General

Dutch department store chain De Bijenkorf has seen its sales drop dramatically last year due to compulsory store closures. Its online shops performed excellently, but could not fully compensate for the losses.

Last weekend, finance ministers from the G7, the leading industrialised countries, reached a "historic agreement" on a minimum tax rate for multinationals. However, a loophole in the agreement could allow Amazon to avoid the tax after all.

French-Italian eyewear group EssilorLuxottica is pushing ahead with the sale of 350 stores - including all GrandOptical branches in Belgium - to complete its deal with GrandVision. According to Bloomberg, investment banks Lazard and Mediobanca have to get the lot sold before the increasingly tight deadline, the end of July.

Amazon is under increasing pressure to reduce its plastic footprint, as shareholders approved a resolution urging the company to reveal how much of its plastic packaging ends up in the environment.

If it were up to American designer Ryan Schlotthauer, we would soon be buying electric car kits from Ikea. For his graduation project, he designed the Höga, an electric car with Renault technology, which you could buy as a kit from the furniture chain for a total of 5,300 euros.

JD.com performed better than expected during the first quarter, driven by strong domestic demand. Meanwhile, services such as logistics are becoming increasingly more important for the Chinese e-commerce giant.

Discounters and online players are on the rise in the charts of the world's largest retailers, and so are retail companies based in the Asian region. Noteworthy, however, is the strong performance of one Benelux player.