Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the United Kingdom

Tag: LSE Enterprise

  • Annual Roundup of 2012

    The exceptional Jubilee year of 2012 is coming to its end and it is time to look back and go through these past months of intense activity.

    The year was opened, as usual, with our New Years Drinks Reception in January. This hallmarked the start of a year of renewed focus in delivering events, training and commercial agendas for the benefit of our members.

    Regent Street Lights 8
    It’s that time of the year in London, when Christmas comes crackling into life with fireworks and miles of decorative lights.

    In April, we named the winner of our Annual Golden Award as being MAPFRE, a Spanish company recognised as making a significant impact within the UK market over the previous year. Not long after, we held our Annual General Meeting ,  which was devoted to providing our members with an open account of the Chamber’s activities & statistics, in order to contrast its successes with the year before. What followed was a formal dinner, presided by the Ambassador of Spain, and with our Guest of Honor being Ms. Tamara Rojo, the internationally acclaimed ballerina who had just been appointed as the Artistic Director of the English National Ballet.

    To round off the year was the largest event of our calendar, the Annual Gala Dinner which this year counted on the presence of Mr. José Manuel Soria,  Spanish Minister for Trade, Energy & Tourism. All of these landmark formal events speak of the ability of which the Chamber is able to bring its members together on a diverse, inclusive and grande scale. But this isn’t the whole story.

    JF_SCC_Golden_Award_25th_April_2012-(111-of-137)
    Our Annual Golden Award  was hosted at the Spanish Embassy.

    The Chamber has run over 50 events in the past year, from training workshops and networking seminars, to collaborative member events and informal parties. All, we hope, have been thoroughly enjoyed by our members, as their continually high levels of demand suggests. We have also worked with LSE Enterprise, Patrons of the Chamber, to provide a series of talks with high profile speakers, including  Mr. Antonio Vázquez, Chairman of Iberia, Mr. Álex Cruz, CEO of Vueling, and Mr. Pedro J. Ramírez, Editorial Director of Unidad Editorial.

    We have also laid on exclusive events with our Patrons, for which we have created the Patrons’ Club which this year has included different activities with high-profile speakers such as Mr. Varel Freeman, Vice-President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Mr. John Cridland, Director-General of the CBI; and Mr. Jaime García-Legaz, Secretary of State for Foreign Trade.

    We have nurtured new talent, too. The XIV Edition of our Graduate European Programme took off in September and welcomed 14 participants that will be carrying out work-experience at London-based companies for 6 months. At the same time, they will be attending different commercial workshops and English lessons on business to help compliment their professional placements.

    IMG_0378
    One of our many informative seminars to have taken place at the Spanish Chamber premises this year.

    To end our calendar, it was our great pleasure to celebrate this fantastic year with our ever-popular Informal Christmas Party, which took place on the King’s Road, last week. The event was kindly sponsored by Beefeater 24, meaning that the G&T’s were being enjoyed by our enthusiastic guests long into the night – saying fairwell to an active past year in style.

    As a final remark, we’d like to thank all of our members and attendees which have made the events over the last year such a success. With more in-depth news on the various trade partnerships and commercial opportunities which were successfully cultivated over the past year, please do have a browse of our earlier blog posts. Beyond that, we only wish to say that we are looking forward to working with you, and new companies on the scene, next year!

  • A New Golden Age for Journalism? An Evening with Pedro J. Ramírez

    For many, Pedro J Ramírez needs no introduction. But for those unfamiliar with his long and high-profile association with the world of media; he became the youngest editor of a national paper in Spain aged just 28, and, under a decade later in 1989, established El Mundo, which grew to become the second most widely-read publication in the country.

    El Mundo is credited as being one of the last successful print-tradition publications in the world to become a notable player within the matrix of world media, prior to the advent of the electronic publication of news via the internet. In this respect, El Mundo has faced the most severe battle of all traditional news outlets with both the old world and the new, in regards to the way in which its news is distributed, with commercial success, to its readership.

    On the night of the event in a bustling LSE lecture theatre, Mr.Ramírez was in good company on stage, which was being chaired by the chief editor of The Times, James Harding and introduced by Adam Austerfield from LSE Enterprise.

    Pedro J. Ramírez, Editorial Director of Unidad Editorial

    After exchanging some fond anecdotes about each other, Mr. Ramírez took to the podium. He told the audience of his pleasant surprise of seeing Sir. Tim Bernes-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, being honoured at the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. They had met each other before, he said, at the 20th anniversary celebration of both the founding of El Mundo and the Internet, which occurred in the same year. But Mr. Ramírez’s tone was serious, as well as jovial.

    The internet, he went on to demonstrate, marked a dramatic shift in the viability of the business model for printed  press – a shift that up until recently has had a cumulatively negative commercial effect on traditional news providers.

    From left to right: Roberto Casado , Spanish Correspondent for Expansion in the UK;  Antonio Lorenzo, Group Director of Strategy at Lloyds (Banking Group); Kyril of Saxe-Coburg, Head of Iberia and Latam at Man GLG; and H.E. The Ambassador of Spain Federico Trillo Figueroa.

    The statistics of sharp and continually falling printed-paper sales, versus a meagre, and also decreasing, offsetting in online advertising revenues, made for rather pessimistic reading. According to one report, for every $10 being lost in printed-paper sales, only $1 was being made back from advertising from their otherwise free-to-browse websites. Indeed, it was when it was discovered that despite having more than 24 million unique visitors per month to the El Mundo website in 2009, over 50% of the content provided was accessed by only 3% of these visitors.

    Mr. Ramírez once recalled how the late Steve Jobs scolded traditional news providers for lamenting the detrimental effect of the digital world, saying that (in paraphrase) “for five years, you have given the content of your news on the web, without collecting anyone’s credit card details”. This sentiment is what has helped fuel Mr. Ramírez’ new optimism. What he was waiting for, he said, was the right platform.

    From left to right: James Harding, Editor of The Times, Pedro J. Ramírez,  and Fernando Pérez, President of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain.

    This came in 2010 with the launch of the iPad, and other tablet technology which followed. Electronic versions of broadsheets had up until this point suffered a lack of transferability to the tactile experience of holding a paper in your hands. With tablet technology, not only could the printed-paper experience be replicated, it could also be made interactive with embedded multimedia. To produce sustainable revenues from this new phenomenun required the creation of content which was exclusive enough, and of high enough quality, that the aforementioned 3% of loyal web readers would be willing to pay for the privilege of reading it. With this, Mr. Ramírez revealed El Mundo’s initiative to tap into this new market, an exclusive current affairs outlet only accessible to subscription customers, named ORBYT.

    This product benefitted from not suffering from the vast traditional production and transportation costs of physically getting printed-papers to newspaper stalls around the world, and for the firs time could thus actually be marketed for a lesser price to its readers abroad. Fundamentally however, it also had the potential to eventually positively offset the losses being made in declining newspaper and online advertising revenues, whilst continuing to provide a free-to-browse website outside of ORBYT. Again, Mr. Ramírez looked back to Sir. Bernes-Lee,  and recalled the famous phrase from that night in the London Olympic Stadium; “This is for everyone”, adding only that perhaps it should have read “This is for everyone… who is ready to pay a fair price for it”.

    The drinks reception proved a great opportunity for attendees to further discuss the ideas covered by the talk.

    The talk prompted impassioned questions from the audience, from a journalist from rival paper El Razón, to a civil servant working in the field of media. An exceptional drinks reception followed, attended by famous designer and wife to Mr. Ramírez, Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada, as well as other VIPs from participant companies and institutions.

    We thank Mr. Ramírez, Mr. Harding, and LSE Enterprise for working with the Spanish Chamber of Commerce to make this evening possible, and we hope all of our attendees had a great time.

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