small business owners australia

Instant Brands, maker of Instant Pot and Pyrex cookware, files for bankruptcy

October 7, 2025

The company that makes kitchen staples like CorningWare, Pyrex and the Instant Pot has entered bankruptcy proceedings in the US and Canada. Illinois-based Instant Brands said Monday that it has “initiated a voluntary court-supervised Chapter 11 process,” due to an unmanageable debt load. “Tightening of credit terms and higher interest rates impacted our liquidity levels and made our capital structure unsustainable,” CEO Ben Gadbois said in a news release. In court filings, the company says it generated operating cash flows of just $17.9 million US in the first three months of the year. That relatively large figure is a sharp…

Ex-TikTok executive says Chinese government used app to locate, identify Hong Kong protesters

September 29, 2025

Business News

A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong. Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to US user data, an allegation that the company denies. Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In…

WestJet shutting down discount airline Swoop

July 23, 2023

Business News

WestJet is shutting down its budget airline, Swoop. The company made the announcement in a news release Friday, noting that the ratification of its recent deal with its pilots allows it to integrate all of its staff at various airlines into a single banner. “As negotiated in the collective agreement, the WestJet Group will now begin integration efforts of its ultra-low-cost airline, Swoop,” the airline said. “Through an expedited process, the airline anticipates a full integration into its mainline operations by the end of October. To avoid traveler impact, Swoop will operate its existing network through to the end of…

Merger talks between Postmedia and Toronto Star owner fall apart

July 14, 2023

Business News

Talks to combine two of the biggest newspaper publishers in Canada have fallen apart. Postmedia Network Canada Corp. and Nordstar Capital LP — the majority owner of The Toronto Star and dozens of other smaller newspapers under the Metroland banner — announced late last month that they had entered non-binding discussions about possibly merging. The framework of the proposed merger would have seen Postmedia transfer its dozens of newspaper titles over to Metroland, with voting control of the new entity split 50-50 between the two sides. But on Monday, the two sides announced that those talks had broken down, that…

CRA asks Shopify for Canadian business records: CEO

July 9, 2023

Business News

Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke is ready to put up a “fight” over what he describes as an “overreach” by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). In a tweet, Lutke said the Ottawa-based e-commerce company was asked to hand over tax records of more than 121,000 Canadian stores from the last six years. “I don’t particularly want a fight with the CRA (Canada’s tax authority)- but we got asked to backchannel them 6 years of records for all Canadian Shopify stores,” Lutke tweeted on Friday. “This feels like low-key overreach to me. We will fight this.” CTVNews.ca has reached out to Shopify…