Haleon H1 revenues grow, Lloyds Bank lifts FY guidance

London pre-open

The FTSE 100 was being called to open 25.2 points higher ahead of the bell on Wednesday after closing out the previous session broadly flat at 7,306.28.

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Healthcare group Haleon said on Wednesday that revenues had climbed in the six months ended 30 June, driven by organic revenue growth and and an improved price and volume mix.

Haleon, which was spun off from GlaxoSmithKline earlier in July, posted interim revenues of £5.18bn, up 11.6% year-on-year, with organic revenues advancing 11.6%, while prices were up 3.7% and volume mix 7.9%.

Lloyds Bank lifted annual guidance on Wednesday after a rise in interim net income thanks to rising interest rates and despite a fall in pre-tax profits.

The lender said net income surged 65% to £7.2bn for the six months to 30 June, while pre-tax profits fell 6% to £3.6bn, after the previous year's earnings were boosted by the release of cash set aside to cover bad debts anticipated during the Covid pandemic.

Newspaper round-up

The railways will again grind to a halt on Wednesday as workers strike over pay, job security, and working conditions. The latest talks to avert the action failed last week, a month since three days of industrial action in June. The strikes involve more than 40,000 workers at Network Rail, 14 train companies, and members of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Union. – Guardian

Ministers and government officials played "fast and loose" when awarding £777.0m in Covid contracts to a healthcare firm that employed the Conservative MP Owen Paterson as a lobbyist, the head of parliament's spending watchdog has said. In a damning report, the House of Commons public accounts committee concluded that the government made a series of failures, making it impossible to know if the contracts had been awarded properly to Randox. – Guardian

Google has suffered its slowest quarterly sales growth in two years, in the latest sign of a global downturn for tech. Alphabet, the search engine giant's parent company, posted a 12% rise in quarterly revenue to $69.7bn. The performance, while better than rivals, was its weakest growth in two years and profits fell 13.6% to $16.0bn. – Telegraph

Credit Suisse is set to lose its second chief executive in three years as the bank continues to lurch from crisis to crisis. The Swiss bank is set to announce the departure of its chief executive Thomas Gottstein after two and a half years in the role, the Wall Street Journal reported. His expected departure comes as the historic European bank struggles to restore its reputation after a string of recent scandals. – Telegraph

Average pay for partners at Macfarlanes has risen by more than 19% over the past year to an average of nearly £2.5m. The law firm, renowned for advising extremely wealthy individuals, said that its revenue for 2020-21 had risen by 16.4% to £303.7m. That translated to a profit of £164.2m, a rise of 15.4% over the previous year. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks closed weaker on Tuesday as market participants thumbed over a hefty slab of corporate earnings.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.71% at 31,761.54, while the S&P 500 lost 1.15% to 3,921.05 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 1.87% weaker at 11,562.57.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com