🗞️ Costco run

Good morning. Brisbane is getting its first Costco, a 15,600 square metre warehouse on a 6.7-hectare site at the airport, 12km from the CBD.

It comes with 870 car parking spaces and a 34-bowser petrol station, where Costco sells fuel more cheaply than the servos around it.

The doors open in late 2029, which gives Queensland three and a bit years to think about the queue.

All the headlines and more below...

BATHLA NEEDS $40M IN CASH TO REACH CHRISTMAS AFTER COLLAPSING WITH ALMOST 2000 HOMES HALF BUILT

Bathla Group, the biggest builder of affordable housing in western Sydney, appointed administrators on Tuesday with 220 projects running across Sydney, Melbourne and regional NSW. 45 of them are under construction, equivalent to almost 2000 houses and apartments. The NSW Supreme Court heard this week the group needs $40m in cash to reach Christmas, and liquidators have warned lenders it needs at least $20m just to survive the next four weeks.

The monthly bill runs to about $3.3M in wages for 349 staff before subcontractors are paid, and the company owed $400,000 in unpaid rent on its own Sydney headquarters. Administrators are still untangling a web of companies, loans and leases, and Justice Ashley Black said the group risked liquidation without the relief he granted on Thursday.

Bathla pointed to a collapse in demand for new homes alongside rising costs. It had planned to build almost 15,000 of them.

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

• Aldi has built its Australian supermarket share to about 9% by 2015 by making about 90% of its cheaper-range products own brands, pressuring Woolworths and Coles. LINK

• CBA, NAB and ANZ have lifted rate forecasts to at least 1 more RBA hike this year as stubborn 3.6% trimmed mean inflation keeps pressure elevated. LINK

• The Queensland and NT governments have secured the right to power new AI data centres with coal and gas as the national cabinet agreed only to minimum renewable requirements. AUS

• A surge in multigenerational living is reshaping Australian retirement as high housing and living costs push 24% of workers to expect family cohabitation, up from 8% of current retirees. AUS

WESFARMERS SAYS ITS AI BOTS ARE TRIPLING CONVERSION RATES AT BUNNINGS AND KMART

The Bunnings chatbot, which runs on Google's Gemini model, has handled more than 350,000 questions and gives DIY advice, and Kmart is now leaning on autonomous agents in sourcing, supply chain and store roles. Chief executive Rob Scott said conversion rates are running two to three times higher where bots such as "Buddy" are talking to customers, and the average order value across Bunnings, Kmart and Officeworks is anywhere from 20% to 40% higher.

Scott's argument is that the extra sales more than offset the cost of running the systems. He is positioning the technology as the centre of a new productivity agenda, meant to keep growth going while the cost of doing business dulls earnings momentum and economic and public policy constraints squeeze both shoppers and businesses.

The pitch landed alongside the full-year result, in which annual sales rose 3.4% to $47.27B. Scott said the group's businesses had focused on mitigating cost pressures through productivity initiatives, and that its retail arms dropped prices on thousands of products during the year as households kept feeling cost-of-living pressure.

COMPANY NEWS

• Kmart will open a second furniture and homewares-only K Home store in a regional QLD centre in November as it chases Filipino Anko shoppers after a strong Melbourne launch. LINK

• Costco has announced a 15,600 square metre warehouse and 34-bowser petrol station at Brisbane Airport to open in late 2029 as the city's first mega store. LINK

• Wesfarmers reported a 1.8% fall in full-year net profit to $2.87B as strong earnings growth at Bunnings and Kmart offset a 22.2% slump at Officeworks. LINK

• Atlassian has suffered technical issues on its Jira Cloud, Jira Service Management and Confluence platforms from about 2.22pm AEST, disrupting Australian teams as it works on a fix. LINK

• Russian-speaking hackers from ransomware group Aurora have used SpaceX’s Cursor Agent, powered by Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, to refine exploitation scripts and attack 10 US and European organisations. LINK

• Magellan Financial Group reported a 47% drop in full-year net profit as costs from the Barrenjoey transaction and capital invested in its funds weighed on earnings. LINK

• Ramsay Health Care reported a more than 13-fold jump in full-year net profit as higher hospital admissions and margins lifted Australian and UK earnings and boosted investor confidence. AFR

• Qantas reported a full-year statutory net profit of $1.29B for the 12 months ended 30 June 2026, down $316M from the preceding year. LINK

• Xero has suffered a heavy shareholder backlash as 70.6% voted against its remuneration report at the AGM, up from 48.75% last year, amid frustration over CEO share sales. CB

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CHART OF THE DAY

Many OECD countries see employment inch up

ONE MORE SCROLL

Odd Pick: A long-running hypothesis holds that the Earth behaves less like a rock with life on it and more like a single living system.

Editor’s Pick: NASA has abandoned a private mission to boost a falling space telescope after the rescue craft tumbled out of control.

Draft Pick: The Tasmania Devils have made finals in their first VFL season, a run nobody expected of a brand new club.

Doctor’s Pick: Study finds short workouts release heart-protective proteins.

BRAINTEASER

What connects the above four clues?

Answer below

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ANSWER

Each of the clues describes ‘one stone’.
- In German, ‘Einstein’ literally means ‘one stone’ (‘Ein’ = one, ‘Stein’ = stone).
- A monolith is defined as one large stone.
- 6.350 kilograms is the equivalent weight of ‘one stone’.
- According to the famous idiom, you can kill two birds with one stone.

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