops.

By refreshing shop layouts, improving customer service and focusing on higher-quality products Tarry is working to recapture the distinctive identity that made John Lewis Partnership a cornerstone of British retail.

The challenges he faces are steep: competition in the retail market is fierce and the economic climate remains uncertain. Yet his clear “retail-first” strategy has been well received by staff and analysts alike and offers a renewed sense of direction for the struggling retailer.

Heidi Alexander will be in charge of a wholesale shake-up of the railways

WIKTOR SZYMANOWICZ / FUTURE PUBLISHING VIA GETTY IMAGES

Heidi Alexander

When asked after yet another network failure who was in charge of the railways, Chris Grayling famously denied that it was him. He was secretary of state for transport at the time. His response perfectly hit the nail on the head of the failing privatised railway experiment: no one was in charge, no one was taking responsibility (Robert Lea writes).

Heidi Alexander will have no such luxury. Appointed transport secretary in November after the departure of Louise Haigh, Alexander is indubitably in charge of the railways because her party is in the process of renationalising them. Whether she likes it or not the next time a bit of infrastructure fails or a train crew does not turn up, sending the timetable into meltdown, people will want to know what she is doing about it.

Alexander, 49, is not quite an accidental transport secretary. A junior minister in the Ministry of Justice following her re-election to parliament in July, she had previously been in charge of transport up to 2021 in Sadiq Khan’s London mayoralty.

She represents her native Swindon in the Commons, one of the country’s historic railway towns. She had been first elected to parliament in 2010 representing a south London seat but quit in 2018 during the upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership.

At the DfT, Alexander will be in charge of seeing through the legislation for the creation of Great British Railways (GBR) and the incremental takeover of the private rail companies into public ownership.

The aim of GBR is to remarry track-and-train operations, merging Network Rail’s regional operations with the people running the trains locally. Although that will be an operational and cultural challenge in itself, all issues of ticketing, industrial relations, staff shortages, failing infrastructure and failure to invest in infrastructure will come back ultimately to Alexander’s door.

She will be able to lean heavily on the rail minister Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, 71, who joined the government in the upper house having previously been chairman of Network Rail; and one of her senior civil servants, Alex Hynes, 47, one of the rising stars of the rail industry and former boss of Scotland’s Railway, who was appointed director of rail services at the DfT last spring.

Murray Auchincloss

When Murray Auchincloss was permanently appointed as the boss of BP at the start of last year, he was seen as the continuity candidate needed to steady the ship after the abrupt departure of his predecessor. Almost a year into the Canadian executive’s tenure, however, rather than reassuring investors, the FTSE 100 oil major has become dogged by the perception that it is caught in a strategic fog (Emma Powell writes).

A strategy update in February will be his big chance to provide the clarity that is desperately sought by shareholders. He is expected to abandon a goal to scale back oil and gas production by 25 per cent by the end of the decade, a central tenet of the pivot towards greener types of energy that, as finance chief alongside Bernard Looney, he helped to set BP on the road towards. A formal target to allocate half its capital expenditure to low-carbon projects by the end of the decade is also expected to be scrapped.

Auchincloss, 54, has already indicated the direction of travel. Most recently its seven offshore wind projects were carved out into a joint venture with Jera, Japan’s largest power generation company. In effect this will lower the capital expenditure to be allocated by BP to its offshore wind pipeline. Meanwhile a big drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico that was approved in July is capable of producing about 80,000 barrels of oil a day.

The chief executive is no stranger to operating in the top ranks of the business through periods of adversity, working as chief of staff to Bob Dudley, another former BP boss, after the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

This, though, is his most high-profile test yet. The shares have underperformed both Shell and the American oil majors, which has left BP valued at a discount to its peers in the oil and gas sector. If Auchincloss fails to win back the market’s confidence, the whispers of takeover rumours that have swirled around the company look likely to get louder.