Serco signs contract extensions with councils, Ashtead on track to beat full-year expectations
London open
The FTSE 100 is expected to open 44 points higher on Tuesday, having closed down 0.83% at 6,721.54 on Monday.
Stocks to watch
International service company Serco Group has signed contract extensions with both Peterborough City Council and Lincolnshire County Council to continue providing a number of frontline and back office services to those councils. The FTSE 250 company said the contract extensions had a combined total value to Serco of approximately £135m.
Equipment rental company Ashtead Group on Tuesday said it expected full year results to beat expectations after interim pre-tax profit rose 25% to £610m.
WPP's new boss Mark Read will spend £300m over the next three years to restructure the marketing and advertising giant with the aim of achieving an operating profit margin of at least 15%. Having so far sold off 16 non-core investments and associates, to raise £704m to reduce debt, he said preparations were well underway to divest a majority stake of its Kantar research business by the second quarter of next year.
Newspaper round-up
Slowing growth in London since the Brexit vote has put the British economy on track to narrow the north-south economic divide over the coming three years, according to a report. The accountancy firm EY, despite warning of a weaker outlook for almost every region through to 2021 amid continuing Brexit uncertainty, said London would no longer continue to grow at a much faster pace than the rest of the country. – Guardian
Several large retailers may be breaking data protection rules with their e-receipts, according to an investigation by the consumer body Which?. Many retailers offer to email receipts to shoppers but the rules in this area were tightened in May when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. – Guardian
A third energy supply company has gone bust since the regulator vowed to toughen up on new entrants to the energy market only three weeks ago. Ofgem confirmed that One Select had ceased trading just weeks after the fall of Extra Energy and Spark Energy. The regulator assured One Select’s 36,000 customers that it would find them a new supplier. – Telegraph
Australian pensions giant AMP has swooped on a UK social care business catering to people with severe learning disabilities in a deal worth hundreds of millions of pounds, reflecting renewed investor interest in the sector. AMP has agreed to buy Care Management Group, a chain of 190 homes with 2,000 patients, from turnaround specialist Court Cavendish, which also owns the UK’s largest care home chain HC-One. – Telegraph
US close
Stocks finished in the green on Monday, after a session in which investors continued to fret about trade relations between the US and China.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.14% at 24,423.26, the S&P 500 added 0.18% to 2,637.72, and the Nasdaq 100 was 1.05% higher at 6,682.74.
Earlier, Wall Street was struck by a downbeat mood after China summoned US and Canadian ambassadors to Beijing, in protest at the detention of Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Manzhou.
Meanwhile, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said over the weekend that he considered 1 March a "hard deadline" to reach a trade deal with China.
Speaking on CBS' Face the Nation, Lighthizer said: "As far as I am concerned it is a hard deadline. When I talk to the president of the United States he is not talking about going beyond March."