The aftermath continues for post-brexit
The aftermath of leaving the European Union is greatly experienced by the UK. With numerous price hikes, one after another, pound plummetted leading to the biggest one-day fall in sterling history against the dollar. The decision is drastically spreading like an epidemic virus. Imported goods have increased even more and the fall affected the profitability of different sectors. Microsoft, on the other hand, just recently announced the increased by 22 percent to compensate loss due to pound's fall. Sergejs Cuhrajs the author of the article Important Volume Licensing Update on the Microsoft UK blog stated the increase is "to realign close to euro levels".
The leading technology provider stated that the price adjustment will commence in January 2017 following their previous harmonization increase for Norwegian krone and Swiss franc. The biggest increase is for their cloud services jumping up to 22 percent and their software enterprise to 13 percent.
According to the blog, orders with annuity volume licensing agreements that are subject to price protection (e.g. Enterprise Agreements) will not be affected by the increase until the end of the agreement. Likewise with business consumers with cloud commitment subscription (e.g. Office 365), the price protection also applies.
Microsoft is not only the company raised their prices due to pound's fall. Recently, the biggest Britain's grocery chain Tesco pulled out dozens of Unilever products from its website. CNBC reported that Tesco and Unilever had a disagreement over prices due to the slump of British currency. Unilever had been increasing their prices to Britain's top four supermarkets - Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrison by up to 10 percent, because it needs to offset the expensive cost of imported goods.
The vote of leaving the EU massively slumped the British economy causing different companies to increase rates and prices. Not only Microsoft and Tesco are affected by this decision. One thing is for sure we'll witness more price hikes to come.
