British American Tobacco performing 'well', Dixons Carphone profits crumple
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The FTSE 100 is expected to open flat on Wednesday, having closed up 0.63% to 7,500.41 on Tuesday.
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British American Tobacco is continuing to perform well with trading in line with expectations, it said in its pre-close trading update for the second half of the year on Wednesday. The FTSE 100 cigarette giant said it remained confident of another year of good earnings growth at constant currency, with continued market share growth, driven by its ‘global drive brands’. It said second half organic operating profit growth would reflect the benefit from the phasing of volume shipments, offset by a more difficult pricing environment in some markets, addin that the Reynolds American integration was on track, with the businesses performing strongly, driven by good share growth and pricing.
Profits at Dixons Carphone crumpled in the first half as UK mobile customers held onto their handsets longer, though the retailer clung onto its market share and intends to maintain its interim dividend. Group headline profit before tax of £61m was down 60% on the equivalent period last year, mostly due to an expected one-off £58m accounting change.
TUI Group said it expects to achieve at least 10% earnings growth in 2018 after reporting a healthy increase for last year. The tour operator said there was strong demand for its holidays and that its UK business was holding up well despite uncertainty over Brexit. Underlying earnings before interest, tax and amortisation rose 12% to €1.1bn (£970m) in the year to the end of September.
Quality assurance provider Intertek Group has acquired Maryland, US-based security certification solutions provider Acumen Security for an undisclosed consideration, it announced on Wednesday. The FTSE 100 company described Acumen as a “leading provider” of product security certification and its service portfolio includes FIPS 140-2 validation, Common Criteria evaluation and related assurance services. It said Acumen was a trusted partner to many of the world's leading IT solutions providers, who relied on the company's security expertise to validate their existing products.
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The World Bank will end its financial support for oil and gas exploration within the next two years in response to the growing threat posed by climate change. In a statement that delighted campaigners opposed to fossil fuels, the Bank used a conference in Paris to announce that it “will no longer finance upstream oil and gas” after 2019. - Guardian
York has become the third UK city to refuse Uber a licence to operate, citing concerns about the ride-hailing company's 2016 data breach, which affected 2.7m British users and drivers, and customer complaints. The City of York council’s gambling, licensing and regulatory committee had been considering an application by Uber Britannia Ltd to renew its private hire operator’s licence in York at a meeting late on Tuesday, but ultimately the councillors decided to refuse the application. - Telegraph
Walt Disney is on the verge of clinching a deal to acquire a sizeable part of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox entertainment group in a deal worth about $60 billion that could be announced as early as tomorrow. Negotiations were moving quickly last night for a deal in which Disney would take control of 21st Century Fox’s stake in Sky, the European broadcaster, as well as 20th Century Fox, its Hollywood film studio business, plus a string of other companies including Star India. The rest of Fox’s assets, including Fox News Channel, would be spun off into a separate company worth about $10 a share, according to reports. - The Times
US close
Wall Street's main indices finished mixed on Tuesday as the Federal Reserve kicked off its two-day rate-setting meeting, alongside several positive updates from corporate heavyweights such as Boeing and 3M.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 0.49% at 24,504.80 and the S&P 500 added 0.15% to 2,664.11, while the Nasdaq 100 fell 0.16% to settle at 6,383.65.
On the economic front, US factory gate prices advanced at a 3.1% clip year-on-year in November, against consensus expectations for 3.0%, with the details of the report leading economists at Barclays and Pantheon Macroeconomics to conclude that inflationary pressures were in the pipeline.
In parallel, the NFIB reported that its small business confidence gauge jumped back to a Reagan-era high of 107.5 last month, the second best reading in that gauge's 44-year history.
Losses for oil were triggered by a statement from the International Energy Agency saying it was monitoring events around the Forties North Sea pipeline, but that there was no reason to act as the market remained well-supplied.